Communicative Practices of Rural Youth in Russia in the Light of «Cellular De-Urbanization»

In the last ten years in Russia demographers noted a massive outflow of young people from rural areas in order to obtain an education and search for a highly paid and prestigious job (in the Russian Far North figures reach 70% of the youth cohort). At the same time, prone to trends about a healthy life in nature, urban youth leaves megacities, with the aim of finding other life reasons in rural areas. We can observe counter migration flows and differently directed life vectors «from village to city» and «from town to village». Of course, the flows of rural youth to the city exceed the flows of returning youth and urban youth moving to the countryside, but the existence of the second allows us to speak (by analogy with the theory of Professor N. E. Pokrovsky of the «cellular globalization» of Russia) about «cellular de-urbanization».

In our opinion, «cellular de-urbanization» in Russia is firmly connected with the labor market and professional trajectories of young people.

The data obtained during the survey on Russian employment on a representative national sample in 2015 allowed us to compare the individual communicative practices of rural and urban youth in the labor market and shpere of leisure, check a number of hypotheses and draw the following conclusions: the professional employment of rural residents implies less autonomy in the formation of the pace of work, the content of labor, the quality of the product or service, requires a lesser degree of creativity and communication skills. Communicative practices of rural youth in the search for work are based on interpersonal communication and informal contacts, the Internet and recruiting agencies are practically not involved. Leisure of rural youth is connected to work on the ground and recreational practices in nature.