【按：本月《堅離地報聯盟》挑選的《The Diplomat》付費會員專區文章，分析俄羅斯與中亞數十年來的勞工移民關係如何影響雙方，並探討該體系在近年因戰爭、經濟困境與政策變動而面臨崩解。文章指出，自蘇聯解體後，來自塔吉克斯坦、烏茲別克斯坦、吉爾吉斯等國的勞工湧入俄羅斯，為俄國經濟發展提供關鍵支援，並構成中亞經濟命脈。然而，俄烏戰爭爆發後，俄方對移民的態度轉向敵視，並試圖強制中亞勞工參與戰爭，導致大量移工因歧視、經濟困境與安全威脅而尋找其他工作機會，甚至選擇回國或前往其他國家。隨著俄羅斯勞動力短缺加劇，中亞各國則逐步尋求替代市場，重塑其經濟依賴模式，顯示出俄羅斯與中亞之間傳統勞工移民關係的裂痕已無法修補。】

Russia and Central Asia have been mutually shaped by decades of labor migration, but these long-running ties have begun to fray.

“This one is from my first trip to Russia,” said Alisher Khudoyorov, showing a photo of him smiling at Moscow’s Red Square circa 2002. The 55-year-old Dushanbe, Tajikistan native spent almost a quarter of a century travelling to Russia yearly for seasonal employment, working everywhere from construction sites to restaurants in and around the country’s capital.

The same dusty old-school album with the image of young Khudoyorov in Moscow also has several photos of his two sons in Russia. “Stable work is still hard to come by [in Tajikistan] so my boys have followed me [to Russia],” said Khudoyorov, flashing a couple of gold teeth as he recounted his time in labor migration.

Khudoyorov’s story is not unique. Unable to find gainful employment in their economically stagnant countries, millions of Central Asians have turned to Russia in search of work and higher incomes since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

As this labor migration grew, it shaped both Central Asia and Russia.

Booming labor migration has allowed Central Asia’s undemocratic governments to avoid domestic demands to create jobs and provide public goods and services. Politically, migration serves as a pressure valve that prevents the buildup of unemployment-fueled social and political frustration, particularly among men and the youth.

It has also helped shape Russia – keeping it from a demographic collapse, helping its economy flourish, and supporting every one of Russia’s ambitious undertakings, from the 2014 Sochi Olympics to its foreign wars. The higher living standard for Russians, built on the backs of countless delivery drivers and cleaning staff from Central Asia, serves as a pressure valve for Russia, too. Labor migration has kept Central Asian countries economically and politically dependent on Russia, becoming a peculiar mirror of sorts for Russia’s own fate, its relationship with the world and with itself.

“Certain sectors of the Russian economy are so deeply dependent on labor migration that they would essentially be nonexistent without it,” Temur Umarov, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), told The Diplomat. “Muscovites who go abroad and complain there that taxi service is expensive and slow or that coffee is not tasty enough don’t think of how excellent customer service in Russia’s big cities is possible only because of cheap migrant labor.”

In 1998, Russia, only half a decade removed from the fall of its Soviet empire, experienced sovereign debt default, a massive devaluation of the ruble, skyrocketing inflation, and a banking crisis. The Russian economy, however, recovered relatively quickly, growing by 6.4 percent in 1999 and by 10 percent in 2000. The sharp depreciation of the ruble in 1998 made Russian exports more attractive internationally and, combined with growing oil revenue, helped stimulate the economic recovery. As its economy diversified and its labor market grew, however, Russia’s working-age population declined. This created a labor shortage and opened the door for more labor migration from other countries.

Russia’s former Soviet satellites in Central Asia, meanwhile, saw a decline in manufacturing, stagnating wages, high unemployment and lack of jobs, widespread poverty, and excess of labor resources as the countries’ populations exploded. The region also experienced political and social unrest, especially in Tajikistan, where a civil war raged until 1997. These dynamics, together with close socio-cultural ties, including the widespread use of the Russian language, and extensive transportation links with Russia – all legacies of the Soviet era – have turned Central Asian republics into labor force suppliers.

“I first left for Russia in 2000,” said Almaz, a Kyrgyzstan native who asked The Diplomat not to use his last name. “The economy under [then-President Askar] Akayev was terrible, corruption was everywhere, and there was too much uncertainty. I had an uncle who moved to Russia in the 1990s, and he helped me get a job in Moscow.”

Almaz, despite having lived in Russia permanently since 2010, still had a noticeable accent when he spoke in Russian to The Diplomat over a Telegram video call. He laughed when asked for an estimate of how much money he has sent from Russia to his family in Kyrgyzstan over the years.

“A million [U.S. dollars]! Well, maybe not that much, but I do work a lot and do what I can [for my family].”

Almaz’s country today receives the equivalent of a quarter of its annual gross domestic product in payments sent home by labor migrants, making it one of the most remittance-dependent countries in the world. In 2022 alone, 978,216 of Almaz’s compatriots went to Russia for work.

Tajikistan is even further along in this dependence, receiving approximately the equivalent of a third of its annual GDP in remittances. Tajikistan was one of the first countries in Central Asia to adopt a state migration policy back in 1998, stimulating labor migration of the unemployed population abroad. In 2022, Tajiks crossed the Russian border intending to work over 3.5 million times. (Some people have likely been counted twice in these figures, as they reflect the total number of registered border crossings).

Uzbekistan, which historically sends more labor migrants to Russia than any other country in the region (almost 6 million work-related border crossings in 2022 alone), has also taken significant steps to stimulate labor migration abroad since President Shavkat Mirziyoyev came to power. Since 2016, the government has eliminated the system of exit permits, empowered its Agency for External Labor Migration under the Ministry of Employment and Labor Relations, established a fund to protect the rights and interests of Uzbek labor migrants abroad, and introduced preferential fees and subsidized loans for the purchase of plane tickets for temporary labor migration.

Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan have managed to avoid this sort of labor migration dependence but for opposing reasons. Turkmenistan, arguably one of the most undemocratic countries in the world, severely restricts outmigration to fight its population decline and strictly regulates internal mobility.

“The government of Turkmenistan asked Turkey to suspend its visa-free regime for Turkmen citizens. Russia has expressed its willingness to simplify or even drop the visa regime for Turkmens several times as well, but Turkmenistan turned those offers down,” Ruslan Myatiev, the editor of Turkmen.News, an independent media outlet based in the Netherlands, told The Diplomat. “Domestically, the government drags out the process of getting a passport, forces Turkmens off of outbound flights, and even implements Russian language tests at the airport.”

Kazakhstan, the richest country in Central Asia thanks to its enormous natural resources and vast agricultural lands, uses passive rehabilitation instead. Its government focuses on reducing the outflow of national labor resources, stimulating the return of oralmans (ethnic Kazakhs living abroad) and students educated abroad, and attracting a limited number of foreign workers to specific industries through established quotas. These policies have turned the country into a net labor force recipient, the only one in the region.

“As Kazakhstan’s economy grew and the local population began to occupy more skilled and technical positions, the demand for low-skilled labor began to be covered by labor migrants from neighboring countries,” Darina Zhunusova, a migration researcher at Paperlab, an independent think tank in Kazakhstan, explained to The Diplomat. “Kazakhstan is currently experiencing a declining birth rate and an aging population, which is creating a labor shortage in agriculture and construction, where migrant labor is becoming increasingly in demand.”

Russia’s appeal in the region, though, has stayed undeniable, especially with streamlined processes for acquiring citizenship for highly qualified professionals from former Soviet republics, such as doctors and engineers. According to Russia’s Federal Migration Service (FMS), over 1.6 million people from Central Asia received Russian citizenship in 2001-2011. By 2013, labor migrants were sending home over $13.5 billion a year, with half of it going to Uzbekistan. Konstantin Romodanovskiy, then-head of the FMS, noted around that time that 8 percent of Russia’s GDP was generated with the hands of foreign labor migrants, who filled many low-prestige jobs with difficult working conditions and helped revive the construction industry in the country’s biggest cities.

“Those were fat times if you weren’t afraid of work,” reminisced Bek Shamsiddinov from Termez, Uzbekistan, over a Telegram video call with The Diplomat.

Shamsiddinov’s first job in Russia was at a restaurant in Krasnodar where he arrived in 2010 as the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis were subsiding in Russia. He moved to Moscow in 2012 to start his own catering business and soon brought in his cousins from Uzbekistan to help out. “There were Uzbeks I knew on every large construction project around the city,” he said.

“After the 2008 crisis, work was good and pay was good,” Alisher Khudoyorov of Dushanbe recalled. He made enough money to send back home to renovate their family house and to put aside for his sons’ weddings during that period. “Everywhere you looked [in Moscow then], you saw posters seeking employees.”

Watching the opening ceremony of the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, Khudoyorov joked to his sons that “it was the hands of Tajik [laborers] that made those Olympics possible.”

“Moscow hosting the Eurovision Song Contest [in 2009], the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, the 2018 FIFA World Cup – none of Russia’s large projects would be possible without its labor migrants,” confirmed Umarov of CEIP.

Then Russia invaded Crimea and annexed it from Ukraine in March 2014.

The Western economic sanctions that followed, as well as a sharp drop in the price of oil in the second half of 2014, hit Russia hard. By the end of the year, the ruble was devalued by 58 percent to the U.S. dollar, and the central bank had to sharply increase its key policy rate from 10.5 percent up to 17 percent. There were massive investment outflows, and inflation rose to 15 percent. This, coupled with Russia’s countersanctions, led to a dramatic reduction of imports, sharp spikes in food and consumer goods prices, and a fall in real wages.

To protect its domestic labor market and to avoid the public’s unhappiness over its gamble in Crimea, the Russian government scapegoated Central Asian labor migrants – a tactic it returned to again and again in the next decade, as Moscow sought to blame Russia’s woes on external actors and to rally the public around the flag. In 2013 and especially in 2014, the government adopted a flurry of federal laws limiting migration, replacing the quotas of migrant workers with a patent system to replenish the state budget with associated fees, tightening eligibility for temporary residence requirements through Russian language and history tests, and increasing the entry ban for violating migration regulations to 10 years.

As a result, the official number of labor migrants in Russia fell from 3 million in 2014 down to 1.8 million the next year. For the first time since 2009, remittance rates in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan dropped – by 29 and 49 percent respectively. In late December 2014, the chairman of the All-Russian Public Movement “Tajik Labor Migrants” Karomat Sharipov said that delayed salary payments to Tajik labor migrants in Russia totaled over 1 billion rubles.

The legislative changes starting in 2014 have made Russia’s legal system for migration more bureaucratic and opaque, increasing corruption and fraud, and exacerbating the migrants’ vulnerability to exploitation, wage theft, and mistreatment. Xenophobic and nationalist anti-immigrant rhetoric from government officials has normalized harassment from law enforcement officials and the public, worsening the migrants’ sense of alienation and fueling migrants’ religious and extremist radicalization.

Looking for a reprieve from these daily challenges, many migrants seek the more secure status provided by a residence permit (either temporary or permanent) or citizenship, both of which allow them to work legally. Among other things, becoming a Russian citizen means no longer having to collect the “myriad of interlinking documents migrants need to stay legal,” according to Caress Schenk, an associate professor of political science at Nazarbayev University who researches the politics of migration in Eurasia. Russian citizenship turned from a marker of identity or integration into merely a tool for economic access and legal security.

To bank on the neighboring countries’ dependence on the Russian economy and to stabilize it against Western sanctions, Russia initiated the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). Founded in 2015, the EAEU today includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia, with Uzbekistan and Moldova as observer states. The union simplifies regional trade and customs barriers, allowing Russia to import goods while circumventing the increasing burden of Western sanctions. The union also makes it easier for nationals of member-states to work in Russia – a carrot that always labor-hungry Russia benefits from and continues to dangle in front of other potential EAEU members like Tajikistan.

But the EAEU is widely seen as a political tool building on Russia’s previous attempts to re-Sovietize the region through the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and the Customs Union Agreement of 1995. That neo-imperialist ambition can be seen in Moscow’s insistence on using Russian as the working language of all regional integration projects and in its occasional threats to close its borders to neighbors refusing to align with Russia’s interests.

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated what Russian border closures could mean for Central Asia. Remittances from Russia to the countries in the region in the first half of that year fell by 22 percent. In fact, the flow of money reversed, with the volume of funds sent from CIS countries to Russia increasing by 47 percent to support labor migrants and students stranded there. As a result of the pandemic, economic growth in Central Asia plummeted from 4.5 percent in 2019 to a contraction of 2.6 percent in 2020 in Kazakhstan, from 4.6 percent in 2019 to...