Meanwhile, what is true for the high end of the labour market is also true for the middle ranks and even the lower end. Russia’s booming economy is luring more and more people not only from the West but in much higher numbers from Central Asia. Many are ethnic Russians, coming back to the motherland from inhospitable and poor lands, but even more are natives of the Central Asian countries, seeking a modest living mostly in jobs where Russians are no longer willing to work, Russia’s per capita income being six times that of, for instance, Uzbekistan.
While the economic boom is powering ahead, driven by rising prices for oil and natural gas and most other resources which Russia has in abundance, the shrinking of the work force complicates the situation. Not only Moscow and St Petersburg need office space, hotels, apartments and shopping malls – along with people to build them. There is a deficit of labour, growing ever more serious. At the end of 2007 the number of migrant workers, published by Moscow’s Russian Economics Institute, was put at 4.9 million, washing dishes, digging ditches and doing other menial jobs. The real number could well be double that figure, most of them coming from the former Soviet republics to the south. There are even those who left Russia ten years ago and are now applying to come back.
The vast influx of foreign labourers, most of them easily recognizable by their darker skin and Asian facial features, helps to solve an economic problem, but it creates others. These ‘blacks’ as they are called, sometimes with even less flattering names, are a visible presence in most major cities. Some, the majority, work hard while some turn to petty crime. Many corner the market in fresh fruit and vegetables, working against the clock to get fresh produce early to market. But it is a thankless task. Although Russia is a multi-ethnic society, with more than one hundred non-Slavic nationalities, the Russians resent the presence of those busy foreigners.
In the summer of 2006 in the Northern Kola Peninsula, in the city of Kondopoga riots broke out against the people who were visibly different, and from the south. The locals felt exploited and cheated by the immigrants who had most of the local business in their hands, and seemed to flourish modestly. Karelia, otherwise known as a tolerant part of Russia, suddenly opened a Pandora’s box of racial hatred, envy and violence. Putin’s express conviction that the Russians were, by and large, used, in Soviet times, to living with other nationalities seems to be wishful thinking. A law of April 2007 forbidding foreigners to work as vendors in Russian markets addresses deep-seated disdain among the Russians for their unwelcome but indispensable neighbours. Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ is not an alien idea throughout Russia; you don’t have to travel all the way to Chechnya or Daghestan to meet it as a daily experience.
SOVA is the name of a courageous and pretty lonely Moscow-based group tracking hate crimes. In 2005 they reported 435 victims of race-based assaults in Russia. In 2006 the number had gone up steeply – whether as a result of better reporting or an increase in hostility is not clear. In early 2007 the number was still increasing.
Russia has registered an average economic growth of between 7 and 8 per cent per annum since 1999. Meanwhile, Russia’s population fell from 148.7 million in 1999 to 143.8 million in 2006 and continues to slide. There are, as throughout the rest of Europe, fewer babies, and so far government programmes to encourage young women to have more children have met with an unwilling response – easily to be explained by the scarcity of good housing, the fragility of families, the need to have two breadwinners in the family, and the slow disappearance of the eternal and omnipresent Russian grandmother, the babushka.
The balance between Russians and non-Russians is continuously shifting in favour of the latter. The overall decline is particularly dramatic in the work force which, according to the Ministry for Health and Social Development, will drop from 74.5 million in 2007 to a pitiful 65.5 million by 2010. The high number of vodka-related deaths among men – Putin’s interpretation of these figures is that ‘they drink too much and then they cause accidents’ – and low fertility rates among women are the fundamental drivers of this development. Even today, four out of ten farm or construction workers are already foreigners, many of them Muslim. Life expectancy for Russian men is by now somewhere between fifty-seven and fifty-nine years – compared to well over seventy in Western Europe.
Today’s Russia welcomes – if that is not too idyllic a term – the second largest number of immigrants after the United States. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many ethnic Russians came back from the inhospitable colonies, followed by many millions of undocumented Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Moldovans and uncounted others. Getting into Russia is not difficult, at least for the first three months. After that, immigrants need a work permit. Until recently, in fact early 2007, most immigrants were living in the grey zones of the economy. Exploited by their employers, paid miserable wages and vulnerable to harassment by the Russian police, they were, though badly needed, at the very bottom of society. Not unlike the US Congress giving legal status to immigrants from Mexico, the Russian state Duma passed a law in January 2007 setting quotas by nationality and by region. In 2007, according to figures from the World Bank, the quota was altogether 6.1 million foreign workers allowed to work, with more than one tenth, 700,000, in Moscow alone.
This does not mean that the process of immigration is quick and easy. It can take weeks for immigrants to work their way through waiting lists at the Federal Migration Service – while they remain in legal limbo. In fact, without a propusk, a special permit costing money, they cannot work legally or be housed. Bribing officials is the obvious way around such obstacles, but it can backfire. The fine for illegally employing a foreign worker can go up to 800,000 roubles. The law is rough and unfriendly, notwithstanding the fact that without labour from abroad the Russian economy faces a demographic implosion. Russia is slowly heading towards crisis point, and all the petroleum money of Khanty-Mansiysk in Western Siberia, of Tatarstan and other places will not help.
Demography is destiny
Demography is destiny, for Russia as much as for Western Europe and the rest of the world. There is no way to escape the fact that, much as the workers’ paradise of the past wasted human endeavour and did not respect the individual, labour is now the one resource, high end or low end, that will limit the rise and rise of Russia.
In strategic terms, Russians cannot but feel apprehension when looking south or east. In terms of high-performance weaponry Russia is still far ahead of any conventional threat. But in terms of both population and asymmetric warfare Russians have every right to feel threatened – and in their heart of hearts they admit that, while oil and dollars continue to lift the economy and the political system, the masses of China and of the Muslim world represent a potential nightmare.
What to do? The Russian authorities were slow to recognize the problem and even slower to do something about it. It is thanks to Putin, with his all-encompassing strategic view of Russia, that as of 2007 the state is investing in massive programmes to stem the decline. The reconstruction of Russian power in the world at large would remain an empty gesture without the reconstruction of the home base, and nothing is more important than having a well-balanced population; yet today’s Russia is far away from any balance or stability. But behind the broader agenda for population growth there is a silent, less visible agenda in order to keep the balance between Russians and non-Russians. Whatever the detail, religious and regional conflicts will increase.
In October 2007 Putin used an address to the Council of the Russian Public Chamber – not a legislative body but a deliberating assembly – to present the new policy. He spoke of three stages. The objective for the first three or four years is to reduce death rates tangibly; by 2015 to stabilize the population total at 140 million (at the end of 2007 the number was 142 million), then to lift overall numbers to 145 million. There are two aims: one is to encourage young families to produce more children, the other to create living standards that give people a healthier life and increase average life expectancy (for men and women) from the current sixty-six to at least seventy years.