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ABSTRACT
This article examines the triggers and effects of migration from rural Azerbaijan in the post-Soviet period. Migration from rural Azerbaijan both reflected and perpetuated the country’s integration into the global circuits of production and consumption as raw petroleum supplier. This study is based on historical research as well as interviews conducted in six villages from two distinct geographic regions in Azerbaijan. In addition to the political and economic aspects, I examine cultural triggers and effects of migration from rural Azerbaijan and show how migrants act as intimate channels through which capitalocentrism and market mentality travels to the remote countryside in the post-Soviet period.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 ‘Region’—official English translation for ‘rayon’, or rural districts.
2 To give the reader a closer sense of migration as a uniting theme in livelihood interviews: One local woman narrated how relatives pitched in to buy a minibus for her husband, who took it to operate in Baku. Another narrated how her son working in Baku helped to pay the costs of his sister’s wedding. The third had her son, working in Baku, and his wife visiting and staying with her during the week of this interview. The fourth told how, of her three daughters, the one who had left for Baku was most in need of her mother’s help. The fifth complained that the absence of a joyful social life (youth gatherings, ‘dance parties as we used to have at the collective farm’) in the village makes her daughter look to her seasonal job in Baku as a way into a more stable and long-term migration to the capital. The sixth said that she is content with completing the wedding of her elder son, ‘who is now in Baku’, and is worried now about ‘building a nest’ (finding a bride, paying for the wedding and initial housing expenses) for her younger son. The seventh mentioned sending ‘a sack of wheat the other day to the kids in Baku’. The eighth, ninth, and tenth also talked about helping their (young adult) children, who had migrated to Baku, with occasional sacks of potatoes, forest nuts and fruits, containers of milk, or fresh-cut meat. The eleventh, a retired schoolteacher, narrated how their village school had 400 students when he was still working but has only 100 students now. In a different village, a concerned parent shared how entire grades in their village school have just one student or no students at all—‘there are simply no kids of that age in the village anymore; the young are all now moving out because of the unemployment’. A high-level local executive officer boastedof Shamakhy’s skilled carpenters, stone carvers, and architects, some of whom now ‘made a fortune building villas for ‘the very top’ in Baku and are highly sought after’. Another official talked about how some shops in Shamakhy town are funded by outmigrants to Russia and employ the migrants’ own relatives. The list could be continued.
3 Available online at http://www.azerbaijan.az/portal/General/Constitution/doc/constitution_e.pdf.
4 This did not include agricultural production.
5 In September 1994 Azerbaijan signed oil contracts with 33 companies from 15 countries were valued at 60 billion dollars—dubbed in Azerbaijan as the ‘Contract of the Century’ (Bayulgen Citation2003). The formal name of the contract is ‘Azeri, Chirag, and Deep-Water Gunashli International Contract No. 1’.
6 A few months after the ‘Contract of the Century’, in 1995, a consortium known as the Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC) was organised. Originally AIOC comprised BP (UK), Amoco(U.S.), LUKoil(Russia),Pennzoil (now Devon of U.S.), UNOCAL (U.S.), Statoil (Norway), McDermott (U.S.), Ramco (Scotland), TPAO (Turkey), Delta Nimir (now Amerada Hessof U.S.), and SOCAR (Azerbaijan). Since then Exxon, now ExxonMobil (U.S.), ITOCHU (Japan), and INPEX (Japan) have joined the consortium. McDermott, Ramco, and LUKoil have since sold their shares. AIOC’s first president was Terry Adams (UK) of British Petroleum (BP), the company that operates the offshore oil platforms and the onshore Sangachal Terminal.
7 Although based on size, Baku may not be a global city as Sassen (Citation2007) used the term.
8 The rise of construction in resource-rich economies have been connected to global economies by Harvey. In his analysis of urbanisation, David Harvey argued that surplus absorption is as integral to global capitalism as surplus production (2006, 2012). Capitalist development is destabilised not only by obstacles to profitable production, but also by impediments to surplus absorption. Thus, if ‘there is not enough purchasing power in an existing market, then new markets must be found by expanding foreign trade, promoting new products and lifestyles, creating new credit instruments and debt-financed state expenditures’ (Harvey Citation2012, 6).Restructuring of cities as Harvey (Citation2006, Citation2012) demonstrated, is at the heart of this process and transforms the cities as centres of surplus absorption. The process of city restructuring itself serves surplus absorption through government’s investment in infrastructural development.Massive construction projects signifying the remaking of Baku and providing jobs to numbers of people from the countryside in the post-Soviet period as Azerbaijan repositioned itself as petroleum producer for the global economy were not a peculiar to Azerbaijan, but reflected the choices made regarding surplus absorption similar to those made about cities around the from China to the United Arab Emirates, mentioned by Harvey (Citation2012).The urbanisation process that has reshaped Baku with Azerbaijan’s reorganisation as a market economy and a global oil supplier has been a twin brother to the system of production for the market—capitalism, described by Harvey (Citation2012, 5–25).
9 Urbanisation was regarded as both a necessary and a positive result of the Soviet industrialisation by the USSR strand of Marxism (Morton and Stuart Citation1984).
10 For racism in post-Soviet Russia, please refer to Amnesty International Citation2003; European Commission against Racism and Intolerance Citation2005; Rapoza Citation2013; Zakharov Citation2015.
11 Acknowledging a ‘cultural’ aspect of migration—tied to values and desires of the purpose of life as bettering one’s own position in this world, and to acquiring the expanded ability to consume— is a conceptual necessity to understand both, (1) at the micro-level, the dilemmas and moral conundrums faced by the migrants in host locations, affecting their reaction to the oppressive regime (questioned, imagined, and theorised by Davis Citation2006; Goonewardena Citation2012; Liss Citation2012; Yiftachel Citation2012; Harvey Citation2012); and (2) at the macro-level, how these migrations can play into the establishment and deepening of the global market at large—a role beyond migrant reshaping of urban and rural labor markets.
12 Remittances amounted to 2% of GDP in Belarus and only 0.2% of GDP in Kazakhstan in 2017 (World Bank Citation2018).
13 The Russian Federation hosts the largest number of Azerbaijan’s emigrants: two-thirds of all Azerbaijani emigrants live in Russia (International Center for Migration Policy Development Citation2018, 44). The next four destination countries are also former Soviet states and together accounted for more than 90% of Azerbaijani emigrants abroad in 2015 (International Center for Migration Policy Development Citation2018, 44).
14 Shamakhy interviewees’ family members who had migrated to Baku were said to be working predominantly as construction workers, drivers, night guards, cleaners, and bread-factory workers. With the exception of one woman’s son, who was a university instructor in Baku, and another’s daughter, who was a seasonal administrative assistant with a Chinese company, the outflow of young labor from the villages of Shamakhy seemed to go right into the lines of the lower working class of the growing Baku.
15 In the case of Baku, to legally work one must be registered to an address in one of the administrative districts of the city. The government body in charge of issuing residential registration is … the local police department. The police also issue all permits for and control any forms of demonstration and protest in the city. In this framework, the ability of rural migrants to earn their livelihoods—their ‘work permits’,—depends on their record/relationship with the city’s police departments. This record must be continuously earned, with checkpoints every three months for temporary residence registration, which thus keeps rural migrants in check, and insecure. If temporary registration is denied, rural outmigrants in Baku may work illegally—without contracts or any slim protection of the Labor Code. The same requirement exists in Russian cities, and most other post-Soviet republics as well, as a preserved leftover of the Soviet-era urbanisation control policy. If registration is denied to Azerbaijan’s migrants in Russia, they face deportation.
16 ‘Capitalocentrism is a dominant economic discourse that distributes positive value to those activities associated with capitalist economic activity, however defined, and assigns lesser value to all other processes of producing and distributing goods and services’. (Gibson-Graham Citation2006, 56)
Capitalocentrism involves valuing cash-bringing activities over non-cash bringing ones, and seeing ‘waged labor, the commodity market, and capitalist enterprise … as the only ‘normal’ forms of work, exchange and business organization’ (Gibson-Graham Citation2006, 53).
17 This made Michael Burawoy point out the inapplicability of Polanyi’s description of the market transformation to the social situation in post-Soviet Russia (2001). Burawoy argued that Russia has become a market society without the commodification of labor—‘the transformation of society’—as well as without the concomitant transformation of production, and state (Citation2001, 8).
18 Karl Polanyi pointed out that the ‘universal’ human desire for material gain characterises only modern market economies. In Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies (1968) Polanyi showed that motives distinctly different from self-gain maximization—like reciprocity, give-and-take—ruled the behaviour of pre-modern societies’ members. Expanding on Polanyi, Hannes Lacher (Lacher Citation1999) wrote:
pursuit of economic gain is itself the product of the way in which people gain access to their livelihood … Only where individuals are ultimately dependent on the market for their livelihood can the market become a social force which compels them to subordinate social values to the pursuit of profit. (P. 345)
19 Going to Iran to bring goods to sell in Lenkeran town is common in this village’s vicinity. This petty trade is dominated by women.