The Russian Work Collective and Migration

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Notes

The authors would like to thank Risto Alapuro, Sarah Ashwin, Anna-Maija Castrén, Michael Eve, Anja-Miina Lohiniva, Suvi Salmenniemi, Sofia Tchouikina and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. The research was financed by the Academy of Finland and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

The term ‘work collective’ can refer to the whole workforce of a single enterprise as well as to one's immediate workmates (Ashwin, 1999a, p. 10). In this article the term ‘co-workers’ refers to those working in the same department as well as to those working elsewhere in the factory. In practice, however, the latter account for only 17% of all co-workers reported in our data.

The salary was, of course, important. The workers could also borrow a large sum of money from the mine in times of acute need (in the case of hospitalisation, for instance). The mine also provided them with goods such as free coal and machinery for hay making. The domestic and enterprise economies were intertwined in many ways (Ashwin, 1999a, p.172).

The Soviet Union, in particular, was characterised by internal migration, since during the Cold War movement between the Soviet Union and other countries was very small. In the 1950s and 1960s emigration was almost impossible; during the 1970s some 340,000 people (mostly Soviet Jews and ethnic Germans) were able to emigrate to the West (Fassman & Münz, 1994, p. 531).

For a detailed discussion of the dichotomies of ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’, and economic and political migration, which in reality are rather artificial categories, see Pilkington (1998, pp. 3 – 22).

Eve thus emphasises the similarities between internal and international migration, even though he certainly recognises the specificity of international migration. The Soviet Union was an interesting hybrid because internal migration had many features that are familiar from international migration, such as restrictions on choosing one's place of residence.

Examples of recent research on migration in other post-socialist countries than Russia include studies of internal migration in Estonia (Kulu & Billari, 2004; Sjöberg & Tammaru, 1999) and Germany (Kemper, 2004); of ethnic return migration to Estonia (Kulu & Tammaru, 2000) and Germany (Bauer & Zimmermann, 1997), and of work migration in the Albanian context (Nicholson, 2004).

The number of workers at the department totalled 297. The Kirov factory data were collected in the course of the ‘Civic Culture and Nationality in North-West Russia, Estonia and Finland’ project, which was financed by the Academy of Finland and the Universities of Helsinki and Joensuu, and led by Ilkka Liikanen from the Karelian Institute at the University of Joensuu.

Because the respondents worked at the same department, the network members they reported may partly overlap (e.g. one particular worker may be mentioned by several respondents).

For a complete description of the data collected see Lonkila & Piipponen (2002). For substantial studies using this method, see the volume Beyond Post-Soviet Transition (Alapuro et al., 2004).

The Finnish data were collected as a part of the ‘Russia, Finland and Globalisation in a Micro Perspective’ project, financed by the Academy of Finland and led by Markku Lonkila at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki.

For each name generator the respondent could name as many people as s/he wanted. Only if the respondent mentioned a large number of names was s/he advised to name the most important ones.

The internal passport system was revived in 1932 in order to control the population in general and to regulate the increasing rural-urban migration caused by collectivisation in particular. The ‘passportisation’ (pasportizatsiya) of the country divided Soviet citizens into two classes: those who at the age of 16 were automatically given passports and those – mainly country dwellers – who legally had the right to apply for a passport on leaving their collective farms but who in practice had very little chance of getting one. Although the system was later somewhat relaxed in practice, its essential features were maintained until 1976, when the country dwellers were granted rights similar to those of other Soviet citizens (Popov, 1995a, 1995b; see also Fitzpatrick, 1994, pp. 92 – 102).

The propiska system was officially abolished in 1993 and replaced by registration at a permanent address, though in colloquial usage people continue to speak of the propiska (Höjdestrand, 2003; Pilkington, 1998, p. 40). In practice the system is very much alive: while it is no longer a formal precondition for employment, most employers nonetheless require it (Höjdestrand, 2003), as do local authorities dealing with migrants (Pilkington, 1998, pp. 41, 92, 101). Owing to the discrepancy between federal law and local practices, a propiska is needed in order to reside in a new locality, and in large cities obtaining one is still difficult (or expensive) (Wegren & Drury, 2001, p. 19).

Migration as a source of identity also falls beyond the scope of this article.

All names used are pseudonyms. Some geographical names have also been changed in order to protect the respondents' anonymity.

Absolute numbers for the migrants were 163 of 392 network members and for the natives 27 of 123.

These numbers reflect those who were actually married (three migrants and three natives never were). Absolute numbers were 13 of 25 met at work for the migrants and 1 of 7 for the natives.

In general, three qualities—talking about work, socialising outside work and giving or receiving material support—were the name generators where co-workers were most often mentioned in St Petersburg.

In absolute numbers, 81 of 149 were met outside work in the migrants' case as opposed to only 9 of 24 for the natives.

In absolute numbers, 50 of 149 for the migrants and 5 of 24 for the natives.

In absolute numbers, 50 of 83 for the migrants and 5 of 32 for the natives.

In general, the migrants had a larger number of overlapping (or multiplex) relationships (one person being, for example, a friend, neighbour and co-worker at the same time).

Absolute numbers of co-workers giving support were 38 of 120 network members for the migrants as opposed to 5 of 34 for the natives.

A minority, 8 migrant workers, had a relative who was (already) living in Leningrad; this was usually an elder sibling who had moved there before them, whereas parents as a rule had remained in their place of origin. These relatives often helped them by providing temporary accommodation or finding them a job, and this was one important factor in favour of moving to Leningrad. Because these relatives usually were other workers and many of them worked in the Kirov factory, however, they were unlikely to introduce other than work-related ties to the networks. The importance of chain migration (which often leads to chain employment; see M. Grieco, 1987, p. 51) and/or networks in the new location has been documented in many studies (see for example M. Grieco, 1987; Eve, 2002a, pp. 7 – 8; Moretti, 1999; Shah & Menon, 1999; Bauer & Zimmermann, 1997; for Russia see Pilkington, 1998, pp. 109, 125, 138; Vitukhnovskaya, 2000, p. 112; Gerasimova & Chuikina, 2000, p. 48).

A good example of this is the Finnish migrant workers in our data who are tightly linked to their place of origin, where they have summer cottages that they and their extended kin visit regularly. In Finland, moving from the countryside to the city does not necessarily mean that ties are cut or even weakened: crossing the rural-urban boundary is in this sense not nearly as dramatic as in (Soviet) Russia (Castrén, 2001, p. 72; see also Alapuro, 1998).

Though several name generators were likely to generate network members who were geographically close (help with baby-sitting is a good example), the respondents were able to add people whom they had not mentioned before but whom they considered important (irrespective of geographical distance).

In their study of Leningrad in the 1930s Gerasimova & Chuikina argue that the main difference between native and migrant workers was the absence of relatives representing the older generations among the migrants. In contrast to our study, they found that co-workers (and neighbours) were equally important for both migrants and natives. It is, however, difficult to compare their findings with ours because the methodology used is very different, their study being based on interviews with elderly people who talked about their lives in the 1930s.

This is again in sharp contrast to the Finnish respondents, many of whom had met their future wives in pubs and other similar settings. These spouses were thus likely to introduce people who were not co-workers into their husbands' networks.

When we compared respondents in St Petersburg with those in Helsinki, we found that all Russians had far more workplace-related ties than respondents in Helsinki did.

We thank Michael Eve (personal communication) for emphasising this point.

That is, they had been working at the factory for four years or less. Altogether 13 respondents had worked in the department for four years or less. Six of them, however, had worked in other factory departments for 20 years or more and cannot therefore be included in the category of ‘newcomers’.

To give one example: while observing the 300th anniversary festivities of St Petersburg, Sofia Tchouikina reported the following episode. The day's celebrations started with a military band parade on Nevsky Prospekt. One spectator was irritated by a nearby woman who was pushing her neighbours, and reproached her: ‘Why are you pushing ahead, woman, you can see you're not a Leningrader—You're quite wrong, I am a Leningrader—A first-generation Leningrader, then. If you were third-generation you wouldn't push your way to the front’ (in Hellberg-Hirn, 2000, p. 287).