Summary
Russia has the 11th-largest economy in the world. But as is the case in many places, its wealth is not evenly distributed throughout the country.
It is also the case that in many countries, underdeveloped areas with high rates of poverty tend to experience more unrest and political instability than developed ones. By identifying the regions of a country with the weakest economies, therefore, it is possible to also discover which areas might pose the largest security threat. This Deep Dive attempts to do just that for Russia. In this report, we identify the poorest regions in the country using a scoring system that employs four economic indicators to measure the level of poverty throughout the country. We then looked at whether these regions have existing political and ethnic tensions that may flare up if economic conditions worsen. We are not forecasting that these regions will destabilize; rather, we are identifying the regions in which unrest could break out if, say, an