Paul
Goble
Staunton, October 2 – In the face of
underlying economic and demographic trends, the central Russian government has
almost no chance to redirect migration within the Russian Federation away from
the major cities and toward the northern and eastern portions of the country,
according to a new study by a leading Moscow demographer.
Nikita Mkrtchyan of the Moscow
Institute of Demography of the Higher School of Economics has prepared a major
study of migration trends in the Russian Federation (publications.hse.ru/chapters/88632915). His key findings were presented on Monday by
Finmarket.ru (finmarket.ru/economics/article/3495164).
According to Mkrtchyan, the efforts
of the Russian government to get Russians to stop moving to Moscow and to move
instead to the under-populated Far East or the unstable North Caucasus have
ended as “a complete failure” despite massive expenditures of government money
and active propaganda campaigns.
The reason for that, he says, is
that migrants almost always seek to move to regions with a higher standard of
living and better opportunities for future advancement, something that one-time
aid packages from the central government or bans on immigration by cities and
regions can do little or nothing about.
Since 2000, the demographer says,
about two million Russians have moved from one region to another or from one
place of residence within a region to another every year. But what is striking, he adds, is that many
of these moves are temporary rather than permanent, with from six to 30 percent
of households in small cities including a worker who has left for a season and
then returned home.
Over the same period, Mkrtchyan
says, the so-called “Western drift” of migration – the movement of populations
from the east to the center, the Volga region and the south of the European
portion of the country – that began 50 years ago has continued, sometimes
increasing and sometimes declining but always in the same direction.
As compared to the rates in the
1990s, however, the size of these flows has declined somewhat, not so much
because people in the east and north are not interested in moving but because
there are fewer of them left. Consequently, the migration potential of most of
these areas – and there are a few exception such as Altay Kray – has been “exhausted.”
Put most starkly, this means that
“all the Siberians have already left for Moscow and St. Petersburg, and now
people of Nizhny Novgorod and the Chuvash are coming in their place.” At the
same time, the northern regions of the country are losing population, albeit
their losses have now stabilized at about 40-50,000 a year.
As for the North Caucasus, the
outflow of population continues, with most ethnic Russians and many members of
other non-titular nationalities having left and many of the members of titular
ones as well. “Apparently, the outflow of the male population from the
mountainous regions of Daghestan in the 2000s has been comparable to that from
the kishlaks of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.”
Russia’s urbanization has continued
as well, Mkrtchyan says, with villagers moving to small cities and residents of
the latter moving to Moscow and St. Petersburg.
That pattern was broken in 1992-1992 but has been restored, albeit at a
somewhat lower rate than in the last decades of Soviet power.
Between 2001 and 2010, restrictions
on immigration from abroad meant that the role of internal migration increased
and now represents 45 percent of migration. Much of that is within particular
regions (70 percent) and only a much smaller part is between regions (30
percent), Mkrtchyan adds.
Because migrants tend to be younger
than the population at large, they are contributing to an increase in average
age in the places they leave and a decrease in that measure in the places to
which they go, thus placing changing burdens on the governments there. That will be more marked among international migrants
than among Russian ones in the coming decades.
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