The Economist has published a survey of Russia. The first article is available for free, but for the rest you’ll either need a website subscription, or to actually go out and buy the magazine itself.
Although I haven’t really had chance to look through it properly, I’d really recommend you check it out – the Economist’s surveys are usually pretty well researched and informative.
The one thing that surprised me from the first article was the map of Russian population. While Russia on a whole is losing people – the Far Eastern population is down almost 16% since 1989 – the Southern (Caucasus) region is rapidly growing – its population rose by almost 12% between 1989 and 2002. Given the large Islamic population in the area, I think the change in the population balance is likely to pose some pretty serious problems in the mid-term future for Russian territorial cohesiveness.
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My impression is that the Southern Region’s populatuion has grown sharply also because of massive immigration, particularly from the independent states of the South Caucasus. Armenians now apparently form a quarter of Krasnodar’s population, for instance.
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