Labour migrants in post-Soviet Moscow: patterns of settlement^*

* This article is the product of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Programme at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE).

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of the social and the spatial structures of Moscow on the patterns of settlement of labour migrants. It emphasizes the ways in which the structure of post-Soviet urban environment differs from the European and U.S. one, and uses interviews with guest workers from Central Asia to map out the strategies they employ in their search for accommodation in Moscow, as well as the barriers they encounter. Special attention is paid to the role played by ethnic networks in the lives of migrant workers, and the ways in which these networks are configured by the urban space. This article demonstrates how the absence of spatial segregation in the post-Soviet city, inherited from the Soviet period, affects the trajectories of social and economic integration of migrants and explains the absence of ‘ethnic areas’ in today’s Moscow.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour migrants
• Moscow
• post-Soviet city
• patterns of settlement
• social and economic integration

Acknowledgements

I appreciate helpful comments from Zhanna Zaionchkovskaia, Olga Vendina, and the anonymous reviewer.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* This article is the product of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Programme at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE).

1 The notion of limitchik appeared in the late 1960s. This was a mainly Moscovian concept denoting originally industrial workers (largely from other towns) recruited to Moscow to fill the quotas (limits) allocated to specific industrial enterprises in the city. On average, these quotas amounted to 60,000–80,0000 migrants a year. Eventually it came to be applied to all lower-class migrants to Moscow, especially those from the countryside.

2 Federal Migration Service of the Russian Federation. URL: http://www.fms.gov.ru/about/statistics/data/details/54891/ [Accessed on 5 October 2015].

3 In Russia today the term ‘visible minorities’ is applied to migrants from Central Asia, from the Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia), as well as from the republics of the North Caucasus, despite the fact that the latter are citizens of Russia

4 An average monthly salary for a labour migrant from Central Asia in Moscow is about 20.000–25.000 roubbles, which was about $400 in 2014 (Demintseva and Peshkova 2014; Varshaver et al. 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Basic Research Programme at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE).