On the basis of a wide range of documentary sources, the paper considers the main characteristics and development trends of population in small towns of the 1920s and 1930s located first within the Yenisei Province and then within the Krasnoyarsk Territory. The author reveals the factors which have a significant impact on the socio-demographic portrait of a small Siberian city as a unique and characteristic form of social organization for Russia, developing in the context of economic and sociocultural modernization of the Soviet state. The period of complex transformations witnesses the whole range of social changes and their inherent contradictions to a greater extent. Achinsk, Yeniseisk, Kansk, and Minusinsk social and cultural policy of the 1920s and 1930s developed under the influence of both a number of general factors determined by the specific historical situation in the country and the region, and those factors which determined specific development of the towns under study and features of their social and cultural policy in the Soviet state. These heterogenous and diverse factors produce a significant and irreversible impact on the demographic processes of both local communities and the region as a whole.