Cities of the Tyumen Region in the 1970s: Comparative Analysis of Trends in Fertility and Mortality

Abstract

In the post-war period, industrial development in the east of the country was often carried out through the formation of territorial production complexes. They were distinguished by the size of capital investments, the pace of industrial growth, and the number of settlements being created. In this regard, it is of great interest how such economic development influenced the nature of demographic processes. The formation of the population of the Tyumen region during the formation of the West Siberian oil and gas complex has already been well studied, many works have been published in which the personnel problems of enterprises and the growth rates of its cities were studied. However, the reproduction of the population has not been studied enough, it is not entirely clear how much the birth rate and mortality changed at different stages of industrial growth. This work is a logical continuation of the article published earlier and devoted to the analysis of demographic trends in the previous inter-census period (1959-1970). The main purpose of the article is to study the total fertility rate and life expectancy, taking into account the changes that have occurred in the social, economic, cultural and everyday life of the population. To solve it, the methods of conditional generation, index, historical-genetic and historical-comparative methods were used in a complex. The article reveals for the first time that demographic trends in the cities of the Tyumen region, in general, corresponded to the processes taking place in Western Siberia. Nevertheless, the nature of socio-economic development in the period under review had a certain impact on the reproduction of the urban population. The growth of investments in housing construction, the development of public utilities, social and household infrastructure contributed to the fact that life expectancy decreased slightly. Moreover, the situation with mortality has improved to the greatest extent in the northern regions. Due to the spread of urban culture, changes in the socio-educational structure of society, migration flows and urban settlement, the birth rate has decreased. In this regard, the nature of reproduction of the urban population in the 1970s became closer to the average Western Siberian indicators.