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Timothy Heleniak is with the World Bank and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. During the 2001-2002 academic year he is a research scholar at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C., where he is doing work on the demographic impact of transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The statements and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not to be attributed to the World Bank, Georgetown University, or the Woodrow Wilson Center.
When Russia became independent in 1992, it inherited from the Soviet Union a spatial distribution of its population that was incompatible with its emerging market economy. Internally the largest migration stream has been out of the overpopulated Russian north and Far East toward central Russia. At other geographic scales, as a result of decades of Soviet labor policy, there were numerous cities and towns in Russia that had many more workers than they would under market conditions. Simultaneously, the breakup of the Soviet Union caused the large-scale departure of Russians, Russian speakers, and others out of the non-Russian states of the former Soviet Union to Russia. The lifting of exit restrictions did not cause the mass exodus that many had predicted, but it did allow the emigration of many highly skilled persons who could have played a role in the country's transition. As a result of the deterioration of the economy and the opening of the economy to the outside world, there has been a rise in the trafficking of Russian women to the West. With the relaxation of border restrictions, there has been a large, undetermined increase in the amount of illegal migration in Russia. These different migration streams are affected by, and are simultaneously affecting Russia's post-Soviet transition to a market economy and democratic society. In this article I examine the various migration streams that were set off by their breakup of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the transition period, with an emphasis upon the impact both nationally and locally.
The Transition of the Russian Migration System
Migration is just one strategy of adaptation that people employ in response to changing circumstances. About half of...