Paul Goble
Staunton, Aug. 13 – Earlier this year, a group of Russian researchers published an detailed article entitled “Ethnic Diasporas as a Threat to the National Security of Russia under Conditions of Hybrid War” (in Russian in Vestnik Yevraziyskoy Nauki, 17(1)(2025); full text available at esj.today/PDF/69FAVN125.pdf).
The problems they pointed to, including the way in which the influx of migrants from Central Asia into predominantly ethnic Russian federal subjects, has led to the formation of assertive ethnic enclaves there, have only intensified since, according to Versiya commentator Kirill Molev (versia.ru/migranty-vsyo-chashhe-predyavlyayut-prava-na-territoriyu-rossii).
Residents of these enclaves increasingly frequently demand that the Russian authorities not only rename streets and villages with terms from the homelands they earlier left but work to make sure that they are treated as special and that their ties with their homelands are not only respected but facilitated, Molev says.
He cites case after case of this to argue that these developments have raised the level of the threat to Russia’s national security to “a qualitatively higher level” and that Moscow must respond by severely limiting new immigration and even considering expelling some of the migrant workers and their families already here.
Like the authors of the earlier article, Molev mentions what he calls “enclavization” in non-Russian federal subjects as well as predominantly ethnic Russian ones; but he even more than they focuses on the impact of such enclaves is especially serious in the latter because it poses a separatist challenge even within the country.
But there are two other reasons, not mentioned by Molev, that may make his conclusion even more compelling. On the one hand, such enclave activism may become a model for regionalist movements. And on the other – and this is far more likely -- it may provoke radical Russian nationalist groups like the Russian Community to respond with violence.
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