Paul Goble
Staunton, October 5 – The Russian
generation born after the demise of the USSR is so small that Russia will need to
attract more highly skilled personnel from abroad over the next decade and not
just unskilled laborers as has been largely the case over the last decade,
Moscow employment experts say.
That will spark competition not only
within Russia but also between it and its neighbors, a competition in which the
migrants Moscow wants to attract will have comparable skills and salary
expectations to their Russian colleagues, according to Gleb Lebedev, research
director at Moscow’s HeadHunter Firm (www.rosbalt.ru/business/2012/10/04/1042459.html).
But that is only one of the changes
the entrance of the new Russian generation will face and produce writes
Vladislav Kuzmichev of the Rosbalt.ru news agency. They will
confront a situation in which the Russian economy has lost more than
eight million jobs over the last six years and one in which immigrants are
already sending home 10 billion US dollars a year.
The careers of these new workforce
entrants, Vladislav Zhukovsky, an analyst at Rikom-Trust, adds, will thus
depend critically on their training and choice of specialization. Employment in
most sectors is down, “and only in the system of government administration,
financial speculation and trade has there been a growth in new work places.”
Between 2002 and
2011, the Russian GDP grew 51.7 percent, while the value added by the financial
sector grew 371.5 percent, agriculture only 16.9 percent and the processing
industry 34.6 percent. All this,
Zhukovsky says, “demonstrate the failure of the ideas of modernization and the
development of the scientific-technical potential” of the country.
“With the exception of a number of
specialities,” he adds, “the new generation of graduates born between 1990 and
2000 may repeat the fate of their predecessors.” But perhaps even more than the
latter, they will have to adapt to “the realities of [Russia’s] ‘pipeline
economy,’” which needs only 25 to 30 million workers, not the 80 million
currently there.
But because that “pipeline economy’” needs
more skilled than unskilled workers, Lebedev suggests, the generation born in the 1990s will have
some advantages – greater computer literacy, knowledge of foreign languages,
and a desire to succeed quickly – but other disadvantages given their number if
they lag in those skills relative to potential immigrants.
Most of the ethnic conflicts in
Russian cities over the last 20 years have arisen because of the influx of
often unskilled workers from Central Asia and the Caucasus. But the small size of the generation of new
Russian entrants to the workforce could spark a very different kind of ethnic
conflict, one not among workers but among skilled professionals.
Such a new pattern of ethnic
conflict almost certainly would have three consequences, each of which might be
far more difficult for Moscow to deal with than the so-called “everyday”
clashes now. First, it could trigger
more ethno-nationalism among educated Russian elites, prompting Russian leaders
to play the nationalist card even more than they do at present.
Second, it could exacerbate
relations between Moscow and its neighbors. Just as service in the Soviet and
Russian military did not integrate people of different ethnic groups as many
expected but rather triggered greater ethnic hostility, so too highly skilled
immigrants might quickly return home with a very different message that Moscow
would like.
And third, this pattern could mean
that the often leaderless non-Russian immigrant workers of today could come to
see the educated immigrants as their allies against ethnic Russian hostility, a
combination that could lead to more intense ethnic and class conflicts in
Russian cities in the future.
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