Ethnic Russians from Regions Find It Harder to Adapt to Moscow than Do Foreign Gastarbeiters, Study Finds

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 5 – Andrey Berezantsev, a Russian psychiatrist, says that a new study of the physical responses of new arrivals in Moscow – heart beat and other measures of stress – shows that “Russians arriving in the capital from other regions despite the absence of a language barrier, can feel more hopeless than migrants from CIS countries.”

            That is because, he says, “an individual from the Russian rural space arrives as a rule alone. He is cut off from his family and he doesn’t have anyone in the city to turn to for help, while CIS migrants often come in large groups … and remain in their own micro-milieux” (life.ru/t/здоровье/1031744/uchionyie_priiezzhim_iz_rieghionov_rossii_v_moskvie_trudnieie_chiem_mighrantam).

                Life’s Yekaterina Semenova reports that the Moscow Research Institute on Labor Medicine examined 1600 women from Russian regions and also from Tajikistan and Armenia who had lived in Moscow less than three years and assessed their adaption to life there by taking a series of physiological measures. It then rated them as to their success in adapting to the city. 

            Russians from the regions formed the largest share of those judged to have been unable to successfully adapt, while among those with moderate success they trailed those from Tajikistan.