section_path: Central and Eastern Europe/Slavic countries/Russia
section_name: Russia
paragraph_text: Russia
  
  In Russia, as of the 2010 Census, 26.3% of the country's population lives in rural localities; down from 26.7% recorded in the 2002 Census. Multiple types of rural localities exist, but the two most common are derevnya (деревня) and selo (село). Historically, the formal indication of status was religious: a city (gorod, город) had a cathedral, a selo had a church, while a derevnya had neither.
  
  The lowest administrative unit of the Russian Empire, a volost, or its Soviet or modern Russian successor, a selsoviet, was typically headquartered in a selo and embraced a few neighboring villages.
  
  In the 1960s–1970s, the depopulation of the smaller villages was driven by the central planners' drive in order to get the farm workers out of smaller, " prospectless " hamlets and into the collective or state farms ' main villages or even larger towns and cities, with more amenities.
  
  Most Russian rural residents are involved in agricultural work, and it is very common for villagers to produce their own food. As prosperous urbanites purchase village houses for their second homes, Russian villages sometimes are transformed into dacha settlements, used mostly for seasonal residence.
  
  The historically Cossack regions of Southern Russia and parts of Ukraine, with their fertile soil and absence of serfdom, had a rather different pattern of settlement from central and northern Russia. While peasants of central Russia lived in a village around the lord's manor, a Cossack family often lived on its own farm, called khutor. A number of such khutors plus a central village made up the administrative unit with a center in a stanitsa (Russian: станица, romanized: stanitsa; Ukrainian: станиця, romanized: stanytsya, lit. ' stanytsia '). Such stanitsas, often with a few thousand residents, were usually larger than a typical selo in central Russia.