Moscow’s Program for Repatriation has Collapsed – Fewer are Returning and Many who Do Aren’t Russians

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 14 – Vladimir Putin’s program set up in 2006 to repatriate what he calls compatriots has collapsed with the total number of people using it falling from 108,600 in 2019 to only 31,700 last year. Moreover, an increasing share of those using it may be Russian speakers but aren’t the ethnic Russians the Kremlin leader hoped to attract.

            That is the message of new research conducted by Versiya journalist Dmity Igonin who says that both the falloff in the numbers and the fact that a large share of those coming now are Russian-speaking non-Russians is raising ever more questions about this effort (versia.ru/potok-pereselencev-v-rossiyu-po-programme-vozvrashheniya-sootechestvennikov-snizhaetsya).

            The decline in numbers reflects the drying up of the available pools, he says; but the shift in the ethnic composition of those returning is the product of Moscow’s focus on language rather than identity. In the early years of the program, more than 80 percent of those returning were Slavs, but by 2022, their share had fallen to only 17 percent.

            Thus a program advertised as one that would help solve Russia’s demographic and especially ethno-demographic problems is now doing neither, bringing ever fewer people back and those who do come being ever less ethnically Russian or even Slavic but consisting of Central Asians and Caucasians who know Russian.

            That isn’t what Russians what, especially as the Russian-speaking non-Russians in almost all cases speak other languages as well and frequently function as non-Russian diasporas when they arrive in the Russian Federation, compounding according to Russian officials the social and even criminal problems the country faces.