Although they have attracted little attention in the West, internal movements, consisting both of intra-regional and inter-regional migration, have numerically been the most significant migration flows affecting Russia in the 1990s, as stated in the first migration policy programme drafted in Russia (Federal'naya Migratsionnaya Programma – FMS 1994: 123–42). As can be seen from Table 14, between 1990 and 1996 about 23 million people changed their residence, either within the same region (12.5 million) or moving from one region to another (10.6 million).¹⁷

The data reported in Table 15 on the various components of net migration for rural and urban areas of Russia, although bearing some clear inaccuracies,¹⁸ show that between 1991 and 1993 rural areas registered a net inflow from urban areas. Contrary, however, to the gloomy predictions of a new structural process of de-urbanisation in Russia, the trend switched back to normal after 1994 with more people going from rural villages to towns and cities than in the opposite direction (Vichnevskiy 1996: 120–21). Finally it must be stressed that rural areas, apart from the above mentioned brief reversal of rural-urban migration in the period 1991–1993, received net inflows of about 1.3 million people throughout the 1990–1996 period as a result of immigration from the new abroad.

The North, Eastern Siberia, the Far East and, to a lesser extent, Western Siberia all scored net outflows to other Russian regions in the period considered (see figures in bold in Table 16). This population loss was more than compensated by net inflows from the new abroad in the Western Siberia district, while for the other three districts the inflow from the new abroad since 1994 has only partially offset the outflow to other Russian regions. If we look at the net migration ratio reported in Table 17, the

differences between the 1978–1988 and 1989–1996 periods are evident. The North, Eastern Siberia and the Far East went from positive to negative rates, while regions of Central Russia switched from negative to positive rates. The data on both inter-regional and external (mainly with the new abroad) net migration suggest a reversal of an historical trend, namely the central European districts, from which Russians for decades moved to the extreme north and east of Russia and to other Soviet republics, have started in the 1990s to receive a considerable inflow of population (Vichnevskiy 1996: 122). In addition to the central European regions, the North Caucasus has also scored steady and considerable net inflows, especially the two provinces of Krasnodar and Stavropol, which have received large numbers of forced migrants from the Transcaucasus and internally displaced persons from the North Caucasian autonomous republics (Codagnone 1997: 145–54). According to Vichnevskiy (1996: 124), comparison of the map of migrations by region with the map of falls in production and increased unemployment by region yields the paradoxical result that there is no significant correlation; indeed in several cases, the regions receiving a large inflow of immigrants are those with the worst indicators with respect to unemployment and fall in production.

In the broadly defined field of the social sciences, migration is probably one of the most difficult phenomena to conceptualise and measure with precision. In view of the limitations inherent in the analytical distinctions made and the data used, the overview of Russian migration flows presented in this first part of the paper cannot and does not pretend to be exhaustive and conclusive. Quantitatively, a statistical re-elaboration of administratively produced data and their integration with empirically sound estimates of undocumented flows will certainly produce a numerically more precise picture. Analytically, empirical qualitative and quantitative research on the motivations of migrants arriving in Russian or moving across its regions will probably make it possible to distinguish more clearly among different migration flows. Despite its obvious limitations, the present overview – if not the specific numbers, at least the overall range of size and trends of flows – can still be used as a satisfactory basis to assess and challenge the validity of forecasts circulating in the early 1990s on post-Soviet migration scenarios, but also as a background against which to weigh and contextualise the migration debates and policies developed in Russia which are analysed in the second part of the paper.