#5
The Russia Journal
December 14-20, 2001
Russians abroad need help
The state should help would-be immigrants
By OTTO LATSIS
President Vladimir Putin’s latest weekly meeting with the government coincided with International Human Rights Day. Putin didn’t forget to point out the importance of human rights in his remarks. He asked the government to pay closer attention to fundamental social and economic rights and to follow the progress of draft laws on pension and labor reform in the Duma.
Putin also mentioned the need to work with Russians living abroad and do more to defend their rights. This call was directed primarily at the Foreign Ministry, suggesting what kind of work Putin had in mind – the traditional role played by embassies in foreign countries.
But in the case of Russia and some of the other former Soviet republics, the issue of compatriots abroad is of a different nature than in most other countries. Most people who think of themselves as Russian and live abroad didn’t leave the state where they were born. Rather, the state left them stranded by shifting borders. As a result, 20 million to 25 million ethnic Russians – equivalent to the population of a medium-sized European nation – now live in countries that 10 years ago were part of the Soviet Union.
In some of these countries, such as Tajikistan, which has had to defend itself from armed attack from the south, the question is not one even of human rights, as such, but of pure survival. Few of the former Soviet republics have given the Russian language official status alongside the native language, as did Kyrgyzstan. None of the new republics recognize dual citizenship, and nor does Russia itself.
This citizenship issue has given Russians abroad a difficult choice between giving up civil rights in their countries of residence and renouncing the Russian citizenship they see as a sort of insurance policy if events at home take a turn for the worse. Two of the former Soviet republics – Estonia and Latvia – don’t even give their people this choice. Many Russians in these countries find it virtually impossible to get citizenship and end up stateless persons in the countries they were born in or lived in for many years. Finally, Russians in a number of countries face restrictions on getting education in their native language. Latvia, for example, is moving toward a complete phasing out of all education in Russian.
With problems like these, just asking the Foreign Ministry to do something won’t help much. On the contrary, some Russian officials’ clumsy propaganda campaigns have at times just made things worse for Russians abroad by making local leaders only more irritated with them. This is most evident in Estonia, Latvia and Kazakstan – the three countries that felt the most threatened by Soviet-era nationalities policy. The Kazaks are already a minority in their own country, and the Latvians and Estonians come dangerously close. This in part explains why the authorities in these countries have taken such a tough line with the Russians since gaining independence.
Routine embassy work won’t be of any help in resolving this tangle of problems, some of which don’t depend on the new independent states at all. What’s needed is a well-financed Russian state program specially aimed at helping Russians abroad move back to Russia if they wish to do so.
Of course, some of them are coming anyway. In the decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union some 4 million people are estimated to have immigrated to Russia from neighboring countries. But this is only a fraction of those who would like to come but don’t because of material difficulties and of Russia’s own demand for people.
Russia faces a serious depopulation problem. Annual natural population decline reaches hundreds of thousands of people, but this was offset by migration from neighboring countries only during the initial years following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, almost all those willing or able to come to Russia without special state assistance have already done so, and Russia hasn’t exactly put on much of a welcome for them. This year, migration to Russia will only compensate for 5 percent of natural population decline, and next year the figure might be zero.
This decrease in migration coincided with the period when Russia made up to $30 billion a year in additional revenue from oil exports alone. It’s not that there was no money to help Russians return; rather, there was no political will.
For comparison’s sake, Israel had 4 million Jews 10 years ago, and now it has 5 million Jews. The 4 million Jews already there have absorbed the 1 million newcomers, and Israel intends to do the same in the next decade. If we transfer these proportions to Russia, this would mean the arrival of at least 35 million people over 10 years, not the 4 million that actually came. Such an influx of people would do a lot to help solve many of Russia’s strategic problems, but so far, no Russian politicians have proposed developing programs to encourage this. They all limit themselves to making appeals to protect the rights of Russians abroad.
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