Urban decline is a phenomenon ascribed to both the United States and Russia; however, the disparity in the spatial configuration of that decline renders the consequences of each country’s situation as unique. In the US, the process of urbanization nationally has diffused from the traditional coastal cities of Los Angeles and the Boston-Washington, DC corridor into the less monolithic towns of the south and southwestern heartland. Similarly at the local level, suburbanization around metropolitan areas has significantly encroached into the agricultural hinterland of each city due not only to the general population increase but also to an out-migration of households and businesses from the center. This mode of development has been facilitated if not generated by an extensive transportation network accompanied by an increased accumulation of wealth at a national scale. In contrast, urbanization in Russia mainly occurred during the seventy years of Soviet rule which meant that the Marxist philosophy of equality dictated the patterns of settlement and migration. The central planners envisioned a landscape of urban areas dispersed evenly throughout the country that were equally sized and uniformly dense. Cities were created in Central Asia and the Siberian Far East, and households were directly and/or indirectly encouraged to migrate from European Russia located west of the Urals. The allocation of aggregate resources for the purpose of building the necessary physical infrastructure was based on political and bureaucratic power. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the foundation for the sprawling landscape was completely and swiftly abandoned. During Russia’s current transition from a planned to a market economy, the superimposition of cost accounting and demand-determined pricing for housing, transportation and employment is creating unprecedented migration patterns. Based on initial post-Soviet data and theories of population-environment dynamics, this paper develops predictions about an eventual spatial stasis of larger, polycentric cities that are regionally dispersed and possess important local economic and political linkages.