This book is an attempt to trace and understand age-old trends, to summarize the development of the city and village in the European part of Russia on the eve of the XXI century. This required not only reconciliation and comparison of data for the beginning and end of the century, not just verification of data and forecasts made by V.P. Semenov-Tyan-Shansky himself, but also a radical, in accordance with the changed requirements, revision of the conceptual and methodological arsenal of the study.