Description
It is well-known that millions of ethnic Russians permanently left the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union after its collapse in 1991. Less widely appreciated, however, is that the exodus – often of highly skilled professionals - to Russia continues. The figures reach the 10,000s per year, and the trend is reshaping the demography of Kazakhstan, especially in the northern regions where Russians once made up more than 50% of the population. These population changes are likely to be reflected in the results of the twice-postponed 2021 Kazakhstan census.
This research was driven by curiosity to understand the motivations driving this dramatic trend. Accordingly, 30 semi-structured interviews were conducted with ethnic Russians and non-Kazakh Russophones who had left Kazakhstan to permanently resettle in the Russian Federation since 1991. The sample included both those who had left during the initial wave of resettlement in the 1990s and those who left more recently, often as part of the Russian government’s Programme for the Voluntary Resettlement of Compatriots which was launched in 2006.
The findings revealed a broad spectrum of motivations, with some key recurring themes that are not widely reflected in the literature, such as the perceived inability to realise themselves in Kazakhstan for cultural as much as linguistic reasons. Among the sample, ethnic-based animosity, “political factors”, and reasons of abject poverty and unemployment featured much less prominently than might be anticipated based on the available literature, particularly among the more recent cohorts of migrants.
The qualitative insights offered by this research inform the design of a larger n quantitative survey which, it is hoped, will be conducted by a sociological research agency in Russia among the same target sample. This will provide understanding of the extent to which the conclusions suggested by the interviews are generalisable to the population under consideration at large.
In addition to summarising the in-depth, rich insights provided by the interviews, the paper will also report official demographic statistics on a regional and local level, which to the author’s knowledge are only available in Kazakh.
