Citizenship, Belonging, and Moldovan Migrants in Post-Soviet Russia

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnographic research among transnational Moldovan households in Moscow, this essay considers how ideals of belonging, assertions of historically inflected rights, and aspirations for mobility are all part of the everyday practice of citizenship. Mobile subjects encountering increasingly restrictive post-Soviet citizenship regimes often recall incorporation into a greater historical polity than their current passports would suggest. Three key areas are examined: the intersection of citizenship regimes and popular understandings of belonging; the sense of rights driven by cultural logics informed by previous history; and the way in which ideals and practices of citizenship are diverse among migrants from apparently homogeneous migration streams. The post-Soviet context where the Soviet promise of enfranchisement continues to inform how people on the margins view citizenship illustrates just how deeply citizenship regimes come to be incorporated into popular understandings of belonging even long after formal citizenship ceases to exist.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-Soviet
• Russia
• citizenship
• belonging
• migration
• Moldovans

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to those migrants from Moldova who took the time to speak with me about their efforts to forge lives spanning Moscow, Moldova, and Turkey. An early version of the essay benefited from a lively discussion at the panel, ‘Working the Migration Puzzle: Security, Labor, and Smuggling across the FSU, the Balkans, and the Europe Union’, organized for the American Anthropological Association meetings held in San Francisco in 2008. The manuscript benefited immensely from a careful reading by an anonymous reviewer at Ethnos. The ethnographic research for this essay conducted in spring 2007 and 2009 was supported by an International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), Short-term Travel Grant, as well as by a University of British Columbia Humanities and Social Sciences Grant.

Notes

1. All names used in the text are pseudonyms.

2. In 2004, Bella was able to make US$500/month working 12–14 h days, six days a week doing apartment renovation on a crew in Moscow; at the same time, as a live-in domestic worker in Turkey she could only make US$300/month. By 2011, Bella was more often an independent contractor, working alone or with just one other person, and getting paid considerably more while working a schedule similar to what she did in 2004; her pay averaged $1,500/month. In both locations, migrants refer to their incomes in US dollars, although they are sometimes paid in local currencies, i.e. Russian rubles or Turkish lira. In 2007 in Moscow it was not uncommon for a one room apartment on the outskirts of the city, but still on a metro line, to cost $500/month to rent, and by 2011 the cost was often closer to $800/month.

3. For a thoughtful analysis of this situation see Buckley's (2008) introduction to Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia.

4. A growing number of human rights groups are documenting ethnically motivated violence in the Russian Federation. For instance, in 2010 SOVA, a Moscow-based human rights organization, recorded 330 people as victims of ‘hate-motivated’ violence, including 33 deaths. SOVA has tracked ethnically motivated violence for over a decade, and the following gives a sense of the scale of the problem: in 2009 over 11 months, 80 people were killed in similar types of violence, with 414 people injured; in 2007 SOVA noted 653 attacks on ethnic minorities in Russia, including 73 deaths, a 16% increase over 2006 (SOVA 2011, 2007). For 2006, the Moscow Human Rights Group documented 230 hate crimes and 74 racially motivated murders in Russia (United Kingdom Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2007: 170).

5. The first series of anti-immigrant legislation in Russia appeared in 2002. New amendments to migration legislation came into effect on January 15, 2007. This legislation made it easier to employ citizens from most countries of the FSU as long as they obtain work permits. Now documented migrants can obtain work permits from the Federal Migration Service (FMS), and employers only need to notify the State Employment Agency upon hiring a citizen of the FSU. Employers hiring workers who are undocumented and lack work permits face serious fines, among other repercussions; in 2007 employing a foreign citizen without a work permit became punishable with fines ranging from 250,000 to 800,000 rubles. In April 2007, 800,000 rubles was approximately US$31,000. Furthermore, as of April 1, 2007, certain jobs, for instance, cashier, became restricted to Russian citizens (Chebotareva & Wilson 2007).

6. In 1994, the height of in-migration following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, 1.1 million people immigrated to Russia from the non-Russian FSU states; in 2001, this figure had fallen to just 186,200, but a steady flow continues (Heleniak 2002; Flynn 2004).

7. For instance, the UK recently restricted the number of immigrants from non-EU countries permitted to enter the UK annually to 24,100 people, a 5% drop from 2009 (BBC 2010). Growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the USA is perhaps most notoriously exemplified by contested Arizona state legislation that grants police the power to demand proof of legal status as part of its routine checks (Sanneh 2012). Meanwhile, in 2010 in Australia the already restricted list of possible occupations in place for its skilled worker migration program declined from 398 to 181 (Mohapatra et al. 2010: 9).

8. The Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS, currently consists of 12 member countries which formerly belonged to the Soviet Union and now work in conglomeration with Russia on common concerns around economic, defense, and foreign affairs policies. For further discussion and a map of the region, see http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/cis.htm (accessed April 5, 2011). From 1992 until the late 1990s the Bishkek Agreement allowed for an ‘open’ migration regime and visa-free travel between CIS states (Tishkov et al. 2005: 35), but after 1999, arrangements were made on more narrow terms between specific countries.

9. The 2002 Russian Federation census counted 145,166,731 people comprising the total population of Russia. This included 11,976,822 people, or 8.3% of the population, who identified as ‘foreign born’, a category that would also have included those who were born in the countries formerly part of the Soviet Union. Of Moscow's total population (10,382.75), 1,128.03, or 10.9% of the those polled in the city identified as ‘foreign-born’. (Russian Federal State Statistics Service, cited in Migration Policy Institute website, http://www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/gcmm/Moscowdatasheet.pdf (accessed January 12, 2011).)

10. For instance, in December 2000, when Georgia refused to allow Russia to traverse its territory to fight against what Russia viewed as separatist Chechens, Russia began to require a visa for Georgians who wanted to cross into Russia (Reuters 2000).

11. The same discourse of ‘friendship of peoples’ or ‘amity between peoples’ circulates in China today, where ethnic co-existence is carefully depicted (See Bulag 2002, cited in Yeh 2009:71). As Yeh (2009: 71) writes of China, ‘The only accepted cultural difference is that which upholds the national unity, and does not split the nation’. The discourse of ‘friendship of peoples’ delicately points to difference while remaining within kosher bounds of political reference.

12. Even just two years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the FMS estimated that two million people were in Russia as undocumented migrants (see Curtis 1996). In 1993, Russia signed the United Nations Convention on Refugees, and Russia became classified as a ‘country of first resort’, meaning that Russia had certain obligations to foreigners fleeing countries outside of the CIS. These new obligations, along with the relaxed border security following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, rapidly increased the number of people arriving in Russia seeking refugee status. According to the UNHCR, in 1994 in Moscow alone, about 28,000 foreign (non-CIS) refugees were living illegally; these included roughly 20,000 Afghans, 6,000 Iraqis, 2,000 Somalis, and smaller numbers of Angolans, Ethiopians, and Zairians. Other sources point to even larger estimates of as many as 100,000 undocumented people living in Moscow, including 50,000 Chinese (Curtis 1996). From 1990 to 1999, official emigration from Russia to beyond the FSU states averaged about 100,000 annually; by 2001, this exodus of mostly skilled, educated persons had fallen by nearly half, and in recent years has continued to fall (Curtis 1996; Heleniak 2002). In contrast, in 2002 the FMS counted 359,000 people entering Russia to work (Tiuriukanova 2003: 179).

13. For the most well-off households engaged in labor migration in the early 2000s, incomes increased fourfold and for the poorest households incomes increased 13 times what they were prior to migration (Ghencea & Gudumac 2004: 49). On average, in regional Moldovan towns 22% of the active working age population is absent in labor migration, in contrast to just over 9% of the same population absent from the capital city of Chisinau (Ghencea & Gudumac 2004: 41).

14. A study of remittances in Moldova based on a sample of 4,500 households, 715 of which had at least one family member abroad from January to September 2003, found that 56% of remittances were received through ‘informal’ channels, that is not wired into bank accounts or via Western Union money transfers (Ghencea & Gudumac 2004: 11, 74). Even as early as 2004 estimated remittances, including unofficially transferred sums, had reached US$1 billion (Argumenty i fakty 2004, cited in Ghencea & Gudumac 2004: 75).

15. In recent years, the number of people ‘absent’ from the country in a given year has been said to be as high as 1,600,000 according to local press accounts, and as low as 234,000 based on scholarly research (Ghencea & Gudumac 2004: 41; World Bank 2011).

16. In May 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Turkish President Abdullah Gul signed an agreement to initiate visa-free tourist travel between their two countries; however, the agreement will only come into being once a ‘readmission’ treaty on illegal immigrants is also in place (see Russian Television 2010).

17. In 2004, Moldovans (or those speaking a language that is widely viewed as commensurate with Romanian) comprised 78.2% of the population, Ukrainians 8.4%, Russians 5.8%, Gagauz 4.4%, and Bulgarians 1.9%. The remaining 1.3% was defined as ‘other’ in recent census data (CIA Factbook 2008).

18. The approximately 153,000 Gagauz living in Gagauzia, in southern Moldova, comprise 82% of the population of the region. There are also over 250,000 Gagauz living throughout the FSU. Concentrations of Gagauz live in Ukraine, in Odessa and Zaparozhye, as well as in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kabardino-Balkaria. There are also Gagauz in Romania, as well as nearly 20,000 Gagauz living in Greece and Bulgaria, and also in Turkey (Gagauz Autonomous Territory Administration 2013).

19. The procedure for obtaining citizenship of the Russian Federation is regulated by the Constitution of the Russian Federation, Federal Law No. 62-FZ, dated May 31,, 2002, ‘On Citizenship of the Russian Federation,’ as well as several other regulatory acts. Currently, successful applications for citizenship require residency in Russia for five years, stable employment, and fluency in Russian.

20. On both sides the grandfathers died years earlier, a commonplace situation in rural Moldova.

21. Ol'ya said that of the 20 students in her graduating class in 2002, only five remained in her hometown. All the rest were working as labor migrants in Russia, Turkey, or Ukraine.

22. In 2009, Sasha did receive his permanent residency status but as of 2012 Ol'ya had still not received hers. Sasha has yet to be granted his Russian citizenship.

23. On Moldovans seeking Romanian citizenship, see Dimulescu and Avram (2011), as well as the following web resources: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,706338,00.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8029849.stm http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/08/romania-and-citizenship http://www.crpe.ro/eng/library/files/crpe_policy_memo.pdf (all accessed March 10, 2012).