Anna Arutunyan

Mounting job losses have some officials trying to encourage more Russians to move from monogorods, or single-industry town, to places lush with vacancies - but sociologists and union leaders say that the very fabric of Russian life keeps workers grounded.

"Moving just doesn't fit with Russian cultural values," said Pyotr Zolotaryov, convener of the Yedinstvo union at the Avtovaz car plant in Tolyatti. "This isn't America, where you can pack up and leave."

With 5,000 Avtovaz workers slated to be laid off by the end of the year - and another 30,000 rumoured to be losing their jobs - Zolotaryov said he has seen fliers encouraging workers to move. "It would be a camp-type workers' settlement - they would live like migrant labourers and eat noodles. I'm looking into who is behind these offers," he said.

Apart from a handful of cases, most unemployed workers opt to stay put.

Nor are people willing to budge in Pikalyovo, the Leningrad region town where Vladimir Putin had to personally intervene to get its plants running again.

"Out of the entire town of 20,000 people, just 50 people left - they found something on their own," said Svetlana Antropova, local union leader at the BasEl Cement plant. "And we're not even certain that they found jobs. Some people came back from St. Petersburg, said they spent a month working and weren't even paid."

Antropova said that local officials had tried to convince Pikalyovo residents to pack up and head to neighbouring towns. But real offers to move were rare, and none offered any housing or guarantees that the worker would actually get a job.

"Women complain to me - why should we let our husbands leave the house, leave their families without any certainty that they will get paid? Why should we leave our land plots?" As for real offers that include housing and an actual work contract - this was never on the table, she said.

Presidential aide Arkady Dvorkovich told a group of experts earlier this month that the government was "trying to create new jobs and help people relocate to areas where there are vacancies", naming Sochi and Krasnoyarsk as possible options. But Kremlin spokespeople would not comment on any specific relocation programmes.

According to Antropova, Valentin Chmil, an official at the Leningrad Region Economic Committee and chairman of a work group dealing with unemployment in Pikalyovo, suggested Tikhvin, which is about 50 kilometres west of Pikalyovo and houses the Titran-Express train assembly plant. Chmil could not be reached for comment.

Examples of successful relocation are few - and even those are rife with problems. One experiment in the Khabarovsk region led to new tensions. According to Alexander Shershukov, an official at the Kremlin-linked Federation of Independent Labour Unions, 14 machine operators from Izhevsk, where they had lost their jobs, travelled across Russia to the KnAAP aviation plant in Komsomolsk, only to the disgruntlement of local union officials and workers.

"Local workers weren't even working a full week, and the plant's administration decided to take in these new people from a different region," Shershukov said.

But a bigger problem, he said, is that people just aren't prepared to move. "Workers are uncertain that they will have what they need at their new place of work, they're not ready to leave their homes to live in a box car."

Indeed, too much is at stake for an average Russian family to relocate. The Soviet-era system of propiska, or registration, virtually grounded people to their place of residence. A residual legacy of serfdom, when peasants were tied to land plots that could be bought and sold, it spawned a localised community culture where residents relied on informal contacts to get what they needed - from quality food products to adequate health services. Those with private homes relied on their land to grow vegetables. Under this system, a home was a coveted deficit, and once obtained it was not exchanged lightly, particularly in another region.

Even now, the registration system continues to hamper mobility. Bureaucracy and high costs turn relocation into an ordeal that many undertake only to improve their living conditions. Under the current propiska system, a Russian citizen who moves to a new city must obtain temporary registration at his place of residence - otherwise, he cannot work, use public health care or any other public services such as schools or kindergartens. If he is renting an apartment, a registration would require an official lease contract, meaning that the landlord would have to pay taxes on the rent. If he is staying with friends, they too must fill out a form saying they approve the registration at their address. A permanent registration is usually only possible in the homes of relatives, if the person is permanently leasing the apartment from the municipal authorities, or if he can prove that he owns the apartment.

Pyotr Bizyukov, a socio-economic expert at the Centre for Social and Occupational Rights, monitored the latest experiment in relocation in the 1990s, when Russian authorities tried to reform the mining industry. "Residents of Siberia who had lived there for several generations were given a choice to move," he said. "When they refused to leave their land plots, these people from the World Bank - who were involved in the reform - they could not understand why."

Khalmer-yu, a mining town in Western Siberia's Komi republic, was shut down by force in 1995, with riot police called in to remove unwilling residents and ship them to nearby Vorkuta. "It was a disaster, and it discredited the practice," Bizyukov said. According to his polls, just 2 per cent of respondents said that they would be willing to leave their homes for a job.