The aim of the study is to assess the cultural resilience of the regions (subjects of the Northwestern Federal District) to crises using the example of the COVID-19 pandemic. The scientific novelty lies in the substantiation and empirical confirmation that budget-funded cultural institutions can be characterized by resilience similar to commercial organizations, regions and national economies, which expands the boundaries of the applicability of the concept of resilience to the non-entrepreneurial sector. We developed a methodology for quantifying the cultural resilience of regions based on the aggregation of four indicators: volume of paid services, budget expenditures, number of employees, and attendance at cultural institutions. The information base was compiled by data from Rosstat, the Federal Treasury, AIS of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and EMISS for 2018–2023. We highlighted three levels of cultural resilience in the regions (low, medium, and high). We found that five regions of the Northwestern Federal District turned out to be the most resistant: the Kaliningrad, Pskov, Novgorod, Leningrad regions, and the Republic of Karelia (high level). The Vologda, Murmansk, Arkhangelsk regions, and the Komi Republic have an average level of resistance; Saint Petersburg is the only region with low resistance. The paper identified the geographical pattern: the western regions of the Northwestern Federal District demonstrate higher stability in the development of the cultural sphere compared to the eastern and northern regions. We established that the high resilience of the cultural sphere is achieved not only through budget financing, but also through the adaptation of paid services, while the personnel component has demonstrated the greatest stability in all regions, with the exception of the Vologda Region and the Komi Republic. Future research areas include expanding the set of indicators, taking into account the digital transformation of cultural services, and comparative analysis with other federal districts. The practical significance of the work lies in the possibility of using the results obtained to improve the mechanisms for managing the cultural sphere, developing targeted measures to support cultural institutions, as well as shaping cultural policy at the regional and federal levels
Keywords
culture, regions, cultural policy, resilience, pandemic, COVID-19