As discussed in Part I (paras. 1.3.2), estimates of the number of undocumented migrants in Russia are clearly problematic and controversial. Leaving aside the question of numbers, the existence of such migration flow from the old abroad seems quite realistic.

Such a flow is, in fact, facilitated by the permeability of Russia’s borders with other former Soviet republics. Though there were premonitory signs, the dissolution of the USSR was a relatively sudden event, in which 15 new states were created within a matter of months. These states emerged lacking a solid legislative basis for regulation of the new ‘international’ relations with each other and with states outside the former Soviet borders, and lacking any developed system for controlling those areas which only a few months earlier had been internal frontiers delimiting the various federal units of a single state. For Russia, in particular, internal frontiers with the other former republics overnight became practically unchecked new international borders. Moreover, the borders at the periphery of the post-Soviet space in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia, due to political instability and local conflicts and to a lack of resources, are still very poorly controlled. Thus undocumented migrants arrived in Russia via former Soviet republics, mainly in Central Asia, as a result of the visa-free travel regime within the Commonwealth of Independent States and the lack of re-admission agreements (Regent 1995: 70).

A second factor, as already mentioned, was Russia’s ratification of the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees and related protocol, making it a country of first resort. On the one hand, asylum seekers who entered Russia through Central Asian republics could not be sent back since these are not countries of ‘first resort’, on the other hand, they could be stopped by Western European countries in virtue of the widespread application of the ‘safe third country’ clause and were thus stuck in Russia. It can be safely concluded that in the 1992–1993 period, Russia was a country completely open to any sort of undocumented flow.

The situation – at least at the policy-making level, if not in practical terms – slowly began to change in 1994. As its consequences became evident, adhesion to the 1951 Convention was increasingly criticised by politicians and bureaucrats (Slater 1994). Criticism was very explicit from the FMS, both in its bulletin (for instance, FMS 1995: 9) and internal policy documents (FMS 1996), and in the interviews and articles of its director, Tatyana Regent (1995). According to Regent, the excessively humanitarian nature of the Russian law on refugees in its earlier version, matched by the restrictive migration policy of Western Europe, produced a situation in which hundred of thousands of individuals who intended only to transit through Russia ended up staying, thus creating serious social problems (1995: 69–71). This critical judgement of the consequences of Russian adhesion to the convention has been shared by scholars. Voronina, a legal scholar formerly working at the FMS, has written that the hurried decision to join the Convention created the preconditions for:

According to Yagodin, establishing the UNHCR Moscow office before creating the FMS resulted in the adoption of misleading criteria for dealing with asylum seekers (1997: 145), while the obligations entailed in the Convention give Western countries the possibility to use Russia as a buffer for undocumented migration (Ibid. 160). The claim that Russia is today the biggest buffer zone of undocumented migration to Western and central Europe was made by Russian government officials at the already mentioned international conference on illegal migration held in Prague in October 1997 (par. 1.3.2).⁵¹

The assessments and statements reported above are indicative of growing Russian disillusionment with and resentment toward the West concerning ‘international migration relations’. After acceding to the Convention as part of its new democratic membership in the international community, Russia soon came to realise that, as a result of its internal problems and of the Fortress Europe migration policy in the West, it is now caught in the web of undocumented international migration. The concrete result of this new awareness on the part of Russian policy-makers was the 1997 amendment to the law on refugees which, as illustrated earlier, has become more restrictive and similar to the new laws enacted in most Western European countries during the 1990s.

For the sake of objectivity and completeness it is important to note that the reverse side of such complaints about the consequences of joining the Convention is that little effort has been made and few resources provided by Russian authorities to accommodate and assist asylum seekers arriving from countries outside the former Soviet Union. Given the lack of financial resources and experience in dealing with such a problem, asylum seekers in Russia find themselves stuck in shabby temporary camps with very poor living conditions.⁵² Since 1995, only 75 asylum seekers from beyond the CIS have been granted refugees status by the FMS.⁵³ Although the Russian law on refugees, in both its earlier and its recently amended versions, does not make a distinction between individuals from CIS countries and those from beyond the CIS, in practice Russian authorities treat these two categories differently to the disadvantage of the latter, for which the only source of assistance is the UNHCR office (Chernyshova 1998). Moscow authorities, for instance, have been singled out by a Human Rights Watch/Helsinki report published in September 1997 for being particularly discriminatory and racist against newcomers, including naturally asylum seekers; according to the report, Moscow does not recognise the validity of UNHCR documents attesting to refugee status and threatens holders with deportation in order to force them to pay ‘fines’ which are, in fact extorted bribes.⁵⁴

Without denying that undocumented migration from the old abroad is a real issue, it should not be assumed that the reaction to migration flows by the FMS and other government structures is proportional to the magnitude of the phenomenon. To some extent, the emphasis and concerns manifested are instrumental to less explicit objectives and interests. First, construing undocumented migration as an overwhelming and alarming phenomenon causing social problems and contributing to rising crime, largely due to external causes (open borders at the CIS periphery and closed borders to the West) serves the purpose of presenting Russia as a victim so as to cover the human rights violations to which undocumented migrants are subjected. Second, it is instrumental to Russia’s more than legitimate attempt to make its interests heard at the international level and to receive acknowledgement of the weight it is carrying and, if possible, financial support. Last but not least, presenting undocumented migration as a serious matter of social stability and national interest is a natural strategy for governmental bureaucracies. This serves both to increase the public profile of their functions and to present these as extremely difficult and burdensome, requiring more financial support from the budget. Given the government’s need to cut expenditures, budgets are highly critical issues in Russia.

This last point, together with the empirical significance of the phenomenon, explains the increasingly assertive and alarmist way in which the issue of undocumented migration has been raised by the Federal Border Guard Service (Federal'naya Pogranichnaya Sluzhba, henceforth FPS) since 1997. In early 1997, General Andrei Nikolaev, at the time director of the FPS, publicly referred to illegal migration as an invasion of the Russian territory, mainly by Afghan refugees and Chinese immigrants.⁵⁵ About a year later, the new FPS chief, Nikolai Bordyuzha, warned that Russia could lose part of the Far East as a result of illegal immigration.⁵⁶ Being involved in the day-to-day business of trying to control thousands of kilometres of borders, the FPS probably has first-hand knowledge of the magnitude of undocumented migration. On the other hand, as declared by Bordyuzha,⁵⁷ the FPS’ financial situation is catastrophic, leaving it without the money to pay for food and fuel, and therefore its emphasis of the risks of weak border controls must be seen as an attempt to convince the government to allocate more funds.

Paradoxically, despite the concerns about undocumented migration repeatedly voiced by various government officials, as briefly discussed earlier (see 2.1.2), Russia does not have a coherent and articulated legislative apparatus for regulating ordinary non-forced migration flows, but only several ad hoc decrees and guidelines. The major legislative acts are:

• presidential decree on the ‘Measures for the introduction of immigration control’ (No. 2145 of 16 December 1993)
• governmental decree on the ‘Measures for the anticipation and reduction of uncontrolled foreign migration’ (No. 1021, of 8 September 1994).

These legislative measures have the merit of having started to establish a system of immigration control, which did not exist at all in the 1992–1993 period. The system should have immigration control points at all border posts, with the FMS responsible for creating and operating such points in collaboration with the FPS. It is obvious that, given the country’s dimensions and the poor funding received by the FMS, this process is not going ahead very quickly; in the two years subsequent to the 1993 presidential decree, 55 immigration control points were established in 25 federal subjects (FMS 1996: 2).

Intervening at a roundtable discussion on migration in Moscow in April 1996, Rybakovskiy repeated his view that one of Russia’s priorities is to contain undocumented Chinese migration and affirmed that:

Sociologist and columnist Georgy Banchadze characterises the situation of the Russian Far East in the following way:

As mentioned earlier (1.3.2), Interior Ministry sources claim that there were already 2 million Chinese in the Far East in 1997. FPS chief Bordyuzha warned in May 1998 that Russian may soon lose vast areas of the Far East to Chinese immigration, and the chief of the FMS immigration directorate forecast that, if left unchecked, the Chinese population would dominate the Far East by the year 2030.⁵⁸ On 25 April 1997, the Russian Interior Ministry told a press briefing that massive Chinese illegal immigration into the Russian Far East represents a serious threat to national security.⁵⁹ The ministry also claimed that undocumented Chinese migrants account for half of all economic crimes in the region and that Chinese mobs traffic in drugs and false documents and are so confident of their power as to engage in armed clashes with Russian border guards. It is noteworthy that such an alarming announcement came at the end of a week in which Russian President Boris Yeltsin and visiting Chinese President Jiang Zemin declared that their two countries had formed a strategic partnership and only one day after Russia, three Central Asian states, and China signed an agreement to reduce military forces along their shared borders.

The link made by government authorities between immigrants and criminal activity is in no way peculiar to Russia. It is also reasonable to assume that the population at large in the Far East shares this stereotype, making the Chinese the scapegoat for rising crime and a falling standard of living. However, as suggested by Goble,⁶⁰ the timing of the ministry announcement suggests that the Chinese immigration issue is being used by the Interior Ministry and other sectors of the government to oppose the new policy of rapprochement between Russia and China. It is clear that in addition to expressing a genuine concern partially grounded in the empirical relevance of the phenomenon, these statements on the dangers of Chinese immigration by the Interior Ministry and the FPS are also an instrument with which to oppose the proposed reduction of military forces contained in the agreement mentioned above as well as to get more resources for patrolling the Sino-Russian borders.

As suggested by Nosov (1996: 32–33), the alarm in the Russian media about Chinese immigration has also been fuelled instrumentally since 1993 by the governors of the Khabarkovsky and Primorsky provinces, Vladimir Ishaev and Evgeny Nazdratenko. Besides responding to xenophobic feelings widespread among the local population and representing a strategy to divert the attention from more serious problems, the ‘Chinese spectre is also a card to be played by regional authorities in their political game of bargaining with the federal government’.

While the trend of outmigration of Russians from the Far East is well documented (see 1.3.5), there is no way of assessing whether the alarm about Chinese immigration exaggerates the real magnitude of the phenomenon. The only data available are those on the officially sanctioned import of Chinese contract labourers for 1994–1995 (see Table 4) which, summed with Chinese estimates for the 1988–1993 period (Portyakov 1996: 53), give a total of about 130,000 labourers imported from China between 1988 and 1995.

The question of strengthening the human presence in the Far East and the way in which it is related to China is not new and dates back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If , as stated by the famous Russian historian Vasily Kliuchevsky , the history of Russia is that of a country that colonises itself (quoted in Pipes 1974: 14), the history of the Far East has been one of large-scale colonisation (Trubin 1996: 59). In his latest monograph on the population and migration history of the Far East, Rybakovskiy explains that this colonisation has been partially voluntary and partially forced by the authorities in their effort to populate this region (1990: 46). On the other hand, an open door policy with China was normal practice in the Far East in the last century, when Russian cities were surrounded by Chinese and Korean rural villages (Nosov 1996: 21). Without changing that policy, in the second half of the nineteenth century the Tsarist administration, to offset the Chinese presence, adopted an active policy of population redistribution which brought large numbers of peasant families from Central European Russia to the Far East (Trubin 1996: 64–68).

Regardless of considerations about the Chinese presence, the Far East has always represented a problem for Soviet authorities because of what Portyakov calls the ‘suitcase mood’, namely the tendency of immigrants to settle for only a short time (1996: 44). Nonetheless, improvement in the means of communication with the rest of the country, economic incentives and privileges,⁶¹ the creation of a large military presence, and the adoption of specific socioeconomic programmes for development with relative propaganda campaigns (in the 1930s, 1967, 1972 and 1987) managed to make life in the Far East bearable and to attract a relatively large number of immigrants in the area (Ibid.: 37). According to Goskomstat data, the population of the Far East grew from about 2.9 million in 1939 to about 8 million in 1989 (Goskomstat Rossii 1996: 28), but subsequently started to decrease and was of about 7.4 million in 1997 (Goskomstat Rossii 1997: 26).

As concerns relations between the Far East and China, in practice the open door policy in the Soviet period lasted only until 1937 (the year Stalin ordered the deportation of Koreans and Chinese from the Far East); indeed, starting in the 1950s, even before the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations, borders with China were strictly closed and remained so until the late 1980s, also in consideration of the fact that the Far East was one of the most militarised zones of the entire Soviet Union (Nosov 1996: 21–22). In the late 1980s, the normalisation of Sino-Soviet relations led to a re-opening of the borders, and Russian analysts indicate a number of ‘objective’ demographic and socioeconomic factors which have been stimulating Russian outmigration and Chinese immigration ever since, making the continuation of this trend in the near future very likely (Nosov 1996; Portyakov 1996; Gelbras 1996; Rybakovskiy and Tarasova 1994, 1989; Rybakovskiy et al. 1995: 17–18).

The Far East conventionally includes 10 federal subjects for a total territory of 6,215,000 km² with a total estimated population of 7.4 million in 1997 – a huge territory, only slightly smaller than that of China, with a population density of only 1.2 inhabitants per km². Of the 10 administrative units of the Far East, only four share borders with China: Amursky oblast, Khabarovsky kray, Jewish autonomous oblast, and Primorsky kray.⁶² For instance, an estimated 70 million Chinese (Nosov 1996: 24) live on the other side of the border with Primorsky province, which as of 1997 had a population of about 2.2 million (Goskomstat Rossii 1997: 26). Thus, given the startling demographic imbalance between the two sides of the borders at this aggregate macro-demographic level, it would seem that the a priori potential for immigration from China is high.

Socioeconomic changes resulting from reforms started in the late 1980s and deepened in the early 1990s largely explain the outmigration of the Russian population from the Far East. The inhabitants of the Far East, whose living standards during Soviet times depended heavily on subsidies from the central budget (Portyakov 1996: 44) were the first to suffer from the sudden disruption of the economic system produced by economic reform. In light of the geographical position of the Far East, the generalised increase in prices, but particularly those of transport, have de facto cut the economic ties between the Far East and the European part of the country (Nosov 1996: 13). As a result, in the early 1990s Far Eastern cities and towns registered price levels for consumer goods 2 to 3 times higher than the Russian overall average. A further factor of crisis has been the steady de-militarisation of the area leading to crisis in the heavy industries and all other sectors working almost exclusively for the defence needs of the Eastern borders. Finally, due to the generalised financial crisis and the economic measures adopted for financial stabilisation, as of 1991 the economic privileges accorded to the Far East and the North have been substantially reduced, which has further stimulated the outmigration from such areas (Moiseev 1994; Nosov 1996; Portyakov 1996; Rybakovskiy and Tarasova 1994).

The other side of the coin of the break-up of economic ties between European Russia and the Far East is the massive increase in economic exchanges between the latter and China, which has indirectly stimulated Chinese immigration. Since the normalisation of Sino-Soviet relations in 1988, economic trade between China and Russia has increased steadily, and in 1993 China was Russia’s second trade partner after Germany (Goskomstat Rossii 1995b: 430–31). Naturally a large proportion of this renewed trade between China and Russia involves the regions of the Russian Far East. In Amursky oblast, for instance, after complete liberalisation in 1992, foreign trade peaked in 1992 and 1993, totalling $408 and $416 million respectively, of which China’s proportion reached 92 percent (Moskalenko 1996: 47). In 1992 and 1993, over 70 percent of the Amursky oblast's exports to China consisted of machinery, equipment and vehicles, ferrous and non-ferrous metals, while imports were mainly consumer goods and food, with the latter accounting for about 60 percent of all regional imports from China (Ibid.: 47). In 1993, in the Jewish autonomous oblast, 94.6 percent of all foreign trade was with China, lower but still considerable proportions (48 percent) were also registered in the Primorsky and Khabarovsky provinces (Larin 1997: 20–21). The structure of import and export given for the Amursky oblast is quite representative of the type of trade relations existing between China and regions of the Russian Far East and indicate that trade is clearly complementary (Nosov 1996: 12–18).

As already mentioned, since 1988 Russian has started to import Chinese contract-labour of which a consistent proportion is employed in Far East regions (especially in Primorsky province) in construction and the agricultural sector (Nosov 1996: 24–25; Portyakov 1996: 52–53). This means that these Russian regions depend on China not only for food and consumer goods, but also for supply of labour force. In addition to this legal migration, the flourishing of trade and the open door policy has probably also made possible undocumented migration, consisting of individuals who overstay their business and tourist visas, who get counterfeit documents or organise fake marriages, and students (Nosov 1996: 24–25; Portyakov 1996: 49–55).

In synthesis, from all the factors considered, outmigration of Russians from the Far East (for which reasonably reliable statistics are available) and the immigration of the Chinese (for which no reliable data are yet available, except for contract-labour immigration) appear to respond to objective conditions. On the other hand, though there is no hard empirical evidence to confirm or refute the allegedly massive character of undocumented Chinese immigration, the alarm that the Far East may fall under Chinese control as a result must be seen, above all, as geopolitical speculation.

First, the outmigration from the Far East reached its peak in 1994 with a net loss of 120,000 and decreased in the following two years (Table 16). Moreover, between 1994 and 1996 the region registered a positive migration balance with the new abroad of about 11,000. Therefore, though it is still a scarcely populated area, it is likely that the loss of population due to emigration will slowly come to a stop. Second, there are no signs that Chinese immigration into the Far East is the result of an organised strategy of China aiming at conquering new territories. Third, the stricter control policy implemented in early 1994 has significantly reduced the chance for illegal entry by Chinese (Nosov 1996: 25–27; Portyakov 1996: 51–52). In January 1994, after Chernomyrdin’s visit to the Far East, Russia unilaterally introduced a visa obligation for Chinese citizens. Moreover, following the 1993 presidential decree on the creation of a system of immigration control, immigration control points were created on the major crossings along the borders with China. In Primorsky province, for instance, 1994 saw the launching of operation ‘Foreigner’ which, by late 1995, had led to the expulsion of 6,000 foreigners, most of them Chinese (Segodnya, 14 September 1995). According to Portyakov these measures have substantially reduced undocumented immigration from China but also negatively influenced trade relations with China, which are currently very significant to the economy of the Far East (1996: 56).