MIGRATION

Across time and cultures individuals migrate to improve their lives, seek better opportunities, or flee unbearable conditions. In Russian history, migration highlights social stratification, underscores the importance of social management, and provides insight into post-Soviet population change. Migration motivations in Russia were historically influenced by direct governmental control, providing a unique case for assessing barriers to migration and a window into state and society relations.

The earliest inhabitants of the region now known as Russia were overrun by the in-migration of several conquering populations, with Cimmerians, Scythians (700 b.c.e.), Samartians (300 b.c.e.), Goths (200 c.e.), Huns (370 c.e.), Avars, and Khazars moving into the territory to rule the region. Mongol control (1222) focused on manipulating elites and extracting taxes, but not in-migration. When Moscow later emerged as an urban settlement, eastern Slavs spread across the European plain. Ivan III (1462–1505) pushed expansion south and west, while Ivan IV (1530–1584) pushed east towards Siberia. Restrictions on peasant mobility made migration difficult, yet some risked everything to illegally flee to the southern borderlands and Siberia.

The legal code of 1649 eradicated legal migration. Solidifying serfdom, peasants were now owned by the gentry. Restrictions on mobility could be circumvented. Ambitious peasants could become illegal or seasonal migrants, marginalized socially and economically. By 1787 between 100,000 and 150,000 peasants resided seasonally in Moscow, unable to acquire legal residency, forming an underclass unable to assimilate into city life. Restricted mobility hindered the development of urban labor forces for industrialization in this period, also marked by the use of forced migration and exile by the state.

The emancipation of serfs (1861) increased mobility, but state ability to control migration remained. Urbanization increased rapidly—according to the 1898 census, nearly half of all urbanites were migrants. The Stolypin reforms (1906) further spurred migration to cities and frontiers by enabling withdrawal from rural communes. Over 500,000 peasants moved into Siberia yearly in the early 1900s. Over seven million refugees moved into Russia by 1916, challenging ideas of national identity, highlighting the limitations of state, and crystallizing Russian nationalism. During the Revolution and civil war enforcement of migration restrictions were thwarted, adding to displacement, settlement shifts, and urban growth in the 1920s.

The Soviet passport system reintroduced state control over migration in 1932. Passports contained residency permits, or propiskas, required for legal residence. The passport system set the stage for increased social control and ideological emphasis on the scientific management of population. Limiting rural mobility (collective farmers did not receive passports until 1974), restricting urban growth, the exile of specific ethnic groups (Germans, Crimean Tatars, and others), and directing migration through incentives for movements into new territories (the Far East, Far North, and northern Kazakhstan) in the Soviet period echoed previous patterns of state control. As demographers debated scientific population management, by the late Soviet period factors such as housing, wages, and access to goods exerted strong influences on migration decision making. Attempts to control migration in the Soviet period met some success in stemming urbanization, successfully attracting migrants to inhospitable locations, increasing regional mixing of ethnic and linguistic groups across the Soviet Union, and blocking many wishing to immigrate.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, migration restrictions were initially minimized, but migration trends and security concerns increased interest in restrictions by the end of the twentieth century. Decreased emigration control led to over

100,000 people leaving Russia yearly between 1991 and 1996, dampened only by restrictions on immigration from Western countries. Russia's population loss has been offset by immigration from the near abroad, where 25 million ethnic Russians resided in 1991. Legal, illegal, and seasonal migrants were attracted from the near abroad by the relative political and economic stability in Russia, in addition to ethnic and linguistic ties. Yet, the flow of immigrants declined in the late 1990s. Refugees registered in Russia numbered nearly one million in 1998. Internally, migration patterns follow wages and employment levels, and people left the far eastern and northern regions. Internal displacement emerged in the south during the 1990s, from Chechnya. By the late 1990s, the challenges of migrant assimilation and integration were key public issues, and interest in restricting migration rose. While market forces had begun to replace direct administrative control over migration in Russia by the end of the 1990s, concerns over migration and increasing calls for administrative interventions drew upon a long history of state management of population migration.

See also: demography; immigration and emigration; law code of 1649; passport system

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Cynthia J. Buckley