Trends in marriages in Russian megacities

Big cities, especially megacities, have reputation of places not facilitating marriages because of change of moral values in favor for career and self-development. The result is postponement of marriages, extend of cohabitation and remarriages. Within my research I check this statement on examples of two Russian largest cities – Moscow and Saint Petersburg with more than 12 and 5 million inhabitants. Taking into account the size of the country, different nationalities with different attitude to marriage, which live in Russia, I conduct my analysis by comparison cities and the regions that surround them–Moscow region and Leningrad region. In the research I use official Dada of Federal State Statistics Service for period of last 25 year. The variables used in the analysis are marriage rate, marital age, divorce index and rate of remarriages. The results of the study indicate that in both megacities there is an increase of marriages rate and reduction of divorce index. Cities have almost the same age structure at the “marital ages, though Saint Petersburg is slightly younger. While marital situation in both megacities does not have any significant difference, the considerable variation is observed in comparison with the Leningrad and Moscow regions. There is no evidence of later marriages in cities than in regions, moreover the divorce index is less in cities and remarriages are less popular. These results give us the reason to identify Russian megacities as untypical in the framework of demographic transition from point of view of marriages.