Nothing catches this better than walking home in Moscow in the snow late at night, at the darkest hour when everyone who is still awake is Asian – gangs of shivering Kyrgyz migrants, pausing to share cigarettes, shovelling snow under the orange street lamp glow in order to make room for the morning’s traffic. Many of them live in squalid basements sharing fetid mattresses, wooden barracks outside the city, or huddled in cramped apartments with dozens of men sleeping on the floor. They are everywhere, even beneath the piecrust architecture of the tsarist centre, where Kyrgyz squat whole basements, Uzbeks cram twenty men into leaking attics and Tajiks stuff as many as they can into suffocating dormitories.
Visa-free regimes between Russia and most of its former colonies, plus the corruption of officialdom, means that few people bother immigrating formally. Nobody knows precisely how many migrants there are in Russia, but officials admit there are over 10 million with the true figure (if one accounts for illegals) as high as 15 million and rising fast.40 Between 1992 and 2008, Russia officially lost over 7 million people, despite the immigration of ethnic Russians and others with Russian citizenship from other former Soviet republics.41 But if you add these new migrants to the calculations, it now has more people than it lost. In short, though the ethnic Russian population has fallen, Russia does not have a demographic crisis – but an ethnic crisis.
Ethnically the country was undergoing a seismic shift. Experts estimated that Russia was on its way to becoming 20 per cent Muslim by 2020, with Islam’s demographic share having exploded 40 per cent since 1989.42 The emigration over two decades of millions of Jews, Volga Germans and the Balts was interpreted as ‘de-Europeanization’, whilst the migrant wave swung the racial balance in Russia back towards Turkic groups for the first time since the eighteenth century. Projections by the nation’s leading demographer Anatoly Vishnevsky estimate that if current trends hold, by 2025 as much as 15 per cent of the population will be recent immigrants, rising to 35 per cent by 2050.43 Most of them will be Muslim. More and more apartments for rent qualified their adverts as ‘Slavs Only’. I emailed one once: ‘Does it matter if I am a non-Slavic Jew for renting the one-bedroom apartment with the shared bathroom on the eighth floor?’ The reply – ‘This may be negotiable’ – was revealing. After two centuries of being fixated by Jews, the cosmology of Russian hate was fixating more and more on Muslim migrants.
The Kremlin found itself in a strange bind by the decade’s end. It had been appealing to nationalism, but it had no choice but to admit over 10 million migrants in order to keep the economic boom afloat. Demographers estimate Russia now needs to admit at least 700,000 more in order to sustain growth.44 Nor could it really police its borders with ex-Soviet states. This meant it was forced to present an anti-chauvinist position, in defence of a huge mostly Muslim migrant wave. Putin began trying to discreetly fashion a more multicultural society. He has announced that for those who wanted to tie their future to Russia ‘the door will always be open’. The head of the Federal Migration Service admitted that migrants are key to improving the demographic situation.
But capitalizing on immigration involves more than just letting people in. Life for migrants became increasingly tough; most lived in penury often harassed by skinheads. Across Russia, cases of near slavery have been reported, with Uzbeks, Kyrgyz and Tajiks tricked or otherwise forced into working in agriculture or on construction sites for little or no pay.45 Even in Moscow, dozens of the sullen Central Asians behind the tills in corner shops – who people see every day – have been found to be beaten slaves.46 Unprotected by the (ignored) labour code, Putinism has created a huge racially distinct underclass that risks not only driving down workers’ wages and rights, but also undermining the case for innovation or basic efficiency gains with plentiful cheap labour. Able to import near-slave labour at minimal costs, employers had no need to modernize or protect workers’ rights. This was not appreciated at the time, but due to the weakness of the rule of law, migrants may have been contributing to growth but they were stalling Russia’s modernization – and further devaluing what it meant to be a ‘Russian citizen’.
This problem, like so many other governance failures, was obscured in the boom years. Putin had not realized it but, by allowing the import of millions of Caucasian and Central Asian migrants, he was cracking the Putin consensus. At the beginning of the decade he could be seen as a nationalist hero, fighting for Russia in the Caucasus. Now he was seen as a man who would flood Russia with Muslims for the sake of cheap labour. As the nationalists lost interest in Jews, only to discover Islam as the enemy, Putin lost them.
The boom had created a new Russia of bloggers, consumers and migrants. It was a place dizzy from change, which was trying to hold on to something. The hand it clasped was not that of Putin’s creations – be they Nashi or United Russia – but the Russian Orthodox Church. To the chagrin of its liberals, the most conservative force in the country would emerge as one of the biggest winners of a period of rapid change. As the country became less Russian ethnically, it was becoming more so culturally.
The Rise of Holy Russia
The revolutionaries who came to power during the collapse, hoping to overturn ‘Actually Existing Socialism’, failed to see their wishes for Russia come true. Except one – Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow. Yeltsin and Gaidar certainly died with regrets. Russia had not become democratic. The economy had not decoupled from a state-driven oil and gas complex. Yet as the Patriarch passed away in December 2008, he could have looked back at his revolutionary aims when he was anointed in 1989 – to bring the Russian Orthodox Church back from the margins of society into its driving force – with a feeling that he had triumphed where the democrats had failed.
In the course of his reign the Church had exploded not only in terms of adherents, but also in terms of power, wealth and infrastructure. The year before Alexy took over in 1988 there were only 22 monasteries and 6,893 priests and deacons in the country. Two years after his death there were 804 monasteries and a veritable army of 30,670 priests and deacons in Russia.47 Across the country, over a hundred Orthodox ‘brotherhoods’ had been founded. Amongst the people, over two-thirds now identified as Orthodox believers, up from less than half in the mid-nineties.48 All in all, Holy Russia was resurgent, an astonishing turnaround for a religion viciously persecuted under the Soviets.
The wealth of the Church exploded, with one tentative 2001 estimate (believed to be a vast underestimate) putting its worth at over half a billion dollars.49 Its budget is now a secret, but the Orthodox Church’s fortune is estimated at being several billion dollars at least. Since then, its property portfolio has exploded, with a 2010 law pledging to restore to the Church all lands expropriated during Lenin’s revolution. This could make it Russia’s single largest landowner.50 Its power and prestige skyrocketed, with the Patriarch living in the Kremlin, blessing the President after each inauguration, regularly broadcast alongside Putin and his ministers, with his priests integrated into the army and the religion de facto that of party and state.