Monotown

The situation in many of Russia's monotowns is highly problematic: they are entirely dependent on the competitiveness of a single company or factory, very inflexible and based on Soviet-era economics and technologies.

Monotown residents proved to be hesitant to move away on their own and seek work elsewhere as well, mostly because the state housing distribution system was almost dead at the time, and the very low market value of their real estate didn't let them count on minimally comfortable apartments in any other developed town (the agricultural sector was and is even more economically depressed in most regions of Russia, making countryside largely unattractive for the town-dwellers).

[3] In one high-profile incident, in 2009 some 300 residents of the north-western town of Pikalyovo blocked a major highway to protest against large delays in the payments of wages.

[citation needed] However, the situation is somewhat helped by widespread small-scale car parts producers and other small car-oriented enterprises in the region, which are providing many additional workplaces.

[1] The Soviet planned economy aimed to establish industrial facilities in rational locations, based on military, political, bureaucratic and economic criteria.

[1] After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most of the monotowns' dominant enterprises were privatised, and consequently many of them had gone bankrupt by the end of the 1990s, either deliberately (usually it was more profitable to sell the property of an enterprise than to keep it functioning) or due to uncompetitiveness, caused by the shrinkage of the home market outside the consumer goods sector, unrestricted import of low-cost industrial wares from China, Turkey or other countries and the lack of long-term investments by the private owners, who were for the most part interested in quick money rather than development or modernization.

Private owners also mostly refused to provide social services to the populations of monotowns, referring to such practice as being "economically inefficient" - however, the government's attempt to delegate the responsibility of providing social services from the companies to the newly created local municipalities was mostly a failure, as they lacked resources to complete the transformation.