SOCIAL IDENTITY OF “POWER CITIES” IN MODERN RUSSIA: BASIC SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES

Abstract

The article analyzes domestic theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of administrative centers of the subjects of the Russian Federation. The author states a wide application of the concept of "capital city" in relation to the regional administrative centers, which are described by researchers as points of concentration of regional (or federal) ruling elites, dominating over the controlled and dependent on them "peripheral" territory of the region in political, economic and cultural relations, having access to global or federal financial flows, providing the population of the city and the region with social chances and access to a variety of services, creating and centralizing information and communication flows on the territory under their control, as well as cultural and symbolic foundations of regional identity. It is noted that there are opposing approaches to the analysis of regional and urban territorial identities in the research: essentialist one, based on the identification of "territories of belonging" and "territorial spaces" as objects of social identification of the population and symbolic formation of territorial identity politics with the self-consciousness of the region and its capital; and constructivist approach, focusing on the activity and interest of regional elites in the production of their capital identities. Culturalization is characterized as the predominant frame for the study of urban identity in contemporary Russia, with less pronounced attention to the civic component of urban identity, which is based on a sense of responsibility for the city and local civic activism. Among the distinctive characteristics of the capital cities identity of the republics within the Russian Federation, domestic researchers refer to the tendency to its "ethnicization" and absorption of republican identity through the reduction of cultural and symbolic components to cultural symbols and performative (including socio-political) practices, attributed by regional elites to the ethno-national identity of "titular" ethnic communities of the republics. Nevertheless, almost the same parameters of identity - local symbols, regional and capital cities’ "political mythology", its heroes and narratives, public events are considered as "natural" or constructed bases of capital city identity in the studies devoted to both the capitals of the republics and other subjects of the Russian Federation.