Immigrant Workers Now Outnumber Indigenous Non-Russians in Many Cities of the Urals, Moscow Expert on Regional Affairs Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 27 – Migrant workers from Azerbaijan and Central Asia have flooded into the cities of the Urals in search of high pay, a pattern that until recently was aided and abetted by local officials and that has frightened indigenous non-Russians who are outnumbered there and angered ethnic Russians who fear the ghettoization of the country, Vadim Trukhachev says.

            “When I came to Surgut, the largest and oldest city of the Khanty-Mansiisk AD,” the Moscow specialist on regional affairs says, “I could not believe my own eyes: practically the entire population consisted of migrants; and there was not a single person who looked like a Slav” (svpressa.ru/society/article/529469/).

             When the oil industry developed there in Soviet times, Trukhachev continues, the area saw an influx of workers from Azerbaijan who had experience in the oil fields there. Now, the migrants coming in are from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as well, something local officials have supported.

            What is important to remember, he says, is that “all these diasporas fight among themselves. In the cities of the region have formed genuine ghettos where the indigenous population of Russia” – non-Russian and ethnic Russian alike – are not allowed” and are being forced out of the economy by migrants who’ll work for less.

            To combat this trend, the Moscow specialist calls for the establishment of quotas in all regions that will set “the percentage of residents who may be migrants” and use forced expulsions to get the numbers down to those levels.   Otherwise, Russia will be overrun by immigrants who bring disease and crime.

            Trukhachev’s claims about the Urals as a whole are hyperbolic. Few cities there are in fact threatened by the influx of migrants he suggests, although it is the case that in many, which have relatively small indigenous non-Russian populations, migrants may dominate in the non-Russian sector and shape how Russians will view both.

            What is worrisome is that such notions are circulating not just among Russian nationalists but among acknowledged experts like Trukhachev, an indication that they may have far more traction in official circles than most observers now believe.