Russia: Nationalism on the march

Vladimir Tor does not look like an angry man. Over a leisurely breakfast of fried eggs, he quotes from Pushkin and tells anecdotes about the Dutch war of independence from Spain.

But today, this plump, rosy-faced man with a goatee will lead a crowd of some of Russia's angriest people. A nationalist leader, he has helped organise the Russian March, an annual rally of the country's nationalists, which regularly features anti-immigrant slogans and sometimes even Nazi emblems.

Radical nationalists have long been part of Russian politics but none of the many groups and parties that keep splitting and merging has developed into a major force. But this year, many see the march as a watershed. Recent anti-immigrant riots have shown that nationalism and xenophobia are not the preserve of a few extremists but are turning rapidly into a leading mainstream concern.

"While a large number of people support 'normal' nationalism, a growing number are starting to turn to aggressive nationalism or fascism," warns Lyudmila Al­ekseeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, a rights organisation.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia has become a magnet for migrants second only to the US, with more than 13m arriving in the country for permanent residence since 1993. Its oil-fuelled boom over much of the past decade created a demand for workers that the shrinking Russian population could no longer meet and attracted millions from the newly independent republics in Central Asia whose economies have been struggling.

Russians across the social spectrum complain that the outsiders are changing their cities. "We are being flooded by migrants. When I go out on the street, I think: is this Moscow or what?" says Olga Ryazantseva, a teacher in the Russian capital. "These people, for example the Tajiks, are different from us. They don't have an appreciation of education like we Russians do. They just want knives and guns."

Such fear and anger reached boiling point after a resident from Moscow's working-class Biryulyovo neighbourhood was stabbed to death last month by a man whom police later identified as a migrant from Azerbaijan. After the media publicised security camera footage showing a man of "non-Slavic appearance", a crowd of locals stormed a nearby wholesale vegetable market, where many migrants work, to hunt him down. More than 300 people were arrested after the riot. Later, a man from Uzbekistan was found dead in the vicinity with several stab wounds.

These ethnic tensions are testing Russia's identity and its perception of where it wants to position itself geopolitically. Still reeling from the political and economic convulsions of the past 22 years, Russia often seems unsure of whether it should try to regain its superpower status or seek a comfortable existence as a European country. "Russia is struggling to find its place in the world," says Andrew Robarts, a historian at the University of California Riverside. "In the projection as to what Russia is, they are still trying to convert an empire into a nation state."

Many are trying to fill the void left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which prided itself on its many nationalities, with a return to Orthodox Christianity and a pride in Slavic roots.

Mr Tor represents an attempt to pull Russia back to its core. His supporters want the country to reduce funding for Russia's republics in the Caucasus, such as Chechnya and Dagestan - an idea that is gaining greater mainstream backing. There are also calls for Moscow to erect a visa barrier to shut out the flows of migrants from Central Asia.

But these sentiments present President Vladimir Putin with an agonising dilemma. He is determined that Moscow remain a power within its own bloc. Restricting the borders with Central Asia would imperil its already difficult project of a customs union and drive those neighbours into the arms of China, whose growing influence Moscow is keen to limit.

Mr Putin is trying to balance his ambitions for a regional trade bloc with his need to respond to the growing anger about immigration.

He has used the Orthodox church and Russian patriotism to underpin his legitimacy and create a stronger sense of social consensus. But at the same time, Mr Putin has resisted all calls for a smaller Russia. In a manifesto-like article in January 2012, he rejected multiculturalism and recognised people's fears of migration but stubbornly stuck to the notion of Russia as a multi-ethnic nation and to the claim to its status as a power spanning Europe and Asia. "President Putin has been remarkably ambiguous on the issue of migration," says Blair Ruble, a Russia scholar at the Wilson Center and co-author of a forthcoming study about the reception of migrants in Russia's regions.

The public anger sparked in Biryulyovo makes that ambiguity more unpopular, when Mr Putin is already under pressure because of a slowing economy and perennial problems such as corruption and bureaucracy.

Since the riots, the authorities have scrambled to placate the public. Moscow's mayor Sergei Sobyanin closed the vegetable market and rounded up more than 1,000 migrants to check their legal status. The authorities have also promised to conduct raids every Friday and police have stepped up document checks of dark-haired men on the metro.

The message from Biryulyovo, says Mr Tor, "is this: if you want law and order on the streets; if you want government institutions to start functioning properly; if you want the government to change for the better - go out on to the streets, turn over cars, take some watermelons and throw them at the heads of Azerbaijanis."

He expects 30,000 people to attend the Russian March - a third more than the number of participants claimed by the organisers last year. Police gave much lower estimates.

Many migrants fear for their safety. "I will not go to work on Monday. I will not go anywhere, it is too dangerous," says Sudoba Numonova, a Tajik in her late 20s who came to Moscow last year and works in a relative's shop. Wang Qunlin, a Chinese trader in Moscow, warns her countrymen via a mobile chat app not to go anywhere near the march. "The Russians have a natural tendency to xenophobia. But now, after the riots, many people feel anything goes when it comes to migrants," she says.

According to the Sova Centre, which monitors hate crime, there have been 19 hate-related murders this year, more than in all of 2012 and the first rise since an earlier peak in 2008.

"There is a growing emotional tension around this issue in the general public," says Alexander Verkhovsky, the centre's director. "It is being fuelled by politicians' rhetoric - this is a year of public official campaigning against migrants, both in elections and with crackdowns which make migrants look like enemies."

Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician who is seen as a potential challenger to Mr Putin after garnering 27 per cent of the vote in September's mayoral elections in Moscow, appealed to people to participate in the march in order not to leave it to the radicals.

Although Russia has had Muslim communities for centuries, suspicion against people believed to be Muslims soared after the flaring of the Chechnya conflict in the early 1990s. "Much of the anti-migrant sentiment is in fact directed against people from the North Caucasus who are Russian citizens," says Prof Robarts.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, probably Russia's most prominent nationalist, offered a reminder of this when he proposed on October 24 that the territory of the Caucasus be fenced off with barbed wire.

But even beyond Russia's troubled relations with the Caucasus, its migration profile can hardly be compared with other nations. "Change has been very radical for people living in Russia," says Andrei Korobkov, a migration expert at Middle Tennessee State University, pointing to the fact that despite the Soviet Union's lofty ideal of friendship of nations, its different nations did not live together in practice in Russia.

The 1989 census showed more than 95 per cent of the population of Kazakh­stan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan living in Central Asia. But as of last month, more than 9m people from the five republics, close to 14 per cent of their combined population, were in Russia, according to the Federal Migration Service. That is not at all surprising: citizens from the Commonwealth of Independent States can enter Russia without a visa, Russia's economy is much more developed than those in most CIS states and many of them speak Russian.

And yet, some of Russia's leading demographers and economists argue that the country needs, if anything, more migrants. "Over the next 10 to 15 years, the Russian economy will be unable to do without labour migrants, and at even greater levels," says Yulia Florinskaya, a migration expert at the Higher School of Economics at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Large enterprises in construction, the oil industry and retail were the first to employ migrants, but the practice has spread to small and medium-sized companies.

Again, this has created a balancing act for the Russian government.

In 2006, the Federal Migration Service liberalised the legal framework governing labour migration from the CIS countries, making it much easier for their citizens to work in Russia legally. As a result, official labour migrant numbers started to soar, and problems from illegal status receded.

However, soon after the financial crisis struck in 2008, the authorities in effect rolled liberalisation back by lowering the annual quotas for labour migrants from each country. Analysts argue that this drove many migrants into illegality.

As much as liberals and nationalists differ on migration, they agree that this phenomenon of illegal immigration has led to the biggest problems. Police regularly extract bribes from migrants without documents. "Police corruption is the single biggest source of conflict," says Ms Florinskaya. "In turn, as the main beneficiary from large numbers of illegal migrants, the police are a hurdle to change."

In 2011, the migration service introduced a system of vouchers through which migrants can buy the right to work in Russia. This has helped to legalise many migrants. According to Irina Ivakhnyuk, a demographics professor at Moscow State University and a member of the government commission on migration policy, Moscow is now considering a proposal to give Russia's regions a greater say in setting quotas for foreign labour. "It appears a reasonable and long-awaited improvement in labour migration management," she says.

Meanwhile, the government is trying to cool the temperature on the streets. Sergei Ivanov, Mr Putin's chief of staff, declared last week that the foundations of Russian civilisation were the values of the traditional religion, culture and world view of all its ethnic groups. "These values are family, public morality, kindness, generosity, mercy. And they are the spiritual basis not just of Orthodoxy but also of Islam, Judaism and Buddhism," he said.

It is a message most Russians would not openly disagree with in principle, but still do not want put in practice. As Mr Tor puts it: "I don't want to live in Asia. I want to live in Europe."

Immigration: New wave of arrivals raises minority fears

When the telephones ring at the tiny office of Migration and the Law, the lawyers and social workers who answer expect to hear the voice of an Uzbek or Tajik migrant worker who is being illegally held by the police, or is owed wages by his employer.

But these days, the staff of the non-governmental organisation - which receives funding from investor George Soros and Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch - are often surprised. "We are seeing a growing number of migrants seeking legal support because they have committed crimes," says Gavhar Juraeva, the centre's head.

At the same time, the number of cases where people are being held illegally or have had their documents confiscated unlawfully is dropping.

Ms Juraeva, herself from Tajikistan, says she is worried about a new generation of migrants from her home country and other parts of central Asia. Like the local Russians, she is uncomfortable with the younger people appearing on the Moscow streets. They seem motivated more by a desire for the good life than by the desire to find a job, she says.

Some also express fears of Muslim fundamentalism spreading among migrants.

"I don't feel very comfortable any more coming here because there are a lot of very cocky young men throwing their weight around, and it's not like it used to be," says a Russian Muslim of the Tatar minority at a mosque in central Moscow.

It is a state of affairs that other European countries with longer histories of immigration already know: the changing demographics of the new arrivals often alienate even members of their own diaspora.

Migration experts confirm that these changes are taking place, but say the answer may have to be for Russia to become more, not less, open to migrants.

"We are starting to get people who are from ever more rural areas, less educated, poorer, and [who] speak less Russian," says Yulia Florinskaya of the Higher School of Economics. "This trend could get more pronounced unless we improve our migration policies."

Additional reporting by Courtney Weaver

© The Financial Times Limited 2013. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation