Migration and restructuring in post-Soviet Russia

Demokratizatsiya, Fall 2001 by Heleniak, Timothy

Timothy Heleniak is with the World Bank and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. During the 2001-2002 academic year he is a research scholar at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., where he is doing work on the demographic impact of transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The statements and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not to be attributed to the World Bank, Georgetown University, or the Woodrow Wilson Center.

When Russia became independent in 1992, it inherited from the Soviet Union a spatial distribution of its population that was incompatible with its emerging market economy. Internally the largest migration stream has been out of the overpopulated Russian north and Far East toward central Russia. At other geographic scales, as a result of decades of Soviet labor policy, there were numerous cities and towns in Russia that had many more workers than they would under market conditions. Simultaneously, the breakup of the Soviet Union caused the large-scale departure of Russians, Russian speakers, and others out of the non-Russian states of the former Soviet Union to Russia. The lifting of exit restrictions did not cause the mass exodus that many had predicted, but it did allow the emigration of many highly skilled persons who could have played a role in the country's transition. As a result of the deterioration of the economy and the opening of the economy to the outside world, there has been a rise in the trafficking of Russian women to the West. With the relaxation of border restrictions, there has been a large, undetermined increase in the amount of illegal migration in Russia. These different migration streams are affected by, and are simultaneously affecting Russia's post-Soviet transition to a market economy and democratic society. In this article I examine the various migration streams that were set off by their breakup of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the transition period, with an emphasis upon the impact both nationally and locally.

The Transition of the Russian Migration System

Migration is just one strategy of adaptation that people employ in response to changing circumstances. About half of the Russian population live in a region other than the one they were born in. 1 Migration theory posits that potential migrants calculate a cost-benefit equation comparing their incomes in their current location with those possible in potential destinations, and if the difference outweighs the costs of moving, the person moves. Wages in potential destinations are discounted by possible spells of unemployment. In addition, various noneconomic, quality-of-life measures are factored into a potential migrant's decision-making calculus. Neoclassical economics states that it is differentials in wages among regions (or countries) that cause people to move from low-wage to high-wage regions. As I will show below for Russia, it is the real wage, adjusted for the regional cost-of-living, that drives migration. Gravity models applied to migration have also shown that the cost of migration increases with distance, as the cost of transporting oneself and one's belongings increases the longer the move, and that information about more distant potential destinations is more difficult to obtain.

People who migrate are favorably self-selected compared to those who remain in their place of origin. Migrants tend to be more ambitious, aggressive, and entrepreneurial and in general more able. 2 Because migration is selective, migration streams are skewed by age, sex, education, and life cycle, with levels of migration rising along with levels of education, occupation, and income. Urban dwellers tend to have higher migration rates than people living in rural areas because they possess many of the socioeconomic characteristics associated with high migration rates. Migration rates are highest among people who have just completed their schooling and are embarking on careers. Migration turnover then slows down as people begin to raise families, rising slightly again around retirement age. These tendencies have important implications both for regions of high in-migration and for those with large out-migration: Those areas losing large numbers of people tend to lose the younger, more educated, more able-bodied segments of their populations, and destination regions gain those persons. In the Soviet Union, certain ethnic groups had higher levels of "migrateability" as result of having many of the socioeconomic characteristics associated with migration. They included Russians, other Slavic groups, Tatars, Jews, and "mobilized Europeans"--Armenians, Georgians, Latvians, and Estonians. 3

Following from this brief summary of migration theory, a number of factors can be identified that influenced migration patterns in post-Soviet Russia. The greatest influence on international migration was the breakup of the Soviet Union into fifteen successor states, causing what had been internal migration within one state to become migration across international borders. 4 The Soviet Union has often been referred to as a museum of different nationalities. Including the fifteen successor states, there were fifty-three ethnic homelands when the Soviet Union broke up, the largest being the Russian Federation. A large portion of post-Soviet migration, but certainly not all, consisted of people returning to their ethnic homelands, including the return of a portion of the Russian diaspora residing in the non-Russian states. In the Soviet Union, both international migration and internal migration were tightly controlled, and external migration control efforts were aimed mainly at keeping people in the country. In post-Soviet Russia, controls over migration have been loosened, and at least de jure control over internal migration has been removed.