To Russia With Waning Love: Changing Migration Dynamics in Central Asia

“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 a contraction of 8.6  percent in 2020 in Kyrgyzstan, from 7.4 percent in 2019 to 4.5 percent in 2020 in Tajikistan, and from 5.8 percent in 2019 to 1.6 percent in 2020 in Uzbekistan. Millions of migrants who usually leave for Russia in the spring were stranded at home. Coupled with lockdown measures, this led to a significant rise in domestic violence, crimes, protests, and unemployment spikes.

However, the pandemic also contributed to the rise of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan as regional labor migration destinations. While Uzbekistan has become a destination for Turkmens, Kazakhstan emerged as an alternative destination to Russia for over 35,000 Kyrgyz, 14,000 Tajiks, and over 200,000 Uzbeks in the year after the pandemic (more precise numbers are hard to find, as many migrants take advantage of visa-free regimes to work illegally and avoid paying taxes).

“In addition to the aggressive tightening of migration regulations, there is a growing xenophobia in Russia, something that labor migrants don’t face in Kazakhstan. The attitude towards migrants from neighboring countries is not as negative here as in Russia,” said Zhunusova of Paperlab. “Although, of course, the salaries that labor migrants receive in Kazakhstan are not comparable to what they could earn in Russia, which sets the labor migrants’ sights on Eastern Europe and South Korea.”

The need for the gradual diversification of labor migration routes proved prescient in February 2022 when Russia escalated the shadow war it has been waging in eastern Ukraine since 2014 into a full-blown invasion.

Russia has long used foreign nationals in its conflicts abroad, codifying the right of foreigners to sign contracts with the military back in 2003. When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, the number of foreigners, mostly Uzbeks and Tajiks, serving as professional soldiers in the Russian Army had grown to almost 300. When Russia intervened in the Syrian civil war in 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree allowing foreign contract soldiers to take part in Russian combat operations.

Within a month of Russia’s failed initial attempt to take Kyiv, army tents recruiting migrants to fight in eastern Ukraine with a promise of Russian citizenship appeared near several metro stations in Moscow. Social media posts of Central Asians appearing on the frontlines in Ukraine and reports of them being killed proliferated rapidly. A Ukrainian newspaper leaked what appeared to be the personal data of 120,000 Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine in March 2022; the list contained multiple ethnically Central Asian names.

As evidence grew, the Uzbek government warned that any Uzbek national found to have enlisted in the service of a foreign army or police service could face a lengthy prison sentence, a notice it has issued repeatedly since. Some Russian lawmakers responded to Uzbekistan’s warnings in typical fashion by calling for visa restrictions on millions of Uzbek migrants in the country. Uzbekistan wasn’t alone. Kyrgyz and Tajik authorities issued similar warnings, too.

After Russia struggled to make meaningful gains in Ukraine in 2022, Putin inked another decree that offered fast-tracked citizenship to foreign fighters who signed on for at least a year of military service. Military recruiters began targeting Central Asians serving out sentences in Russian prisons and tricking Central Asian migrants into joining up in exchange for expedited citizenship.

“Labor migrants are reaching out [for help] constantly because they, non-citizens, are being forced to sign contracts for ‘voluntary’ military service when applying for all sorts of documents, from work patents to residence permits,” Valentina Chupik, a Russian human rights lawyer in exile and the director of the Russia-focused migrant rights group Tong Jahoni, said in September 2023.

In August 2023, the Russian government stepped up coercion of Central Asians into its Ukraine war by rounding up hundreds of migrant workers from the region in a wave of raids. The effort appeared to mainly target men who recently received Russian citizenship but didn’t complete their compulsory military registration. A two-day raid that targeted a large produce warehouse in the south of St. Petersburg in mid-August turned up more than a hundred labor migrants with recently acquired Russian passports who were immediately taken for military registration. Similar raids occurred in Belgorod, Cheboksary, Novocheboksarsk, Kurgan, Krasnodar, and Krasnoyarsk, with dozens of migrants forced to register for military service in each city. Many Central Asians now realized that the long-covered Russian citizenship has become a liability.

Hundreds of migrants from Central Asia have ended up working in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine, despite dangerous conditions and warnings from their governments not to go to Ukraine. Most of these migrants are used in the reconstruction of war-ravaged cities like Mariupol and Donetsk; others dig trenches and collect dead bodies on the frontlines. Female migrants from Central Asia are also offered jobs in military hospitals, canteens, and factories in occupied eastern Ukraine. Vacancies are posted on major employment websites like Headhunter and some regional employment websites, shared via social media and in migrant communities. Employers promise to cover travel expenses to Ukraine, accommodation, meals, and uniforms, and offer salaries significantly larger than what laborers can earn in Russia.

Yet despite these enticing promises, Central Asian migrants face the same issues in Russia-occupied Ukraine as they do in Russia itself – unsanitary conditions, poor treatment by employers, and pay fraud. Some disillusioned workers who tried to leave Ukraine were stopped by Russian border guards, forcing them to continue working in dangerous conditions while facing criminal prosecution from Kyiv and their home governments for participating in the invasion.

At least a hundred citizens of Central Asian countries had died fighting for Russia in Ukraine by mid-2024, but the real death toll of Central Asians there remains unknown. Russia carefully conceals its military losses and the demographics of its forces fighting in Ukraine.

With the war in Ukraine putting a significant dent in Russia’s working-age male population and Central Asian countries looking for other labor destinations, Russia is more in need of labor resources from the region than ever. By some estimates, migrant workers account for up to 10 percent of Russia’s total workforce today and by 2030 the labor market deficit could reach 2 to 4 million people. Despite that need, the Russian government continues to scapegoat labor migrants for any internal problems, falling into the classic trap of autocracy – investing in total control by its security apparatus, which is designed to impress the domestic audience rather than to effectively counter any actual external threat. This not only inflates the scale and cost of the security apparatus and of its control measures but also sacrifices economic interests – in this case by deterring the migrants who are vitally important to the Russian economy – to create a false impression of competence.

This dynamic was especially evident in the crackdown following the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack in March 2024. The attack, which claimed 145 lives and was allegedly conducted by four Tajik nationals with ties to the Islamic State Khorasan Province, resulted in a vicious spike in xenophobia and discrimination against Central Asians in Russia. In the week after the attack, raids against illegal migrants took place in 68 regions, at least 161 criminal cases were opened, more than 1,700 foreigners were deported, and several hundred individuals received military summonses. A number of regions have restricted the hiring of foreign workers in trade, passenger and freight transportation, food production, as well as catering and hospitality. The government tightened migration legislation once again and amped up anti-migrant and nationalist rhetoric. Tajik laborers bore the brunt of this ire both in Russia and back home, but other Central Asian nationals suffered too.

Almaz, the Kyrgyzstan native The Diplomat spoke to for this piece, avoided ending up in Ukraine due to his age. But he was fired from the restaurant he was working at in the wake of the Crocus City Hall attack. “I’ve heard of so many of our boys [from Kyrgyzstan] getting arrested and deported. This is the worst life in Russia has ever been,” he said. Almaz is still struggling to find permanent work in Russia, despite having citizenship.

Bek Shamsiddinov returned to Termez, Uzbekistan late last year before Russia enacted stricter migration regulations. He is looking for work abroad but doesn’t want to return to Russia because of its cruel use of Central Asians in Ukraine, its xenophobia, and its corrupt migration system. His country’s government might help him as it is negotiating easier employment conditions for its citizens in the United Kingdom and in EU countries, as well as in Israel and Saudi Arabia. With the mediation of the Uzbek Agency for External Labor Migration, some 70,000 Uzbek citizens have gone to work in developed countries over the past two years. There are more obvious alternatives to Russia too, like Turkiye and Kazakhstan, to which Uzbek citizens can travel without visas.

When asked why he isn’t considering staying and working in Uzbekistan, Shamsiddinov shrugged with a sheepish smile. “We always look for our future elsewhere. That’s our fate.”