City of federal subject significance is an

administrative division Administrative divisions (also administrative units, administrative regions, subnational entities, or constituent states, as well as many similar generic terms) are geographical areas into which a particular independent sovereign state is divi ...

of a federal subject of

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

which is equal in status to a district but is organized around a large

city A city is a human settlement of a substantial size. The term "city" has different meanings around the world and in some places the settlement can be very small. Even where the term is limited to larger settlements, there is no universally agree ...

; occasionally with surrounding rural territories.

Description

According to the 1993 Constitution of Russia, the administrative-territorial structure of the federal subjects is not identified as the responsibility of the federal government or as the joint responsibility of the federal government and the federal subjects."Энциклопедический словарь конституционного права". Статья "Административно-территориальное устройство". Сост. А. А. Избранов. — Мн.: Изд. В.М. Суров, 2001. This state of the matters is traditionally interpreted by the governments of the federal subjects as a sign that the matters of the administrative-territorial divisions are the sole responsibility of the federal subjects themselves. As a result, the modern administrative-territorial structures of the federal subjects vary significantly from one federal subject to another; that includes the manner in which the cities of federal subject significance are organized and the choice of a term to refer to such entities. In the federal subjects which have closed administrative-territorial formations, those are often given a similar status. Occasionally, this status is also given to the areas organized around the inhabited localities which are not cities, but smaller urban-type settlements.

List of designations

As of 2013, the following types of such entities are recognized:

References

{{Administrative divisions of Russia Political divisions of Russia