Russian Cities Caught Between Kremlin’s Desire to Have More Immigrants and Local Residents’ Opposition to That

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 15 – The Russian government wants to have ever more immigrants come to Russia from the former Soviet republics not only because Russia needs them to fill jobs but also because it believes that such people will play a positive role in re-integrating the former Soviet space.

            But residents and officials in the larger cities of the Russian Federation have a different view: They feel threatened by the influx of culturally and increasingly linguistically different peoples, fear that they are a source of crime, and are concerned that some of them are coalescing into ethnic neighborhoods that could eventually become ghettos.

            That tension between what the central government wants and what city people prefer is increasingly on view in Moscow as it heads into an election in which the incumbent mayor Sergey Sobyanin has sought to placate voters there without taking any steps that might offend the powers that be above him.

            Vzglyad commentator Petr Akopov says that the positions of both sides in this debate are understandable.  The Russian state “wants to reintegrate the post-Soviet space geopolitically and economically and is pushing its neighbors toward this with all possible means,” including inviting to Russia workers from them (vz.ru/society/2018/8/15/937080.html).

            But at the same time, he continues, Russians living in the cities to which these workers come are anything but thrilled. Their arrival pushes down the wages of locals in many cases and changes “the inter-ethnic balance” in all cities but especially in Moscow -- and in “a far from good” direction.

            This is not just about an increase in the fraction non-Russians form in the population but in the fact that in the capital in particular, “districts of compact settlement of this or that nationality are forming.” These are “still not China towns or ghettoes,” he says, “but rather ‘regions with a national coloration,” something that hadn’t existed ever before.

            If they continue to form, Moscow will soon become “an entirely different city,” not one in which nationalities will come together to form a single people but one in which each of them  will remain separate, distinct and in some cases hostile to all others. Gradually, he says, the city could become a collection of neighborhoods, “each living as it were in its own pavilion.”

            Akopov insists that this is “not an alarmist scenario.” Rather it is “one of the completely possible scenarios of the development of Moscow. It is clear that neither Muscovites, not Sobyanin, not the federal powers that be want that outcome.” But they have not yet found a way to regulate the influx so that it won’t happen.

            What is important, he concludes, is that the federal government and the cities understand one another and find a compromise, instead of promoting their own very different interests in isolation one from another.

            Just how much of an influx there now is in Moscow was highlighted today by Nikolay Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. He told a meeting in Oryel that every 13^th resident of Moscow is a foreigner, that every fourth one of these is there illegally, and that some of those who can’t find work are turning to crime (kp.ru/daily/26868/3910965/).