This definition carried both ethnic and geographical characteristics, making exact identification of what comprised "metropolitan" Russia difficult.
[4] The term zemskaia Rossiia has also been used by Moscow State University historian Kirill Solovyev to refer to the landed gentry of the Empire.
The Astrakhan, Orenburg, and Ufa governorates, as well as right-bank Ukraine, were later integrated into the metropole and allowed to possess zemstvos, while the other listed regions would remain unrepresented, and therefore as part of the periphery, until the 1917 Russian Revolution.
American independent researcher Allen J. Frank, for instance, describes metropolitan Russia as including those areas which were part of the Russian Empire prior to the 19th-century colonisation of the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Peripheral Russia has been described by Russian political scientist Vladimir Gelman as the "principal constituency of the current ruling class," in reference to Putin's government.
[10] Vytautas Magnus University academic Leslie Dienes has described post-Soviet metropolitan Russia as an "archipelago", with highly developed cities being separated by swathes of undeveloped territory.
Dienes wrote in 2002 that peripheral Russia was "primitive" and "deprived of the most elementary physical and social infrastructure," in a phenomenon not found in either the rest of Europe or the United States.
Metropolitan Russia has an established middle class and is undergoing a transition to post-industrial society, with white-collar workers comprising an increasing amount of its workforce.