village:

A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet, but smaller than a town or city. Though generally located in rural areas, the term urban village may be applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New York City and the Saifi Village in Beirut, Lebanon. Villages are normally permanent, with fixed dwellings; however, transient villages[1] can occur. Further, the dwellings of a village are fairly close to one another, not scattered broadly over the landscape (‘dispersed settlement’).
Villages have been the usual form of community for societies that practice subsistence agriculture, and even for some non-agricultural societies. Towns and cities were few, and were home to only a small proportion of the population. The Industrial Revolution caused many villages to grow into towns and cities; this trend of urbanisation has continued, though not always in connection with industrialisation. Villages have thus been eclipsed in importance as units of human society and settlement.

In Russia, the bulk of the rural population are concentrated in villages. In Russian, two terms are mainly used to refer to these rural localities: selo (село) or derevnya (деревня). Historically, the formal indication of status was religious: a city (gorod) had a cathedral, a village (selo) had a church, while a hamlet (derevnya) had neither.
The lowest administrative unit of the Russian Empire, volost, or its Soviet or modern Russian successor, selsoviet, was usually headquartered in a selo and embraced a few neighboring villages.
Between 1926 and 1989, Russia's rural population shrank from 76 million people to 39 million, due to urbanization, collectivization, dekulakisation and the World War II losses, but has nearly stabilized since.[citation needed] During 1930–1937, mass starvation in Russia and other parts of the Soviet Union lead to the death of at least 14.5 million peasants (including 5-7 million in the Holodomor). [7]