Political Machines and Regional Variation in Migration Policies in Russia

By Colin Johnson

B.A., Rhodes College, 2010

M.A., Brown University, 2012

A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island 2018

This dissertation by Colin Johnson is accepted in its present form

by the department of Political Science as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date ______Dr. Linda J. Cook, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date ______Dr. Melani Cammett, Reader

Date ______Dr. Douglas Blum, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Dr. Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School

iii CURRICULUM VITAE

Colin Johnson Department of Political Science, Brown University

Education d Brown University, Providence, RI. • Ph.D. in Political Science (2018). • M.A. in Political Science (2012). Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. • B.A. in International Studies, Minor in Russian Studies, cum laude (2010). Grants and Fellowships d External • International Advanced Research Opportunity Fellowship, IREX (Sept. 2013–June 2014). • Critical Language Scholarship Program, Kazan, Russia, U.S. Dept. of State (June– Aug. 2010).

Brown University • Interdisciplinary Opportunity Fellowship, Population Studies and Training Center (2015-2016). • Teaching Fellow (Spring 2015). • Dissertation Fellowship (2014–2015). • Graduate School Incentive Grant (2013–2014). • Summer Fieldwork Grant, Population Studies and Training Center (June 2012). • NSF-IGERT Fellowship, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs (2012–2013). • Joukowsky Family Fellowship (2010–2011).

Publications d Book Chapters

“Perspectives on Migration Theory – Sociology and Political Science,” (with Michael J. White) in Michael J. White (ed.), International Handbook of Migration and Population Distribution (Springer Publishing, 2016).

iv Academic Conferences and Workshops d “The Wrong Islam: Ethnic Identity and Marginalization of Labor Migrants in Tatarstan,” presented at the American Political Science Association conference, San Francisco (September 2017).

“Complex Arrivals: The Politics of Migration in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan,” presented at the Islam in Russia Conference and Workshop, Davis Center at Harvard University, Cambridge (October 2015).

“Whose Problem Are They? Migration Politics in Russia’s Volga Region,” - American Political Science Association conference, San Francisco (September 2015). - Association of the Study of Nationalities at Columbia University, New York (April 2015). - Post-Communism Workshop at the Davis Center at Harvard University, Cambridge (March 2015).

“Maximizing Returns: The Social Politics of Central Asians’ Migration to Russia,” co- authored with Linda Cook, presented at the annual American Political Science Association conference, Chicago (August 2013).

“Reacting to Migrants in Russia: Insights from the Volga Federal District,” presented at the annual New England Political Science Association conference, Portland (May 2013).

“Demography and Immigration: A Xenophobic Outcome Inevitable?,” Association for the Study of Nationalities conference, Columbia University, New York (April 2012).

“Demographic Decline and Social Politics in the Russian Federation,” presented at the Social Science Research Council Eurasia Dissertation Workshop, “Youth and Social Instability in Eurasia,” University of Texas, Austin (October 2011).

Invited Lectures d “Political and Social Impact of Central Asian Migrants to Russia,” panel briefing for policy officials on behalf of the Title VIII program, U.S. Department of State, Washington, DC (May 2015).

“Open Arms or Closed Doors? Migration Politics in Russia’s Regions,” presented at Rhodes College, Dept. of International Studies Guest Lecture series, Memphis (March 2015).

Professional Experience d Teaching POLS 1823X - “Survey of Comparative Politics,” Brown University (Spring 2015).

v Teaching Assistance “Introduction to Comparative Politics,” Brown University (Spring 2012). “Politics of Radical Islam,” Brown University (Fall 2011).

Research Assistance Professor Linda J. Cook, Brown University (2012–2013).

Work Experience Institute Coordinator, Brown International Advanced Research Institute in Population and Development, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs (January – June 2013).

Relevant Experience and Information d Additional Training GIS Methods Institute, Spatial Structures in the Social Science, Brown University (2013). Population Studies Training Center Trainee, Brown University (2011–2017). Graduate Program in Development Trainee, Brown University (2010–2012).

Professional Membership American Political Science Association Association of the Study of Nationalities International Studies Association Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Population Association of America Phi Beta Kappa

Languages Native English High Proficiency Russian

Relevant Experience Internship at the Podrostok Social Rehabilitation Center in Velikiy Novgorod, Russia as a Mertie W. Buckman Scholar for International Internships, Rhodes College (Summer 2009).

Prometheus Program in Transition Studies at the University of Tartu, Estonia as a Buckman International Studies Fellow, Rhodes College (Spring 2009). Russian Language Study at the Gornyi Institute in Saint Petersburg, Russia as a LeMasters Scholar, Rhodes College (Summer 2008).

vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Despite the isolating process necessary to complete a dissertation, it is the result of a remarkable community of colleagues, friends, and family. The list that follows is far from comprehensive, but without these following individuals, this project undoubtedly would not have been completed.

My fieldwork is indebted to the industrious and welcoming intellectual communities of Russia, particularly those in Kazan and Ufa. Foremost, I must thank Dr.

Polina Ermolaeva and the Center of Advanced Economic Research in the Academy of

Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan for supporting this project throughout its development. I was fortunate to make the acquaintance of Dr. Vasil Sakaev at Kazan

Federal University – Naberezhnye Chelny, faculty at Kazan Federal University, and the assistance of scholars at the Bashkir Academy of Public Administration and Management for the President of the Republic of Bashkortostan. My year in Russia was fraught with difficulty, and without the friendship of Damir, Ivan, Irek, Renat, and Kelsey, and without the care of Farida and Ilgizar, I would have been without of laughter and comfort for nearly a year.

I would like to thank my tireless committee for their insight and patience across the years. Dr. Linda J. Cook encouraged my professional and intellectual development at every turn, giving me the intellectual freedom to pursue a myriad of interests. Her positivity and advice pushed me to overcome personal and professional obstacles, a mentorship that is unfortunately rare. Her passion for this project has been instrumental

vii to its completion, and I will only hope to pass along her passion to my future students.

Dr. Melani Cammett inspired me throughout this writing process with her professionalism and critiques, setting a standard I can only strive towards. Her thorough feedback, despite travel and time constraints, helped me to value my work and to fight for finding time to assist colleagues in their research. Dr. Douglas Blum supported this research in its infancy, and his enthusiasm and patience over the years has been inspirational. From brainstorming sessions in his office to meeting in cafes, his excitement for mentorship and intellectual curiosity pushed me through periods of self- doubt and inspired me in my own interactions with my students.

Penultimately, I would like to mention the city of Providence for giving me the ideal community to find dear friends, to celebrate beautiful moments, and to explore gorgeous streets. Returning to Brown, my wonderful peers, Aaron, Megan, Jazmin,

Kaitlin, Nazar, Diego, Carla, Liza, Pellumb, Poulomi, and Daniel inspired me with their brilliance and unconditional support. Among the many friends I was fortunate to laugh with, I must recognize Chelsea, Morgan, Amy, Jess, Maren, Evan, and Erin for including me in their lives. A special thank you to Patrick for his friendship and daily encouragement, and to Ben for his kindness and patience. Similarly, the community at

Rhodes College continued to support me through this process. I’d like to thank the

Department of International Studies for giving me the space to present my work and assisting in the professionalization of its graduates beyond graduation. Yet without the lifelong friendships and love from Scott, Lacey, Derek, Hunter, and Carly, I would never have typed a page or made it to this point.

viii Finally, I must thank the friends and family back in my native Texas for uninterrupted encouragement and help. To my parents, Marsha and Steve, I can only say, however insufficiently, thank you for your love and support, even as I embarked on this journey and to ever farther places. To Kema, thank you for being a source of laughter, no matter how impossible I thought such a thing could be. To Garrett and Billy, thank you for encouragement, whether at home or during your visits. To list the incredible extended family that has been with me along the way would easily double the length of this acknowledgement, so I will recognize the love of Johnny and Melba Johnson and Roy and Etta Mae Moore. Without these four beautiful souls, I would not have had the possibilities and opportunities that I have enjoyed, and I am forever shaped by their example and the lives they brought together.

ix TABLE OF CONTENTS

Curriculum Vitae iv

Acknowledgements vii

Table of Contents x

List of Tables xi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: 22

Federal Migration Policy and the Space for Regional Policies

Chapter 2: 68

Theory and Methods

Chapter 3: 114

Tatarstan: Exemplar or Exception?

Chapter 4: 164

Bashkortostan: The Importance of Autonomy

Chapter 5: 208

Samara and Orenburg: Persistent Engagement

Conclusion 253

x LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: 13

Depiction of Cases

Table 2: 50

Phases of Federal Migration Policy

Table 3: 55

Variation in Regional Migration Policies within Tatarstan, Bashkortostan,

Samara, and Orenburg

Table 4: 58

Perception of Foreign Construction Workers

Table 5: 59

Opinion on Priority for Russian Migration Policy

Table 6: 60

Opinion on Deportation for Immigrant Families

Table 7: 61

Opinion on Organizations Defending Migrants’ Rights

Table 8: 62

Opinion on Restricting Migration, by Ethnicity

Table 9: 63

Reflection on Threat Perception

xi Table 10: 64

Perception of Violent Crimes Committed by Migrants

Table 11: 65

Perceptions of Crime and Migrants

Table 12: 108

Depiction of Cases

xii

INTRODUCTION:

REGIONAL MIGRATION POLITICS IN RUSSIA

When I arrived in Saint Petersburg in 2008 on my first trip to Russia, numerous billboards displayed advertisements for Russia’s Year of the Family, a designation declared in 2007 by President Vladimir Putin. Seeking to address Russia’s demographic decline, in which the national population was falling as a result of low fertility and high mortality, the Year of the Family encouraged couples to begin families and highlighted federal policies that offered financial support for those having more than one child. Since

Putin declared in 2006 that the demographic crisis was “the most acute problem facing our country today,”1 these policies and declarations sought to address the question, “What are we going to become?” Unbeknownst to me at the time, this question was not being asked in Russian society solely because of fertility rates, as after turn of the millennium the Russian Federation had become host to the world’s second-largest immigrant population, an estimated 11 million immigrants.

Russia’s international immigrant population is the result of several migration processes. The initial influx of immigrants occurred as the collapse of the Soviet Union spurred the movement of millions across international borders, as well as the relocation of millions within the borders of Russia, as many moved towards the economically

1 Vladimir Putin, “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly” (Office of President of Russian Federation, May 10, 2006), http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/23577.

dynamic regions in European Russia.2 Then the outbreak of violence between Azerbaijan and Armenia and civil war in Tajikistan led hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in

Russia.3 Then at the turn of the century, Russia’s economy rapidly expanded atop high energy and commodity prices, creating the demand for international labor migrants from the comparatively impoverished societies from across the post-Soviet space. Given the reordering of all social, political, and economic life during the transition from the Soviet

Union, migration was just one of many pressing issues for the fledgling Russian state, like maintaining control over a vast nuclear arsenal and ratifying a federal constitution.

Yet as migration processes shifted and shaped Russia’s society, it would cause more to consider the questions, “Who are we?” and, “What are we going to become?,” just as these questions are increasingly asked in North America and Western Europe.

1.1 Regionalism: The Contest of Federal and Regional Political Power

One of the most important factors shaping migration in the post-Soviet region has been the visa-free regime provided through the 1992 Bishkek Agreement. In the rapid construction of institutions in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the

Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was formed in 1992, a multinational organization that included all the former Soviet republics, save for Estonia, Latvia, and

Lithuania.4 An enduring policy tenet of the CIS is a visa-free regime for travel of 90 days or less for citizens of member states. This regime was among the most transformative

2 Timothy Heleniak, “An Overview of Migration in the Post-Soviet Space,” in Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008). 3 Oxana Shevel, Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 4 Georgia withdrew its membership in 2009, while Ukraine and Turkmenistan currently maintain associate status, having not ratified the charter. Ukraine has maintained associate status since 1993, while Turkmenistan joined in this status in 2005.

policies in the post-Soviet space, laying the legal groundwork for millions of labor migrants from Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, and Moldova to seek employment in

Russia. Commenting on the labor migration situation nearly twenty years after the CIS agreement in January 2012, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin asked the Board of the

Russia’s Federal Migration Service:

“As for other post-Soviet countries, I am aware of the problems your service is facing, as well as some aspects of law enforcement, because we don’t have visas with most of these countries. We can deport people, but what next? They will board a plane or a train and come back here. . . We have no visas with CIS countries for political reasons, because if we introduce them we will lose these countries forever. This is not easy for us, not at all. Besides, our economy needs immigrants. So what is the solution? Is there a solution? I think so. But what is it?”5

Indeed, the scale of immigration has generated a fierce policy debate in Russia, which has substantiated fears over increasing xenophobia and racism in Russian society.

Famously, the far-right nationalist movement in Russia has conducted an annual march on November 4th on National Unity Day. The march draws thousands of far-right nationalists from neo-Nazis to monarchists to the streets of Russia’s largest cities, especially Moscow. Public opinion reveals strong anti-immigrant views within Russian society since polling began in 1993, and in 2012, 71% of those polled in a nationally- representative survey believed immigration had detrimental effects on Russia.6 Against this social backdrop, we would expect a convergence in migration policy, yet we observe a spectrum of regional responses to international immigration. From Moscow City’s

5 “Official Website of the Government of the Russian Federation,” January 26, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20130501091111/http://government.ru/eng/docs/17877/. 6 “Levada Center: Russian Public Opinion 2012-2013” (Moscow: Levada Analytical Center, 2013).

offer of temporary amnesty for undocumented migrants in 20057 to the remote Arctic city of Novy Urengoi, which responded to its international labor migration by having itself classified as a closed city in 2012,8 regional and local governments have pursued a variety of independent migration policies, providing their own answers to Putin’s question, “Is there a solution?”

Such political activity reflects processes in Russian politics from the 1990s, when regionalism threatened the political and economic integrity of the Russian Federation.

Spurred by then-President Yeltsin in 1994 to “take as much sovereignty as you can swallow,” regional governments across the nascent democracy of Russia claimed political and legal authority over the spectrum of government positions, from opening consulates9 to customs offices10 to paying the salaries of naval officers11. These claims over economic and political power were negotiated and formalized in bilateral treaties signed with Moscow from 1994-1998, giving President Yeltsin political allies in the regions, while allowing over 38 regions to secure varying levels of sovereignty.

7 Elena Tyuryukanova, “Regularization and Employer Sanctions as Means towards the Effective Governance of Labour Migration: Russian Federation and International Experience” (Moscow: International Labor Organization, 2009). 8 A “closed city” is a legal status for a municipality that requires official permission for any person to move or even visit the city. A more common classification during the Soviet regime, modern closed cities are usually those with military installations, yet Novy Urengoy was able to utilize its strategic importance as the largest generator of natural gas in Russia to limit all immigration in response to the perception that crime had increased as a result of international labor migrants. See Claire Bigg, “Russia’s ‘Gas Capital’ Cuts Itself Off To Curtail Migration, Crime,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, December 6, 2012, https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-gas-capital-closes-itself-to-cut-migration-crime/24790218.html. 9 Katherine E Graney, Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism in Russia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). 10 Daniel S. Treisman, After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 11 Mikhail Alexseev, ed., Center-Periphery Conflict in Post-Soviet Russia: A Federation Imperiled (St Martin’s Press/London: Macmillan, 1999).

The threat of regionalism was so great that Vladimir Putin placed reining in the regions and increasing the power of the federal government as a top political priority upon his election to the presidency in 2000. Successful in increasingly centralizing political and economic power, Putin’s initiatives created a “power vertical” in Russia.

The political party United Russia was fundamental to this centralization, as its rapidly expanding power gave the Kremlin a party through which to control the federal legislative process, nearly every regional executive, and each regional legislature in

Russia. This transformation of the political space in Russia gave Putin’s administration the capacity to reclaim political authority from the regions and harmonize policy arenas across Russia.

The main vehicle for asserting the federal government’s control over migration policy was through the reconfiguration of the Federal Migration Service (FMS). Initially established in 1994 to assist international refugees, those displaced by armed conflict within Russia’s borders, and those migrating from remote areas of Russia, the FMS had a largely humanitarian mission as it sought to assist vulnerable populations. In 2001, however, the FMS was completely shuttered under Putin’s orders, and its responsibilities were transferred to the Ministry of the Interior (MVD), which oversees the various police forces across Russia. In 2002, the FMS was reinstituted within the MVD and tasked with monitoring and regulating migration flows, thus reorienting the mission of the FMS from humanitarian aid to law enforcement. In the decade that followed, Russia’s international immigrant population grew to become the world’s second-largest, hence this dissertation’s focus on the period 2002 through 2012. Federal migration policy underwent three periods of reform in these ten years, explained in greater detail in

Chapter 1, and each reform increased the federal government’s authority and capacity to monitor and regulate international labor migration, efforts that public opinion surveys suggest were supported by the majority of Russians.12

Despite the reorganization of the FMS and the capacity of United Russia to limit regionalism, we observe some regions continued to claim and exercise authority in migration policy, such as in Moscow City’s amnesty initiative. While the Kremlin gained power and the regions’ bilateral treaties with Moscow expired, migration was a policy realm in which some regional governments continued to assert authority. Yet as these select regions did so, it led to an observable divergence of migration policies at the regional level. Within this spectrum of regional migration policies, we even observe regional governments offering services and support to international labor migrants. This presents an empirical puzzle – given consistently hostile public opinion and during a period of centralization, why do we observe regional engagement in migration policy, particularly those designed to assist international labor migrants?

To investigate this puzzle, I conduct a qualitative case study of four Russian regions from 2002 to 2012, and I find that the expansion of United Russia’s power established a two-level principal-agent game for regional executives, who sought to provide votes for United Russia while consolidating their political control at the regional level. Rather than eradicating regionalism in its entirety, this political dynamic provide regional executives a means to accrue political power and leverage this power to pursue a regionalist agenda, as they also provide support for United Russia. As a result, regional

12 “Levada Center: Russian Public Opinion 2012-2013.”

political machines13 became commonplace across Russia, incorporating large business enterprises, significant regional employers, and large social groups to create a system of patronage that served to give regional executives greater control over regional politics and reduce the emergence of political rivals. Regional executives, therefore, exist in a precarious political position, balancing the interests of regional actors against federal agendas. By securing autonomy for their respective political machine, however, regional executives can implement policies that can improve the economic well-being or social stability of their region or even provide greater capacity for graft and corruption. As this dissertation proves, the stakes are high for regional executives, and not all are successful in remaining in power.

I argue that the political machines created to survive the new two-level principal- agent dynamic provided a pathway for a contemporary manifestation of regionalism, observable in independent regional migration policies. To explain the variation in regional engagement in migration policy we observe across Russia, I argue that the determining factor for whether a regional government implements an independent migration policy is the degree of autonomy from federal influence and defection of regional actors, overpowering the rival explanatory factors of economic concentration, ethnic identity, demographic outlook, and increased threat perception through exogenous shocks. By focusing on political machines as the unit of analysis and evaluating the degree of autonomy, my project assists us in identifying which regions are more likely to

13 I follow Henry Hale’s example and use Banfield and Wilsons’ definition of a political machine as, “an organization that depends crucially upon inducements that are both specific and material for political power.” See Henry Hale, “Explaining Machine Politics in Russia’s Regions: Economy, Ethnicity, and Legacy,” Post-Soviet Affairs 19, no. 3 (January 1, 2003): 229; Edward C Banfield and James Q Wilson, City Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

engage in migration policy, as well as understanding the policy outcomes through a careful study of the structure of included actors within a respective machine.

1.2 Approaches to Migration Policy

In making its argument, this dissertation conducts a theory-building exercise that engages the migration politics literature, pushing it beyond the liberal democratic regime type that has attracted much of recent scholarship,14 and considers arguments from the regionalism literature in Russia to explain variation in regional migration policies. By drawing upon theoretical mechanisms from the migration politics literature that are not reliant on regime type, such as theories of threat perception,15 this dissertation seeks to build a framework that brings the literature’s insights to a subnational level of analysis and in a non-democratic regime. Similarly, I build on the regionalism literature16 to reflect the contemporary Russian context where the center-periphery competition for political power is a two-level principal-agent game,17 in which regional executives18 seek to maintain power over regional political actors and favor with federal authorities. As

14 A. Boucher and J. Gest, “Migration Studies at a Crossroads: A Critique of Immigration Regime Typologies,” Migration Studies, August 22, 2014. 15 Gordon W Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Publication Company, 1954); Lawrence Bobo, “Whites’ Opposition to Busing: Symbolic Racism or Realistic Group Conflict?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, no. 6 (1983): 1196–1210; Lincoln Quillian, “Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-Immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe,” American Sociological Review 60, no. 4 (1995): 586–611. 16 Steven Solnick, “The Political Economy of Russian Federalism: A Framework for Analysis,” Problems of Post-Communism, no. 43 (1996): 13–25; Daniel Treisman, “The Politics of Intergovernmental Transfers in Post-Soviet Russia,” British Journal of Political Science 26, no. 3 (1996): 299–335; Kathryn Stoner- Weiss, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance (Princeton: Princeton Univesrity Press, 1997). 17 G. Sharafutdinova, “Subnational Governance in Russia: How Putin Changed the Contract with His Agents and the Problems It Created for Medvedev,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 40, no. 4 (September 1, 2010): 672–96. 18 “Regional executive” refers to the official at the helm of the executive branch in a region. This office normally carries the title of Governor, but in various regions in Russia, this office carries the title of President. To avoid being embroiled in the politics behind the title in each region, I refer this position in each region as the regional executive.

such, this dissertation seeks to identify the important factors, structures, and processes that have contributed to the implementation of integrative migration policies in Russia, as well as the divergence amongst the cases therein.

Previous works in migration politics have suggested that constitutional definitions of citizenship,19 judicial decision,20 international treaties,21 and a political commitment to democratic norms22 play influential roles in constraining governments’ ability to alter their migration policies. While referring to national-level policies in liberal democracies, these legal and normative explanations do not assist us in explaining the variation we observe in Russia, where we have reason to doubt the independence of the judiciary and the status of rule of law. Similarly, arguments for the role electoral politics in influencing migration policies fail to explain these cases,23 since all dominant political parties in

Russia favor restrictionist migration policies.24 Furthermore, during the ten years this study investigates, United Russia was the dominant party in nearly every region, reducing the likelihood that political parties in Russia played a role in shaping regional responses to migration. Given these limitations, this dissertation draws primarily on the threat

19 R. Hansen, “Globalization, Embedded Realism, and Path Dependence: The Other Immigrants to Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 35, no. 3 (April 1, 2002): 259–83. 20 Christian Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Great Britain (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999). 21 Gabriele Orcalli, “Constitutional Choice and European Immigration Policy,” Constitutional Political Economy 18, no. 1 (March 20, 2007): 1–20; Gallya Lahav and Virginie Guiraudon, “Actors and Venues in Immigration Control: Closing the Gap Between Political Demands and Policy Outcomes,” West European Politics 29, no. 2 (March 2006): 201–23. 22 James F. Hollifield, “The Emerging Migration State,” International Migration Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 885–912. 23 Martin A. Schain, “The Extreme-Right and Immigration Policy-Making: Measuring Direct and Indirect Effects,” West European Politics 29, no. 2 (March 2006): 270–89; Joost Van Spanje and Wouter Van Der Brug, “The Party as Pariah: The Exclusion of Anti-Immigration Parties and Its Effect on Their Ideological Positions,” West European Politics 30, no. 5 (November 2007): 1022–40; Anthony M Messina, The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration to Western Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 24 Vladimir Mukomel’, “Migration Rhetoric In Program Documents of Russian Political Parties,” Explanatory Note, Socio-Political Module (CARIM-East, September 2012).

perception literature to account for the role exogenous shocks, such as a terrorist attack, and competition perception within the native population may have in determining regional migration policies in a more closed political system.

The explanations offered by the regionalism literature from the 1990s are better suited to explain the variation at the subnational level in Russia, but they fail to explain the outcomes we observe. Treisman’s work25 suggests that regions which are more economically productive and contribute more to the federal budget are also more likely to resist federal authority and have the revenues available to pursue independent policies.

Stoner-Weiss’s work26 argues that the concentration of a regional economy in a single sector increases the likelihood of policy consensus among economic actors, which can yield coherent independent policies. Others27 convincingly argue that nationalist political movements among minority ethnic groups have been successful at gaining political autonomy from the federal government, suggesting that continued political mobilization of these identities may undergird independent migration policies. Similarly, the demographic realities of each region may generate migration policy outcomes, as societies react to varying rates of demographic decline.28 Additionally, exogenous shocks can create conditions of threat perception, as immigrants are viewed as economic

25 Treisman, “The Politics of Intergovernmental Transfers in Post-Soviet Russia”; Daniel Treisman, “Fiscal Redistribution in a Fragile Federation: Moscow and the Regions in 1994,” British Journal of Political Science 28, no. 1 (1998): 185–222. 26 Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance. 27 Dmitry P Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Elise Giuliano, “Who Determines the Self in the Politics of Self-Determination? Identity and Preference Formation in Tatarstan’s Nationalist Mobilization,” Comparative Politics 32, no. 3 (April 2000): 295–316. 28 Mikhail Alexseev, Immigration Phobia and the Security Dillema: Russia, Europe, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

or cultural threats, and these shifts in perception surrounding migration could lead to policy change.29 Yet, these arguments assume a liberal democratic political reality in which regional governments are able to negotiate with the federal government as political unit of equitable standing – a reality that no longer exists.

1.3 The Argument

I argue that with the centralization of power by the federal government and the establishment of United Russia as a national party of power, the function of regional political machines has shifted towards a principal-agent model, attenuating the explanatory power of previously influential factors in the regionalism literature, especially with regards to migration policy, in which threat perception plays a fundamental role. With the political chaos of the 1990s, the lack of well-institutionalized political parties at the national level and ineffective federal governance provided the incentive for regional leaders to develop their own patronage networks to guarantee electoral victory.30 It has been argued that these atomized regimes began to lose their independence as Putin was able to expand his political control through United Russia,

29 Gordon W Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Publication Company, 1954); Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1, no. 1 (1958): 3–7; Lincoln Quillian, “Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-Immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe,” American Sociological Review 60, no. 4 (1995): 586–611; Victoria Esses, Lynne M Jackson, and Tamara L Armstrong, “Intergroup Competition and Attitudes Toward Immigrants and Immigration: An Instrumental Model of Group Conflict,” Journal of Social Issues 54, no. 4 (1998): 699–724; Victoria Esses et al., “The Immigration Dilemma: The Role of Perceived Group Competition, Ethnic Prejudice, and National Identity,” Journal of Social Issues 57, no. 3 (2001): 389–412; Claudine Gay, “Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes Towards Latinos,” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 4 (2006): 982–97. 30 Timothy J Colton and Jerry F Hough, eds., Growing Pains: Russian Democracy and the Election of 1993 (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1998); Vladimir Gel’man, “Leviathan’s Return: The Policy of Recentralization in Contemporary Russia,” in Federalism and Local Politics in Russia, ed. Cameron Ross and Adrian Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1–24.

which dominated electoral politics in Russia, a process that contributed to the decline of regionalism as a force in Russian politics.31

I argue, however, that United Russia created the political incentive for regional executives to construct political machines, and only in regions that maintain an autonomous political machine, one insulated from federal influence and with a low risk of defection from actors included within its patronage networks, will we observe independent regional migration policies. Migration politics is a volatile issue both nationally and regionally, and given the risks inherent in wading into this policy arena, only regional leaders with stable autonomous political machines can weather the risks. I argue that the importance of autonomy overpowers the rival hypotheses from the regionalism literature: the relative concentration of a region’s economic resources, the role of ethnic identity, the demographic realities of a region’s population, and the effect of threat perception through exogenous shocks. While these rival explanations allow us to understand some of the dynamics in regional migration policies in Russia, I argue that by focusing on the autonomy and composition of a regional political machine as part of a two-level principal-agent model, we can better identify which regions will engage in migration policy and better understand the policy orientation of each region.

1.4 Case Selection and Methods

To make this theory-building argument, I conduct a qualitative comparative case study of four regions in Russia from 2002 to 2012, the ethnic republics of Tatarstan and

31 J. Paul Goode, Decline of Regionalism in Putin’s Russia (New York: Routledge, 2011).

Bashkortostan,32 and the oblasts of Samara and Orenburg.33 All four regions begin with integrationist policies in place by 2002, but by 2012 only Bashkortostan has ceased its engagement in migration politics. Geographically, the four regions are a contiguous unit, which assists this study in controlling for the complexity of migration processes in

Russia.

Table 1: Depiction of Cases

32 Ethnic republics are regions in Russia with a significant population of a non-Russian ethnic group, and in the wake of the regionalism phenomenon, these ethnically diverse regions were able to gain greater autonomy in political and economic affairs from the federal government. Functioning in an asymmetric federalist style, like Catalonia in Spain or Quebec in Canada, ethnic republics have separate regional constitutions and judiciaries, in addition to greater sovereignty in determining political matters, such as language education. This separates ethnic republics from the most common regional government structure, oblasts, which have majority ethnic Russian populations and are dependent on the federal constitution, judiciary, and bureaucracies. 33 Hereafter, I will not refer to regions as the Republic of Tatarstan or Samara oblast. Instead, I will refer to regional governments as Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Samara, and Orenburg. In the course of this dissertation, if I wish to refer to the capitals of Samara and Orenburg, which are eponymous, I will refer to municipal governments as Samara City or Orenburg City.

As will be discussed more in depth in Chapter 1, the various waves of migration in the post-Soviet space, though distinct from one another due to the different populations involved, occurred without interruption, one wave flowing while another ebbed. The term migrant(i) in everyday discourse in Russia, therefore, refers to a wide swath of experiences, from Russian citizens who have permanently moved to the area or to international labor migrants who are currently working in the area temporarily.34 These regions experienced similar exposure to international immigration, as migrants from this time period account for ten percent of the population in each region. This unusual consistency across cases is ideal for a case comparison among the regions. Furthermore, each region pursued a regionalist political agenda in the 1990s, most notably in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, which were instrumental in the creation of Russia’s asymmetric federalism.35 To achieve greater political autonomy from the federal government and to pursue regionalist political goals, each region went about creating a political machine to reduce uncertainty surrounding elections and consolidate their political power.

Once established, these respective political machines became the means for remaining in power for the regional executives, even as Vladimir Putin successfully centralized political power in Russia. The formation of the United Russia political party in 2001 was critical to Putin’s centralization of power and fundamentally altered the relationships between the federal government and the various political machines that had emerged in the 1990s. Rather than the bargaining model of politics in the 1990s, the center-periphery politics in Russia were replaced by a principal-agent model, in which

34 It should be noted that the term can refer to Russian citizens or foreigners alike and can include ethnic Russians. In contemporary usage, however, migrant it tends to reference ethnically non-Russian migrants. 35 A more extensive description and comparison across all four cases can be found in Chapter 3.

regional executives acted as agents for the Kremlin, seeking to deliver votes to United

Russia and remaining an active party in the patronage network. Those regional executives with powerful political machines were placed in a two-level principal agent model, as they sought to maintain control over their own regional agents while maintaining access to the patronage network of the federal principal. In this reconfiguration of center-periphery relations, the political machines that had pursued regionalist agendas in conflict with the federal government now worked to ensure electoral successes for United Russia and maintain exclusive control over their political machines.

With each region having constructed an autonomous political machine by the beginning of this dissertation’s investigation in 2002, we observe each region engaging in migration politics, though along different trajectories. Following the early lead of

Tatarstan in the 1990s, all four regions had constructed publicly-funded institutions, known as Houses of Friendship, to provide space for ethnic minorities in each region to celebrate their respective cultures, an important contribution given the large immigrant communities in each region. After these Houses were built and the formation of United

Russia as a political force, we observe divergence among the four cases from 2002 to

2012. Tatarstan pursued the most ambitious regional migration policy out of the four cases, establishing a series of publicly-funded institutions to assist migrants in maintaining legal status and improving access to regional government bureaucracies.

Samara sought to provide legal assistance and be inclusive of migrants’ concerns, but it has worked with civil society groups rather than establishing public institutions.

Orenburg passed laws claiming the authority to manage the regional offices of federal

bureaucracies in order to leverage increased spending from federal coffers to support its policy preferences. Bashkortostan began constructing housing for refugees, but ceased to further its programs after 2004, a cessation of engagement in migration politics not observed in the other cases.

To explain these migration policy outcomes across all four cases, I argue that we must first look at a region’s political machine and ascertain the extent of its autonomy, in an index score I label as a dependency score, which determines whether the region is likely to engage in migration politics. Once established, we must then turn to the interests represented in the machine to understand the policy divergence among regions.

In the case of Bashkortostan, the unraveling of its once-formidable political machine began in 2003, when the regional executive was forced to rely on federal support to survive a surprisingly competitive election. Without an autonomous basis for political supremacy and battling the slow dismantling of his machine, Bashkortostan’s regional executive did not wade into the migration debate due to its volatility. For the remaining three cases, the composition of the respective political machines gives us insight into their migration policy trajectories. Tatarstan’s migration policy initially emerged as an extension of its nationalities policy, which sought to promote ethnic diversity, but it was reoriented away from a nationalities policy towards an economic development model to support the paramount political goal of development through foreign investment. Samara

Oblast’s migration policy also emerges to serve its economic development policy, but we observe the regional government cooperating with regional non-governmental actors

(NGOs) to pursue its economic development agenda, an approach that reflects the interests embedded within the machine’s structure. Orenburg Oblast’s migration policy

claimed authority over the regional office of the Federal Migration Service in order leverage greater federal spending in the region through the principal-agent relationship.

Thus, this dissertation will make the theoretical contribution in understanding how regionalism can survive in a United Russia-dominated political space, as well as best explain the variation we observe across independent migration policies during a time of political centralization and hostile public opinion towards migration.

To make this argument, I make use of extensive newspaper archival materials, survey data, and elite-level interviews conducted in 2013-2014 for a comparative case study of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Orenburg, and Samara. By speaking with government officials and regional experts, I am able to understand the dynamics of regional migration policies in terms of perceived successes, limitations, motivations, and future considerations. My newspaper data is collected on the basis of an “eventful” perspective,36 in which I follow newspaper reporting on the issue of migration in the three months prior and three months following three major events: the Beslan hostage crisis in 2004, the economic recession in 2007, and the assassination attempt on the

Grand Mufti of Tatarstan in 2012. This newspaper data allows me to understand the effect these exogenous shocks have on the threat perception surrounding migration and evaluate whether these threat perceptions have the capacity to alter the composition of the regional political machine or regional migration policies overall. These original data are combined with numerous secondary sources documenting the structure of each region’s political machine in a comparative case study design.

36 Mark R Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

1.5 Chapter Structure

To make this argument, this dissertation will take the following structure:

Chapter 1 presents an overview of migration in the post-Soviet space and federal migration policy in Russia. In order to understand regional migration approaches, it is necessary to explain the multiple waves of migration to the Russian Federation briefly and to demonstrate how these waves shaped the rancorous migration debate. Then I will explain the progression of federal migration policy and its implementation via the FMS.

With this macro-level picture established, it will be possible to discuss the regional migration debate in each of the four cases.

Chapter 2 will explore the theoretical underpinnings of the regional variation we observe in Russia from 2002 to 2012 concerning migration policy, as well as present in more detail the case selection and methodology of this dissertation. Of principal concern in this chapter is exploring our understanding of regional political behavior in Russia, while also explaining migration policy’s importance as a policy arena in which we observe contestation against an increasingly centralized federal government under Putin’s reign. With a theoretical framework established, I will move towards a discussion of empirics and the selection of my four cases: the Republics of Tatarstan and

Bashkortostan and the Samara and Orenburg Oblasts.

Chapter 3 will be a discussion of the Republic of Tatarstan, a combative region along the Volga River that has played a foundational role in establishing the Russian government’s federal structure. As a top oil-producing region, a leader in attracting foreign-direct investment, a majority non-Russian region in ethnic population terms, and

a leader in the “parade of sovereignties” in the 1990s, Tatarstan has been defined by its ability to balance between an indispensable contributor to the federal budget and as an oppositional political force against Moscow. This defiance has informed its regional migration policy, which has sought to provide publically-financed support to migrants through a unique institution - the Assembly of Peoples. This policy approach represents a bold departure from federal migration policy, as it uses public funds to offer migrants aid to maintain legal status and offer a venue for representation in regional political affairs. Though this approach is not without its limitations, it reflects the autonomy of the political machine to enter the migration debate in service of other policy goals.

Chapter 4 investigates the neighboring Republic of Bashkortostan, which shares many characteristics with Tatarstan, except that it fails to develop a similarly ambitious regional migration policy. With the largest population of any ethnic republic, frequently topping lists of regional oil producers, and an independent political streak in the 1990s alongside Tatarstan, Bashkortostan seemed primed to complement Tatarstan’s approach, if not compete with its neighbor. Such policy initiatives halt suddenly with the breakdown of then-President Murtaza Rakhimov’s political machine in 2003. The cessation of policy engagement is unexpected, given the region’s similarities with

Tatarstan, but it demonstrates the overpowering effect the autonomy of a regional political machine has on the implementation of an independent migration policy.

Chapter 5 presents the cases of Samara and Orenburg Oblasts to demonstrate the effect of a political machine’s composition on independent migration policies. Unlike

Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, Samara and Orenburg have an overwhelmingly ethnically

Russian population and do not enjoy the heightened political autonomy that comes with

being an ethnic republic in Russia’s federal system, such as an independent constitution.

In spite of these dissimilarities, Samara has embarked on an integrative regional migration policy that relies on official cooperation with NGOs to provide services with migrants, such as legal aid and temporary housing. This approach mirrors Tatarstan’s approach, as it has similar economic development policy orientations, but Samara opted to work with civil society groups rather than publicly fund the assistance provision due to a less autonomous political machine. Orenburg’s approach reflects the region’s relationship with the federal center, as its smaller population and economy did not attract the federal government’s attention and investment. Leveraging its lengthy border with

Kazakhstan and its role as a transit corridor for labor migrants from Central Asia,

Orenburg pursues a migration policy that deputizes federal bureaucracies in an aggressive regionalist fashion at the height of the federal government claiming authority in migration policy. This approach, despite its aggression, was less comprehensive than Samara or

Tatarstan, which reflects of the interests represented in the region’s machine. In comparison to Bashkortostan, however, Orenburg had more autonomy to place migration towards the center of its agenda with Moscow, in order to gain more resources and influence vis-à-vis the migration debate.

I then conclude the dissertation by considering the long-term implications for migration policy in Russia as a result of center-periphery struggles. Migration will continue to be a mainstay in Russian political and social life. After decades of low fertility rates and comparatively high death rates, the Russian population has been undergoing a demographic crisis, depriving its economy of much needed labor. This demand for labor has generated the influx of migrants from the comparatively poor and

underemployed countries in Central Asia, notably Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and

Kyrgyzstan. Buoyed atop high commodities and energy prices at the turn of the 21st century, the resurgent Russian economy provided wages and opportunities sufficient to attract millions of international labor migrants. Even with the Great Recession’s effects in the Russian economy, migrants continued to travel to Russia for employment. This dependency has led Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to rely more on remittances to substantiate their economy than any other states in the world, according to the World Bank’s estimates. Given the expected long-term demand for migrant labor in the Russian market, international labor migration will continue to be a top political and social issue in the post-Soviet space, and we must refine our understanding of these processes to understand the effects of the processes into the 21st century.

21 CHAPTER 1:

FEDERAL MIGRATION POLICY AND THE SPACE FOR REGIONAL

POLICIES

You know, my friend in Moscow owns a company, and he found huge differences between groups. First he hired Tatars, because they’ll work for the same money, but they’re more dependable than Russians since they don’t drink much. But then he wanted to save some money, so he switched to Uzbeks, and they worked harder and were cheaper. Then he managed to hire some North Koreans, and they were the best. They worked the hardest, and he didn’t have to pay them.

Sitting with a friend in Kazan, Russia in 2014, I was told the anecdote above.

Given that this story lacked any details and had the “comedic trifecta,” where punch lines are delivered on the third iteration, I had sufficient reason to believe that I was being presented a joke as fact. But the anecdote lingered in my mind in the subsequent months during my fieldwork. Whether founded in reality somewhere or a complete fabrication, the anecdote neatly presents the complexity and diversity of migration streams in Russia, as humor is wont to do. Yet for the anecdote to function perfectly, the listener must be aloof with regards to migration, unaffected by an employer refusing to hire ethnic

Russians and ambivalent to the diversity of populations found in contemporary Russia.

As an American researcher studying international labor migration, I was supposed to be the perfect audience for this anecdote, someone that would find it insightful and funny.

As an avid storyteller, I couldn’t help but wonder what the limits of this joke were. Who

22 wouldn’t laugh? Who else fit into the ideal target audience? In short, what other social and political realities did this anecdote neatly parse?

Before I undertake a summary of the regionalism and migration politics literatures upon which this dissertation’s argument relies, it is important to review the history of migration in Russia and the national-level responses to these processes through federal migration policy reforms and public opinion surveys. In doing so, I aim to ground the reader in two important realities: the macro-level pressures regional executives confront within the migration politics debate and the complexity of the term migrant(y) in everyday conversation in Russia. The first reality is necessary to understand the national- level structures that regional governments seek to navigate and the potential costs of navigating this space. The second reality is necessary to understand that migration as a process has been a common theme in the Russian Federation, even as international labor migration has become the dominant migration process in the 21st century. As a result, the terms migrant(y) and migratsia often lack precision and instead conflate labor migration with other migration patterns that have occurred since independence. This will clarify and thus motivate the puzzle we observe in contemporary Russia, where some regions have engaged in migration policy-making despite the political risks of confrontation with the federal government and the public at large.

This chapter presents the reader with the terminology and recent history of migration in Russia, as well as an overview of federal policies, public opinion polls, and relevant actors’ interests to inform the reader of the political space in which regional governments have acted. I first present the relevant terminology regarding migration in

Russia since its independence, as well as the characteristics of the distinct migration

23 processes that have occurred. I then explicate the development of migration policy in the

Russian Federation in the face of these shifting migration flows, focusing on the development of policies affecting international labor migration. I conclude with an overview of the negative public opinion regarding immigration to illustrate the social context of immigration in Russia, which only increases the political risks for regions seeking to engage in migration policy.

2.1 The Migration Processes of the Post-Soviet Space

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was a tectonic shift, and among the ramifications of this geopolitical event was mass migration across Soviet Eurasia. The shifts in economic and political life created conditions that instigated internal and international migration, e.g., the disappearance of subsidies for those living in the Far

North1 and the eruption of violent conflicts in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Though this dissertation is interested in the contemporary labor migrant flows, which are considerable, the majority of the world’s second-largest immigrant population arrived to the Russian Federation within a decade of its independence. The magnitude and complexity of these processes strained the limited capabilities of the Russian Federation’s fledgling Federal Migration Service (FMS), which was suddenly responsible for the full spectrum of categories of migration.

2.1.1. Basic Descriptors of Migration

1 Seema Iyer, “The Permanence of the ‘Frostbelt’ in Post-Soviet: Migrant Attraction to Cities in the Irkutsk Oblast, 1997-2003,” in Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia, ed. Cynthia J. Buckley, Blair A. Ruble, and Erin Trouth Hofmann (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), 123–60.

24 Before presenting the contemporary history of migration in Russia, it is necessary at the onset to establish the basic lexicon to describe migration processes and how migration patterns have shifted in the post-Soviet space beyond simple measures of magnitude. Migration patterns are identified most simply along three criteria: geography, motivation, and duration. With these terms explained, it will be easier to identify important shifts in migration patterns in the post-Soviet space.

Geography consists of two binaries that capture important social and bureaucratic obstacles that migrants may encounter. The first binary, international or internal migration, takes crossing international boundaries as its basis for distinction to recognize the bureaucratic requirements to a foreign country, such as passports and visas. This is not to say that internal migration must be without similar bureaucratic obstacles, like the hukou system in China,2 but crossing into foreign territory distinguishes migrants from domestic populations in legal terms and in their respective relationship with the state.3

The second geographic characteristic identifies whether a migrants’ origin and destination are considered rural or urban sites, e.g., rural-to-urban or urban-to-urban.

Recognizing the differences in individual attributes between rural and urban populations, such as education or accumulated skills, helps us capture differences in labor markets and social networks from one context to another for migrants. Rural populations from

Thailand, for example, are distinguishable from urban populations in the length of

2 Tiejun Cheng and Mark Selden, “The Origin and Social Consequences of China’s HuKou System,” The China Quarterly 139 (1994): 644–68; Zhiqiang Liu, “Institution and Inequality: The Hukou System in China,” Journal of Comparative Economics 33, no. 1 (2005): 133–57. 3 Rainer Bauböck, “Towards a Political Theory of Migrant Transnationalism,” International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003): 700–723.

25 education and the extent of their social networks.4 Beyond these individual-level differences, and crucially for political science, this measure also captures exposure and access to the state, as rural destination sites are less likely to provide the full range of government services in comparison to urban sites.

A second key characteristic of migration, and perhaps the most important, is motivation, and this categorizes migrants according to the reason that they have participated in migration in the first place. A key binary in this typology is whether a migrant voluntarily decides to migrate or does so by force. Forced migration comes in many potential forms, from environmental, e.g., a result of flooding or drought, to being targeted by violence. Similarly, voluntary migration occurs for a variety of reasons, from seeking employment (labor migration) to attending university (education migration). The distinction is necessary to recognize that forced migrants, unlike voluntary migrants, had no pre-meditated plan to migrate. Furthermore, forced migrants typically do not have the option of “returning home,” and even when their displacement is temporary it is impossible to know how long they will be displaced. This is in addition to material hardships from unplanned migration, in which migrants were likely unable to properly consolidate financial assets or bring many goods with them on their journey. Thus, this binary between forced and voluntary migration does not seek to obscure the range of motivations for migration, but rather, at its most basic, to assist in distinguishing migration born of unexpected necessity from migration of hopeful opportunity.

4 Sara R. Curran et al., “Gendered Migrant Social Capital: Evidence from Thailand,” Social Forces 84, no. 1 (2005): 225–55; Sara R. Curran and Filiz Garip, “Increasing Migration, Diverging Communities: Changing Character of Migrant Streams in Rural Thailand,” Population Research and Policy Review 29, no. 5 (2010): 659–85.

26 The third category, duration, is a temporal measure of the length of stay for a migrant in his/her destination site, simply stated as permanent or temporary. Depending on the point of reference, duration can reflect a migrant’s initial plans prior to migration, current plans at the time of the interview or survey, or past migration history. As a means to understanding varying migration patterns, duration allows us to recognize differences in migrant populations, such as extent of social networks at destination sites and migrants’ relationship with the state. These distinctions between temporary and permanent migrants also affect migrants’ behavior in terms of participating in the labor market,5 saving,6 and remitting7. As such, we observe importance differences between populations of permanent migrants and populations of temporary migrants.

Altogether, these three criteria - geography, motivation, and duration - give us a simple vocabulary to identify the variation found within a state’s migrant population. In the case of Russia, we observe migration in every possible combination of the descriptors, e.g., a temporary, voluntary, rural-to-urban, international migrant. This complexity is not unique to the post-Soviet space, but as we will see, the spectrum of migratory patterns manifested quite suddenly, affecting every post-Soviet successor state.

Despite the spectrum of migratory processes occurring simultaneously, the momentous

5 Christian Dustmann, “Differences in the Labor Market Behavior between Temporary and Permanent Migrant Women,” Labour Economics 4, no. 1 (1997): 29–46. 6 Thomas K. Bauer and Mathias G. Sinning, “The Savings Behavior of Temporary and Permanent Migrants in Germany,” Journal of Population Economics 24, no. 2 (2011): 421–49. 7 Christian Dustmann and Josep Mestres, “Remittances and Temporary Migration,” Journal of Development Economics 92, no. 1 (2010): 62–70.

27 geopolitical, economic, and social events since the dissolution of the Soviet Union did generate identifiable waves of international migration into Russia.8

2.1.2. The First Wave: Ethnic Resettlement and “Brain Drain” in the Periphery

As the USSR splintered into fifteen independent nations, millions of Soviet citizens found themselves living beyond the borders of the country claiming to represent their “titular nationality,” i.e., Uzbeks living outside Uzbekistan. As Demtri Trenin stated, “about 25 million ethnic Russians suddenly woke up on the wrong side of the border”9. While this statement makes considerable assumptions about a connection between ethnic identity and nationalist sentiments towards newly formed states, the reorganization of the geopolitical landscape nevertheless spurred the movement of hundreds of thousands across newly formed international borders. Ethnic Russians were highly likely to migrate to the Russian Federation, as they constituted 85% of migrants from Belarus and 62% of those from Tajikistan in 1994.10 Between 1990 and 1994, more than a third of the ethnic Russian population living in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Armenia migrated to the Russian Federation.11 As data from the State Statistics

Committee, Goskomstat, demonstrate, ethnic Russians accounted for 54% of international immigrants in 1990, 66% in 1992, and 63% in 1994.12 The overwhelming

8 These waves, like many social phenomena, do not have neat beginnings and ends. Rather, we are able to observe a new wave as one pattern begins to subside, while the swell of a new pattern emerges. Thus, there is considerable overlap, even by several years, as a new pattern becomes salient, but this overview will present them as discrete phenomena for the sake of clarity. 9 Dmitri Trenin, Getting Russia Right (Washington, D.C: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 69. 10 Hilary Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia (New York: Routledge, 1998). 11 Cristiano Codagnone, “The New Migration in Russia in the 1990s,” in The New Migration in Europe: Social Construction and Social Realities (London: Palgrave Macmillian, 1998), 39–59. 12 Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia.

28 majority of these migrants were permanent migrants, seeking to begin new lives with their families in Russia.

The claim that ethnicity played a central role in the permanent redistribution of populations in the former Soviet Union has not been without controversy. Maintaining that economic development in the periphery drove migration patterns during the Soviet period,13 some have argued that economic shock from the collapse and individual employment strategies yielded the first migratory.14 These scholars correctly point to increasing education outcomes amongst non-Russian populations in southern Soviet republics as influential factors contributing to more south-to-north migration observed towards the end of the 1980s. For example, in Kyrgyzstan in 1989, ethnic Kyrgyz outnumbered ethnic Russians employed in literature and the arts, in medicine, and in law by a 2-to-1 margin on average.15 Given these ratios of highly skilled professions, we would expect equitable, if not higher, flight of ethnic Kyrgyz in response to shifting economic factors. While we do observe non-Russians migrating to the Russian

Federation from 1989 to 1992 at rates consistent with the decade prior,16 the proportion of ethnic Russians migrating to Russia was unexpectedly high.17

13 Robert A. Lewis and Richard H. Rowland, Population Redistribution in the USSR: Its Impact on Society, 1897-1977 (New York: Praeger, 1979). 14 Richard H Rowland, “Regional Migration in the Former Soviet Union During the 1980s: The Resurgence of European Regions,” in The New Geography of European Migrations, ed. Russell King (New York: Belhaven Press, 1993), 152–74; Beth Mitchneck and David Plane, “Migration Patterns During a Period of Political and Economic Shocks in the Former Soviet Union: A Case Study of Yaroslavl’ Oblast,” The Professional Geographer 47, no. 1 (1995): 17–30. 15 Andrei V. Korobkov, “Post-Soviet Migration: New Trends at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century,” in Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia, ed. Cynthia J. Buckley, Blair A. Ruble, and Erin Trouth Hofmann (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), 69–98. 16 Ibid. 17 Rowland, “Regional Migration in the Former Soviet Union During the 1980s: The Resurgence of European Regions.”

29 The ultimate result of this initial wave of international migration into Russia was a noticeable “brain drain” of skilled labor, particularly in industrial sectors. In 1989 in

Kyrgyzstan, ethnic Russians accounted for nearly 60% of industrial engineers and managers, despite ethnic Russians only being 21% of the population in Kyrgyzstan.18

The disproportionate migration of ethnic Russians to Russia affected all the previously mentioned highly skilled professions, but this migration pattern particularly affected expertise in industrial enterprises, endangering profit and revenue-generating enterprises across Kyrgyzstan shortly after independence.19 Ethnic Russian flight, despite enviable positions in industrial sectors, reinforce arguments that ethnic sentiments played a larger role in migration behavior than economic forces.20 Thus, ethnic identity motivated voluntary migration streams unexpectedly in the period immediately following the collapse of the USSR.

2.1.3. The Second Wave: Forced Migration

Though the outbreak of widespread interstate war was avoided during the dissolution of the USSR, as armed conflicts began across the post-Soviet space from

1992 to 1998, forced migration constituted the Second Wave of international migration into Russia. Armed conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, civil war in Tajikistan, and separatist movements in Georgia and Moldova displaced millions, regardless of

18 Korobkov, “Post-Soviet Migration: New Trends at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.” 19 Uranbek Ergeshbayev, “Trends and Development of Migration Processes in Kyrgyzstan,” in Migration Perspectives - Eastern Europe and Central Asia: Planning and Managing Labour Migration, ed. Roger Rodriguez Rios (Vienna: International Organization for Migration, 2006), 45–53. 20 Zhanna Zaionchkovskaya, Nikita Mrktchian, and Elena Tyuryukanova, “Russia’s Immigration Challenges,” in Russia and East Asia: Informal and Gradual Integration, ed. Tsuneo Akaha and Anna Vassilieva, Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series 51 (Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 200–243.

30 ethnicity, though this accelerated the exodus of ethnic Russians from the periphery as we had observed in the First Wave. Unlike the previous wave of voluntary migrants, however, these forced migrants were fleeing their homes in fear of death or persecution or an inability to maintain a livelihood with the chaos surrounding them. Refugees were geographically concentrated in southern Russia, the Volga region, or Moscow not only due to their proximity to the conflict zones, but also because of transportation networks, particularly railways.21 By 1998, the Russian Federation was host to the largest refugee population among the post-Soviet successor states, as it recorded 1,191,900 refugees.

Yet the Second Wave of forced migration was not a wave of permanent migration, whereas the first largely had been, and with the cessation of violence in many conflicts, forced migration to Russia declined. By 2001, the refugee population in Russia had dropped by nearly 3.3 times.22

Though the Second Wave had largely ebbed by 2002, when this dissertation begins its investigation, this wave had an important effect of establishing diasporas in various regions in Russia, particularly in Moscow. In combination with the First Wave, the migration patterns in the 1990s helped support networks of international migrants, even leading to the formation of enclaves in some major cities. These diaspora communities would become crucial nodes for the labor migrants in the Third Wave, discussed below, as they sought to find employment through these networks.

2.1.4. The Third Wave: Influx of Labor

21 Saodat Olimova and Igor Bosc, Labour Migration from Tajikistan (Dushanbe: Mission of the International Organization for Migration, 2003). 22 Korobkov, “Post-Soviet Migration: New Trends at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century.”

31 The zenith of forced migrants to Russia was in 1997-1998, and following the economic chaos of the ruble collapse in 1998, Russia began to enjoy high economic growth atop high energy and commodities prices. This economic growth, and comparatively stable geopolitical situation in the Eurasia region, assisted in generating a

Third Wave of temporary labor migration to Russia. At the turn of the millennium, approximately half a million Moldavan migrants sought employment in Russia, alongside one million migrants from Ukraine, which combined constituted the largest contributors to the international migrant labor pool in Russia.23 The gradual opening up of access to

EU labor markets, however, did cause Moldovan and Ukrainian migration patterns to reduce slightly,24 while labor migration from Central Asia and the Caucasus increased dramatically due to high unemployment rates in post-conflict environments. By the early

2000s, the International Labor Organization estimated that approximately 3 million illegal guest migrants were in Russia, two million of whom were from Central Asia, supported continued migration from the struggling economies, particularly from

Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.25 Initial estimates of remittances by the International

Monetary Fund were sizeable at the turn of the century, accounting for “4 to 7 percent of gross domestic product in Georgia, Armenia, and Tajikistan”26. This would peak to over

40% of GDP in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan within a decade,27 when nearly one in three

23 Zaionchkovskaya, Mrktchian, and Tyuryukanova, “Russia’s Immigration Challenges.” 24 Ibid.; Timothy Heleniak, “An Overview of Migration in the Post-Soviet Space,” in Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia, ed. Cynthia J. Buckley, Blair A. Ruble, and Erin Trouth Hofmann (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008). 25 Elena Tyuryukanova, “Regularization and Employer Sanctions as Means towards the Effective Governance of Labour Migration: Russian Federation and International Experience” (Moscow: International Labor Organization, 2009). 26 Heleniak, “An Overview of Migration in the Post-Soviet Space,” 57. 27 Michael J. White and Colin Johnson, “Perspectives on Migration Theory - Sociology and Political Science,” in International Handbook of Migration and Population Distribution, International Handbooks of Population 6 (New York: Springer, 2016), 69–89.

32 working age males in Tajikistan were working abroad.28 The dependence of Central

Asian migrants on the Russian labor market to support themselves and their livelihood is a highly structured and clearly defined relationship, a quality lacking in the First and

Second Waves. This dependence became clear in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis, as Hemmings29 estimates that approximately 150,000 Tajiks left Moscow in 2008 alone, the principal site of employment due to wages nearly eight times higher than in

Tajikistan at the height of the crisis. Those that departed were typically new arrivals and younger, thus lacking the social networks and skills as their more experienced counterparts. Whether the post-2008 economic environment has constituted a distinct

“wave” of immigration with distinct population characteristics remains unclear. Given the increasing dependence on the Russian labor market, rather than shifts away to new markets, I find little evidence to suggest a fourth “wave” had emerged by 2012. Instead,

I argue that the dynamics we observe in the Third Wave reveal a responsiveness to economic conditions, rather than an indication that the underlying motivation for migration, i.e., employment, has shifted.

In comparison to the First and Second Waves, the Third Wave does not seem to have a precipitating event, unlike the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the violent conflicts that help cause each wave, respectively. The Third Wave is driven by three macro-level processes: the growth of Russia’s economy in the 21st century, the comparable lack of domestic economic growth in some post-Soviet states, and the

28 Hilary Hemmings, Remittances, Recession... Returning Home?: The Effects of the 2008 Economic Crisis on Tajik Migrant Labor in Moscow, Eurasian Migration Papers, no. 4 (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Kennan Institute, 2010). 29 Ibid.

33 demographic crisis facing Russian society. As mentioned before, atop high energy and commodities prices at the turn of the century, Russia enjoyed an economic resurgence that assisted Russia in gaining membership to the Group of Eight (G8) of advanced economies. While these same macroeconomic trends helped Kazakhstan and

Turkmenistan enjoy windfalls of energy prices, comparatively less resource rich

Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan saw their economies stagnate. The visa-free regime within

CIS member states assisted hundreds of thousands of migrants from Central Asia find employment in Russia’s more dynamic economy. Yet these labor migrants were able to find employment due to a demographic calamity faced by Russia. After years of high mortality rates, especially among adult males, and low fertility rates that failed to compensate for such mortality, the Russian population has experienced a staggering natural decline of nearly 900,000 persons per year from 1990 to 2000.30 While the severity of this population loss has been reduced considerably since that time, these trends have left Russia with a labor shortage that will only grow with its increasingly ageing population. The demand for labor created the market for un(der)employed citizens in CIS member states to find work in Russia by the millions, and this is a macro- level trend that will not lessen over time.

2.1.5. Internal Migration: IDPs and the Push Towards European Russia

While the patterns of migration discussed thus far have focused on international migration, substantial internal migration streams within the Russian Federation emerged in response to domestic conflict and economic uncertainty. The first separatist conflict in

30 Timothy Heleniak, “Russia’s Demographic Decline Continues” (Population Reference Bureau, June 2002), http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/RussiasDemographicDeclineContinues.aspx.

34 Chechnya, a bloody conflict that last from 1994 to 1996, caused hundreds of thousands to flee the region, becoming forced migrants. Similar to the refugees from the First Wave, these forced migrants are labeled internally displaced persons (IDPs). This categorization recognizes the fact that these are Russian citizens who have been forced from their homes as a result of conflict or fear of persecution. There are not precise figures on the magnitude of IDPs generated as a result of the first Chechen War,31 but it is believed as many as half a million Russian citizens were displaced as a result of the conflict.32 The forced migration as a result of the Chechen crisis occurred within the Second Wave, contributing to an overall pattern of forced migration in this time period, but also adding an additional layer of complexity to period of forced migration.

Yet conflict was not the only cause for internal migration in the Russian

Federation, as the loss of Soviet-era support for industrial enterprises in remote locations also caused hundreds of thousands to migrate generally in two cardinal directions: west and south. The economic chaos of the 1990s and the disappearance of subsidies for communities across the Russian Federation led the Russian Far East’s population to decrease by approximately ten percent by 1999, falling to approximately 7 million citizens across a vast territory that covers one-third of Russia.33 Similar westward migration occurred across the Siberian territories, but migration patterns also increased

31 Precise numbers are difficult to obtain due to the Russian government’s policy, which requires that an IDP must leave their region of residence in order to receive status as an IDP. Thus, a resident of Chechnya who is displaced but does not leave the territory of the region is not considered an IDP for government statistics. 32 Vladimir Mukomel’, Forced Migrants in the Commonwealth of Independent States: Stability, Cooperation, and Conflicts in the Former Soviet Union: Implications for Migration (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1996). 33 Mikhail A. Alexseev and Richard C. Hofstetter, “Russia, China, and the Immigration Security Dilemma,” Political Science Quarterly 121, no. 1 (2006): 1–32.

35 urbanization, as villages and small towns failed to provide adequate employment and services.34 Migration south towards European Russia occurred in the Far North, as the

Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regional economies suffered without the vitality of the

Soviet military industrial complex. This permanent internal migration took place primarily during the First and Second Waves and declined as the economy stabilized in the 21st century.

Internal migration across all Three Waves has followed a logic of increasing urbanization, in which Moscow and the constellation of “regional capitals” have been the largest beneficiaries. Undoubtedly the greatest magnet for migration has been Moscow

City, the political and economic heart of Russia since the end of Tsarist rule. From 1999 to 2002, the city expanded from approximately 8.5 million to 10.5 million inhabitants, and, coupled with the surrounding Moscow Oblast, Moscow “accounts for fully half the population growth due to migration in Russia during the post-Soviet period”.35 St

Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, and a number of regional capitals, such as

Yekaterinburg in the Urals or Novosibirsk in Siberia, have also been large beneficiaries of migration during this time period. These regional centers grew as a result of a migration chain in which citizens from rural areas and collective farms moved to medium-sized cities, while urban populations moved to even larger urban centers for greater employment opportunities and wage earnings. This process will continue in

34 Iyer, “The Permanence of the ‘Frostbelt’ in Post-Soviet: Migrant Attraction to Cities in the Irkutsk Oblast, 1997-2003.” 35 Matthew Light, “Policing Migration in Soviet and Post-Soviet Moscow,” Post-Soviet Affairs 26, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 282, doi:10.2747/1060-586X.26.4.275.

36 Russia, albeit it at a much lower rate than during the First Wave,36 and along with the

Moscow area, St Petersburg, Belgorod Oblast, Krasnodar Krai, and the Republic of

Tatarstan are expected to remain magnets for further internal migration.37

2.2 Russia’s Federal Migration Policy in the 21st Century

The presentation of migration in the post-Soviet space thus far has focused on population trends and migration as processes occurring regardless of policy. Throughout this entire period, however, the Russian state has sought to monitor and manage migration flows, and these efforts have not been without consequence. Not only have these policies shaped the lived experiences of migrants and native citizens alike, but they have created the spaces for regions to become active in migration policy.

Just prior to this discussion of migration policy, I must briefly underscore my conceptualization of migration policies following Hammar’s38 parsimonious bifurcation between policies designed for immigration control and for immigrant integration.

Immigrant control refers to establishing rules of entry and boundaries of legal activity for migrants, whereas the immigrant integration concerns policies designed to facilitate the peaceful coexistence of immigrants and their host societies. Hammar’s categorization of migration policies is necessary not just to understand the policies themselves, it also reflects on the policy-making processes within the respective category. When deciding

36 Stephen Crowley, “Monotowns and the Political Economy of Industrial Restructuring in Russia,” Post- Soviet Affairs 32, no. 5 (September 2, 2016): 397–422, doi:10.1080/1060586X.2015.1054103. 37 Stephan Sievert, Sergey Zakharov, and Reiner Klingholz, The Waning World Power: The Demographic Future of Russia and the Other Soviet Successor States (Berlin: Berlin Institute for Population and Development, 2011). 38 Tomas Hammar, European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Tomas Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens, and Citizens in a World of International Migration (Adershot: Avebury, 1990).

37 the goals, protocols, and implementation of migration policies, we can expect a completely distinct set of bureaucracies and interests to be represented in discussions of migration control than from discussions of migrant integration. In the Russian case, migration control will involve discussions of border security, customs, verification by authorities on Russian soil, thus likely engaging the Ministry of the Internal Affairs more than any other bureaucracy, but also questions of quantitative limits to arrivals, which would bring the Ministry of Economic Development more towards the front with regards to labor migration. Migrant integration, however, involves questions of the health, education, and quality of life for migrants and their surrounding communities, which would engage a range of bureaucracies, from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs to the Ministry of Culture.39 As we discuss migration policy throughout this project, we must be mindful of this distinction and the importance it has for the design and implementation of migration policies by federal and regional authorities alike.

That being said, the implementation and design of Russia’s federal migration policy in the 21st century has been tumultuous, leading to a familiar judgment in the scholarly community that Russia has not had a migration policy.40 Unlike the commonly recognized migrant-receiving states in Western Europe and North America, Russia had no precedent for international migration policy after its independence from the Soviet

Union. Throughout the history of the Russian state, forced migration had been used as a

39 Though not stated explicitly here, one of the most important issues for integration policies is deciding rules for establishing citizenship. Research on citizenship is often discussed separately in the field, since legal changes in citizenship requirements represent the ultimate form of migrant integration. For more on citizenship exclusively, see Kymlicka and Norman 1994; Kymlicka 2003; and Varsanyi 2005. 40 For a brief and convincing overview of this position, see Sergei Riazantsev, “Russia Needs a New Migration Policy,” Russian Politics and Law 51, no. 3 (May 1, 2013): 80–88.

38 means to banishing individual political dissidents41 from the territory42 to relocating entire peoples to underpopulated regions in Siberia and the Far East43. Save for specific moments in which migrants were permitted or invited, such as Catherine the Great’s program to bring Germans to the Volga Region in 1760,44 the Russian state had very little experience in monitoring or regulating the movement of populations across its international borders. Instead, its expertise was in keeping native populations within those very borders, and unfortunately each new regime in Russia has relied on the bureaucrats and experts from the previous regime to maintain control over the vastness of

Russia’s territory.45 Yet the Soviet apparatus did not have expertise in managing the complexities of migration in the modern age, and given the immediacy and breadth of demands on the newly created government during the First Wave, such a task was overwhelming. As a result, federal migration policy in Russia has been largely implemented ad hoc, but foundational agreements and laws are identifiable in spite of the shifting policy landscape.

Of unparalleled importance in understanding how Russia could experience such dramatically different waves of migration since independence is the Bishkek Agreement of 1992, in which member states in the Commonwealth of Independent States could enjoy visa-free travel. Though not ratified by every member, bilateral agreements

41 As a point, perhaps the greatest example of policy is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who was exiled from Russia for political activities against the monarchy. 42 Yossi Shain, “The War of Governments Against Their Opposition in Exile,” Government and Opposition 24, no. 3 (1989): 341–56. 43 E.N. Chernolutskaya, The Forced Migrations in the Soviet Far East in the 1920s - 1950s (Vladivostok: Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far East, 2011). 44 Rogers Brubaker, “Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 18, no. 2 (1955): 189–218. 45 See Rowney and Huskey (2009) for an excellent overview of bureaucratic continuity across Russia’s regimes.

39 between the Russian Federation and each CIS member state maintained the spirit of the agreement without interruption. The constant provision of these agreements is that citizens of CIS members may travel and stay visa-free for up to 90 days within the territory of fellow member states. While a generous provision that has facilitated a high degree of freedom of movement over much of the former Soviet Union, this policy adds a layer of complexity to the legality of migration into Russia.

Rather than a simple binary of whether a migrant has the proper documents or not, the legality of migration in the Russian Federation is best conceptualized in terms of whether a migrant’s legal status throughout their stay has been regular or irregular.

Though forced migrants may not have proper documentation as they fled their homes, the vast majority of migrants into Russia have the necessary documentation to enter Russian territory and begin their 90-day stay as citizens of CIS members. If migrants gain employment without proper documentation,46 however, they enter an irregular legal status, where their presence on Russian soil is legal, but their labor is not. Conversely, a migrant may be legally employed but overstay the limits of their visa or the 90-day visa- free period, thus having an irregular legal status. The low barrier to entry as a result of the Bishkek Agreement assisted millions of CIS citizens in their migration across international borders to seek employment and safety from harm, yet it has also added complexity for migrants attempting to maintain a regular legal status.

The duties of enforcing the migration policy of the Russian Federation and monitoring the movement and legal status of persons across its borders belonged to the

46 The rules for legal employment in Russia have changed considerably from 2002 to 2012, as will be explained in the following sections.

40 newly created Federal Migration Service in 1992. As a result of the first wave, the FMS opened offices in each region in Russia, and it largely served to provide aid to immigrants, whether internal or international. As forced migration became the predominant pattern of international migration, the FMS became ever more focused on providing humanitarian aid and registering refugees. While a massive undertaking in its own right, the economic and political chaos of the 1990s also prevented the newly formed Federal Migration Service (FMS) from enjoying a reliable budget. In 1997, the

FMS received only 40 percent of its allotted budget from the federal government,47 which as just discussed was the height of the forced migration crisis! The primary responsibility of Russia’s migration policy in the first years of independence was to facilitate the movement of millions of ethnic Russians, and provide support for the hundreds of thousands of refugees from conflicts in the Caucuses and Central Asia. Critically underfunded in the first decade of its existence, Russia’s federal migration policy existed on paper, affecting the legal status of migrants, but often failed to provide services.

Consequently, nearly twenty regions developed their own regional migration policies to address the influx of peoples from across the former USSR,48 thus instigating the competition over migration policies between the federal and regional governments.

2.2.1. Migration Policy Concept of 2003 – Reinstating the FMS

47 Natalya Kosmarskaya, “Post-Soviet Russian Migration from the New Independent States: Experiences of Women Migrants,” in Engendering Forced Migration: Theory and Practice, ed. Doreen Indra (New York: Berghan Books, 1999), 177–99. 48 Vladimir Mukomel’, “Ethnic and Migration Policy in the 2000s Viewed in the Context of Relations Between the Federal Center and the Regions,” Russian Politics and Law 51, no. 3 (May 1, 2013): 66–79, doi:10.2753/RUP1061-1940510304.

41 The beginning of Putin’s administration coincided with rising government revenue and economic prosperity, ushering in an era of centralization across the policy spectrum, and migration was no exception. In 1999, the FMS was dismantled, and its responsibilities delegated to the Ministry for Federation Affairs, Nationalities, and the

Interior. In 2001, this Ministry was dissolved, and its functions were integrated with the

Ministry of Internal Affairs. The following year, in 2002, the Federal Migration Service was reconstituted but as a branch within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Guided by a

Migration Policy Concept in 2003, this organization focuses overwhelmingly on internally displaced peoples (IDPs) and refugees with little emphasis on labor migration.

The opening paragraph of the document states that migration in Russia has had positive and negative effects, but the positive effects are not addressed with structured policy goals beyond the establishment of a system to monitor and control labor migration.

Rather, the majority of the document seeks to gather data and expand organizational capacity to address the list of negative effects that Russia had experienced in the first decade of independence:

“. . . nationalism, terrorism, the vulnerability of sections of the state border of the Russian Federation, the deterioration of the quality of life of people and the environment, economic instability and social conflict.”49

49 Российская Федерация, “Концепция регулирования миграционных процессов в Российской Федерации,” March 1, 2003, http://www.carim- east.eu/media/sociopol_module/Migration%20Policy%202003.pdf.

42 The reorganization of the FMS into the Ministry of Internal Affairs represented an effort to bring migration directly under the control of the executive branch,50 while also symbolizing a shift in framing the migration issue. The relative lack of positive associations with migration in the 2003 Concept was already in contrast to the original duties of the FMS, which was principally humanitarian. Rather than the organizational mission of the FMS to provide services and assist migrants, the orientation of migration policy shifted towards control and enforcement.51 This shift coincided with the rise of the third wave, international labor migration, and thus pushed the FMS further along the path of migration law enforcement within the bureaucracy of Russia’s police forces.

In a survey of migration experts conducted in 2004 by the Center for Strategic

Studies,52 the new mission of the FMS was seen primarily as a vehicle for development, suggesting that the 2003 Concept had greatly underemphasized the positive role that the government, and migration itself, could contribute. When asked to formulate the main policy objectives of the migration policy of Russia, nearly seventy percent of those who answered this prompt used their sentence to discuss development, whether in socio- economic or cultural terms, while the remaining thirty percent focused on issues of geopolitics and security. None of the 67 experts surveyed viewed the purpose of the

FMS as restricting or preventing migration outright, even among experts that expressed

50 Caress Schenk, “Controlling Immigration Manually: Lessons from Moscow (Russia),” Europe-Asia Studies 65, no. 7 (September 2013): 1444–65, doi:10.1080/09668136.2013.824242. 51 As I will demonstrate in the following chapters, some of the most active citizens advocating for refugees and migrants in Russia worked in the first iteration of the FMS, and their experience crystalized a personal commitment to migrants as a vulnerable group in need of aid. 52 Сергей Градировский and Михаил Тюркин, Экспертный Опрос: Ключевые Проблемы В Области Миграционной Политики Российской Федерации (Москва: Центр стратегических исследований Приволжского федерального округа, 2005), http://www.archipelag.ru/agenda/povestka/povestka- immigration/.

43 strict nationalist views. When asked what aspects of migration policy needed to be rectified, nearly half the respondents pointed to the lack of an overall strategy to guide

Russia’s migration policy and assist experts in discerning whether policy goals are being achieved. This was undoubtedly a critique of the 2003 Concept. Following this lack of strategy as the single-greatest concern, experts saw the ambiguity of legal status, the inconsistency of legislation on migration, and the lack of transparency in decision- making processes as critical barriers. This second-order of issues in migration reflects the position of many migrants after the First and Second Waves, many of whom were left in a legal quagmire as a result of forced migration or during the geopolitical uncertainty due to the dissolution. Third-order policy priorities reflected the work and affiliation of the participant, as those working in the bureaucracy highlighted the lack of border controls, while those working in NGOs focused on the lack of funding for integration initiatives. Overall, this survey reflects the institutional and legal inconsistency of

Russia’s migration policy several years into the Third Wave, leaving a considerable space for regions to pursue their own interests.

2.2.2. Migration Policy Concept of 2012 – Increasing Control and Expertise

The Migration Policy Concept of 2012 displays a far more nuanced notion of migration, befitting after ten years of experience in migration enforcement. Rather than conceptualizing migration into the three simple categories of IDP, refugee, or labor migrant, the 2012 Concept identifies eleven distinct migration processes ranging from educational migration to seasonal labor migration, thus recognizing the importance of migration’s basic descriptors previously discussed. As such, the document is far more ambitious in its detail and outlines clearly stated policy goals for each of the eleven

44 migration processes, building on the 2003 Concept’s primary concern with building bureaucratic capacity and policy expertise.

Troublingly, the 2012 Concept states that its origins are in consultation with numerous other national-level concepts, such as the Demographic Policy until 2025 and the National Security Strategy until 2020. Consultation and coordination among the governmental bodies producing such strategies is quite common, yet the Demographic

Policy and the National Security Strategy themselves contain no references to either iteration of Migration Concepts. This underscores the precarious position of federal migration policy as in the service of a myriad of other national policy priorities, again reflecting its relegated position within the structure of the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

The 2012 Concept reiterates a vision of migration policy as the means to monitor and control migration processes, albeit with greater nuance and precision than its predecessor.

Yet the importance of migrant integration is still underspecified, as is a grand vision of migration policy, separate from demographic and security priorities. These reflect that the key concerns for experts surveyed in 2004 had not been addressed eight years later, and that the policy goals of the Ministry of Internal Affairs had taken precedence in its emphasis on migration control over migrant integration.

2.2.3. Fundamental Migration Policy Reforms: Quotas and Patenti

In 2007, well into the Third Wave, the federal government created a quota system, in which the FMS, the Ministry of Health and Social Development, and the Federal Labor

Service determine the maximum number of work permits allotted for each region in

45 Russia, as well as setting limits by industry and type of employment.53 This reform extended the decision-making power to additional government bureaucracies, increasing the perspectives brought to bear on labor migration in contemporary Russian labor migration. Critically for migrants, the 2007 reforms also allowed labor migrants to apply for such jobs while on Russian soil. Prior to this reform, migrants from CIS states were allowed to travel under the visa-free regime for up to 90 days, seek out employment opportunities, receive a guarantee of employment, return home, apply for a work visa from their home country, and finally return to Russia with a legal work permit to fulfill the employment guarantee. This entire process could potentially take as long as six months, leaving the labor market bereft of readily accessible and sanctioned migrant labor, while also increasing the time and monetary costs for obtaining legal employment for migrants. Allowing migrants to apply for work permits while on Russian soil during their visa-free 90 days was a substantial improvement for the regularization of migrant labor.

Yet the quota system fundamentally altered the center-periphery relationship in

Russia’s regions, as regions must apply annually for their share of quotas and negotiate with Moscow. As Caress Schenk rightfully observes, the quota system has never been a purely bureaucratic process.54 The first quota ceiling in 2007 was set at six million, which met estimates of the labor demand within Russia.55 With the 2008 crisis, the quota ceiling was suddenly reduced in 2008 to 1.8 million, and subsequently was increased

53 For example, a region could receive 20,000 work permits for a single year within the construction industry, but migrants working as electrical engineers are allotted only 200 of those work permits. 54 Schenk, “Controlling Immigration Manually.” 55 Tyuryukanova, “Regularization and Employer Sanctions as Means towards the Effective Governance of Labour Migration: Russian Federation and International Experience”; Zaionchkovskaya, Mrktchian, and Tyuryukanova, “Russia’s Immigration Challenges.”

46 mid-year to 3.4 million. The 2009 ceiling was originally set for 4 million, but Putin

“cited a need to protect the labour market for Russian citizens in a time of economic crisis”,56 and reduced the ceiling by half to 2 million. Since 2009, the quota ceiling has not risen above two million, insufficient to meet the demand for labor. Such a discrepancy demonstrates the power Moscow had obtained through the 2007 quota reform. The executive branch could directly control the entire regulatory apparatus of the

FMS, even as the system failed to meet the needs of Russian labor markets and the requests for more work permits from the regions.

The uncertainty regarding the availability of work permits from year to year generated considerable inefficiency in the labor market and frustration in the quota system amongst business owners. OPORA is a Russian business group that represents small- and medium-sized businesses in Russia, and in 2010, they conducted a nationally- representative survey of 1,500 firms across Russia to ascertain the use of migrant labor.

This survey reveals that officially only 14% of surveyed firms stated that they had used foreign workers, but when evaluating their respective industries, these same employers estimated that 50% of the firms in their sector used migrant labor.57 The difference in the reported use of labor and estimates of its industry-wide use suggest an underreporting of migrant labor. Regardless of the underreporting of migrant labor, nearly 80% of firms stated that they used migrant labor due to shortage or a lack of flexibility in local labor markets. While flexibility is likely a reflection of seasonal work or the desire to reduce

56 Schenk, “Controlling Immigration Manually,” 1452. 57 Elena Tyuryukanova and Yuliya Florinskaya, “Inostranaya Rabochaya Sila Na Rinke Truda Rossii,” Demoscope Weekly, no. 535 (December 10, 2012), http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2012/0535/analit06.php.

47 wages during the wake of the 2008 recession,58 the survey shows that amongst those firms using migrant labor, small-sized businesses are disproportionately reliant, employing an average of 13 migrant workers, in comparison to the average of 40 migrant workers for a large firm. The survey also points to the potential promise of federal policy reforms, as nearly two-thirds of firms began hiring foreign labor after the 2007 quota reform. Yet dissatisfaction with the now-consistently low number of quotas is among the highest complaints for the firms surveyed.59

The tremendous inconsistencies in the distribution of quotas negates the inclusion of other ministries into the migration policy decision-making process, since the federal executive has demonstrated the capacity to override the entire system, and highlight a key failure according to experts in the 2004 survey: transparency of the decision-making process. Without a clear understanding of the regulations behind labor migration, employers are unable to address labor input needs and migrants are less likely to gain legal employment, as quotas are far below demand. Since the 2007 reforms, regions operate in a more centralized system with regards to migration control and quotas, which reduces official regional influence over control of migration but provides greater clarity in terms of process and strategy to meet their goals. Yet the unchecked power of the federal executive represents the supremacy of centralized control, one that leaves regions with very little institutional influence. Even with greater federal control and funding, regional governments had little guarantee that the needs and interests of their respective region would be addressed through the 2007 reforms. This policy shift increased the

58 Ibid. 59 Ibid.

48 political consequences for regions getting involved in migration policy, as such actions could appear to contest the centralization of migration policy. Yet the shift also indicated to regions that independent migration policies may be necessary in order to achieve their respective preferences.

The second critical federal migration policy reform is the 2010 patenti reform, which underscores the tumultuous nature of federal migration policy and represents a departure towards liberalization in the labor market for international migrants. Floated as a policy option in 2008,60 the patenti system allows international labor migrants to work for individuals legally, by purchasing a patent at their regional FMS branch. Valid for up to one year, patenti were designed to allow the state to gain revenue from economic activity that had previously been beyond the reach of the state, while providing migrants with legal status and adding flexibility to the Russian labor market. The patenti reform does not replace the quota reform; it seeks to complement its predecessor. Though this reform it has positive implications, the patenti system expands the power of the Ministry of Internal Affairs via the FMS, effectively undercutting the influence of the Ministry of

Health and Social Development, which had gained influence in decision-making through the 2007 reform. Though the 2010 reform assisted in liberalizing the Russian labor market on the whole, it also reaffirmed the federal executive and the Ministry of Internal

Affairs as the most powerful political actors in federal migration policy.

Altogether, the reconstitution of the FMS in 2002, the quota reform in 2007, and the patenti reform in 2010 mark discrete phases in federal migration policy formation.

60 Marthe Handå Myhre, “Labour Migration from Central Asia to Russia – State Management of Migration,” Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research Report, no. 5 (2014), http://www.nibr.no/filer/2014-5.pdf.

49 These phases occur within the Third Wave of migration into Russia, and while the policy shifts affect the legal status of migrants and the nature of their interactions with the FMS and other state apparatuses, the phases do not disrupt the flow of labor migration into

Russia. The visa-free regime is constant throughout this time period, and as such, the largest initial barrier for labor migrants in the former Soviet Union – crossing Russia’s border – remains unaffected. As Table 2 illustrates, I have labeled these three phases of migration policy as reorganization, centralization, and liberalization phases.61

Table 2: Phases of Federal Migration Policy

2002-2006 2007-2009 2010-2012 Reorganization Centralization Liberalization FMS reconstituted Quotas Introduced Patenti Implemented

The phases do not reverse or dismantle the prior policy designs, but instead, each serves to expand the ability of the FMS to monitor and control migration. The reorganization phase established the new position of the FMS within the federal bureaucracy, firmly placing migration policy within the bounds of law enforcement, rather than labor relations or social assistance; thus signaling the priority of migration control over migrant integration in Hammar’s bifurcation. Importantly for regional governments, the Ministry of Internal Affairs is a powerful ministry within Putin’s resurgent federal government, eroding regional leverage on federal bureaucracies that had

61 My labels disagree with Sergei Gradirovski’s analysis, though we independently arrived at the conclusion of three distinct phases. Gradiorvoski labels the 2007 reform as the beginning of liberalization, while the 2010 reform is described purely as a “differentiation period.” Though I have the benefit of more hindsight in my analysis, Gradirovski does not recognize the unrestrained power of the federal executive in the decision-making processes behind the 2007 quota reform in his categorization, which is a crucial development. While I have noted the issues within the 2010 reform and its distribution of power in migration policy, it is undoubtedly a shift towards liberalization, as migrants and employers are freed of the regulatory hurdles of the quota system. See Sergei Gradirovskiy, “Репатриация И Трудовая Миграция В России,” ПОЛИТ.РУ, February 8, 2011, http://polit.ru/article/2011/02/08/gradreport/.

50 emerged during Yeltsin’s administrations in the 1990s. While other federal bureaucracies are involved in the quota decision-making, and potentially those bureaucracies more attentive to the economic and social needs of regions, the FMS gained considerable leverage over economic and political interests at the regional level, since it alone was responsible for announcing and overseeing implementation of the quota reforms. Federal control has not lessened under the liberalization phase, rather it represents further enlargement of the authority and scope of the FMS into previously unregulated areas of

Russia’s labor market. As it relates to regional governments, the liberalization phase empowers employers and undercuts a regional criticism that the 2007 quota reform is too restrictive for the economic needs for regional businesses.62 As a whole, the Concepts and the two reforms undoubtedly centralized power, an underlying theme of Putin’s administrations, and it is against this increasingly powerful federal government that regions have begun exercising authority.

2.3. Migration Policy as Regional Politics

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, regions across Russia have experienced shifting migration patterns, and in the wake of these shifts regional governments have responded in a myriad of ways, claiming authority over migration policy despite the federal government’s desire to exercise exclusive control. From offering temporary amnesty in Moscow City to forming anti-immigrant Cossack brigades in Krasnodar, migration has yielded a spectrum of responses. This spectrum is remarkable, because we observe the range of policy responses occurring at a time of

62 Schenk, “Controlling Immigration Manually.”

51 centralization by the federal government, primarily between 2002 and 2009, prior to the gradual liberalization of federal policy through the patenti system. What determined whether regional governments became involved in the migration debate, at a time when the federal government began consolidating its oversight of migration nationwide? I argue that rather than becoming an uncontested branch in Putin’s “power vertical,” migration policy became a means for regional governments with independent political power to challenge the federal government. As will be expounded in the following chapters, the critical factors determining whether a region pursues an independent migration policy involve the stability and autonomy of a regional government’s political machine. Absent stable and independent political power, regional governments will not pursue an independent migration policy, as the potential political costs of pursuing such policies at the regional level are simply too great.

But what are some regional migration policies that regions can pursue? The federal government does hold a preponderance of power in the category of control policies, as it sets the rules for entry, legal employment, and punitive actions, and it has complete control over rules for citizenship and residency, which are key integration policies. For migration control policies, regional governments are able to increase the priority of enforcement of federal rules, i.e. directing police to investigate the documents of any suspected migrants as their paramount task. Regional governments can also create their own enforcement agencies, such as the Cossack brigades in Krasnodar.63 These

63 Ekaterina Turysheva, “Cossacks to Control Migration in Southern Russia,” Russia Beyond The Headlines, August 8, 2012, https://www.rbth.com/articles/2012/08/08/cossacks_to_control_migration_in_southern_russia_17163.h tml.

52 measures are not without consequence, as all police and FMS officers are federal employees, and therefore do not answer to regional executives, yet this is the power and authority regional governments can claim or circumvent by creating their own groups.

Regional governments can also implement integrationist policies to compensate for the federal government’s lack of specified programs and institutions. These can take the form of assisting migrants in their attempt to maintain legal status, providing funds for cultural programming, or providing housing. Though these integrative measures may have normative goals that Russian society can value, the use of regional public funds for migrants rather than service provision for Russian citizens is not without controversy and runs a political risk, as will be demonstrated in the following section.

The range of regional migration policies has been extensive across Russia since independence,64 but this project focuses on the implementation of regional migration polities from 2002 to 2012 to highlight the first decade of the reorganized FMS as well as to understand regional migration policies during a time of federal centralization. This project investigates the dynamics of four regions in Russia to make its argument highlighting the pivotal role a regional political machine’s autonomy plays in determining whether a region pursues an independent migration policy. The theoretical logic and methods underpinning this argument are detailed in the following chapter, so as to give the reader sufficient background to incorporate our understanding of federal- regional relations in contemporary Russian politics, especially during the ten years of interest to this project (2002-2012). This project makes use of the experience of the

64 Mukomel’, “Ethnic and Migration Policy in the 2000s Viewed in the Context of Relations Between the Federal Center and the Regions”; Vladimir Mukomel’, “Integration of Migrants: Russian Federation,” Research Report (CARIM-East: European University Institute, 2013).

53 Republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan and the Oblasts of Samara and Orenburg to make its claims,65 and Table 3 below briefly demonstrates the variety of regional migration policies I seek to explain.

A cursory examination of Table 3 shows that my four regions are primarily involved in migration policies focusing on migrant integration, rather than migration control, and the Republic of Bashkortostan is the least involved region amongst the four cases. As stated previously, federal migration policy focuses nearly exclusively on migration control rather than migrant integration, in terms of specifically assigning responsibilities to institutions and developing corresponding protocols. The four regions

I investigate have pursued regional migration policies that focus primarily on migrant integration, allowing me to split integration into policies dealing with economic access, social service provision, cultural representation, and additional services, with a final category for migration control. This fracturing reveals that all four regions have provided a public space for cultural representation, though the details of the day-to-day operations of these have substantive differences that will be discussed in the following chapters.

Interestingly, it is only the Orenburg region that delves into migration control, as it passed regional legislation to give its regional FMS branch a set of policy goals related to border security. Tatarstan and Samara have gone the furthest in providing services to migrants, most strikingly in the provision of representation to migrants with regular meetings with heads of regional offices, though the differences between these regions

65 The Russian federal system is asymmetric, as is Canada or Spain. Constitutionally, ethnic republics (Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in my project) have institutional designs akin to individual states in the United States, in which each republic has a separate constitution and court systems, however these are subordinate to the federal constitution. Oblasts, by contrast, do not have a separate constitution, but rather rely solely on the federal constitution and corresponding court system.

54 will be explored in greater detail. Most notable, however, is Bashkortostan’s lack of involvement in regional migration policies, which runs counter to many of our theoretical understandings of regional politics in Russia, as this project will argue.

Table 3: Variation in Regional Migration Policies within Tatarstan, Bashkortostan,

Samara, and Orenburg

55 2.4 Migration in the Spotlight of Public Awareness

Before moving on to regional migration policies within Tatarstan, Bashkortostan,

Samara, and Orenburg and the relevant theoretical arguments, it is necessary to explore a final fixture of the migration debate in Russia: public opinion. The federal policies described in this chapter and the regional migration policies that I will explore in earnest in the following chapters are not designed and implemented in a political vacuum. As a result of the Three Waves and the internal migration processes, the terms migrant and migratsia in Russian life are ubiquitous in conversation and media. This national awareness prevents migration policy from slipping into obscurity or getting lost in the minutia of policy debates.

The paramount cause of the public interest in migration policies is the “gap hypothesis” advanced by Cornelius et al66, which hypothesizes that the state’s capacity to control migration will always be less than its desired capacity, and this gap generates the public dissatisfaction and the intensity of migration debates.67 There has long existed a paucity of capacity in federal migration policy, as each Wave has demonstrated, and this is why the single-strongest policy goal expressed in the 2003 Migration Concept was for the FMS to develop the capacity to monitor and then regulate migration into Russia.

While the FMS had built expertise by the time of the 2012 Concept, the capacity to regulate effectively across the territory of Russia would require far more resources,

66 Wayne Cornelius, Philip Martin, and James Hollifield, eds., Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, 1st ed. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 67 James F. Hollifield, “Immigration Policy in France and Germany: Outputs versus Outcomes,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 485, no. 1 (1986): 113–128; Jagdish Bhagwati, “Borders Beyond Control,” Foreign Affairs 82 (2003): 98.

56 though the hypothesis would state that no amount of resources would completely regulate

Russia’s borders. It is this gap between capacity and desire, ever-increasing with the expansion of labor migration flows in the Third Wave, that became more evident in the public eye.

Public opinion on migration in Russia has been largely negative since polling began, yet survey data also highlights inconsistencies within the public’s view, suggesting that migration policy is not well understood by the society at large and it remains a policy arena in which attitudes are dangerously mercurial for politicians. For public opinion on migration, I utilize surveys conducted through the Levada Center,68 a trusted and scientifically-informed sociological research institute. I rely on their annual yearbook publication of nationally-representative surveys to observe any shifts in public opinion on migration politics with data beginning in 2002. The second dataset is from

Mikhail Alexseev’s research69 investigating the security perceptions of Chinese migration in the Russian Far East,70 and much of the survey sampling was conducted by the Levada

Center. Despite the regional focus of his work, Alexseev’s survey included a nationally- representative sample of Russians, as well as regionally-representative samples from

Moscow City, Moscow Oblast, Krasnodar Krai and the Republic of Adygea, Volgograd

Oblast, Orenburg Oblast, the Republic of Tatarstan, and Primorski Krai. Focusing

68 “Levada Center: Russian Public Opinion 2012-2013” (Moscow: Levada Analytical Center, 2013). 69 Mikhail Alexseev and Richard C. Hofstetter, “Migration and Ethnic Relations in the Russian Federation,” ed. Levada-Analytical Center and Public Opinion Research Laboratory, Institute of History, Archeology, and Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far East, Russian Academy of Sciences, Far Eastern Branch, 2005, http://alexseev.sdsu.edu/migration_and_ethnic_conflict/hostility.html. 70 Mikhail Alexseev, Immigration Phobia and the Security Dillema: Russia, Europe, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

57 specifically on migration politics and regional variation in views makes this survey ideal to assist us in understanding the contours of public opinion.

A recurring question asked in Levada Center’s annual questionnaire,71 presented here in Table 4, asks respondents to reflect on the influx of labor migrants, even prior to the Third Wave. During the Second Wave, many Ukrainians living in the regions bordering Russia’s southern border sought employment in the European area of Russia.

Much of this labor migration was undocumented, and, making use of the visa-free regime, reached its peak during the 1998 ruble crisis. With the overall shifts in labor migration towards labor migrants arriving to Central Asia, the question was altered in

2010 to reflect these shifts, albeit significantly after they had begun.

Table 4: Perception of Foreign Construction Workers

71 “Levada Center: Russian Public Opinion 2012-2013.”

58 The results to this question underscore the negativity in public opinion facing labor migration. Despite rising and falling views within the “definitely negative” response and the “neutral” response being the most popular answer, the negative responses always score higher than positive responses.

When asked about government policies,72 as seen in Table 5, respondents took a far more negative view of migration than experts surveyed by the Center for Strategic

Studies in 2004. The inaugural year of this question has only one percent difference between positive and negative policy preferences, yet ten years later, we see that negative preferences outnumber positive preferences by more than 3 to 1.

Table 5: Opinion on Priority for Russian Migration Policy

While there was not a question change in this question, we do see the most dramatic loss of positive preferences after the 2008 crisis, suggesting there could be a shift in public opinion in the harder economic time period.

72 Ibid.

59 Asking a series of questions relating to specific policies, Alexseev and

Hofstetter73 find a less dramatic policy preference for complete restriction. In the first iteration, seen in Table 6, respondents are asked whether they favor immediate deportation “of all migrants and their children”, regardless of legal status. The national average has a majority that disagree with such an extreme measure of deportation, yet there is certainly regional variation, as 54% of those in Krasnodar favor deportation whereas only 40% favor deportation in Orenburg.

Table 6: Opinion on Deportation for Immigrant Families

The wording of the question could prime respondents to already paint migrants in a negative light, since it asks, “about problems arising from migrants’ presence,” rather than taking a neutral position on the contributions of migrants. Yet as Table 7 shows,74 when asked about organizations that defend the rights of migrants regardless of legal

73 Alexseev and Hofstetter, “Migration and Ethnic Relations in the Russian Federation.” 74 Ibid.

60 status, we see a precipitous drop in favorability, with less than 5% of respondents fully supporting non-profit work with migrants. Despite over 17% of Krasnodar respondents voicing full support, the highest regional level of support, approximately 50% of those surveyed did not support these efforts, outpacing support overall in the region. Lack of support is strongest in and surrounding Moscow, much more so than the national average, suggesting the migration trends towards Moscow across all three waves, and internal migration, have left the local population particularly disinterested in the needs of new arrivals.

Table 7: Opinion on Organizations Defending Migrants’ Rights

If perceptions of migration are this negative, what drives them? As mentioned previously in this chapter, the two wars against separatist movements in Chechnya created tens of thousands of displaced persons, and in conjunction with the multiple

61 terrorist attacks by Chechen separatists,75 threat of terrorist attack remains linked with migration. As labor migration has shifted to nominally Muslim Central Asia, these fears have not dissipated. This fear of violence has poured over into the common stereotypes of migrants, particularly with regards to crime. These associations of migration to violence have helped generate negative perceptions of migrants.

Let us take Table 8, with data from the Levada survey as an example.76

Table 8: Opinion on Restricting Migration, by Ethnicity

The percentages recorded in Table 8 are the percentage total of those surveyed who would restrict a particular ethnic group. The only group that receives a near majority vote

75 There have been many attacks after the First Chechen War, which concluded in 1996, but the most notable for observers of international events would be the 2002 Moscow theatre attack (over 160 dead) and the Beslan school attack (over 300 dead). For a more complete listing, see Council on Foreign Relations, 2016. 76 “Levada Center: Russian Public Opinion 2012-2013.”

62 for restriction occurred in 2005 in regard to, “People from the Caucasus,” in which 50% of those surveyed favored restricting migration. Though 50% is the highest value for this question, the average response rate for favoring no restrictions by ethnicity is around

20%. This question was asked in the month prior to the Beslan attack, and the 50% spike is not unexpected since it was asked within a year of the event.

Yet as Table 9 from the Alexseev and Hofstetter survey shows,77 terrorism and crime played a disproportionate role in determining respondents’ views on migrants. In a section of his questionnaire in which respondents are asked to “What extent do you think migrants of each of the follow ethnic groups pose a threat to the security of Russia?” At the conclusion of this section, after asking about perceptions on eleven ethnic groups from ethnic Russian migrants from post-Soviet republics to Vietnamese migrants, without hesitation, terrorism was the most cited source of threat perception.

Table 9: Reflection on Threat Perception

77 Alexseev and Hofstetter, “Migration and Ethnic Relations in the Russian Federation.”

63 Alexseev and Hofstetter conduct the survey just after the one-year anniversary of the Beslan terrorist attack, so this could be playing a disproportionate role in this question. The inability of a respondent to specify the source of the threat perception for each ethnic group lets us only see the results of a collapsed categorization of migrants.

Even though this is imprecise, we cannot deny the strength of the public’s association of security fears with terrorism.

Public perceptions around security may be heavily influenced by terrorism, but

Alexseev and Hofstetter’s survey gives us reason to pause and wonder about the cognitive dissonance at play for the respondents.78 Table 10 asks respondents to evaluate a common claim that migrants commit violent crimes against the local population. Save for respondents in Moscow City, the vast majority of respondents believe that such violent crimes do not occur or at least constitute a negligible proportion.

Table 10: Perception of Violent Crimes Committed by Migrants

78 Ibid.

64 Yet Table 11 shows the responses to a question in which the respondent is asked to rate the effect of crime on life in their region.79 In comparison to the general rejection of the association between immigrants and violent crime in Table 10, Table 11 shows that migrants are associated with crime by a wide margin in every region, save for Moscow

City’s “+1” response. Perhaps the lack of the “violent” adjective dramatically rearranges public perception. Regardless of the power in the qualification of violence, Table 11 displays that there is an underlying current of distrust in Russian society with regards to migrants.

Table 11: Perceptions of Crime and Migrants

79 Ibid.

65 The inconsistencies in public opinion are not inconsequential. In most of the questions asked in both the surveys presented here, the term “migrant” is used, though occasionally an ethnic identity is offered. Despite the Three Waves of immigration to

Russia, there is little attempt to refine the language surrounding migration. When a respondent hears these questions and the word migrant, do they imagine a recent labor migrant or an internally displaced person? We are not certain, and as such, there is far too much packed within the term migrant. As shown, the sudden shift towards rejecting an association of criminality with migrants may hinge on the word “violence.” If this is the case, public opinion is dangerously volatile. In the very least, it is quite malleable, leaving regions active in migration politics quite exposed to political risk for their activities. As Table 5 shows, by 2012, approximately 70% of Russians are in favor of restricting migration, and nearly as many respondents do not support the activities of

NGOs that support migrants (Table 7). In the midst of an ever-increasing dissatisfaction with current migration trends in public opinion and against a federal government seeking to consolidate control over migration policy, why do we see regions entering this policy arena at all?

2.5 Conclusion

The previous question is the heart of this project, and through the course of this dissertation, I work to bring clarity and help us understand more concerning regional migration politics in Russia. As a whole, this chapter has sought to briefly cover the processes of migration that have occurred, so that we can understand the basis for the volatile and contradictory public views on migration. Even though this dissertation focuses on the Third Wave and labor migration exclusively, disentangling this population

66 and process from migration writ large is more difficult. Nevertheless, the reader now should be familiar with the two critical reforms that the federal government has implemented in its attempts to regulate labor migration, and we have a basic understanding of the possible policies that regions can advance, an understanding that will be refined through the course of this dissertation.

This chapter also serves to illustrate the two-level game at play for regional governments, as they are responding in concert to federal policy and not acting in a policy vacuum. The severity of Russia’s demographic issues motivates much of the federal government’s attention to migration policy, as well as the dissatisfaction of the business community as they seek to thrive in the midst of a labor shortage. As discussed, however, federal migration policy has been reactive, with little to guide its overall structure and evaluating its efficacy. For regional governments seeking to ensure the stability of their respective economies and societies, the challenges of these demographic pressures are more acute than to those monitoring the situation at the national-level.

Remaining idle can affect their long-term futures, while becoming involved in migration politics risks considerable political consequences. Properly informed of the dynamics structuring the migration debate in Russia, we can now focus on the factors influencing the agency of regional governments as they become involved in migration politics.

67 CHAPTER 2:

THEORY AND METHODS

The previous chapter’s exposition on the migration patterns that Russia has experienced since independence and the three reforms in federal migration policy from

2002-2012 lends itself to a simple policy implementation story: as migration patterns shift, federal policies respond accordingly, however slowly. Yet this is far from the political reality, as migration policy is a volatile political issue, often discussed in tandem with employment, economic development, demographic change, and cultural shift. Such concerns are amplified by Russia’s reliance on international migrant labor, as the

Chairman of the Public Advisory Council under the Federal Migration Service (FMS) in the Republic of Bashkortostan stated just before the 2008 crisis, “Without foreign labor,

Russia today cannot function.”1

Public opinion in Russia is strongly opposed to immigration, and federal policy, despite its reforms, has not altered the fundamental tenet of Russian migration policy: the visa-free regime with fellow Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) members, which are the countries of origin for most contemporary labor migrants in Russia. This is precisely what the “gap hypothesis” predicts, where the gap between a government’s desire to control migration and its actual capacity frustrates the public, and this creates

1 Irina Nurimanshina, “Media, your way!,” Vercheniya Ufa, July 9, 2008, 133 edition.

68 the space for the politics of migration in the Russian Federation.2 This frustration has more visibly increased the membership and activities of neo-fascist groups has increased significantly,3 most notably represented by the annual November 5th parades on Russia

Day. Regional governments have also entered the policy fray, such as Krasnodar’s efforts to prevent immigrants from registering, which prohibits their capacity to gain employment or purchase property.4 Yet regional governments have also responded to provide for migrants’ needs, such as Tatarstan’s provision of free legal aid to migrants seeking to maintain legal residence and employment status. Given the volatility and complexity of public opinion and during a period of centralization of the Russian political space under Vladimir Putin’s administrations, we would expect that the policy responses would not vary substantially or in the very least be uniformly anti-immigrant. Why then, do we observe such diversity in regional government responses to immigration?

I argue that regional governments have asserted authority in migration policy despite federal attempts to consolidate exclusive control in this policy arena, thus demonstrating that regionalism remains a potent force in contemporary Russian politics and manifests in new policy arenas. The variation that we observe in regional migration policies in Russia is not a matter of degree within a narrow spectrum of policy agendas.

Instead, a wide spectrum exists, as the difference between Krasnodar and Tatarstan

2 James F. Hollifield, “Immigration Policy in France and Germany: Outputs versus Outcomes,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 485, no. 1 (1986): 113–128; Wayne Cornelius, Philip Martin, and James Hollifield, eds., Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, 1st ed. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Jagdish Bhagwati, “Borders Beyond Control,” Foreign Affairs 82 (2003): 98. 3 Hilary Pilkington, Elena Omel’chenko, and Al’bina Garifzianova, Russia’s Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives, Routledge Contemporary Russia and Eastern Europe Series (London and New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010). 4 Oskari Pentikäinen and Tom Trier, “Between Integration and Resettlement: The Meskhetian Turks” (Flensburg, Germany: European Centre for Minority Issues, 2004).

69 reveals, and a considerable number of regional governments do not pursue independent migration policies at all. The determinants of which regions engage in such behavior is unclear, particularly given the intensity of public attention on the issue. The regionalism literature is helpful for identifying which regions may be more likely to become engaged in regional migration policy making, but as I will show, it falls short in explaining the policy outcomes. In order to explain the variation we observe in regional migration policies, the regionalism literature must be pushed to incorporate the political reality of the Putin administration, i.e. a strengthened central government, as well as the political costs of engaging in the migration debate itself. This account of regionalism’s dynamics in contemporary Russia is a valuable contribution to the regionalism literature as well as the migration politics literature, which has long neglected cases outside industrialized liberal democracies of the Global North.5

I argue that the autonomy of regional political machines as the most influential factor in whether regions pursue independent migration politics after a comparative case study of four regions in Russia, the Republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan and the

Oblasts of Samara and Orenburg,6 and their regional migration policies from 2002 to

2012. All four regions have a rich history of combating with the federal government for greater autonomy in regional affairs since the early 1990s, and we would expect each of these regions to continue in this combative political behavior. Tatarstan and

5 Michael J. White and Colin Johnson, “Perspectives on Migration Theory - Sociology and Political Science,” in International Handbook of Migration and Population Distribution, International Handbooks of Population 6 (New York: Springer, 2016), 69–89. 6 The Russian Federation has an asymmetric federation, in which ethnic republics have heightened autonomy, like Galicia in Spain or Quebec in Canada. The most common federal subject is the oblast, which do not have separate constitutions or court systems, unlike ethnic republics. This asymmetry is the result of political mobilization of ethnic identities, which will be discussed in the following pages.

70 Bashkortostan are among the top oil-producing regions in Russia, in addition to being manufacturing and agricultural leaders, respectively. Samara is among the most industrially productive regions, and Orenburg enjoys the windfalls of one of the largest natural gas fields in Russia. These characteristics contributed to all four regions maintaining independent migration policies, but after ten years, Bashkortostan is the only case that no longer pursues an independent migration policy.

Despite the array of factors that would predict Bashkortostan’s continued involvement in migration policy, which are detailed in this chapter, these explanations fail to predict this empirical puzzle. By incorporating regional political machines into the analysis of migration politics, I provide an account for this puzzle and argue for an analytical lens that can be applied nationally in future research. My argument is not that regional political machines are new or that the regionalism literature is irrelevant.

Rather, I argue that even in regions with political machines and engaging in regionalism in other policy arenas, only those machines that enjoy autonomy will pursue migration policies due to the political risks embedded within this nationally salient policy arena.

Studying regional political machines is the most effective analytical lens to understand regional migration policies and the policy decisions we observe.

3.1 Clarifying Regionalism

Regionalism, in the study of the Russian case, has investigated political movements seeking to divide the national-level polity into smaller entities, and it has been a theme in Russian politics since the 1800s in Imperial Russia, continuing through the Soviet Union and, as I will argue, into the current day. In its contemporary incarnation, regionalism is the study of politics of federalism in Russian society,

71 understanding the dynamics between the federal government and its regions in their fight for political and economic power. Beginning as response to rebellions against Tsarist rule, the unitary state of Imperial Russia created guberniyas, creating the first federal system for the Russian state and the political entities through which regionalism could be pursued.7 The borders of guberniyas and the powers available to them were recurring points of political tension, reaching heights during the Russian Civil War’s power vacuum, in which numerous regions declared themselves as independent nations, such as the vast Siberia guberniya and the ethnically diverse Idel-Ural republic. The Bolsheviks used ethnic and political identities to their advantage to gain support in regions across the

Russian Empire, even in regions declaring their independence.8 As a result of political compromises to maintain support for the Bolsheviks, the early Soviet state had 9 Union

Republics and 12 Autonomous Republics, each recognizing the legitimacy of a separate ethnic identity. By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union would consist of 14 Union

Republics and 18 Autonomous Republics, laying the institutional groundwork for the asymmetrical federal system we observe in Russia today.

The regionalism literature understandably focused on the fracturing of the

Imperial, Soviet, and democratic Russian state, yet it overemphasized changes in territorial boundaries and separatism at the expense of recognizing the spectrum of claims regions have made for sovereignty. In the fledgling democratic society after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, regionalism was a powerful political force, especially as

7 John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700- 1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); J. Paul Goode, Decline of Regionalism in Putin’s Russia (New York: Routledge, 2011). 8 Mikhail Stoliarov, Federalism and the Dictatorship of Power in Russia, Routledge Studies of Societies in Transition (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2003).

72 articulated as a goal for minority ethnic groups in Russia, seeking to regain the levels of independence from the early Bolshevik period that had eroded over the course of Soviet rule. These various movements to increase the power of regions and claim authority from the central government was an existential threat to the newly independent Russian state at the time.9 Putin’s successful push towards centralization under his inaugural presidential administration led Ross et al10 to focus on the consolidation of political units in the Russian Federation from 89 in 2002 to 83 in 2007. Others have focused on the

Putin administration’s successful efforts to regularize tax rates, mineral rights, privatization of state resources, and other policies.11 These studies reflected a trend in the regionalism literature to conflate the political phenomenon with the “high politics” of economics and separatism, neglecting other important policy arenas in which regional governments could assert their authority.

In this dissertation, therefore, I will argue for a broader definition of regionalism that encompasses regional claims of authority in policy realms where the federal government has sought exclusive control. The establishment of uniformity in the tax code and the consolidation of political units in Russia are undeniable signs of growing centralization in Russian politics. Though the federal government has enjoyed accumulating power under Putin’s leadership, regional governments have not stood idle,

9 Steven Solnick, “Methods of Central Control over Russia’s Provinces and Prospects for the Future,” PONARS Memo, (1999); Mikhail Alexseev, ed., Center-Periphery Conflict in Post-Soviet Russia: A Federation Imperiled (St Martin’s Press/London: Macmillan, 1999). 10 Cameron Ross, ed., Regional Politics in Russia (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002). 11 Vladimir Popov, “Fiscal Federalism in Russia: Rules versus Electoral Politics,” Comparative Economic Studies 46, no. 4 (December 2004): 515–41; David J. Brown, John S. Earle, and Scott Gehlbach, “Helping Hand or Grabbing Hand? State Bureaucracy and Privatization,” American Political Science Review 103, no. 2 (n.d.): 264–83; Matthew Crosston, Shadow Separatism: Implications for Democratic Consolidation, Post-Soviet Politics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004).

73 and I argue that they have claimed authority and sought greater autonomy in policy arenas where the federal government has not effectively consolidated its control.

Whereas migration politics has been a policy arena in which the federal government has claimed absolute authority through a series of reforms as discussed in Chapter 1.

Regional governments’ claims for authority in migration politics is not without consequence. It engages issues of economic development and stability, particularly given

Russia’s declining population and labor force,12 of national security,13 and of interethnic relations,14 which motivates the federal government’s consolidation of control in migration politics but also motivates regions to respond to perceived failures of federal management. This dissertation will illustrate that regional governments have differed in their policy approaches, reflecting the nature of the political machine operating in the respective regions, and the variation of regional migration policies reveal the continued strength of regionalism in Russian politics, not its gradual demise.

3.2 Conceptualizing Regional Political Dynamics in Russia

So that we may investigate regionalism in Russia in contemporary politics, I will briefly discuss how regionalism shaped the formation of the Russian Federation and observe how Putin’s consolidation of power has been such a turning point in Russian politics. Prior to Putin’s election to the presidency in 2000, President Boris Yeltsin relied

12 Nicholas Eberstadt, “Russia’s Peacetime Demographic Crisis: Dimensions, Causes, and Implications,” NBR Project Report (Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2010). 13 Mikhail Alexseev, Immigration Phobia and the Security Dillema: Russia, Europe, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); UNDOC, “Illicit Drug Trends in the Russian Federation,” Paris Pact Initiative (New York: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Regional Office for Russia and Belarus, 2008). 14 Elena Chebankova, “Implications of Putin’s Regional and Demographic Policies on the Evolution of Inter-Ethnic Relations in Russia,” Perspectives on European Politics and Society 8, no. 4 (December 2007): 439–59.

74 on regional governments for political support throughout the 1990s. The primary vehicle for ensuring regional support for the Yeltsin administration was agreeing to sign bilateral treaties with regional governments. Though minority ethnic groups had successfully mobilized to establish an asymmetric federal system, these bilateral treaties effectively undermined the authority of the Constitution in ethnic republics and oblasts alike, as regions negotiated rights such as ownership of major industrial holdings, lower tax rates, and even political sovereignty in the treaties.15 Allowing regional governments to pursue bilateral treaties served proximate political goals for Yeltsin, most notably to gain electoral support from regional political elites in the contentious 1996 elections.16

Bilateral treaties also acted as a bulwark against separatist political movements, which threatened the territorial integrity of the fledgling Russian state. Yeltsin’s use of bilateral treaties as a strategy to combat the rising political power of regionalism would leave an indelible legacy in relations between federal and regional governments.

The literature concerning regional politics in Russia has seen a shift from conceptualizing the dynamics as a bargaining model towards a principal-agent model, which this project uses in its analysis. Daniel Treisman’s analyses17 of fiscal transfers between regional governments and the federal government are foundational to how we

15 Solnick, “Methods of Central Control over Russia’s Provinces and Prospects for the Future”; James Hughes, “Regionalism in Russia: The Rise and Fall of Siberian Agreement,” Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 7 (1996): 1133–62; Mikhail Filippov and Olga Shvetsova, “Asymmetric Bilateral Bargaining in the New Russian Federation: A Path-Dependence Explanation,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 32, no. 1 (1999): 61–76; Gail Lapidus, “Asymmetrical Federalism and State Breakdown in Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 15, no. 1 (1999): 74–82. 16 Steven Solnick, “The 1996-1997 Gubernatorial Elections in Russia: Outcomes and Implications” (Washington, D.C: National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, 1997); Jeffrey W. Hahn, ed., Democratization in Russia (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1996). 17 Daniel Treisman, “The Politics of Intergovernmental Transfers in Post-Soviet Russia,” British Journal of Political Science 26, no. 3 (1996): 299–335; Daniel Treisman, “Fiscal Redistribution in a Fragile Federation: Moscow and the Regions in 1994,” British Journal of Political Science 28, no. 1 (1998): 185– 222.

75 understood and perceived the structure of regionalism in Russia. Studying the transfer of regional revenues to the federal government and the corresponding fiscal transfers to regional governments, e.g. subsidies and grants, in 1992, Treisman found that low votes for Yeltsin in 1991, frequency of strikes in the year prior, and an early declaration of sovereignty generated greater transfers from the center.18 In a follow-up study of transfers in 1994, Treisman19 argued that labor unrest had lost influence as a factor, whereas governors making public statements against the Yeltsin administration caused federal transfers to increase.

These studies revealed the precariousness of support for Yeltsin’s administration, and while Treisman20 argued that Yeltsin’s strategy of appeasement prevented regionalism from escalating to widespread separatism,21 the assumed model in these studies was a bargaining model, one in which regional leaders and federal leaders were peers, able to negotiate and leverage their relationship with the other.22 The regional governments were empowered by the Yeltsin administration’s need for electoral support, but in the economic chaos of the 1990s, Yeltsin’s access to funds gave his bargaining position considerable power. By 1994, the last year Treisman studied fiscal transfers, the

Yeltsin government had begun signing bilateral treaties with regional governments.

Signing a bilateral treaty with Moscow became a paramount goal for dissenting regions, since, once established, these treaties settled the question of financial transfers, as well as

18 Treisman, “The Politics of Intergovernmental Transfers in Post-Soviet Russia.” 19 Treisman, “Fiscal Redistribution in a Fragile Federation.” 20 Daniel S. Treisman, After the Deluge: Regional Crises and Political Consolidation in Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 21 This claim is not without criticism. See Sergei Lavrov, “Rossiiskiy Byudzhetny Federalizm: Pervie Shagi, Pervie Itog,” Segodnya, no. 104 (1995): 5. 22 The bargaining model is ideal for statistical analysis, as it assumes every region is equally capable of bargaining with Moscow, fulfilling the need for equally distributed randomness in variation.

76 delineating which political issues were under federal and regional control. But with 47 regions having signed treaties by 1999, the center-periphery dynamics in Russia had become less comparable across regions, weakening the explanatory power of the bargaining model. The establishment of United Russia as a party in 2002 would further erode the bargaining model’s credibility as means to understand center-periphery politics in Russia.

The transition from one presidential administration to another ought to bring significant changes in leadership style and policy approach, but the establishment of

United Russia as the predominant national political party would fundamentally alter the structure of center-periphery relations in Russia. In the months prior to the 1999 elections to the national legislature, the Duma, some of the most powerful politicians in

Russia at the time formed the All Russia-Fatherland bloc, which combined the Fatherland

Party, chaired by the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, and the All Russia Party, chaired by the president of the Republic of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiev, and the president of the Republic of Bashkortostan, Murtaza Rakhimov. Formed to protect the political and economic rights regions had secured during the prior decade, the All Russia-Fatherland bloc relied on regional political machines to deliver votes for its candidates.23 The strategy yielded 68 seats and established All-Russia Fatherland as the third-largest political bloc in Russia, just behind the 73 seats gained by the pro-centralization Unity

Party, led by President Boris Yeltsin and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The 1999

23 Timothy Colton and Michael A McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 2003).

77 election revealed regionalism’s ability to contest centralization in national elections, expanding regionalism’s power into federal institutions.

The electoral success of Vladimir Putin in the 2000 presidential elections laid the groundwork for the creation of United Russia, a political party joining the Unity Party with the All Russia-Fatherland bloc, which resulted in a national party of power. Despite popular regional politicians entering the race, such as Konstantin Titov, the governor of

Samara Oblast, Putin won in the first round, enjoying support from the Unity and

Fatherland Parties. Two years later, the All Russia-Fatherland bloc and Unity consolidated into a single political party, United Russia, and gained 223 seats out of the

450 seats in the Duma, resulting in the predominant political party in Russia. As a result of the union, United Russia’s Supreme Council included Presidents Shaimiev and

Rakhimov and Mayor Luzhkov, placing the leaders of regionalism in the highest governing structure in the party.24 With the inclusion of these political rivals, United

Russia had the capacity to reshape the national and regional politics alike.25

Where bilateral treaties ushered in the end of the bargaining model for understanding center-periphery politics in Russia, the emergence of United Russia as the force in Russian politics established the principal-agent model as the most effective lens for analyzing center-periphery politics in Russia.26 Firmly grounded in the economic

24 Nikolai Petrov, “Russia’s ‘Party of Power’ Takes Shape,” Russia and Eurasia Review 2, no. 16 (2003), http://www.jamestown.org/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=28444&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=226. 25 Andrew Konitzer and Stephen K. Wegren, “Federalism and Political Recentralization in the Russian Federation: United Russia as the Party of Power,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 36, no. 4 (2006): 503–522. 26 Ora John Reuter and Thomas F. Remington, “Dominant Party Regimes and the Commitment Problem: The Case of United Russia,” Comparative Political Studies 42, no. 4 (2009): 501–26; G. Sharafutdinova, “Subnational Governance in Russia: How Putin Changed the Contract with His Agents and the Problems It Created for Medvedev,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 40, no. 4 (September 1, 2010): 672–96.

78 theory of contracts, the principal-agent model’s logic rests on the asymmetry of information “between a political agent (the principal), who delegates power to an agent for accomplishing certain policy-making tasks.”27 In the case of Russia, the federal executive28 is the principal, and it delegates to regional executives, but the federal executive does not have complete information as to whether their agents are fulfilling their delegated tasks. This asymmetry of information gives agents additional power, and incentivizes the principal to construct means of monitoring and verification in order to deter defection.29

The paramount task for regional executives is to deliver votes to United Russia in local and national elections, in return for which the federal executive offers political and economic support. Elections, therefore, are the primary indicator of the strength of the principal-agent relationship between the center and a region, providing the center with the information necessary to evaluate whether the regional executive should continue to enjoy support as an agent. Due to the importance of elections in demonstrating support for the regime,30 the principal will invest in monitoring the popularity and success of its agents in preparation for elections. Governors have been replaced with greater frequency surrounding elections, and loopholes in term limits have been introduced largely to provide regional leaders with the capacity to deliver tremendous electoral landslides to

27 Sharafutdinova, “Subnational Governance in Russia,” pg 674. 28 In journalistic and academic shorthand, the federal executive is often referred to as "Moscow,” “the Kremlin,” or “Yeltsin/Putin.” 29 D. Roderick Kiewiet and Matthew D McCubbins, The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 30 Larry Jay Diamond, “Thinking About Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 21–35; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (51-65): 2002.

79 United Russia.31 This is not to say that issues related to corruption are irrelevant, but the paramount concern of the principal is the electoral victory of United Russia.

3.2.1 Political Machines: The Prevailing Structure of Regional Politics

While center-periphery politics are best captured by the principal-agent model, regional political dynamics in Russia are dominated by political machines. This makes regional executives behave simultaneously as agent and principal a two-level principal- agent model, the stability for both which are tested near elections. In this center- periphery iteration of the model, regional executives act as agents and enjoy complete information concerning their strategies and their commitment to fulfilling the delegated tasks requested by the principal. Yet these agents are also principals with incomplete information on the preferences and voting strategies of the electorate. This agent- principal relationship between regional politicians and the electorate existed before the rise of United Russia and developed during the political confusion of the 1990s. While the approaches of regional elites varied across Russia,32 a common strategy for regional executives in Russia is to develop a political machine, a political system in which votes are secured through a structured system of favors and access through powerful economic or social partners. Political machines can provide politicians with easier access to financial resources, since they only need to advocate for the interests of a narrow set of actors, and this allows politicians an independent war chest to establish a system of

31 Elena Chebankova, “Adaptive Federalism and Federation in Putin’s Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 6 (August 2008): 989–1009. 32 Colton and McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000; Crosston, Shadow Separatism: Implications for Democratic Consolidation.

80 patronage.33 Political machines can also use public and private sector employees and allied social groups to vote as a single bloc and/or participate in public protests. Once established, a political machine can reduce the uncertainty around elections,34 and this was particularly useful during the 1990s, when political realities were volatile and preferences of the electorate were difficult to ascertain. Yet political machines fundamentally alter the “level playing field”35 of regional elections, turning many of

Russia’s regions into increasingly authoritarian regimes.

The rise of United Russia as a political force owes much of its success to regional political machines, as Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, which delivered votes effectively to

United Russia in the party’s first election in 2003. Since United Russia’s emergence on the national electoral scene, the federal executive has exercised patronage in its principal- agent relationship with regional executives, offering United Russia’s financial and political resources to regional campaigns. United Russia did not dismantle regional political machines; rather, it encouraged their development. Yet not all regional political machines were equally reliant on United Russia resources, and those that maintained independent political machines could deliver votes to United Russia, while maintaining nearly exclusive control over their regions.

Political machines are not static arrangements between regional executives and their system of patronage, however, and the formation of a machine provides clear goals

33 Grigorii V. Golosov, “Machine Politics: The Concept and Its Implications for Post-Soviet Studies,” Demokratizatsiya 21, no. 4 (2013): 459. 34 A political machine is far from impervious to changes in public opinion or a degradation of the machine if politicians cannot deliver favors to their supporters. 35 Steven Levitsky and Lucan A Way, “Why Democracy Needs a Level Playing Field,” Journal of Democracy 21, no. 1 (2010): 57–68.

81 for political actors seeking policy change at the regional level. Since regional political machines began to develop prior to the Third Wave of migration, the economic and political interests represented in such a machine do not necessarily include those affected by international labor migration, such as construction firms, which would enjoy higher profits if more migrant labor was available, or labor unions that have members competing with migrants in the labor market. To see their policy preferences enacted, actors would need to become politically powerful enough to threaten the functioning of the machine, as it seeks to deliver votes and distribute favors and access.

The machine would respond to such a threat by trying to dismantle the actor through cooption or discredit its goals, but should the actor be successful in its opposition, several outcomes are possible. The actor could succeed in convincing the machine to enact the coalition’s policy goals, but fail to gain accession into the machine’s structured system of exchanges. This would effectively maintain a high threshold of disruption from the actor if it wished to enact additional policy preferences. The actor could retain the ear of sympathetic actors in the machine, perhaps maintaining influence but still excluded from the exchange of services. This would reduce the effort required to implement additional policy preferences but not grant the actor any decision-making power. As the best outcome for actors, the regional machine could integrate the actor into the machine’s structure. This integration could simply be as an addition the other extant actors or, if the policy debate involved an extant actor in the machine, the newly added actor could replace the opposition, which would have lost the battle for political supremacy. Each of these outcomes each carry existential risks to the machine, as instability in the machine’s structure signals vulnerability, endangering its efficacy for the

82 regional executive seeking to win the next election or eroding the center’s willingness to support regional executives, and thus endangering the other actors’ confidence in the executive’s ability to provide access and distribute services.

While a stylized depiction, this model of understanding the center-periphery dynamics in Russia gives us a better picture to understand the political behavior of regional governments in an increasingly centralized Russian political environment.

Through United Russia’s political and financial resources, the federal government established a principal-agent relationship with regional governments, as opposed to a bargaining model, where the two actors enjoy an equitable relationship.36 Since 2003, it is within this more confined political landscape that regional governments would have to work to pursue their agendas. Despite centralization, regionalism has not disappeared from Russian politics, but rather, it is an active agenda pursued in emerging policy arenas, as this dissertation will prove through the case of migration politics.

3.3 Political Economy of Migration Politics

After broadening the concept of regionalism to include new policy arenas, and having established political machines as the primary form of regional politics, I now turn to answer a principle question in the migration politics literature: why do individuals, groups, and institutions become involved in the migration politics debate? Consulting the migration politics literature to undergird the theoretical basis of this investigation of migration politics is necessary, lest we imagine policy issues as leaves adrift in the wind,

36 Sharitdunova (2011) argues that a principal-agent model can be used to interpret Yeltsin-era politics with greater effect than a bargaining model. I do not mean to suggest that the bargaining model is a superior analytical lens through which to understand Yeltsin-era politics. I simply seek to argue that the use of bilateral treaties and the rise of United Russia, the bargaining model ceases to operate as a useful analytical framework.

83 all equally open for regional executives in Russia to assert their authority. Instead, political machines are responding to certain incentives and changes, and we must explore how this operates. With a framework for the origin of preferences, we can then begin an earnest exploration of hypotheses for influential factors.

Following the analysis of Freeman and Kessler,37 arguments in the migration policy literature can be classified into three broad explanations: statist, institutional, and interest group.38 Statist explanations have conceptualized a state that pursues specific goals primarily when constructing and implementing policies, such as security39 or regulation40. Statist arguments suffer from underspecified motives for the implemented policies, insisting that a singular “national interest” exists but with “few guidelines for determining what the national interest is.”41 Institutionalist explanations reject a monolithic view of the state and focuses on the role competing bureaucracies42 and political parties43, which can assist in highlighting process, but also requires assumptions

37 Gary P. Freeman and Alan K. Kessler, “Political Economy and Migration Policy,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 4 (May 2008): 655–78. 38 Janoski and Way identify a fourth explanation of migration politics: identity. The effects of identity, xenophobia, and racism will play a prominent role through this dissertation, but as a broad category of investigation in political science, studies of identity fall under interest group explanations for migration policy. For more, see Thomas Janoski and Fengjuan Wang, “The Politics of Immigration and National Integration,” in The Handbook of Political Sociology: States, Civil Societies, and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 630–54. 39 David Ben-Gurion, The Restored State of Israel (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1969); Ole Waever et al., eds., Identity, Migration, and the New Security Agenda in Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Myron Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis: Challenge to States and to Human Rights (New York: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1995); Alexseev, Immigration Phobia and the Security Dillema: Russia, Europe, and the United States. 40 Tomas Hammar, European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Douglas S Massey, “International Migration at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century: The Role of the State,” Population and Development Review 25, no. 1 (1999): 303–23. 41 Freeman and Kessler, “Political Economy and Migration Policy,” pg 658-659. 42 Kitty Calavita, Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (New York: Routledge, 1992); Marc R Rosenblum, “The Transnational Politics of US Immigration Policy” (LaJolla, CA: Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, 2004). 43 Money Jeanette, Fences and Neighbors: The Political Geography of Immigration Control (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Martin A. Schain, “The Extreme-Right and Immigration Policy-Making: Measuring Direct and Indirect Effects,” West European Politics 29, no. 2 (March 2006): 270–89.

84 concerning an institution’s preferences. Interest group explanations highlight the behavior of individuals, studying the conditions that lead to coalition-forming and how individuals navigate the pursuit of their preferences.44 The individual approach largely suffers from an inability to identify interests from a theoretical standpoint prior to their involvement in migration politics.

These shortcomings have left migration politics with poorly specified theoretical underpinnings, which this dissertation will seek to overcome by resting on the insights of the political economy literature. Though I take an institutional approach, not only via my disaggregated analysis of the state into subnational units, but also through my focus on

“brick and mortar” institutions as the actors of interest, i.e. socio-political organizations, bureaucracies, firms, and offices of government that have identifiable physical addresses involved in the migration debate,45 I do not accept these institutions preferences as given.

The interests of these institutions are the result of a cost benefit analysis and are, therefore, responsive to changes in the effects associated with international labor migration.

Adapting Wilson’s46 framework, Freeman47 predicts modes of politics based on the concentration of costs and benefits of a given policy within a polity, offering us a

44 James G Gimpel and James R. Edwards, Jr., The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999); Leah Haus, “Openings in the Wall: Transnational Migrants, Labor Unions, and U.S. Immigration Policy,” International Organization 49, no. 2 (1995): 285–313; Julie R Watts, Immigration Policy and the Challenge of Globalization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 45 By focusing on these types of organizations and institutions, I separate myself from studies classified in the interest group category. This prevents my study from considering “flash pan” social movements or groups with a potent but informal digital presence. While this will cause my study to miss some of the micro-level mechanisms related to migration policy, I am fundamentally interested in how migration politics has altered regional institutional arrangements, a bias I must acknowledge in my analysis. 46 James Q Wilson, The Politics of Regulation (New York: Harper, 1980). 47 Gary P. Freeman, “Modes of Immigration Politics in Liberal Democratic States,” International Migration Review 29, no. 4 (1995): 881.

85 conceptual landscape by which to understand four potential political modes for migration politics: client, entrepreneurial, interest group, and majoritarian. When benefits and costs are concentrated, the framework suggests we will see interest groups form readily to advocate for the respective actors, both “winners and losers,” but the outcome is difficult to predict. In situations where the benefits are concentrated but the costs are diffuse, a client mode of politics exists as the state responds to the specific actors that mobilize to ensure access to the concentrated benefits, yielding a more expansive immigration policy.

When it is the costs that are concentrated and the benefits are diffuse, an entrepreneurial mode emerges in which political actors mobilize to restrict migration. When both costs and benefits are diffuse, majoritarian politics takes precedence, but this mode offers no predictions towards policy outcomes.

Freeman predicts that in democracies the client political mode is the most likely, since most citizens are “rationally ignorant of many issues because the incentives to become informed fail to override the costs of obtaining information”48, whereas those that stand to benefit from greater labor immigration have the incentives to pursue lobbying their government for a more expansive labor migration policy. Yet Freeman49 acknowledges that these modes are not static and economic recessions or shifts in migration streams affect the concentration of costs and benefits, causing the political mode to move from client to interest group, along with a corresponding increase in political conflict between varying interests. In Russia’s industrialized economy and the increasing scale and complexity of labor migration patterns from 2002 to 2012, we have a

48 Ibid, pg 883. 49 Gary P. Freeman, “Political Science and Comparative Immigration Politics” (Conference on the Political Economy of Immigration, Tulane University, New Orleans, 2000), 1–26.

86 theoretical basis to anticipate a shift from the client political mode to an interest group mode, as more individuals, firms, and organizations began to experience benefits and costs of labor migration. In the interest group political mode, we would observe political parties, trade groups, firms, and civil society organizations begin to lobby their local and regional government officials and threaten the stability of the political machine, necessitating a political reaction from regional executives.

3.4 Integrating the Role of Threat Perception

While a helpful framework that offers greater theoretical clarity for the origins of preferences than the statist, institutional, and interest group approaches, Freeman’s50 iteration of the Wilson51 framework suffers from an assumption that only material benefits or costs create the incentives necessary to encourage collective action,52 which leaves us with incomplete picture of the volatility in migration politics. Freeman’s53 descriptions of a shift from client to interest group politics hints at unincorporated interests at play, like when he notes the increasing cases of “scapegoating migrants for a variety of social ills”54 throughout Europe, which has only increased since he noted these trends.55 Threat perception is a powerful facet of migration politics, receiving considerable attention in sociological literatures. While there is a myriad of models for threat perception,56 the majority operate on two key assumptions: groups compete for

50 Freeman, “Modes of Immigration Politics in Liberal Democratic States.” 51 Wilson, The Politics of Regulation. 52 Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 53 Freeman, “Political Science and Comparative Immigration Politics”; G. P. Freeman, “Comparative Analysis of Immigration Politics: A Retrospective,” American Behavioral Scientist 55, no. 12 (December 1, 2011): 1541–60. 54 Freeman, “Political Science and Comparative Immigration Politics,” pg 3. 55 Schain, “The Extreme-Right and Immigration Policy-Making”; Anthony M Messina, The Logics and Politics of Post-WWII Migration to Western Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 56 Janoski and Wang, “The Politics of Immigration and National Integration.”

87 resources with the perception that the competition is zero-sum57 and the dominant group in the social hierarchy will respond to changes in the status quo to maintain their superior position58. These two assumptions allow us to conceptualize “resources” beyond simple economic resources, such as wages, to social resources, such as recognition of religious holidays. In doing so, my project will be able to better capture the range of responses to international labor migration in the Russian case.

Since the majority of migrants in Russia during the 21st century are labor migrants seeking employment, we cannot ignore the fact that migrants and natives are operating in a common economic space, and so competition is inherent. Regions will differ, however, in the extent to which native and foreign labor compete in different sectors of the economy, a characteristic known as segmented labor markets.59 Recent labor migration into Russia seeks to fill labor demands in the low-skill sectors, such as construction or trade. From one context to another, migrants may be in a segmented labor market or not, even within the same industry, depending on the employment opportunities. For example, many labor migrants work in construction, yet they are likely filling in the lowest rungs of the construction labor market, whereas native Russian labor may maintain the higher skilled managerial positions without competing with immigrant labor. In industries or economic sectors where native and foreign labor do compete for the same positions, this can generate rancorous opposition to immigration due to a threat

57 Lawrence Bobo, “Whites’ Opposition to Busing: Symbolic Racism or Realistic Group Conflict?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45, no. 6 (1983): 1196–1210. 58 Felicia Pratto et al., “Social Dominance Orientation: A Personality Variable Predicting Social and Political Attitudes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (n.d.): 741–63. 59 Michael J. Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Helga Leitner, “International Migrationa Nd the Politics of Admission and Exclusion in Postwar Europe,” Political Geography 14, no. 3 (1995): 359–78.

88 of increased competition for employment. Yet studies have shown that the perception of economic deprivation by the native labor force in relation to migrants, such as heightened wealth inequality or disparate rates of unemployment in the native population, may help generate economic or existential threat perceptions, which have been demonstrated to overpower other conditional variables.60 This reinforces the need to not rely solely on material-based rational actor models and include perception as a paramount motivator for group-threat reactions.

To address the previously-stated shortcomings of relying exclusively on materialist rational models, I utilize the instrumental model of group conflict and

Blumer’s 61 seminal conflict theory. The instrumental model of group conflict assumes that perceived competition for resources will cause groups to create institutions to increase their respective group’s competitiveness or decrease the threatening group’s competitiveness62. The instrumental model also states that political and social power and position should be included conceptually as resources, in addition to economic resources.

Taking such a broad concept of resources and corresponding potential sources of conflict, this project will also adopt Blumer’s model in which perception of competition

60 Jeanette, Fences and Neighbors: The Political Geography of Immigration Control; Joel S Fetzer, Public Attitudes Toward Immigration in the United States, France, and Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Robert M Kunovich, “Social Structural Position and Prejudice: An Exploration of Cross-National Differences in Regression Slopes,” Social Science Research 33, no. 1 (March 2004): 20–44; Alexseev, Immigration Phobia and the Security Dillema: Russia, Europe, and the United States; Claudine Gay, “Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes Towards Latinos,” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 4 (2006): 982–97. 61 Herbert Blumer, “Race Prejudice as a Sense of Group Position,” Pacific Sociological Review 1, no. 1 (1958): 3–7. 62 Victoria Esses, Lynne M Jackson, and Tamara L Armstrong, “Intergroup Competition and Attitudes Toward Immigrants and Immigration: An Instrumental Model of Group Conflict,” Journal of Social Issues 54, no. 4 (1998): 699–724; Victoria Esses et al., “The Immigration Dilemma: The Role of Perceived Group Competition, Ethnic Prejudice, and National Identity,” Journal of Social Issues 57, no. 3 (2001): 389–412.

89 substantiates the threat. In line with previous studies,63 Blumer’s model does not assume rationality of groups, since threats only need to be perceived to affect intergroup dynamics.64 Thus, this project assumes that perceived threats from migrants, regardless of their materiality or factual basis, are sufficient to affect actors’ understanding of the costs and benefits of migration and thus, their policy preferences, reducing the barriers to collective action. This does not suggest that perceived threats are guaranteed to affect the political mode of a migration policy debate, but rather argues that perceived threats alone can create the conditions necessary to overcome the respective collective action problems to create coordinate and create the institutions and organizations necessary to pursue their policy preferences.

Having included threat perception into my account of the interest group mode of politics, I have a complete theoretical account of the origins of regional migration politics in Russia. The most common organization of political life in Russia’s regions is through political machines, many of which were successful in the 1990s in securing heightened sovereignty from the federal government in exchange for political support. As the federal government consolidated political power and curtailed regional sovereignty, regional political machines were allowed to remain in place as long as United Russia was the dominant political party in regional elections within a principal-agent model.

Simultaneously, international labor migration increased significantly, generating new costs and benefits, material or perceived, which provided incentives for overcoming

63 Gordon W Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Publication Company, 1954). 64 As Lincoln Quillian notes, Blumer’s model escapes the paradox of zero-sum logic existing in models that assume rationality and only consider threats for which there is observable competition. For example, zero- sum logic of economic competition is invalid by definition when the economy is growing. See Lincoln Quillian, “Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti- Immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe,” American Sociological Review 60, no. 4 (1995): 586–611.

90 collective action and creating of socio-political organizations or economic associations to advocate for their preferences within the extant structure of a regional political machine.

Yet this theoretical framework does not explain why we do not observe every region in Russia pursuing independent regional migration policies nor does it explain the characteristics of these policies. In order to explain these outcomes, I now turn to the structural factors emphasized in the regionalism literature that have previously been found to contribute to a region’s likelihood to engage in regionalism.

3.5 Economic Factors

Since contemporary labor migration flows are the primary focus of this project, economic factors are expected to be among the most influential in determining regional migration policies. The underlying principles for economic demand for migrant labor are straightforward, most notably the opportunity for employers to pay lower wages and for employers to overcome shortages in local labor markets. These two basic issues can create for demand of migrant labor across all sectors in a modern economy, though the demand is typically higher for low-skill or manual labor-intensive industries, such as construction. The demand for migrant labor by firms, which can increase profits through reducing labor costs and increasing productivity, runs counter to the negative public opinion surrounding migration in Russia, as discussed in Chapter 1. The tension between these two forces requires a careful examination of the economic factors undergirding regional migration policy, a requirement reinforced by the importance economic factors have played in our understanding of regionalism in Russia.

91 As previously discussed, Treisman’s work on fiscal transfers and regionalism65 suggests that regions with larger economies are likely to be able to pursue independent migration policies. Treisman’s analyses illuminated the power of a region’s relative bargaining strength via fiscal transfers for the center, and demonstrated that threatening to withhold transfers yielded more concessions from the Yeltsin administration. Thus, the larger a regional economy, the more likely a region could sustain itself through taxes, not rely on transfers from the center, and exert leverage on the federal government. Yet as stated previously, regionalism in contemporary regional politics functions less as a bargaining game, in which each side attempts to gain leverage on the other. Instead, a larger regional economy and the correspondingly higher revenues creates a situation in which a region is more likely to pursue regionalism. Wealthier regions will have greater resources with which to implement independent regional migration policies, whether they be integrationist or exclusionary. Based on Treisman’s work, therefore, I expect that the larger a regional economy, the more likely a region will pursue an independent migration policy.

The demand for migrant labor, however, is not wholly dependent on an economy’s size, but is instead a function of available labor and potential for profits, and so there is the possibility for poorer regions to pursue migration policies to satisfy demands in the regional economy. Firm-level arguments can assist us in identifying potentially influential factors, particularly given the fundamental role political machines in regional economies. Kathryn Stoner-Weiss66, writing contemporarily with Treisman,

65 Treisman, “The Politics of Intergovernmental Transfers in Post-Soviet Russia”; Treisman, “Fiscal Redistribution in a Fragile Federation.” 66 kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance (Princeton: Princeton Univesrity Press, 1997).

92 convincingly argues that the higher concentration of economic resources within a region, the higher the regional government performance. Stoner-Weiss finds that in the economic uncertainty of the 1990s, concentrated economic resources, “in terms of sector, labor, assets, and productive output,”67 reduce barriers for coordination amongst economic actors, which increases the likelihood of consensus building among economic and political actors, thus yielding concrete economic goals, trade policies, and greater efficiency in government functions. Stoner-Weiss “demonstrates successful reform efforts involve more than merely getting the institutions right,”68 and underscores the importance of economic structural factors. This framework is applicable for migration policy, since the federal government’s shifting migration policy creates considerable uncertainty for regional governments. The directionality of this cooperation is unclear, as the coalitions formed may not benefit from labor migration, and thus we cannot predict whether these coalitions will seek expansionary or integrationist policies. Nevertheless, I expect that the more concentrated a regional economy, the more likely a region will pursue an independent migration policy.

3.6 Ethnicity

Ethnic identity has proven itself to be among of the most powerful forces in post-

Soviet politics, and it continues to play a central role in contemporary migration politics in Russia. As mentioned previously, the USSR’s federal structure and respective territorial divisions derived their very names and existence as political units by the political activities of ethnic groups. These borders of geography and boundaries of

67 Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance, pg xiii. 68 Ibid, pg 53.

93 identity were reified during the disintegration of the Soviet Union, as “titular nationalities,” e.g. Lithuanians in Lithuania and Tatars in Tatarstan, organized political movements, harnessing the mobilizing power of ethnic identity.69

These ethnic mobilizations are a result of the recognition of the importance of non-Russian ethnic identities and such movements provide ethnic republics with a potentially greater institutional capacity to pursue migration policies. Though ethnic republics owe their existence to the mobilization of a specific “titular nationality,” we could predict that increasing rates of labor migration from Central Asia would be less threatening for a polity originating out the basis of ethnic diversity. Conversely, we can also imagine a reaction to increased migration by foreign ethnic groups that perceived the increased diversity as a threat to the “titular” claim of the native ethnic group. Ethnic identity’s salience as a political issue in ethnic republics, and the political networks formed in the wake of ethnic identity mobilization, may reduce coordination costs if migration is framed within identity politics. Furthermore, the success of mobilizing to achieve their constitutional status as ethnic republics ought to increase the likelihood continued engagement in regionalist behavior by ethnic republics. Thus, I expect that ethnic republics are more likely to have independent migration policies than other federal subjects.

3.7 Demographic Factors

69 Dmitry P Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Elise Giuliano, Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

94 Demographic trends of high mortality and low fertility have contributed to

Russia’s overall demand for foreign labor as population growth have remained negative during 2002 and 2012, and regions experiencing the effects of such demographic trends have significantly difference incentives for becoming involved in the immigration debate.

Just as the concentration of economic resources can alter the incentive structure for cooperation, population loss can create new incentives for cooperation across economic sectors, social groups, or political actors. While high mortality and low fertility are of primary concern across Russia’s territory, the deleterious effects of internal migration are less ubiquitous. In a migration chain in which citizens move from villages to medium cities, from medium cities to major cities, and from major cities to global cities, e.g.

Moscow or St Petersburg, internal migration is depriving regions of their educated youth or skilled adults.70 Coupled with national trends, these demographic characteristics could lead to a heightened sense of labor competition with migrants.71 Conversely, the demographic crisis can create the impetus for regional governments to enact programs designed to attract greater rates of labor immigration to maintain economic solvency.

The gravity of these population-level trends for regions leads me to expect that the greater the population loss for a region, the more likely a region will have independent migration policies.

3.8 Perceptions of Competition and Security

70 UNDP, ed., Russia’s Regions: Goals, Challenges, Achievements, National Human Development Report, Russian Federation, 11.2006/07 (Moscow: UNDP Russia, 2007). 71 Mikhail A. Alexseev, “Economic Valuations and Interethnic Fears: Perceptions of Chinese Migration in the Russian Far East,” Journal of Peace Research 40, no. 1 (January 2003): 85–102.

95 Perception has played a powerful role in regionalism, and given the importance of threat perception in the development of preferences on migration policy, this must be carefully considered. Perception of space, resources, and competition have fueled regionalist movements in the past, even in cases where we would not expect it. Yoshiko

Herrera72 convincingly argues that in the majority Russian oblast of Sverdlovsk, a regional political identity was constructed on the basis of ownership of regional economic resources rather than an ethnic identity. This identity was so strong that the regionalist movement in Sverdlovsk sought to receive the same constitutional recognition as ethnic republics were granted, despite the lack of a significant ethnic minority population. But the perception of regional resources being plundered by the central government assisted in galvanizing a political identity that gave regional leaders the leverage necessary to sign an advantageous bilateral treaty with Moscow under the Yeltsin administration.

Similarly, Elise Giuliano’s73 work on ethnic group mobilization questioned why ethnic republics sought such varying levels of autonomy, especially given the early successes of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. Giuliano finds that the successful construction of ethnic grievances assisted in the formation of more effective coalitions within minority ethnic movements. Grievance construction was possible even in cases where discrimination was far less evident than in others. For example, the fledgling Tatar movement in Tatarstan gained popularity amongst Tatars when a grievance of favoritism towards hiring ethnic Russians for managerial positions in industrial manufacturing resonated within the community. In reality, Tatars were among the best represented

72 Yoshiko M. Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 73 Giuliano, Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics.

96 ethnic groups in all of Russia in managerial positions, yet the perception of such grievances assisted in maintaining political support to one of the most influential ethnic mobilizations in Russia.

As discussed earlier, labor migration often ignites threat perceptions concerning the labor market, but it has also generated threat perceptions related to the loss of cultural and social position in regional societies. The perception of competition in the labor market or even the relative success of immigrants to their native counterparts can create a grievance against immigrants. Since labor immigrants are predominantly from Central

Asia from 2002 to 2012, the security concerns of radicalism in Muslim populations has also substantiated fears of terrorist activity, as survey data from Chapter 1 illustrates.

Hostility towards labor migrants has been a theme behind the expansion of the membership in far-right movements in Russia,74 fueled by grievance construction against the perceived erosion of ethnic Russian supremacy in society. These perceptions ought to assist in the formation of organizations seeking regional government intervention in migration policy.

To account for threat perception and its role in regional political landscapes, I incorporate exogenous shocks into my analysis to account for events that can generate a perception of greater competition or security threat amongst the general population.

While I maintain an institutional approach to migration politics, by including exogenous shocks I ensure that this project does not view interests of actors as static and I account for how political machines respond to within these unexpected moments of political

74 Pilkington, Omel’chenko, and Garifzianova, Russia’s Skinheads: Exploring and Rethinking Subcultural Lives.

97 opportunity for all actors involved in the migration debate. Exogenous shocks can be moments for political coordination, as the shift in threat perception can reduce coordination costs, but they can also suddenly shift the interests and strategies of the actors involved in a political machine, which can threaten the stability of political machines. Economic recession can affect the cost-benefit analysis of firms that may wish to utilize migrant labor, potentially shifting the economic interests represented within a political machine, thus affecting policy. Similarly, recession may increase public hostility towards migrants, increasing the likelihood of a regional government’s migration policy becoming a lightning rod for discontent. Additionally, migration has been associated with acts of terrorism and crime in Russian society,75 and we can expect terrorist attacks or crimes committed by migrants can affect threat perception and the similarly threaten to destabilize public opinion or the actors within a political machine.

Therefore, I expect that the exogenous shock of economic recession or terrorist attack have causal repercussions for independent migration policies, whether inspiring their implementation, cancellation, or reformation.

3.9 Political Machines: The Irrelevance of Political Parties

Much has been made of political parties’ role in Russian politics in this chapter, especially United Russia, yet I have little reason to believe political parties and the electoral competition among them in Russia affect regional migration policy outcomes.

The rise of United Russia, as discussed thus far, played a fundamental role in centralization and structuring the relationships among regional governments and the

75 See Chapter 1, section 2.4, for national polling regarding public opinion on migration and threat perception.

98 federal government. The emergence of a national party of power also serves to reduce the spectrum of inter-party ideological and policy diversity.

During the Yeltsin era, the plethora of political parties competing nationwide held the potential for supporting a diverse array of policy solutions, including in the migration debate. Though power regional executives often sought to create political machines through a single regional party of power76 an array of regional parties of power could have given rise to multiple approaches to migration policy. As the number of political parties has diminished over time, however, we have little reason to believe that political parties themselves are responsible for the variation in regional responses to migration that we can observe. Out of the seven national party platforms, only “A Just Russia” has an immigration-friendly view; all other parties, including United Russia, seek to control and reduce the effects of migration.77 This lack of policy diversity amongst major parties also prevents a political marginalization effect, in which far-right parties push mainstream parties to take more restrictionist positions on migration issues, a process we have observed in Western Europe.78

This is not to say that political parties are monolithic and devoid of policy debates within themselves. I simply argue that the number political parties and their relative electoral strength do not assist us in identifying regions which will be more active in the migration debate. The variation in migration policies we observe occurs even though

76 Grigorii Golosov, Political Parties in the Regions of Russia: Democracy Unclaimed (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004); Golosov, “Machine Politics.” 77 Vladimir Mukomel’, “Migration Rhetoric In Program Documents of Russian Political Parties,” Explanatory Note, Socio-Political Module (CARIM-East, September 2012). 78 Tim Bale, “Cinderella and Her Ugly Sisters: The Mainstream and Extreme Right in Europe’s Bipolarising Party Systems,” West European Politics 26, no. 3 (July 2003): 67–90; Joost Van Spanje and Wouter Van Der Brug, “The Party as Pariah: The Exclusion of Anti-Immigration Parties and Its Effect on Their Ideological Positions,” West European Politics 30, no. 5 (November 2007): 1022–40.

99 United Russia is the most powerful party in nearly every region from 2002-2012. More important than whether the Communist Party or United Russia has enjoyed recent electoral success is the structure of the regional political machine. The structure of this machine, which organizations, businesses, and political actors are connected, plays a larger role in determining regional migration outcomes than we would come to expect from both the Western democratic experience of parties competing for votes and the more diverse political landscape of the 1990s.

I argue that the most influential factor in whether a region pursues an independent migration policy is the autonomy and stability of a regional political machine. As discussed, regional political machines operate under two principal-agent systems, balancing themselves in a precious position. Seeking to maintain power by distributing favors and resources to groups in exchange for political or financial support, long-lasting regional machines have often been described as “fiefdoms” in the literature79 for the nearly absolute power the ruling coalition maintains. Yet a large enough misstep by the political elites in the machine can threaten their support amongst regional actors and/or with United Russia, a crucial actor in distributing financial and political support during elections. If a regional political machine relies too heavily on United Russia for its survival and maintenance, it will not wade into the politically tumultuous issue of migration, as this unnecessarily exposes the regional executive.

I will look at the results elections for regional executives and the events surrounding the election to evaluate the autonomy a regional political machine has from

79 Henry Hale, “Explaining Machine Politics in Russia’s Regions: Economy, Ethnicity, and Legacy,” Post- Soviet Affairs 19, no. 3 (January 1, 2003): 228–63.

100 United Russia and defection among regional actors. I conceptualize autonomy as a series of indicators that would suggest a breakdown of a political machine’s autonomy and are tallied as a count to measure the overall health of the political machine. The indicators are as follows.

Gubernatorial elections where the winner wins by less than ten percentage points over the closest competitor. If a candidate wins the election by 53% of the vote, but the closest competitor garnered 43% or more of the vote, I would say this indicates that the machine is showing signs of stress, as it is not effectively guaranteeing electoral results. Within the principal-actor model, this would be noticed by regional actors seeking reliable access to favors and by United Russia, which may see the candidate as an unreliable surrogate.

Run-off Gubernatorial Elections. Similar to the previous indicator, if a gubernatorial election requires a run-off vote, the political machine is under strain. Run-off elections could indicate that United Russia is backing other candidates or that rival politicians have acquired political resources that threaten the autonomy of the political machine at the regional level.

Appointments from Outside the Region. From 2004 to 2012, gubernatorial elections were suspended and instead operate by appointments from Putin, which are approved by a vote in regional legislatures. If a candidate from outside a region is appointed and approved, rather than a local politician, this indicates that the political machine is not autonomous from United Russia’s influence. While the appointment of a diehard opposition candidate is unlikely, autonomous political machines necessitate deference if United Russia is to enjoy the more reliable electoral benefits of such well-functioning machines. Thus, the approval of a politician with no ties to a region indicates that the autonomy of a political machine is in doubt.

Dismissal of a governor. While dismissal of a governor could be for a variety of motivations, from being too unpopular in the region or too prominent an opposition politician, regardless of its motivation, the willingness to do this indicates the political machine is vulnerable to capture by the center or that the governor is no longer a reliable agent at the helm of the political machine.

While focused on elections or the end of terms during appointments, these are precisely the moments that reveal the efficacy of a political machine for both federal and regional actors seeking continued access to benefits through political patronage.

Measured as a count, the dependency index gives us a scale to measure the autonomy of a

101 regional political machine from 2002 to 2012. Since United Russia acts as the party of power, and regional executives are battling for political longevity in a two-level principal-agent game, the greater the dependency index score, the less likely a region will have an independent migration policy.

3.9.1 Composition of a Political Machine

Since political machines are an established system through which favors and resources are distributed to achieve political goals, of utmost importance is the composition of the interests represented within a political machine. Regional political machines were formed in Russia during the 1990s by regional executives to secure electoral victory in the uncertain and under-institutionalized political environment, and we can expect that political machines included political and economic actors that differ from those firms and organizations experiencing and perceiving costs and benefits of contemporary labor migration. Firms operating in rentier sectors, such as petroleum or natural resource extraction, were attractive for politicians due to an easier access to profits, and those firms employing significant proportions of the population could yield greater voter turnout for regional politicians during elections, such as large manufacturing firms. Contemporary labor migration patterns may not complement a political machine’s structure,80 and so it is unclear which interests are represented within a political machine from macro-level economic characteristics.

80 In a survey of 1500 firms across Russia conducted in 2010 by OPORA, small and medium-sized businesses were disproportionately reliant on migrant labor in comparison to large firms. Though migrant labor was utilized by nearly 80% of the businesses surveyed, we should not expect the firms incorporated into political machines in the 1990s to capture the diversity of economic interests within the respective region, especially those of small and medium-sized firms. For further results of the survey, see Elena Tyuryukanova and Yuliya Florinskaya, “Inostranaya Rabochaya Sila Na Rinke Truda Rossii,” Demoscope Weekly, no. 535 (December 10, 2012), http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2012/0535/analit06.php.

102 Composition of a political machine is consequential as we determine why a region pursues integrationist or restrictionist policies, since we expect that those interests represented within the structure are paramount to any interests external to the system of exchanges and favors. The factors that I have discussed thus far assist us in identifying regions where we would should expect independent migration policies, and investigating composition is required for process-tracing and understanding the dynamics of the principal-agent model, autonomy of political machines, and threat perception that affect outcomes in regional migration politics. Within my argument, however, composition is the second-stage of analysis, since a region with a high dependency index score should not maintain an independent migration policy regardless of its composition. This is precisely what the case of Bashkortostan reveals. Despite the region’s wealth, ethnic republic status, and demographic pressures, the region abandons its independent migration policy as its political machine loses autonomy from defection by local actors and influence from United Russia.

3.10 Case Selection

Of primary concern is case selection, and the four cases of this project were carefully selected to control for a variety of possible factors. Previous studies concerning migration politics in Russia81 have focused on the experience of Moscow City and St

Petersburg, since they have been the primary destinations for migrants in the post-Soviet

81 Matthew Light, “Policing Migration in Soviet and Post-Soviet Moscow,” Post-Soviet Affairs 26, no. 4 (October 1, 2010): 275–313; Hilary Hemmings, Remittances, Recession... Returning Home?: The Effects of the 2008 Economic Crisis on Tajik Migrant Labor in Moscow, Eurasian Migration Papers, no. 4 (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Kennan Institute, 2010); M. S. Rozanova, Migration Processes and Challenges in Contemporary Russia: St. Petersburg Case Study, Eurasian Migration Papers ; Number 6 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2012).

103 space. Given its dominance in economic size and political importance before and after the USSR’s collapse, Moscow City has attracted refugees and labor migrants alike, accumulating a Muslim population estimated to be 1.5 million out of approximately 12 million residents.82 Moscow is an obvious case for those wishing to study the experiences of migrants themselves or responses to migration in Russian society. For the purposes of this project, however, Moscow City could only be compared to Saint

Petersburg City, the second-largest city and only other “federal city” in Russia.83 Such a comparison would tell us about how regional migration policies that affect a considerable proportion of labor migrants in Russia, but the experience of these cities would give us little insight into the political responses to labor migration into Russia. As the oft- repeated saying goes, “Moscow is not Russia.”

To account for processes of centralization and for exogenous shocks, I selected my cases from a single Federal District. As part of Putin’s reforms to centralize the

Russian state in 2000, Federal Districts are not constitutionally-recognized territories but rather an extension of the Office of the President, as federal subjects were made to report to their respective district’s envoy, officially titled the “Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of the Russian Federation in a Federal District.” Meant to increase the central government’s oversight of regional politics, every region in Russia has an appointed chief inspector, who reports to the presidential envoy in each District, who in

82 Mansur Mirovalev, “Despite Animosity, Moscow’s Muslims Change the City,” Al Jazeera, July 22, 2015, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/07/animosity-moscow-muslims-change-city- 150720093306298.html. 83 In the Russian Constitution, Moscow City and Saint Petersburg City are constitutionally-recognized territories, which share the same relationship to the federal government as oblasts. Thus, these municipalities are constitutionally equal to regional governments.

104 turn reports to the President.84 By selecting cases within a single Federal District, I control for the significant differences among envoys, such as leadership style and stated goals,85 and thus their effect in centralization within their District. Furthermore, Federal

Districts are territorially contiguous, which helps to reduce the effect of exogenous shocks, such as weather or regional events. Since Federal Districts’ territories can be massive, such as the Far East District’s authority over the eastern third of Russia’s territory, selecting among geographically proximate units ensures that each of my selected cases experiences similar exposure to the effect of an exogenous shock. For example, if a region experiences a terrorist attack, selecting cases from within the same

Federal District should expose each case to the effects of threat perception. Thus, my case selection strategy allows my project to integration the effects of exogenous shocks in my analysis.

Considering these advantages, I selected my cases from within the Volga Federal

District to reduce the influence of dominant regional economies, to offer a greater number of potential cases, and to increase the ethnic diversity available to this study. The

Volga Federal District’s (VFD) authority extends to fourteen regions, the second-highest after the Central District’s eighteen regions, giving this dissertation a greater number of potential cases from which to choose. The VFD also has an advantage over all other

Federal Districts, because it does not have a single urban center that dominates economic and political life in the District. With eight of the top twenty cities in Russia distributed

84 In effect, Federal Districts allow the principal (the federal executive) to monitor its agents (regional executives) in the center-periphery iteration of the two-level model. 85 Nikolai Petrov, “Seven Faces of Putin’s Russia: Federal Districts as the New Level of State—territorial Composition,” Security Dialogue 33, no. 1 (2002): 73–91; Dmitri Mitin, “From Rebellion to Submission: The Evolution of Russian Federalism Under Putin,” Problems of Post-Communism 55, no. 5 (September 1, 2008): 49–61.

105 throughout the VFD, it is less likely that a single regional government’s decision-making holds disproportionate sway over the surrounding regions, an incomparable situation to

Moscow’s dominance in affairs in the Central Federal District, for instance. The VFD is also among the most ethnically diverse Districts, as it includes six ethnic republics, improving my project’s capacity to include ethnic identity’s role in shaping migration policy at the regional level. Economically, the VFD has several of the most industrially productive regions, three of the largest oil and natural gas producers, and some of the most fertile agricultural regions in Russia.86

While by no means representative of the entirety of Russia and ethnic diversity in the VFD allows project to evaluate the effect of mobilizing ethnic identities, discussed previously in this chapter. A limiting factor of some previous studies on regional politics87 was the inclusion of a single ethnic republic in their analysis.88 While these studies sought to incorporate the important legacies of ethnic mobilization,89 including a single ethnic republic prohibits a study from determining whether the conclusions drawn from an ethnic republic are idiosyncratic or representative across ethnic republics. The issues of ethnic identity and threat perception in migration politics amplify the need to include ethnically diverse regions in this project’s investigation of regional migration

86 UNDP, Russia’s Regions; Stephan Sievert, Sergey Zakharov, and Reiner Klingholz, The Waning World Power: The Demographic Future of Russia and the Other Soviet Successor States (Berlin: Berlin Institute for Population and Development, 2011); “Russian Energy - 2014” (Analytical Center for the Government of the Russian Federation, October 2015), http://ac.gov.ru/files/publication/a/6490.pdf; “Russia’s Regions: Drivers of Growth,” Insight Report, Scenarios for the Russian Federation (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2014). 87 Crosston, Shadow Separatism: Implications for Democratic Consolidation. 88 A notable exception is Colton and Hough’s edited volume, which included of several ethnic republics in their analysis of Russia’s first elections. See Timothy J Colton and Jerry F Hough, eds., Growing Pains: Russian Democracy and the Election of 1993 (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1998). 89 Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation; Giuliano, Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics; Henry E Hale, “The Makeup and Breakup of Ethnofederal States: Why Russia Survives Where the USSR Fell,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 1 (2005): 55–70.

106 policies. Given the critical role ethnic republics have played in creating Russia’s federal structure and the important institutional differences between republics and oblasts, better incorporating the experience of ethnic republics is an important methodological contribution of this project.

Taking these concerns into consideration, I have selected the Republics of

Bashkortostan and Tatarstan and the Oblasts of Orenburg and Samara as cases for an investigation of regional migration politics in Russia from 2002 to 2012. Table 12 compares the cases briefly, but I will draw the reader’s attention to several important distinctions. Ethnically, Samara and Orenburg have majority Russian populations

(though both have significant Tatar populations), while Tatarstan has a minority Russian population. 90 Bashkortostan has a more complicated demographic profile with three major ethnic populations – Russian, Tatar, and Bashkir. The Russian population is the largest ethnic group in absolute terms, but the majority of the population is ethnically non-Russian. Economically, manufacturing and energy are dominant sectors, though as subsequent chapters will prove, these sectors have varying interests, and, overall, the regions have much more diversified economies than this simplified overview presents.

Most importantly, however, is the final column, which highlights that by 2012, only

Bashkortostan lacks an independent migration policy.

90 Tatars are a Turkic-speaking, nominally Muslim ethnic group, and they are the second-largest ethnic group in Russia. Neighboring Bashkortostan is home to the majority of Bashkirs, a separate but numerically smaller Turkic-speaking, nominally Muslim ethnic group.

107 Table 12: Depiction of Cases

These four cases do reflect a bias of “most-likely” cases, that is, cases where we would expect regionalism to continue as a guiding principle in regional politics given the theories discussed previously.91 Samara, Bashkortostan, and Tatarstan have all been

“donor regions” since independence,92 which granted these regions tremendous leverage over the Yeltsin administration during the era in which the bargaining model dominated

Russian politics. Though not as economically powerful as its neighbors, Orenburg was

91 I have consciously chosen to describe this case design as “most-likely” rather than Mill’s “most-similar” case design. These cases are similar in that they all have a history of regionalism, but there are important dissimilarities across all four cases. If I were to select cases based strictly on a most-similar case design, I would lose my ability to control for important factors, such as geographic proximity, centralization policies via Federal Districts, or regional political institutions, e.g. ethnic republic vs oblast. See John Stuart Mill and John M Robson, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive : Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974). 92 “Donor regions” refers to regions who contributed more to the federal budget than they received in return. This was a critical distinction for the bargaining model, as these regions had the potential to leverage more from the federal government since they contributed so much to the federal budget.

108 among the first four oblasts to sign a bilateral treaty93, signing its treaty shortly after

Tatarstan and Bashkortostan but before Samara. After Yeltsin’s administration, Tatarstan and Bashkortostan were instrumental in establishing United Russia, but they also fiercely resisted Putin’s centralization policies.94 Further demonstrating rebellious political activity, Samara’s governor ran against Putin in the 1999 elections precisely because of

Putin’s intentions to centralize political power, and remained a vocal critic. All four regions have engaged in regionalism, and so we have reason to believe this experience would increase the likelihood of developing independent migration policies. Yet

Bashkortostan fails to maintain such a policy by 2012, despite a history of regionalism, rich ethnic diversity, significant economic resources, and the institutional capacity of an ethnic republic, thus this dissertation’s focus on the autonomy of political machines.

Further undergirding a basis for comparison, these four cases have experienced similar labor migration patterns since independence, a critical variable to control for in order to understand the driving forces behind regional migration policy. All four regions experienced significant migration in-flows during the First and Second Waves, the latter largely a result of the geographic proximity of all four regions to Central Asia (Orenburg has a lengthy border with Kazakhstan). In the contemporary Third Wave, Orenburg City is the first stop in Russia for trains originating from Central Asia along the route to

Moscow, making the Orenburg Oblast the first stop for many labor migrants traveling by

93 James Hughes, “Managing Secession Potential in the Russian Federation,” Regional & Federal Studies 11, no. 3 (September 2001): 36–68. 94 Alexander A. Sergounin and Mikhail I. Rykhtik, Foreign and Security Policies as a Legal Problem between Center and Regions (ETH Zentrum-Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research, 2002), http://dspace.africaportal.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/7399/1/Foreign%20and%20Security%20Policies %20as%20a%20Legal%20Problem%20between%20Center%20and%20Regions.pdf; Katherine E Graney, Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism in Russia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).

109 rail, the most common form of transportation. The lower wages in the VFD, in comparison to Moscow and St Petersburg, have not made the District a primary destination for migrants historically, but as labor markets have saturated in these centers for migration, labor migrants have made their way to the VFD. While comparatively low numbers of migrants are moving into the four cases selected, previous work95 has proven that even low levels of migration have generated political responses against international migration. Altogether, these four cases give me greater leverage on generalizability for regions that are not historic centers for labor migration, a label applicable to the overwhelming majority of Russian regions.

3.11 Methods

To make its arguments, this dissertation relies on qualitative data gathered in a year of fieldwork from August 2013 to August 2014, during which I conducted interviews with regional academics and migration experts, consulted newspaper archives, and collected a host of secondary research conducted in each region on migration politics.

My interviews with local scholars and migration experts served to include well-informed perspectives of the debates surrounding migration in each region, while also identifying the institutions and organizations experts see as being the most involved, if not efficacious, in the regional migration debate, which assists my identification of the regional political machine as well as verifying accounts reported in newspaper data.96

95 Alexseev, “Economic Valuations and Interethnic Fears: Perceptions of Chinese Migration in the Russian Far East”; Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 96 Unfortunately, due to the events surrounding the annexation of the Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine in 2014, I was unable to interview regional politicians and bureaucratic officials extensively. The uncertainty surrounding the events, and the higher profile migration had gained as a result of the question surrounding the legality of Russian “volunteers” operating in Ukraine closed the door to interviews with those involved

110 Similarly, I collected secondary materials from local experts, organizations, regional bureaucracies, and firms alike to assist in defining interests of these actors, while also mapping the institutional landscape in each region. These data allow me to identify the political machine, the interests represented within its composition, and identify the strategies employed by these actors to achieve their goals.

My newspaper data seeks to trace the involvement of institutions and organizations involved in the migration debate from 2002 to 2012, but also to include exogenous shocks and their effect on the debate altogether, potentially leading towards coalition-building or shifting preferences of institutions and actors. This approach reflects the eventful perspective advocated by Beissinger97, which recognizes the importance of punctuated institutional changes in political structures and policies. The three events I have chosen are the 2004 hostage crisis in Beslan, the 2007 economic crisis, and the 2012 assassination attempt on the Grand Mufti of Tatarstan. By gathering newspaper articles concerning migration in the three months prior to an event and the three months after an event, I hope to understand whether the institutions involved in the migration debate changes, whether the interests of any of these actors shift in response to these events, and whether we see the emergence of new policy in response to these exogenous shocks.

Newspapers force my data to only recognize certain aspects of the migration debate, but as a record of a regional experience, my newspaper archival work gives me

in the discussions on migration policy. I collected minutes from meetings where possible, but regrettably interview data was not collectable. 97 Mark R Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

111 great insight into the regional migration politics. I am most interested in “brick and mortar” institutions and organizations with an expressed interest in migration policy, and these same actors are consulted by regional newspapers in their reporting of regional politics. This assists my project in determining an organization’s efficacies in pursuing its goals, or whether these missions begin to diverge, potentially signaling shifts in preferences. Unfortunately, in using this data, I have very little access to behind the door decision-making, which we know dominates Russian political life. Clearly, many firms employ migrant labor illegally, and the considerable corruption surrounding labor migration98 gives us reason to suspect that the firms not publicly involved in the policy- making process may be seeking to affect policy decision-making behind closed doors.

Such a strategy of corruption may be most effective for firms in regions without a concentration of economic resources, since they may be able to receive firm-specific assistance from regional governments, such as advanced warning of inspections for undocumented migrants. Evaluating the entirety of such clandestine efforts are beyond the scope of this project to investigate, and we should expect that the public consensus- building fails to include such interests. Corruption remains an option for economic actors regardless of the region, and much of this activity will be unobservable for this project.

Though corruption is discussed throughout Russia as a fundamental issue for migration policy, I do not assume corruption affects migration policy systematically and predictably in every region in Russia.

98 Ekaterina Khodzhaeva, “Everyday Interactions between Policemen and Labor Migrants in Russia: The Results of the Participant Observation in Kazan, the Republic of Tatarstan” (Migration: Knowledge Production/Policymaking, Telc, Czech Republic: Multicultural Center Prague, 2010); Dave Bhavna, “Informal Practices and Corruption in Regulation of Labour Migration in Kazakhstan,” Социальная Среда Российских Городов В Восприятии «гастербайтеров» И Местного Населения (IDE-JETRO, 2013).

112 Through a comparative case study design, I test my hypotheses regarding the likelihood of regions to implement regional migration policies. As these regions assert authority in migration policy, it is not a neutral act. The federal government has increased its oversight and control of migration politics writ large, yet we continue to see regional governments risk the ire of the federal government. Even more compelling, despite public opinion on migration in Russia that is overwhelmingly negative, regional governments have sought to spend public monies on programs supporting the integration of migrants. I argue that regional governments’ involvement in regional migration policy reflects the autonomy and stability of their political machines, but also the interests represented within those machines. The shifts in federal migration policy have centralized power and neglected region-specific interests, buttressing regions’ desire to pursue their own agendas. Yet only those machines autonomous of United Russia will pursue these agendas due to the political costs involved, overpowering all other factors.

As such, this project is theory-generating and contributes to a research agenda that will expand its analysis to all Russian regions, a necessary task given the importance labor migration will have for the future of Russia’s economy and demographic health.

113 CHAPTER 3:

TATARSTAN: EXEMPLAR OR EXCEPTION?

The Republic of Tatarstan is 500 miles east of Moscow in the slowly rolling hills of the East European Plain at the confluence of the seemingly interminable Volga River and its largest tributary, the Kama River. A majority of the region’s 3.8 million inhabitants identifies as Tatar (53%), while ethnic Russians account for 40% of the population. As one of the largest producers of oil, petroleum-derived products, and among the most productive industrial and agricultural regions in Russia, Tatarstan has buttressed Russia’s economic health since Russia’s independence as one of few “donor regions,” which send more financial transfers to the federal government than they receive back.1 Led skillfully by Mintimer Shaimiev for nearly twenty years, Tatarstan has played a pivotal role in shaping Russia’s constitution and in assisting the rise of the United

Russia party, all while pursuing a political agenda that questions federal authority and seeks to make Tatarstan a consequential region in the Russian economy and political development.

Among the four cases selected for this project, Tatarstan had the most autonomous political machine, and this provided the Shaimiev administration with the political capacity to implement an ambitious integrative migration policy. After gaining the support of the burgeoning Tatar nationalist movement as the Soviet Union dissolved,

1 J. Paul Goode, Decline of Regionalism in Putin’s Russia (New York: Routledge, 2011).

114 Shaimiev pursued a regionalist political agenda, leveraged the demands for sovereignty against the nascent federal government, and secured control the region’s energy and manufacturing sectors, which gave his political machine the resources to create a powerful patronage network. Reflecting the Tatar nationalist movement’s demands for recognition, Shaimiev created institutions to provide spaces for minority ethnic populations, and these expanded by Shaimiev’s decree to offer services to migrant communities. These integrative institutions evolved in tandem as Tatarstan’s political priorities emphasized economic development and foreign direct investment. Thus, we observe a dynamic migration policy in Tatarstan, growing from a policy of supporting diversity towards a policy that recognizes migration’s role in Tatarstan’s economic development.

Yet this migration policy was not without controversy, as it claimed regional authority in migration policy at a time of centralization, and I argue that the autonomy of

Shaimiev’s political machine is fundamental to facilitating the expansion of its migration policy. Key to the longevity of Shaimiev’s rule was his skill at balancing being an ally to the Putin regime, while extracting concessions from the federal government to benefit

Tatarstan. In the two-level agent-principal model, Shaimiev’s political machine delivered electoral landslides for United Russia and by providing such electoral returns, Shaimiev maintained the political capital to engage in migration policy. Simultaneously,

Shaimiev’s political machine retained control over Tatarstan’s energy sector throughout this time period, providing the resources necessary to keep a regional patronage network functional and prevent the ascent of any political competitors. With this autonomy intact,

115 Tatarstan was able to engage in migration policy but expand it over time, despite the centralization drive of Putin’s political machine.

Furthermore, as the composition of Tatarstan’s political machine shifted to emphasize economic development, we observe a shift in Tatarstan’s migration policy that reflects the importance of the machine’s composition in determining the migration policy the region would take. Despite the origins of Tatarstan’s migration policy in recognizing the ethnic diversity found in the region, the expansion of these policies reflected the machine’s compositional transition towards one of economic development rather than changes in the interethnic relations in the region. Additionally, Tatarstan enjoyed relative demographic stability, and so the regime was not facing a dire demographic collapse that would necessitate an increasingly aggressive migration policy. Similarly, exogenous shocks cannot offer explanatory power regarding the expansion of Tatarstan’s migration policy, though the 2012 assassination attempt of Tatarstan’s grand mufti does real the limitations to Tatarstan’s approach in migration policy.

4.1 Regional Characteristics

In comparison to Russia’s 83 regions,2 Tatarstan stands primarily because of its demographic characteristics, which create foci of political and economic power in the region. As previously stated, the fact that the region is ethnically majority Tatar places the region in the company of very few regions where ethnic Russians are the minority.3

2 The annexation of Crimea has added an ethnic republic and a federal city to the Russian Federation according to the Russian government, but in light of the lack of international recognition of these territories as constitutive of the Russian Federation, this dissertation will not recognize these regions. 3 The only other regions with this characteristic are the fellow ethnic republics of Tuva, Chuvashia, Tuva, Chechnya, Dagestan, Inguishetia, Karbardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Karachay-Cherkessia, and North Ossetia-Alania.

116 This ethnic composition has had profound effects on the political machine in Tatarstan, just as it has in these other majority non-Russian regions,4 but Tatarstan is set apart from these ethnic compatriots due to the size of its population and having two major urban centers. Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and Dagestan are the only republics with populations over 2 million, but only Tatarstan has a second urban center in which over 10% of the population lives – Naberezhnye Chelny.5 Located 140 miles east of Kazan, on the banks of the Kama River, this second urban center has played a fundamental role in Tatarstan’s political and economic development, as both the birthplace of the Tatar nationalist movement and of its policies for ethnic inclusion.6

Reflecting its population distribution, Tatarstan’s has primary economic sectors that are concentrated in several cities, rather than the regional Russian norm, in which a single urban center dominates a region’s economic profile. Tatarstan’s economy has been reliant on oil production for most of the 20th century, and this reliance continues into the 21st, as oil accounted for two-thirds of the region’s exports.7 The oil industry is largely centered in Almetyevsk, a city of 150,000, where Russia’s sixth-largest oil company, TATNEFT, is headquartered. Fifty miles north of Almetyevsk, and just east of

Chelny, the city of Nizhnekamsk is home to Russia’s largest producer of synthetic rubbers and other petrochemicals, reinforcing the importance of oil. Heavy

4 Daniel S. Treisman, “Russia’s ‘Ethnic Revival’: The Separatist Activism of Regional Leaders in a Postcommunist Order,” World Politics 49, no. 2 (1997): 212–49; Dmitry P Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Henry Hale, “Explaining Machine Politics in Russia’s Regions: Economy, Ethnicity, and Legacy,” Post-Soviet Affairs 19, no. 3 (January 1, 2003): 228–63; Elise Giuliano, Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 5 Henceforth, I will refer to this city in its colloquial form of Chelny. 6 Giuliano, Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics. 7 “Tatarstan Profile: General Information about the Republic of Tatarstan” (National Agency for Direct Investment, 2008), http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC85162.pdf.

117 manufacturing in Tatarstan is dominated by KAMAZ, a diesel truck manufacturer located in Chelny, which is the largest diesel truck producer in Russia and the former Soviet

Union. Furthermore, on the opposite bank of the Kama River from Chelny, the city of

Yelabuga is the site of a federal Special Economic Zone (SEZ), which provides tax and economic incentives for foreign direct investment, and specializes in large-scale industrial manufacturing, attracting factories for 3M, Rockwool, and Ford. These urban centers collectively act as the eastern focus point of Tatarstan’s oil and manufacturing sectors, extending its political and economic horizon beyond its capital and largest city.

The metropolitan area surrounding Kazan acts as a western focus point of economic activity, specializing in services and manufacturing. The chemical8 and avionics9 sectors dominate Kazan’s manufacturing base, much like Chelny. Unlike its neighboring economic area, however, the Kazan metropolitan area has well-developed sectors in services and trade. AK Bars Bank is among the top 20 in Russia by capitalization,10 and Kazan has the region’s second SEZ, established for IT-related industries. While accounting for only 3.5% of regional GDP by 2011,11 IT is focused nearly exclusively in Kazan and features heavily in regional investment goals announced in 2012.12 Among Russia’s ten-largest cities, Kazan has large retail sector, attracting global chains like IKEA, and a dynamic construction sector, which was only amplified

8 Kazanorgsintez is the largest producer of polyethylene in Russia. 9 Three companies operate within this sector, helicopter manufacturer Russian Helicopters, KMPO, and a large Tupelov factory. 10 “Tatarstan Profile: General Information about the Republic of Tatarstan.” 11 Ben Aris, “Tatarstan’s High-Tech Transformation,” Russia Beyond The Headlines, September 14, 2011, http://rbth.com/articles/2011/09/14/tatarstans_high-tech_transformation_13410.html. 12 In 2012, the plans were announced for Innopolis, a multi-billion dollar planned city outside Kazan, completely devoted to IT-related industries, akin to Dmitry Medvedev’s Skolkovo project outside of Moscow.

118 with Kazan’s selection to host the 2013 Universiade Games.13 Furthermore, as the seat of political power, public employment buoys the economy through its municipal and regional offices and bureaucracies.

The remaining territory of Tatarstan is inhabited by rural communities and is devoted to agricultural production, which has been supported through transfers of oil wealth. The regional support for agriculture began in the 1990s with policies that set mandatory prices above market rates during the tumultuous period of “shock therapy.”14

With greater economic stability and higher oil prices, Tatarstan discontinued these policies and instead invested in mechanization and consolidation of farmland to provide for greater cultivation.15 Together, these policies have supported rural economies, buoying rural employment rates above 60% in 2010,16 and expanding Tatarstan’s agricultural production to Russia’s third-largest.17

With two major metropolitan areas contributing to one of the largest regional economies, and a minority Russian population, Tatarstan is an outlier amongst Russia’s regions. Yet due to its ambitions, particularly in financing the 2013 Universiade project,

Tatarstan is the third-most indebted region in Russia, behind only Moscow City and

13 A sporting competition for university-age athletes, modeled on the Olympic Games, 30 sporting venues were constructed specifically for the Games as well as dormitories for 14,000 athletes. See “27th Summer Universiade in Kazan, July 6-17 2013,” http://kazan2013.com/en/sportobjects/competitions. 14 Katherine E Graney, Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism in Russia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). 15 Vassily Uzun, ed., Prospects of the Farming Sector and Rural Development in View of Food Security: The Case of the Russian Federation, JRC Scientific and Policy Reports (Luxembourg: Publ. Office of the European Union, 2014). 16 Ibid. 17 Stephan Sievert, Sergey Zakharov, and Reiner Klingholz, The Waning World Power: The Demographic Future of Russia and the Other Soviet Successor States (Berlin: Berlin Institute for Population and Development, 2011).

119 Moscow Oblast.18 This has left the regional budget more reliant on oil prices, undermining the diversification the regional government has sought, particularly as it has pursued financing other large-scale infrastructure projects, e.g., Innopolis. Though this dissertation is concerned with the time frame of 2002-2012, the long-term macroeconomic consequences of more than doubling the regional debt between March

2010 and March 201219 for the financial and economic health of Tatarstan cannot go unnoticed. Despite its wealth and prominence in the Russian economy, the region has taken risks that could threaten what it has achieved since Russia’s independence. And with this macroeconomic picture in mind, we now turn our attention to the political machine that has undergirded the economic development of Tatarstan.

4.2.1 Formation of the Political Machine

Tatarstan’s regional political machine began with the mobilization of Tatar ethnic identity, which provided the nascent regional government with broad political support.20

At the time of the USSR’s collapse, Tatarstan was recognized within the Soviet institutional structure as one of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republics (ASSR), which were subordinate to the 13 constitutive Union Republics of the Soviet Union but enjoyed greater political recognition than all other subnational units. At the time of the

USSR’s demise, Mintimer Shaimiev was the First Secretary of the Communist Party in

Tatarstan, and in the political reshuffling of 1989-1990, he was elected the Speaker of the

18 Ibid. 19 “Dynamics: Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation,” Public Debt of Republic of Tatarstan, January 1, 2015, http://info.minfin.ru/debt_subj.php. 20 The Russian Federation’s formation in the wake of the USSR’s dissolution was a complex affair at the international and domestic level, and so for the sake of brevity, I will only cover the processes that concern the formation of the regional machine in Tatarstan.

120 Supreme Soviet. In 1991, Tatarstan declared itself an SSR, a designation which would put Tatarstan on par with the Russian SSR, in effect, declaring sovereignty. Famously,

Tatarstan refused to sign the Federation Treaty, which sought to bind all the subnational units within Russia to the same Constitution, and Shaimiev held a sovereignty referendum, in which the majority supported independence for Tatarstan.

Shaimiev’s ability to advance such a radical political agenda rested on the successful formation of the Tatar Public Center (TPC) in Tatarstan, which sought to bring together Tatars under a united political banner to push for greater autonomy.21 Beginning in 1988, the TPC began organizing on behalf of ethnic Tatars, articulating a grievance of ethnic discrimination.22 This movement began in Chelny, where activists claimed that managerial positions at KamAZ had overwhelmingly gone to ethnic Russians at the expense of the Tatar majority. This grievance had greater initial resonance in Chelny than

Kazan, since the political elite at the regional level were well-represented by Tatars, e.g.,

Shaimiev himself is Tatar.23 The TPC expanded rapidly, utilizing the academic community in Kazan to hold its first Congress and publish works in academic journals and gaining members through the Tatar members of the Communist Party itself, which assisted in its rapid growth. Organizing alongside pro-democracy groups allowed the

TPC to gain the grassroots networks to organize outside Chelny and Kazan, reaching every city in Tatarstan and even cities outside the region. At a congress held one year after its founding the TPC attracted attendees from 32 cities outside the region, and the

21 Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation. 22 Giuliano, Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics. 23 Dmitry Gorenburg, “Not with One Voice: An Explanation of Intragroup Variation in Nationalist Sentiment,” World Politics 53, no. 1 (2000): 115–142.

121 total number of chapters would explode to 130 by 1994.24 Organizing along the combined frustrations of cultural suppression and economic grievance of perceived ethnic discrimination, the TPC creating a powerful minority ethnic nationalism movement that

Shaimiev aligned with quickly. Bolstered by the strength of TPC’s grassroots organization and its calls for democratic rule, Shaimiev was able to play a dual role as populist and Tatar nationalist in his negotiations with Moscow. This first materialized in the refusal to sign the Federal Treaty in 1992, which only Chechnya and Tatarstan refused to join. But instead of declaring independence, as Chechnya did, Tatarstan worked towards a treaty with Moscow, securing a special status within the Russian

Federation. This strategy became known as the “Tatarstan plan,” and more than half of the regional governments in Russia would negotiate their own treaties during Yeltsin’s administration, particularly in the lead-up to the 1996 elections.25 For Tatarstan, the 1994 treaty gave the region a greater share of tax revenues and greater discretion on issues such as education than other regions at the time, as well as the political symbolism of a treaty with the federal government. Furthermore, the treaty stipulates that regional and federal bodies jointly exercise powers related to the “implementation of a general policy in the social sphere: employment of the population, migration processes, social protection, including social security”26. The bilateral treaties signed by other regions differed considerably, based on differences in regional interests and the capacity of the

24 Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation. 25 For the Yeltsin administration, securing the support of regional executives was an electoral strategy for securing a second term. 26 “КЦФПП: Договор РФ И РТ От 15.02.1994 - Договор Российской Федерации И Республики Татарстан «О Разграничении Предметов Ведения И Взаимном Делегировании Полномочий Между Органами Государственной Власти Российской Федерации И Органами Государственной Власти Республики Татарстан» От 15 Февраля 1994 Г.,” accessed March 24, 2016, http://www.kazanfed.ru/docum/dogovor/1/.

122 respective region to leverage their strengths against the federal government in negotiations.27 These newly secured victories for Tatarstan gave the Shaimiev administration the political legitimacy to create a regional political machine without federal interference, funding its patronage networks through the revenue streams provided by the bilateral treaty.

4.2.2 The Actors of the Machine

Utilizing the recently acquired autonomy, the Shaimiev administration did not participate in the federal “shock therapy” policies, and instead slowly privatized major industries and buoyed prices of locally-produced goods. As mentioned previously, keeping prices artificially high for agricultural goods yielded tremendous support for the

Shaimiev administration in the countryside,28 and the regional budget also funded additional housing construction in urban areas.29 In a survey of perceptions regarding economic futures, in comparison with neighboring Samara oblast, residents in Tatarstan perceived their economic position considerably higher than their peers, and this perception was reflected in popularity the Shaimiev administration enjoyed.30

27 For example, a region with few mineral resources will have little interest in negotiating a lower tax rate on revenues from extracted resources in comparison to Tatarstan. Differences amongst regions with respect to population size, especially important for delivering votes to Yeltsin if negotiations were held closer to elections, and differences in the presence of nationally significant economic enterprises, to name only two relevant factors, contribute to the variation among the bilateral treaties. For more detailed accounts, see Matthew Crosston, Shadow Separatism: Implications for Democratic Consolidation, Post- Soviet Politics (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2004); Donna Bahry, “The New Federalism and the Paradoxes of Regional Sovereignty in Russia,” Comparative Politics 37, no. 2 (January 1, 2005): 127, doi:10.2307/20072879. 28 K. Matsuzato, “From Ethno-Bonapartism to Centralized Caciquismo: Characteristics and Origins of the Tatarstan Political Regime, 1900-2000,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 17, no. 4 (December 2001): 43–77. 29 Graney, Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism in Russia. 30 Ibid.

123 The redistribution of regional revenues to rural communities ensured their loyalty to the regime, but the Shaimiev administration needed to take steps to secure continued access to these resources in order to build a robust political machine. The single-largest asset in its ability to fund its political machine is the regional oil company TatNeft, especially under the terms of the treaty with Moscow that allowed Tatarstan to retain a greater share of revenue. Crucially for undergirding the regional political machine,

TatNeft’s fields within Tatarstan are mature,31 allowing the bulk of the company’s oil fields to be revenue-producing rather than awaiting significant capital investments for development. To maintain control over this asset, a public joint stock company was created in 1994 in which the Republic of Tatarstan maintained a “golden share,” giving the regional government the authority to reject changes to the board or selling of additional shares. Critically for the political machine, the Prime Minister of Tatarstan from 1998-2010, Rustam Minnikhanov, has served as the Chairman of the Board of

Directors since 2004, and continued to serve even after being appointed the President of

Tatarstan in 2010. The board’s membership has been stable over the years, as the

General Director, Shafagat Takhautdinov, has served in the position since 1999, and the

Minister of Finance, Radik Gaizatullin, has served on the board since 2004.

Maintaining the controlling share in one of Russia’s largest public companies provides stability to regional budgets and development strategies, but the creation of the holding company TAIF in 1995 would also provide considerable stability to the political machine. Through a series of acquisitions and an opaque governing structure, TAIF

31 There are concerns that the fields are past peak production, requiring more intensive methods to maintain oil extraction, but mature fields have the infrastructure in place for such operations and do not require as much capital as new fields.

124 would expand into telecommunications, investments, construction, petrochemicals, and energy. By 2008, TAIF’s holdings were valued at 14 billion USD and accounted for 96% of Tatarstan’s chemical, petrochemical, and oil/gas products.32 In 2005, TAIF was ranked

Russia’s 36th largest private firm, rising to third by 2008, and capturing first place in

2011. Though the financial aspects of TAIF are notoriously opaque, a glaring signal of private-public collusion is that Mintimer Shaimiev’s two sons, Radik and Airat, are the co-owners.33 By securing ownership of most chemical and petroleum-based industries in

Tatarstan, the regional political machine under Mintimer Shaimiev ensured that defection amongst its actors would remain minimal. Furthermore, Shaimiev’s ability to place family in the major private companies not only speaks to the degree of his influence in the company, but also serves to further align TAIF’s business goals and revenues expenditures with the regional political machine and its system of patronage.

The regional government’s ties to KamAZ are less financially lucrative for the region, but due to the firm’s foundational role in Chelny’s economy the regional government sought to buttress its economic health. In the chaos of the 1990s, the firm required financial assistance from the regional government to remain solvent in the face of operating losses, as many of its previous customers were the similarly struggling post-

Soviet republics. Yet the KamAZ’s symbolic importance to the Tatar nationalism movement and the size of its workforce made the firm a valuable asset for securing

32 Ведомости, “«ТАИФ Стоит Не Менее $14 Млрд», - Альберт Шигабутдинов, Генеральный Директор ТАИФ,” July 17, 2008, http://www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2008/07/17/taif-stoit-ne- menee-14-mlrd---albert-shigabutdinov-generalnyj-direktor-taif. 33 In the inaugural ranking of Russian billionaire families, the Russian edition of Forbes ranked the Shaimiev brothers as the fifth-richest family, claiming each brother to be worth 1.15 billion USD. See “10 Богатейших Семей России: Рейтинг Forbes,” http://www.forbes.ru/rating-photogallery/266461-10- bogateishikh-semei-rossii-reiting-forbes.

125 avotes in the region, as KamAZ and TatNeft combined accounted for half the employment in Tatarstan in 1995.34 Assisting the firm towards profitability, the Deputy

Minister of Economy and Industry, Sergei Kogoghin, resigned and was made the CEO of

KamAZ. Kogoghin would also be named a Deputy to Tatarstan’s unicameral State

Council in 2004, ensuring the connection between the state and the firm remained intact.

KamAZ’s relationship to the regional government was less direct than with TAIF and

TatNeft, but in sum, the regional government succeeded in bringing every major firm in the region under its control, providing the means for financing and protecting its political machine.

4.3 A Nationalities Policy Becomes a Migration Policy

The Shaimiev administration utilized the increased tax revenues gained through the 1994 treaty with Moscow to fund several regional initiatives, and among such initiatives was an expansive nationalities policy. Such policies have existed in the

Russian state since Tsarist times, and these policies have oscillated in their purpose, from suppressing the ethnic identities of minority groups to supporting the expression of minority identities. In Tatarstan, local articulations of a nationalities policy began in

Chelny, due to the massive influx of Soviet citizens from across the USSR. Just prior to being selected as the site for KamAZ, Chelny was a grain storage town with approximately 30,000 residents. Once Chelny was selected in 1969, the KamAZ factory was built in two years, and Chelny rapidly expanded to a city of 500,000 people. As one

34 Pauline Jones Luong, “Tatarstan: Elite Bargaining and Ethnic Separatism,” in Growing Pains: Russian Democracy and the Election of 1993, ed. Timothy J. Colton and Jerry F. Hough (Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), 637–66.

126 of the later Soviet industrial projects, KamAZ received a more ethnically diverse workforce than earlier projects.

To support this diverse community, Chelny founded the first House of Friendship, an organization and space to support the celebration of ethnic holidays and identities.

Supported through KamAZ donations, the House of Peoples in Chelny opened in 1987 and became the first of its kind.35 Seeking to build on positive public reception of the

House in Chelny, Mintimer Shaimiev convened the first meeting of the Association of

National Cultural Societies (ANKO) in 1992. After the successful negotiation of the bilateral treaty with Moscow, a House of Friendship was established in Kazan through municipal funds in 1997. In these early stages, the goals of the Houses remained committed to Chelny’s original mission – supporting the cultural expression of all ethnic groups living within the region. The popularity of these institutions did not depend solely on minority ethnicities, as the Houses of Friendship supported Tatar and Russian cultural events. In 2005, Houses of Friendship received primary support from regional coffers and opened additional centers in Nizhnekamsk and four additional cities.36 As the explained by a staff member at the House of Friendship,

“My job is to create the conditions but not to interfere with the work. We do not meddle in their [ethnic communities’] affairs. In fact, the House of Friendship is a resource center, where we provide accommodation, give office equipment, and pay the light bill. And what they are doing - we have no right to interfere in it . . . I say this, ‘In the House of Friendship, ethnic communities come in with the idea and leave with a finished product.’ That is, the idea will be realized.”37

35 Interview with Staff Member, House of Friendship, Naberezhnye Chelny, Russia, 2014. 36 Houses of Friendship still received funding from municipal sources, and these additional funds are critical to the programming provided through the House of Friendship, as regional funds largely cover staff and building maintenance. Ibid. 37 Interview with Staff Member, House of Friendship, Kazan, Russia, June 2014.

127 Convening a second meeting of ANKO in 2007, Mintimer Shaimiev announced the creation of the Assembly of Peoples, which would provide representation to minority ethnic groups. The Assembly is composed of members elected by their respective communities, and these members meet regularly with the heads of regional bureaucracies, such as the regional office of the Ministry of Labor, Employment, and

Social Protection and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. At these meetings, the Assembly voices concerns and seeks cooperation and assistance from the relevant ministries on issues relating to their communities. The Assembly’s financial support from the regional government is readily visible, as the Assembly and the House of Friendship in Kazan were the sole occupants in a new office building in Kazan’s center in 2012, and offices for Assembly members were opened in eight municipalities across the region.

The Houses of Friendship and the Assembly of Peoples provided more tangible programming than cultural support, however, and these institutions became central to the region’s migration policy. Before the House of Friendship was established in Kazan, the

Multinational Sunday School was established in 1995 under the authority of the ANKO, and it hosted free language classes in native minority languages not studied in the public curriculum. Though a simple system, offering these classes at 9am on Sundays, the

Sunday School set the standard for inclusivity in subsequent programs offered through

House of Friendship in Kazan and the Assembly. Aside from providing a space, however, the Sunday School program was volunteer-led, as none of the teachers are paid.

This inclusive program, nevertheless, exposed the House of Friendship in Kazan to the struggles faced by those immigrants from the First and Second Wave who were forced migrants, fleeing violence in Tajikistan or otherwise fearful of ethnic violence.

128 To assist forced migrants in maintaining legal residency in Tatarstan, the House of Friendship in Kazan opened the Center for the Social and Legal Protection of

Foreigners, offering free legal aid to migrants in 2003. Unlike the Sunday School, this legal center was supported with public funds, initially through the municipal budget and later through the regional budget. Furthermore, the office was opened with the expressed cooperation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and by 2007, the program was renamed the Regional Agency of Employment and Legal Assistance to Migrants (RAELAM). In

2007 alone, this agency assisted in securing more than 3000 work permits, 650 residency permits, and citizenship for 80 migrants. By 2010, the RAELAM recorded having assisted more than 30,800 migrants with legal assistance. Yet by 2010, the demand for assistance had increased by 300 percent, which RAELAM believes is a reflection of the demand within the region as well as the reputation the Agency has within the immigrant community.38

Though the Assembly of Peoples is dedicated the same commitment to neutrality in the affairs of the communities represented in the House of Friendship, the Assembly was designed to engage in migration policy. As stated by a staff member of the House of

Friendship,

“We [the House of Friendship] are engaged in culture. We may have a meeting here on our site, and of course some of the work in meetings is carried out by migrants, that is just the way things are . . . The Assembly of Peoples has the migration service, there’s the migrant community.”39

38 “Агентство Занятости Иммигрантам,” http://www.an-tat.ru/ob-assamblee/the-agency-of-employment- of-immigrants/. 39 Interview with Staff Member, House of Friendship, Kazan, Russia.

129 The Assembly’s expressed commitment to migration is obviated by the fact that the inaugural Chair of the Executive Committee worked previously as the director of the

Tatarstan offices of the Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Migration Service. This expertise is crucial to the mission of the Assembly, which was described as,

“a big river, and on one side - it is public, the other side - it is the law enforcement, power structures . . . and I am a two-way traffic bridge. I want no accidents, as we interact with the public, law enforcement, the power structure. We are engaged in these matters [migration policy].”40 As the Assembly acts on behalf of migrants, it is bound by two axioms, however, and this places limits on the Assembly’s ability to advocate for migrants. The first axiom, “One

Nation – One Voice,” is the motto for the Assembly on printed materials, and it seeks to declare an equality among the migrant communities represented in Tatarstan, following the example of the House of Friendship. The second axiom was professed by the Chair of the Assembly as, “Beyond politics, beyond religion,”41 and this prevents the Assembly from taking public stances on political or religious issues that may inflame interethnic conflict within the communities, such as making statements about the ongoing conflict in

Nagorno-Karabakh. While this certainly assists in keeping the Assembly focused on issues of concerning migration, the Assembly is required to be neutral in all public statements, discharging its duties in its meetings with ethnic communities and regional bureaucracies at its roundtable. As it seeks to advocate for migrants, however, this public face of neutrality can frustrate the activities of the Assembly, but as the Chair proudly stated,

“For fifteen years, the ordinance [“beyond politics, beyond religion”] should be the only way to engage in development . . . but life makes us, in the charter we

40 Interview with Staff Member, Assembly of Peoples, Kazan, Russia, 2014. 41 Ibid.

130 have it written, we work, and we began to engage and we continue to deal with migration issues.”42

In 2009, in a bold act to support the Assembly’s efforts, the Shaimiev administration pursued an Agreement of Cooperation in the Field of Migration Policy, which declared the Assembly of Peoples an equal partner with other regional bureaucracies with the authority to review actions and protocols. This agreement elevates the Assembly of Peoples above its previous advisory role and grants it authority to form policy with regional branches of federal bureaucracies, such as the Federal

Migration Service, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Federal Security Service

(FSB).43 This agreement also places RAELAM within the Assembly of Peoples, while requiring the Agency to assist the other regional bureaucracies as they carry out their duties, expanding its mission of the Agency to include development and employment strategies in Tatarstan.44 The Assembly granted migrants representation in government decision-making and recognized the unique needs of migrant communities in comparison to the native population. In effect, the 2009 Agreement deputized the regional offices of federal bureaucracies by ordering them to recognize a regional entity as an equal partner and cooperate with this entity during their respective operations. This is regional executive overreach into a policy arena at the height of centralization by the federal government.

42 Ibid. 43 “Говорим ‘Татарстан’, Подразумеваем ‘мир И Согласие’ (окончание) - Выпуск №1 (009) 2010 Г. - Журнал ‘Наш Дом - Татарстан,’” accessed January 23, 2017, http://www.an-tat.ru/zhurnal-nash-dom- tatarstan/31/2624/. 44 “Соглашение О Взаимодействии В Области Миграционной Политики,” http://www.an- tat.ru/natsionalnaia-politika-v-rt/the-agreement-on-cooperation-in-the-field-of-migration-policy/.

131 The expansion of Tatarstan’s nationalities policy into a migration policy is a result of direct sponsorship of President Shaimiev and reflects regionalist political behavior in an emerging policy arena. The evolution of the Chelny’s original House of Friendship into a regionally-oriented migration policy actor could be explained through mission creep, as the institutions reflected the needs of immigrant communities: from integrative programs for forced migrants to employment support for labor migrants. Yet the manner of this expansion reflects regionalist political behavior, not gradual bureaucratic expansion. Mission creep could be an explanation if the House of Friendship eventually provided all the aforementioned services, but in the case of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiev explicitly sponsored the evolution of the migration policy. Save for the Sunday School,45 each institution and program was founded through executive decree, not with the approval of the legislature. The alterations in funding and stated authority were negotiated by the president’s office and signed by Shaimiev. This confers considerable risk upon President Shaimiev, as any shifts in public opinion or federal intervention would directly affect his office. If it was his intent to distance himself from these programs, we would have observed delegation to other regional officials. Instead, we observe deliberate action on the part of the regional executive to assert regional authority in migration policy, even deputizing the federal bureaucracies charged with enforcement and regulation of migration.

Though Tatarstan’s migration policy did not attempt to invalidate federal migration policy, Shaimiev’s declaration that regional institutions were equal to federal

45 There is no founding charter of the Sunday School, and as a volunteer program, its origins were spontaneous in nature. Though now formally integrated within the Assembly, its programs are not managed directed by the Assembly.

132 bureaucracies was acceptable under the 1994 bilateral treaty but an unauthorized claim of authority under the 2007 bilateral treaty. The original 1994 bilateral treaty with Tatarstan stipulates that regional and federal bodies jointly exercise powers related to the

"implementation of a general policy in the social sphere: employment of the population, migration processes, social protection, including social security."46 Additionally, in another article of the treaty, federal and regional bodies are permitted to create joint commissions with equal footing. Tatarstan negotiating greater autonomy to address these issues of social importance reflects the chaotic situation in the early 1990s with inconsistent federal funding, and Tatarstan sought the ability to intervene as it saw fit.

The second bilateral treaty in 2007, however, only specifies "joint solution of issues related to economic, ecological (as a result of long-term use of oil deposits, taking into account the geological conditions of hydrocarbon production), cultural and other characteristics of the Republic of Tatarstan."47 While migration could be considered one of the “other characteristics,” the 2007 treaty stipulates that any “joint solution” requires the passage of identical legislation in regional and federal legislatures. By specifying this path for cooperation, the federal government sought to curtail the capacity for Tatarstan to act quickly and authoritatively across policy arenas.

Yet by enacting the 2009 Agreement of Cooperation, rather than going through the negotiated protocol for cooperation, Shaimiev asserted an authority that his office and

46 “КЦФПП: Договор РФ И РТ От 15.02.1994 - Договор Российской Федерации И Республики Татарстан «О Разграничении Предметов Ведения И Взаимном Делегировании Полномочий Между Органами Государственной Власти Российской Федерации И Органами Государственной Власти Республики Татарстан» От 15 Февраля 1994 Г.” 47 “Договор О Разграничении Предметов Ведения И Полномочий Между Органами Государственной Власти Российской Федерации И Органами Государственной Власти Республики Татарстан,” accessed March 18, 2017, http://tatarstan.ru/documents/polnomochia.htm.

133 the institutions created by its decrees would be able to make demands on federal bureaucracies. This act carried considerable political risk, as it could invite retribution from the center in future interactions on Shaimiev directly or the emboldened migration policy in Tatarstan. Shaimiev’s approach smacked of the regionalism of the 1990s and reflects the seriousness with which his administration viewed migration policy for

Tatarstan’s economic development.

4.4 Principal-Agent: The Machine Delivers Votes

The expansion of Tatarstan’s migration policy, and the authority claimed therein, did not elicit an immediate response from the federal government due to the regional political machine’s capacity to deliver votes to United Russia, fulfilling its role in the principal-agent relationship. As discussed previously, Tatarstan’s rebellious political behavior prior in the 1990s had hardly earned it good will from the federal government.

The sovereignty referendum and subsequent negotiation of the 1994 bilateral treaty questioned the legitimacy of the federal government, though crucially Tatarstan did not go as far as Chechnya in declaring independence. In 1999, Shaimiev was instrumental in creating the All-Russia political party, chairing the party along with Rakhimov in

Bashkortostan, Aushev in Ingushetia, and Yakovlev in St Petersburg to oppose centralization in the 1999 federal Duma elections. All-Russia joined the Fatherland

Party, chaired by Moscow’s mayor, Luzhkov, to form the Fatherland-All Russia voting bloc to oppose Putin’s Unity Party in the 1999 Duma elections.48 Such open opposition established Shaimiev as a political threat in federal elections, potentially obstructing the

48 For an excellent overview, see Vicki I. Hesli and William M. Reisinger, eds., The 1999-2000 Elections in Russia: Their Impact and Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

134 federal government’s attempts at centralization. In the lead-up to the 2003 Duma elections, however, All-Russia and Fatherland merged with Putin’s United Party to create the United Russia party, thus creating a principal-agent relationship rather than an oppositional relationship.

The primary indicator of the strength of the principal-agent relationship is the delivery of predictable election results to United Russia, and the strength of Tatarstan’s political machine in delivering votes was substantiated throughout 2002 and 2012. In the first Duma elections under the United Russia political banner in 2003, United Russia received more than 84% of the votes cast. In the presidential elections in 2004, Putin received 82% of the vote.49 Through these first federal elections, Shaimiev demonstrated that he could be relied upon to guarantee victories for United Russia. In the years that followed, United Russia received 81% of the vote in the Duma elections in 2007, and

Medvedev would receive 79% of the vote in the 2008 presidential election. And even during the 2011 Duma elections, in which opposition to United Russia was at its peak,

United Russia received 78% of the vote. In the 2012 presidential elections, Putin was re- elected with 82% of Tatarstan’s in support. The stability of these vote totals from 2002 to 2012 revealed the power of the regional political machine. At the regional level,

Shaimiev prevented the rise of any political opponents and guaranteed United Russia’s dominance.

49 “Сведения О Проводящихся Выборах И Референдумах,” accessed January 24, 2017, http://www.tatarstan.vybory.izbirkom.ru/region/region/tatarstan?action=show&root=1000039&tvd=100100 0882990&vrn=1001000882950®ion=16&global=1&sub_region=16&prver=0&pronetvd=null&vibid=1 001000882990&type=227.

135 The critical indicator of Moscow’s approval of Tatarstan’s regional political machine is the continuity of Shaimiev’s leadership as President. After the Beslan terrorist attacks in 2004, a presidential appointment system replaced direct elections for regional executives. In the new system, which lasted until 2013, the President appoints a governor, who was then confirmed through a vote in the respective regional legislature.

This reform was one of several reforms that dramatically increased the power of the federal government and represented a major obstacle for regionalist governors.50 For

Shaimiev, the law had a provision that gave him the ability to remain President of

Tatarstan regardless of the term limits established on his office. Given his record as a leader of regionalism, if Putin believed Shaimiev to be a political threat, he could remove him from office by refusing to appoint him. Nevertheless, Shaimiev was appointed and confirmed by his legislature in 2005, due to Shaimiev’s powerful political machine, his role in leading United Russia, and his successes in moderating Tatar nationalists’ claims for independence. This also served as a signal to regional actors within Tatarstan’s political machine that Shaimiev was still favored by Moscow and capable of distributing resources from the federal government and within the region.

4.5 Regionalism and Politics: Shifts in the Machine

Despite the last section’s seemingly placid account of regional politics, Shaimiev continued to pursue an aggressive regionalist political agenda, even as serious shifts

50 Lynn D. Nelson and Irina Y. Kuzes, “Political and Economic Coordination in Russia’s Federal District Reform: A Study of Four Regions,” Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 4 (June 2003): 507–20; Donna Bahry, “The New Federalism and the Paradoxes of Regional Sovereignty in Russia,” Comparative Politics 37, no. 2 (January 1, 2005): 127; Dmitri Mitin, “From Rebellion to Submission: The Evolution of Russian Federalism Under Putin,” Problems of Post-Communism 55, no. 5 (September 1, 2008): 49–61; Vladimir Gel’man, “Leviathan’s Return: The Policy of Recentralization in Contemporary Russia,” in Federalism and Local Politics in Russia, ed. Cameron Ross and Adrian Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2009), 1–24.

136 occurred in the region’s political machine. In 2005, the same year that Shaimiev was appointed President of Tatarstan, the bilateral treaty that Shaimiev had negotiated with

Yeltsin expired. The Putin administration had made it clear that it would not accept bilateral treaties to be renegotiated, and many regions annulled their bilateral treaties ahead of their stated expiration dates as a show of support for Putin.51 This transformed the center-periphery dynamics within Russia, as tax revenues were standardized nationwide, which in the case of Tatarstan reduced the revenues available to the region, particularly from oil. Though the Shaimiev political machine had incorporated the majority of large-scale industrial enterprises, the new financial situation for the region was a blow to its ability to advance its regionalist agenda.

The expiration of the bilateral treaty was expected, and Tatarstan pursued a myriad of options to expand its economic base. In July 2005, a federal law allowed for the establishment of special economic zones (SEZ) and later that year, a site outside

Chelny was selected for an industrial SEZ, the Alabuga SEZ. This became critical to the region’s development strategy, which sought to attract large-scale investments to expand the industrial base of the region, expand its long-term tax base, and increase the profile of

Tatarstan for investors interested in Russian markets. The Alabuga SEZ was successful quickly, adding Ford-Sollers, Rockwool, and 3M to its list of residents, which was met by praise from federal authorities and the public.

These efforts gave leverage to Tatarstan’s reinvigorated regionalist agenda, particularly in a behind-the-scenes negotiation that took place in Moscow, resulting in the

51 Crosston, Shadow Separatism: Implications for Democratic Consolidation.

137 only second bilateral treaty in Russia. Signed in 2007, this second bilateral treaty did not confer all the economic and political rights from the first treaty, e.g., special tax rates and rights to declare citizenship, yet the symbolic importance of the treaty was undeniable.

The second treaty’s text does not explicitly recognize Tatarstan as a sovereign state, but it does recognize the 1992 referendum and the 1994 bilateral treaty – both of which are fundamental to Tatarstan’s argument for sovereignty.52 Instead, the treaty delineates areas of cooperation between the federal government and Tatarstan and recognizes Tatar as an official language of the Republic of Tatarstan. No other region renegotiated a second bilateral treaty.53 Yet the ratification required two attempts, as the Federation Council rejected the treaty the first time, requiring Putin to re-introduce the treaty a second time five months later, after “convincing” members of the Council.54 These events were a boon to Shaimiev’s administration, proving its continued ability to negotiate with the federal government while also demonstrating its capacity to gain concessions that no other regional government received.

For the regional political machine, this treaty coincided with the establishment of the Assembly of Peoples and gave the Shaimiev administration greater control over the

Tatar nationalist movement. Shaimiev rose to prominence by utilizing the narrative of the Tatar nationalists in Chelny, yet once in power, he moved to ensure this movement would not threaten his rule. In the years since then, Tatarstan had jailed several

52 “КЦФПП: Договор РФ И РТ От 15.02.1994 - Договор Российской Федерации И Республики Татарстан «О Разграничении Предметов Ведения И Взаимном Делегировании Полномочий Между Органами Государственной Власти Российской Федерации И Органами Государственной Власти Республики Татарстан» От 15 Февраля 1994 Г.”; “Договор О Разграничении Предметов Ведения И Полномочий Между Органами Государственной Власти Российской Федерации И Органами Государственной Власти Республики Татарстан.” 53 The President of Bashkortostan announced that he would pursue a similar treaty, yet was unable to do so. 54 Graney, Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism in Russia.

138 prominent Tatar activists on the charges of inciting violence or under the broadly-defined

“extremism” laws.55 Negotiating a second bilateral treaty with the federal government bestowed considerable legitimacy upon the Shaimiev political machine, as the accomplishment was singular in Russia and indicated that the administration could still defend the interests of Tatarstan and the recognition won by the Tatar nationalist movement. The establishment of the Assembly of Peoples also served to create a designated public space to discuss issues relating to national identity, undermining the

TPC’s prominence. This also allowed the regional authorities to police the discourse of the nationalist movement with greater ease. Combined, these political developments reduced the likelihood that Shaimiev or his political machine could be threatened by the same Tatar nationalist movement that brought them to power.

While the Shaimiev administration worked to minimize political opposition within the region, the 2008 financial crisis threatened the stability of the regional political machine. For Tatarstan’s economy, the Great Recession hit its two major exports: oil and diesel trucks. The price of oil dropped from 144USD a barrel to 55USD between May

2008 and November 2008, and the Russian stock markets lost a trillion USD in the same period.56 The reverberations of this economic shock caused KamAZ to reduce production in 2008, though it had already reduced shifts earlier. Chelny’s primary economic engine was sputtering, and a 10% stock purchase by Daimler-Chrysler was not covering the

55 Giuliano, Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics; Яна Александровна Амелина, “Религиозно-Политические Искания Радикальной Части Участников Татарского Национального Движения И Внешний Фактор,” ПРОБЛЕМЫ НАЦИОНАЛЬНОЙ СТРАТЕГИИ, no. 3 (2011): 61–79; Elise Giuliano and Dmitry Gorenburg, “The Unexpectedly Underwhelming Role of Ethnicity in Russian Politics, 1991-2011,” Demokratizatsiya 20, no. 2 (2012): 175. 56 Zeljko Bogetic, “Russian Economic Report No. 17,” 2008, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1805804.

139 financial gap. To save the enterprise, a 49.9% stake in KamAZ was purchased by Rostec,

Russia’s state-owned industrial behemoth.57 Though Kogoghin would remain CEO, preserving the link between Tatarstan’s regional government and the firm, it had essentially been nationalized. Yet at a time of strained regional budgets, Rostec’s intervention saved the regional government from a mortal blow to its legitimacy, and ensured that KamAZ would have access to far greater financial resources to maintain solvency.

The restructuring of KamAZ’s ownership and the collapse of oil prices generated a shift in Tatarstan’s economic development model and political priorities, which became oriented towards attracting foreign direct investment. The early successes of the Alabuga

SEZ led to a consensus towards attracting international investors to improve the economic stability of Tatarstan, as well as to increase its profile within the Russian

Federation. One of the influential factors in this decision was the success of a regionally- funded technological park, Idea, which utilized regional funds to assist business and technological start-ups. Envisioned in 2002, IDEA Park was completed in 2004, and the growth was impressive for the region’s first business incubator. By 2008, the Idea

Technopark was only two years away from paying off the regional government’s investments in its creation and was contributing approximately 400 million rubles to the region’s budget through income taxes.58

Seeking to build on this success, Tatarstan aggressively pursued policies to expand its marketability for technology- and innovation-related foreign investment. To

57 Rostec would include KamAZ in its automobile division, alongside AVTOVaz in the Samara Oblast. 58 “Инновационный Технопарк «ИДЕЯ»,” accessed January 25, 2017, http://www.tpidea.ru/en/page11.

140 overcome the lack of protection for intellectual property in developing economies, the

Shaimiev administration created an “intellectual property registration and management system,”59 which involved the Ministry of Economy and Industry, the Tatarstan Scientific and Technical Information Center, the Republic of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, the

Investment and Venture Fund of the Republic of Tatarstan, and IDEA Park. This system sought to buttress Tatarstan’s success in patent applications, for which the region was seventh in 2004 and fifth in 2006 across Russian regions,60 and to create the necessary institutions for protecting the intellectual property of foreign technology firms, which were lacking at the federal level. Additionally, Tatarstan successfully lobbied for federal funds through an initiative of President Medvedev to support the construction of a second technological park, IT Park, in 2007. Construction was underway at the height of the crisis, and IT Park, Eastern Europe’s largest technological park, was completed by

October 2009.61 Meanwhile, the federal government was spending considerable financial resources on stabilizing the ruble and the Russian economy, stalling the construction and execution of President Medvedev's enormous IT-project in Moscow, Skolkovo.62 This gave Tatarstan’s efforts unexpected momentum, as the Medvedev’s efforts stalled. These ambitious steps by the Shaimiev administration set a new agenda for Tatarstan’s economic development, into which migration policy was integrated.

59 Radii I Salimov and Gaziz Fuatovich Mingaleev, “The Regional Policy of Industrial IPM Services for the Development of Knowledge Potential in Russia,” in Implementing International Services: A Tailorable Method for Market Assessment, Modularization, and Process Transfer, 1st ed. (Germany: Gabler Verlag, 2011), 425–35. 60 Ibid. 61 “Информация,” accessed January 25, 2017, http://mic.tatarstan.ru/rus/info-it.htm. 62 Heralded with great fanfare, Medevdev hoped Skolkovo would become Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley, but building an entire city to fund innovation and IT-related enterprises proved too costly in the wake of the Great Recession. Though still extent, the project has yet to reach its initial construction or investment goals.

141 4.6 Migration Policy, Development, and Tolerance

As Tatarstan’s economic development strategy demanded adjustments in the wake of 2008, the ripple effects of such reorganization rippled throughout regional institutions. The success of the Alabuga SEZ created the institutional momentum to pursue additional incentive-based projects to lure investment. Tatarstan’s regional government would create 11 additional economic zones by 2012, such as HimPark, a chemical-industrial park in Kazan, by relieving firms established in the parks from regional tax collection for varying periods of time.63 These regional industrial parks could not offer the scale of financial incentives as the federally-established SEZs and their financial success can only be evaluated in the long-term, but they nevertheless represent a significant shift in Tatarstan’s development strategy.

The shift towards these large-scale investment projects and their importance to the

Shaimiev administration were reflected in ancillary institutions, such as the provision of legal assistance through RAELAM. A report filed by RAELAM to Shaimiev’s office in

2009 details the efforts made on behalf of the Alabuga SEZ, which is managed by the

Ministry of Economic Development, a regional bureaucracy made equal to the Assembly as part of the 2009 Agreement. The report demonstrates that RAELAM was instrumental in securing employment of 500 Tajik migrants for a factory in the Alabuga SEZ. The report does not stipulate whether these efforts precluded its assistance of other migrants due to limited time and resources, but it demonstrates that RAELAM’s experience in labor migration law was being redirected towards the region’s development strategy. The

63 “Guide to Investment: Republic of Tatarstan” (PwC Russia, 2015).

142 report explicitly signals the alignment of migration policy in Tatarstan towards economic and development priorities.

It could be argued that the report of RAELAM’s annual activities reflects the growth of international labor migration streams that constitute the Third Wave and the overall reduction of refugees and internally displaced persons to Tatarstan. It is reasonable to expect RAELAM to work with labor migrants more in its casework given the transformation of the immigrant population, but the 2009 report shows that the regional executive played a role in directing the Agency’s activities. RAELAM was no longer an organization oriented exclusively towards the needs of the community it served

– it now also responded to the needs of potential employers, and, to government instructions. The 2009 report illuminates an organization that is indeed responding to a shift in migration patterns regarding labor issues, but it is now an accountable and active player in the region’s development strategy.

Just as RAELAM would be a player in the reorganization of Tatarstan’s economic development strategy, the Assembly of Peoples received considerable investment as part of the campaign to encourage foreign investment. The most significant investment for the Assembly was a new five-story building opening in downtown Kazan in 2011. With construction beginning in 2009 utilizing regional funds, this is no small commitment given the state of the Russian economy, which had just stabilized after the 2008 recession. Opened to much fanfare, the building has a façade that is used in promotional materials concerning investment in Tatarstan. Whether information on the Alabuga SEZ, the Idea Park, or Tatarstan in general, the Assembly is mentioned as part of the sales pitch for the region. These documents stress the multicultural social fabric of Tatarstan,

143 highlighting the presence of Houses of Friendship in Chelny, Yelabuga, Nizhnekamsk, and Almetyevesk. Though originating from a nationalities policy designed to leverage

Tatar nationalism for political legitimacy, these integrative organizations were incorporated into the developmental strategy of Tatarstan to confer legitimacy through the ethnic tolerance espoused and practiced by the Houses of Friendship and the

Assembly of Peoples.

While promoting Tatarstan’s multiconfessional and multiethnic society was crucial to attracting foreign investment, the region also embarked on leveraging its

Muslim identity to create additional linkages in the international sphere. One of the primary vehicles for increasing the profile of Tatarstan was through the Organization of

Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which Russia joined as an observer in 2005. Arguing that

Russia’s twenty million Muslims deserved recognition and representation in the international sphere,64 Putin began the accession process to the OIC in 2003 on a state trip to Malaysia, quickly obtaining observer status. Soon after accession, President Shaimiev led a delegation from Tatarstan to official state visits to Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait to present the “investment potential of Tatarstan” and the Alabuga SEZ.65 Shaimiev’s administration built on the success of this trade mission and in June 2008, the Islamic

Development Bank (IDB) sponsored an international investment conference in Kazan to promote investment in Tatarstan, the first such conference held in a OIC non-member

64 Grigory Kosach, “Organization of Islamic Cooperation: Priorities and Policies,” accessed January 13, 2017, http://russiancouncil.ru/en/inner/?id_4=5100. 65 It is worth noting, upon arrival to Damascus, Shaimiev was received under the flags of the Syrian Arab Republic, the Russian Federation, and the Republic of Tatarstan. At the time, Tatarstan was negotiating its second bilateral treaty with Moscow, and the delegation was a show of independence and influence by Shaimiev.Tatar-Inform, “Delegation of Tatarstan Led by RT President Mintimer Shaimiev Arrived in Damascus,” Official Advisor for the Republic of Tatarstan, March 30, 2006, http://shaimiev.tatarstan.ru/eng/news/view/11427.

144 state.66 A month later, Kazan’s former mayor, Kamil Iskhakov, was appointed as the first ambassador to the OIC, a post he would hold until 2011.67 The 2008 IDB conference would inspire the now annual Kazan Summit, first held in 2009, which is an official forum for the Russian Federation and OIC member states. Addressing a range of topics, from investment in Tatarstan to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Kazan Summit has been a vehicle for raising the international profile of Tatarstan and the importance of the region within Russia, steadfast goals in Tatarstan’s expression of regionalism.68

4.7 Minnikhanov: The Machine’s Autonomy Survives Transition

The development strategy shift towards foreign investment and the expansion of

Tatarstan’s migration-related institutions occurred during the height of centralization of migration policy and at a point of weakness for the regional administration. The

Assembly was founded in the same year the FMS introduced the quota system, and the

2009 Agreement, which elevated the role of the Assembly and RAELAM, came into effect at the zenith of federal oversight of migration policy. In December of 2008, Prime

Minister Putin was presented with a call-in question concerning the high quota ceiling despite the economic woes following the economic recession. In response, Putin declared that the quota would be reduced substantially, and a month later, an executive decree slashed the quota for 2009 in half.69 This act displayed the absolute authority the

66 Russia is an observer state in the OIC. 67 Since 2011, the Russian ambassador to Saudi Arabia serves concurrently as the ambassador to the OIC. 68 Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation; Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, “Paradiplomacy in the Russian Regions: Tatarstan’s Search for Statehood,” Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 4 (June 2003): 613–29; Graney, Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism in Russia; Helen M Faller, Nation, Language, Islam: Tatarstan’s Sovereignty Movement (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). 69 Caress Schenk, “Controlling Immigration Manually: Lessons from Moscow (Russia),” Europe-Asia Studies 65, no. 7 (September 2013): 1444–65.

145 federal government claimed in migration policies, just as Tatarstan expanded its activities in migration policy. This served to increase the likelihood of conflict between the principal and its agent in this policy arena, as federal government’s decisions affected the nascent development model being pursued by Tatarstan.

Yet the replacement of Mintimer Shaimiev as President of Tatarstan demonstrated that the regional political machine was not only coherent but also deemed too valuable to disrupt by the federal authorities. Shaimiev’s term was to expire in 2011, and given that he had been Tatarstan’s regional executive since 1989, the transition of power was a moment of opportunity for the federal government. Though the federal government had negotiated a second bilateral treaty with Tatarstan, if there was a moment to dismantle an enduring oppositional regional government, the end of Shaimiev’s term would be the moment. Since gubernatorial elections would not be reinstated until 2012, the presidential appointment process gave Medvedev the opportunity to appoint a more complaisant leader with greater allegiance to the federal government, rather than a regional politician with a history of questioning federal authority. Yet Shaimiev surprised regional and federal authorities when he announced his retirement in 2009, ahead of the end of his term. Working behind closed doors, Shaimiev suggested Rustam

Minnikhanov, the Prime Minister and Chairman of Tatneft, to succeed him. Appointing

Minnikhanov as President would have left Tatarstan’s regional political machine practically untouched, as it would retain control over a prized economic asset and maintain the political status quo.

Despite the irritations Tatarstan had presented the federal government since independence, Medvedev appointed Minnikhanov to be President of Tatarstan, indicating

146 that the regional political machine in Tatarstan provided for the principal’s needs.

Minnikhanov mirrored Medvedev’s background, since Medvedev had been Chairman of

Gazprom while acting as First Deputy Prime Minister, and his accession suggested a similar technocratic approach to governance. While this could have played a role on a personal level for Medvedev, Shaimiev’s popularity throughout the longevity of his career had provided United Russia with regional legitimacy when the party was created.

The diplomatic success of the Kazan Summit offered a pathway to foreign investment from wealthy Gulf States, and the regional government had proven to be an effective manager of economic assets and a reliable donor region to the federal budget. And importantly for the principal-agent relationship, the political machine built under

Shaimiev had never failed to deliver votes for United Russia, and his popularity remained intact through the economic recession. Shaimiev also made statements suggesting that ethnic harmony in Tatarstan could be imperiled if political stability was seriously undermined by appointing an outsider.70 These factors contributed to the appointment of

Rustam Minnikhanov to the presidency in 2010, which was confirmed swiftly by the

Tatarstan legislature.

The autonomy of Tatarstan’s political machine was undoubtedly intact, allowing for the strides made in migration policy to remain and continue. While Minnikhanov’s appointment was evidence of stability and autonomy in Tatarstan’s political machine, a powerful reminder of the continuity of Shaimiev’s political machine was the fact that he

70 Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, “Getting The‘ dough’ and Saving the Machine: Lessons from Tatarstan,” Demokratizatsiya 21, no. 4 (2013): 507; Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, “Elite Management in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes: A View From Bashkortostan and Tatarstan,” Central Asian Affairs 2, no. 2 (March 13, 2015): 117–39.

147 maintained an office in the presidential administration building. Serving as State

Counselor of the Republic of Tatarstan, Shaimiev promoted the history of Volga Bulgars, eventually having the ancient capital designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Yet his presence in the regional administration conferred legitimacy and calm to

Minnikhanov’s ascent into the role of President. Minnikhanov continued in Shaimiev’s footsteps, moving ahead with the construction of the Assembly’s new headquarters in

Kazan, and working towards foreign investment as a means for economic diversification.

Though outside the timeline of this study, these efforts would materialize in an additional

SEZ for innovative technologies in Kazan and more than a dozen regionally-funded industrial zones by 2014.71

Most importantly for the principal-agent relationship, the political machine under

Minnikhanov’s management delivered votes for United Russia despite unprecedented protests against the party of power. Named the “Snow Revolution” in contrast to the

“Arab Spring,” the 2011 Duma elections saw the largest political protests since Russia’s independence – drawing more than 100,000 protesters to the streets in Moscow according to the organizers.72 The inspired opposition left United Russia with its smallest legislative proportion since its creation, yet in Tatarstan, United Russia received 78% of the vote, a dip of only three percentage points from the 2007 Duma elections. Despite the increased animosity for United Russia and its system of political patronage, Minnikhanov demonstrated that he could provide the Kremlin’s party of power with a comfortable majority of votes in the midst of considerable political opposition. While this would

71 “Guide to Investment: Republic of Tatarstan.” 72 “Moscow Protest: Thousands Rally against Vladimir Putin,” BBC News, December 25, 2011, sec. Europe, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16324644.

148 expose the regime to questions regarding the legitimacy of the vote, the political capacity and loyalty demonstrated by Minnikhanov kept his position safe from removal.73

Along this dissertation’s score of dependency, described in greater detail Chapter

2, Tatarstan receives a score of 0, the lowest possible score. The dependency score is a count of incidents in which a gubernatorial race is won by less than ten percentage points, a run-off is required for a gubernatorial election, a governor from outside the respective region is appointed by Moscow, and the dismissal of a governor by Moscow. Shaimiev never faced strong competitors in his election bids, winning by more than ten points and never requiring a run-off, and his early retirement was not forced by Moscow, but instead assisted in ensuring Moscow did not appoint an outsider. The supremacy of the regional executive in Tatarstan was not in question from 2002 to 2012, and as such, the leadership of Shaimiev and Minnikhanov have allowed Tatarstan’s political machine to maintain autonomy from federal influence.

Tatarstan required this stable and autonomous political machine to implement and expand its migration policy. The initial institutions, the Houses of Friendship, were an outgrowth of a nationalities policy that derived its legitimacy from an ethnic minority movement and its success in winning concessions from the federal government. As the federal government began consolidating its control and proclaiming exclusive authority,

Tatarstan created the Assembly of Peoples and afforded the Assembly and RAELAM equal status with the regional offices of federal bureaucracies. Despite the possibility of

73 Gubernatorial elections would be reinstated in 2012, and ahead of this reform, several governors were dismissed due to their perceived unpopularity and inability to win elections. “Irkutsk Governor Out, Prokhorov Ally In,” accessed January 25, 2017, https://themoscowtimes.com/news/irkutsk-governor-out- prokhorov-ally-in-14858.

149 incurring tension in relations with the federal government with these claims on the authority granted to regional institutions, the Shaimiev administration consistently delivered votes to United Russia, providing the region with the leverage necessary to tally up several remarkable political victories: renegotiating a second bilateral treaty, rights for the Alabuga SEZ, and maintaining internal control over leadership transition. These signaled to regional actors that the political machine Shaimiev built was worth their continued investment, eliminating the possibility of mass defection. Without the stability of these political relationships and autonomy from federal influence, we would not have observed the survival and expansion of Tatarstan’s migration policies. As the following sections will demonstrate, alternative explanations offer varying levels of explanatory power but all fall short of explaining the policy decision-making we observe in Tatarstan.

4.8 Economic Concentration: Less Machine, More Firms?

The argument presented relies heavily on the political in “political economy,” and it is necessary to emphasize the degree to which the characteristics and actors in the regional economy allow for this outcome. Of principal concern is addressing the relative concentration of the regional economy in various economic sectors, the cornerstone of

Stoner-Weiss’s argument.74 According to this logic, the dominance of petroleum and heavy manufacturing in Tatarstan’s economy makes it considerably easier for economic elites and political elites to agree on policy. While a plausible argument for explaining the lack of controversy surrounding Tatarstan’s economic development strategy shift towards foreign investment, there is little evidence to suggest that absent Shaimiev’s

74 Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance (Princeton: Princeton Univesrity Press, 1997).

150 political machine Tatarstan’s economic actors would have lobbied for the integrative policies we observe.

In the case of Tatarstan, economic concentration in two sectors does provide fertile grounds for broad consensus, but it also incentivized elite capture through the construction of a formidable political machine. Investigating the early independence years for Russia, Stoner-Weiss did not preclude the formation of political machines. Her study focused on the quality of governance, which increased with greater concentration of economic resources. This model could illuminate Tatarstan’s nascent economic policies of utilizing oil revenues to support agriculture and struggling manufacturing enterprises – policies that score well in the stated metrics of governance. Yet this concentration of resources would become an easy target for elite capture, which Stoner-

Weiss’s work lacks the time horizon to incorporate.75

Even if the management of Tatneft and KamAZ had not been integrated with

Tatarstan’s political elites, and if the holding company TAIF had not accumulated most of the region’s petroleum-based enterprises, these are not the sectors of the Tatarstan economy that would benefit more than other sectors from increased immigration rates.

Surveys of Central Asian migrants’ work experience in Russia reveal that immigrants work mostly in construction, trade, and agriculture, i.e., low-skill positions.76 Though any enterprise employing immigrants at below market rates would see an increase in profits, there appears to be little complementarity between immigrants’ labor skills and

75 This is not meant to detract from Stoner-Weiss’s valuable contributions. It reflects the time horizon of the project, which did not cover a long enough period in the 1990s to account for elite capture that would occur. 76 Saodat Olimova and Igor Bosc, Labour Migration from Tajikistan (Dushanbe: Mission of the International Organization for Migration, 2003).

151 these concentrated economic assets. Since most of the wells in Tatarstan are mature, if not past peak, there is less exploration and construction of extraction sites, reducing the number of jobs which would suit less-skilled immigrants.77 TAIF’s array of corporate holdings also do not derive significant profits from construction. The central position of

KamAZ for economic life in Tatarstan’s second-largest city, and for the Tatar national movement, also significantly increases the political and social pressure the company would experience if immigrant labor supplanted domestic labor on a systematic scale.

Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest these firms are competing in a zero-sum game for the available immigrant labor, or that these firms have labor input needs that only immigrants can provide. Absent such macro-level conditions, we have little reason to expect these firms to coordinate with regional political leaders on migration policy, especially when tax policy or regional subsidies rank more highly in order of importance to their economic performance.

Furthermore, the neglected role small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and small- plot farming play in economic policy decision-making hinders likelihood that economic conditions in Tatarstan alone would yield the migration policies we observe. Tatarstan ranked poorly for the support offered to SMEs amongst Russian regions.78 Despite the disproportionate need for immigrant labor inputs in SMEs, this sector of the economy is not a significant proportion of Tatarstan’s tax base and is not geographically concentrated

77 The notable exception to this would be Tatneft’s subsidiary, Taneco, which is a massive oil-refining complex, that began the first phase of construction in 2006. While an important construction project, it is most unlikely that this single expansion inspired the expansion of Tatarstan’s migration policy. 78 Leo McCann, Economic Development in Tatarstan: Global Markets and a Russian Region (London: Routledge, 2005); Oleg Pavlov, “A Lesson for Tatarstan’s Businessmen: Go Elsewhere,” openDemocracy, November 30, 2011, http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/oleg-pavlov/lesson-for-tatarstans- businessmen-go-elsewhere.

152 unlike large-scale enterprises, reducing the likelihood that these smaller enterprises can effectively coordinate with regional authorities. Similarly, the agricultural sector receives considerable subsidies for mechanization via regional wealth transfers, which does not assist small-plot farming. Such small-scale farming may benefit the most from additional input of migrant labor, but it is unlikely that these households can afford migrant labor consistently, much less have the considerable resources necessary to coordinate with the regional authorities. Despite the shared interests among SMEs and the agricultural sector regarding migration policy, these economic sectors lacked the concentration of resources necessary to steer an entire regional policy agenda.

Stoner-Weiss’s contributions give us insight into the political economy of

Tatarstan, but the framework falls short of explaining the origins and deepening of

Tatarstan’s migration policy from 2002 to 2012. The concentration of economic resources in Tatarstan fits with Stoner-Weiss’s political economy framework, providing a means to understand the relative ease by which the Shaimiev and Minnikhanov administrations could shift towards a foreign investment development strategy. Yet the concentration of economic resources in Tatarstan does not translate into a coordination of efforts regarding migration policy, thus leaving us unclear as to the origins of Tatarstan’s migration. Instead, the concentration of economic resources allowed for elite capture by the Shaimiev administration, which had come to prominence atop Tatar nationalism based on a political message of peaceful interethnic relations. This confluence of events and interests generated Tatarstan’s migration policy, rather than a regional administration responding to the collective demands of a coherent organization of regional economic interests.

153 4.9 The Muted Role of Ethnicity

Though ethnicity is undoubtedly a facet of Tatarstan’s politics, there is little evidence to suggest that Tatar ethnic identity or the political mobilization therein played a causal role in developing Tatarstan’s migration policy. The political mobilization of

Tatar ethnic identity undoubtedly buoyed Shaimiev’s rise to prominence and legitimized the claims for heightened autonomy, all of which is fundamental to the construction of his political machine. Yet once this power was consolidated regionally, Shaimiev utilized the institutions of the region’s nationalities policy, Houses of Friendship and the

Assembly of Peoples, to marginalize Tatar nationalists frustrated with Shaimiev’s cooperation with Moscow. These institutions were upheld as the spaces for expressing ethnic identity, but as avowedly apolitical institutions, this aimed to depoliticize ethnic identity and prevent Tatar nationalists from undermining the Shaimiev administration.

Furthermore, though Tatarstan implemented an integrative migration policy, there is no evidence that authorities did so out of a “co-ethnic” identification among ethnic

Tatars and labor migrants from Central Asia. Though the Houses of Friendship and

Assembly of People provided spaces for expressing ethnic identity, labor migrants still struggled in Tatarstan society broadly. Interviews with local experts in Kazan and

Chelny indicated that migrants were not universally welcome in mosques, particularly in mosques where the use of Tatar was suspended in favor of using Russian as lingua franca.79 Similarly, ethnographic accounts of Tatarstan policing reveal that Tatar and

79 Interview with Migration Expert, Kazan, Russia, 2014.

154 Russian police officers alike ethnically profile labor migrants to extract bribes,80 following practices of corruption throughout Russia.81

Therefore, in order to identify which regions are most likely to implement independent migration policies, Tatarstan’s experience suggests that the presence of ethnic minority populations or the political mobilization of such populations are not determinative. Tatar nationalism assisted in constructing Shaimiev’s political machine and helping Tatarstan gain its constitutional status as an ethnic republic. Yet Shaimiev exercised authority and agency in migration policy through his authority as a powerful regional executive, rather than through institutions established in Tatarstan’s constitution that oblasts would lack. Without an autonomous political machine, Shaimiev would not have been able to advance Tatarstan’s migration policy, even if those advances were implemented through institutions founded in light of Tatar nationalism’s mobilization.

4.10 Tolerance via Demographic Stability?

The influx of labor migrants from 2002 to 2012 was substantiated by demand for migrant labor, yet Tatarstan’s demographic outlook does not suggest that population- level characteristics overpower other explanations for Tatarstan’s independent migration policy. This argument suggests that the relative rates of growth of populations in

Tatarstan could yield demand for migrant labor due to shortages in the labor market or yield hostility as populations view demographic growth as a zero-sum game for

80 Ekaterina Khodzhaeva, “Everyday Interactions between Policemen and Labor Migrants in Russia: The Results of the Participant Observation in Kazan, the Republic of Tatarstan” (Migration: Knowledge Production/Policymaking, Telc, Czech Republic: Multicultural Center Prague, 2010). 81 Bhavna Dave and Linda J. Cook, “Migration” (Russian Analytical Digest, December 20, 2014).

155 resources. Such macro-level trends could explain the emergence and expansion of

Tatarstan’s migration policies rather than the characteristics of a political machine.

Tatarstan’s demographic outlook, however, was among the most stable in Russia by 2012, reducing the likelihood that demographic concerns motivated Tatarstan’s migration policy. An outlier within Russia, Tatarstan had a fertility rate of 1.28 in 2002, which is far from replacement level of 2.1, but near the national average of 1.29. By

2012 these rates had improved considerably to 1.8, while the national average lingered at

1.69.82 Though mortality rates were still a concern, on average, Tatarstan’s mortality rates were below the Russian average, further stabilizing the regional population.83 Further reinforcing the health of Tatarstan’s population, the region had been a magnet for internal migration from surrounding Russian regions, and it is expected to be a net recipient of internal migration in the years to come.84 This scenario of demographic stability undermines the argument that Tatarstan was compelled to enact an independent migration policy in response to the demographic health of its population.

In addition to relative population stability in Tatarstan, immigration processes did not appear to increase competition in the regional labor market, suggesting a segmented labor market may exist between international migrant labor and the native labor. The best data available to ascertain labor market forces is a comparison between the Ministry of Labor’s statistics regarding the sector employment of the native population and the

82 “ФЕДЕРАЛЬНАЯ СЛУЖБА ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ СТАТИСТИКИ,” Центральная База Статистических Данных, May 5, 2017, http://www.gks.ru/dbscripts/cbsd/dbinet.cgi?pl=2415002. 83 “ФЕДЕРАЛЬНАЯ СЛУЖБА ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ СТАТИСТИКИ,” Центральная База Статистических Данных, May 5, 2017, http://www.gks.ru/dbscripts/cbsd/dbinet.cgi?pl=2415002. 84 Sievert, Zakharov, and Klingholz, The Waning World Power: The Demographic Future of Russia and the Other Soviet Successor States.

156 work permits distributed to international labor migrants in Tatarstan. Work permits assigned in Tatarstan from More qualitative work is necessary to accurately measure the degree of labor segmentation in Tatarstan, as this dynamic of competition is obscured by general demographic and labor statistics. Given that Tatarstan’s demographic health is expected to continue to be reinforced by internal migration and domestic labor market forces,85 there is little evidence to suggest that demographic trends have steered the course of Tatarstan’s migration policy during this period.

4.11 Exogenous Shocks: Revealing Limitations of Tatarstan’s Approach

The account presented thus far is an institutional account, and I have emphasized the autonomy and composition of political machines over the structure of economic and demographic realities, but an investigation of three major events between 2002 and 2012 reveals that Tatarstan’s migration policy is resilient to exogenous shocks, though limitations to its approach present themselves as a result of the 2012 assassination attempt on the Grand Mufti of Tatarstan. To investigate the effect of exogenous shocks on the migration policy outcomes we observe in Tatarstan, I looked at the reporting on migration in the three months before and the three months after three events, the Beslan terrorist attack in 2004, the economic recession in 2007-2008, and the 2012 assassination attempt on Tatarstan’s Grand Mufti, in five major regional newspapers.86 These events were chosen as moments of crisis that could generate threat perception responses by the local population against labor migrants, as the recession may generate increased perceptions of economic competition and the acts of violence substantiate security threat

85 Ibid. 86 The newspapers are the “Evening Kazan,” “Time and Money,” “News of Tatarstan,” “Kommersant,” and the “Republic of Tatarstan.”

157 perception. In such situations, we would expect that the political risks for engaging in migration politics increase significantly in the face of negative public opinion, perhaps forcing a response by authorities.

Over time, we observe the frequency of reports concerning migration to increase, as well as the average length of such reports, but in the three months before and after the

Beslan terrorist attack and the 2008 recession, we do not observe significant threat perception. The Beslan terrorist attack involved Chechen separatists, but the as explained in Chapter 1, the common term migrant(y) is associated with several waves of migration, including the internally-displaced persons from the First Chechen War. Though the reporting in the aftermath of Beslan was considerable, the connection to migration as a process or migrants as a source of violence was not made across the publications.

Similarly, after the 2008 recession was declared, there was not a clear connection that migration increased economic competition or contributed to economic woes, but reporting on arrests of migrants increased overall, mentioning the nationality of those arrested. Such reporting could contribute to a sense that certain ethnic groups are arrested in greater numbers than others, but this does not suggest that a clear connection between migration and economic competition was firmly established in the printed press.

In both cases, we do not observe a sudden shift in reporting, nor do we observe a shift in

Tatarstan’s migration policy that would suggest these events contributed to the expansion of its policies or to their curtailment.

The assassination attempt on the Grand Mufti of Tatarstan in 2012, however, did generate two ethnic riots in the countryside and caused a critic of Tatarstan’s migration approach to rise in prominence. On the morning of July 19, 2012, Valiulla Yakupov, a

158 Deputy Mufti of Tatarstan, was shot and killed on the street as he exited his apartment in

Kazan. Shortly thereafter, the Mufti of Tatarstan, Ildus Fayzov, was badly injured in a car bomb explosion outside his apartment in Kazan. Having been the city that day, there was not a sense of widespread panic, as a kind of shock had settled in. Tatarstan had not experienced this sort of violence, and so while it was unsettling and people I overheard on the street hoped for answers, there was not an immediate concern that widespread violence was around the corner. In the days that followed, half a dozen would be arrested, as the violence was blamed on a militant Islamic cell operating in Tatarstan.87

In September of 2012, however, two ethnic riots broke out against Tajik migrants in two separate villages, Shumkovo and Kurmaenovo. Shumkovo is a village of approximately 500 residents, the overwhelming majority of whom are ethnically Russian, and Kurmaenovo is a village of approximately 800 residents, the overwhelming majority of whom are ethnically Tatar. In each village, there is a Tajik community that began settling approximately ten years prior, growing to approximately 50 members in each village. In both villages, the Tajik community had begun building a mosque, which would have been the second mosque in Kurmaenovo, and a riot broke out to stop construction, principally out of fear that a radical form of Islam would be preached in the new mosques.88 In the immediate aftermath, President Minnikhanov dismissed both mayors for failing to ensure inter-ethnic harmony,89 underscoring the importance a lack of ethnic strife is for the political legitimacy of the political machine in Tatarstan. Given

87 “Another Suspect in Mufti of Tatarstan Assassination Attempt Arrested,” RAPSI, accessed June 5, 2017, http://rapsinews.com/judicial_news/20120724/263900498.html. 88 Interview with Migration Expert, Kazan, Russia. 89 Interview with Staff Member, Assembly of Peoples, Kazan, Russia.

159 that these communities had lived without such violence and that construction at both mosques had begun weeks prior to the riots, it was assumed that the assassination attempt contributed to the panic and eventual riots.

In the intervening period, a staff member of the Volga Center for Regional and

Ethno-Religious Studies became a vocal critic of Tatarstan’s integrative migration policy.

As a branch of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a Kremlin-funded think tank, this commentator had a position from which he could articulate a concern over growing radicalism in Tatarstan, even to the likes of National Public Radio,90 and linked this growing radicalism directly to migration. In our interview, he stated unequivocally that,

“Migration is a dangerous process,” and described a process of “colonization,” in which,

“they [labor migrants] occupy these villages, the locals do not want to live together with migrants, and they [locals] begin to leave the cities. And their homes, they often sell to migrants, that is, because no one will buy these homes, and workers are ready to buy them on the cheap. As a result, it seems to me, in twenty years we will find ourselves in a situation where we are in Tatarstan here are only migrant villages, villages, villages, that is exactly the same as in Central Asia. . . Along with labor migration, Islamic religious fundamentalists come here.” 91

His perception of migration did not appear in the newspapers selected, however, only his concerns over Islamic extremism, leaving the printed media’s account of the assassination attempt free of this explicit connection to labor migration. Nevertheless, he was active in the Russian and Tatar blogospheres and a language of “colonization” did arise unprompted in several casual conversations I had with residents in Kazan,

90 Corey Flintoff, “Attacks Raise Specter Of Radical Islam In Russia,” NPR.org, accessed June 5, 2017, http://www.npr.org/2012/08/22/159822487/attacks-raise-specter-of-radical-islam-in-russia. 91 Interview with Staff Member, Volga Center for Regional and Ethno-Religious Studies, 2014.

160 suggesting his connection between radicalism and labor migration was reaching a public audience.92

Thus, the newspaper analysis surrounding the exogenous shocks of the 2004

Beslan attack, the 2008 economic recession, and the 2012 assassination attempt does not support a hypothesis that these shocks, and any shifts in threat perception, had a causal effect on Tatarstan’s migration policy from 2002 to 2012. The violence in the aftermath of the 2012 assassination attempt does indicate that there are latent threat perceptions that can lead to outbreaks of violence, and a compounding effect of multiple attacks could have an immediate effect on the public view of migration in Tatarstan. Despite the advancement of Tatarstan’s integrative institutions, the Assembly of People’s inability to make public statements on political concerns, such as a connection between labor migration and radicalism, leaves migrants vulnerable and reliant on the Minnikhanov administration for protection in future conflicts. If public perception were to shift rapidly in light of an exogenous shock, such protection would not be guaranteed. Though shocks did not shape Tatarstan’s migration policy through public opinion from 2002 to 2012, the reaction to the 2012 assassination attempt illustrates that such shocks could have an effect if the political machine is vulnerable to a loss of legitimacy.

4.12 Conclusion

Tatarstan was able to conceive and implement its migration policy due to the autonomy its political machine from federal influence and expand its mission in response to changes in the composition of its actors. Though the concentration of economic

92 As anecdotal evidence, I cannot place a strong claim on the popularity of the commentator’s perception of labor migration. Nevertheless, the use of the term “colonization” was striking and suggests a link.

161 resources, the relative demographic stability of the region, and the effects of exogenous shocks also contribute to migration policy, none of these factors adequately explain the integrationist path which the Shaimiev and Minnikhanov administrations pursued. The regional executives built institutions, funded their expansion, and elevated their authority to the level of federal bureaucracies, even as the federal government centralized its political control through the rise of United Russia and consolidating its authority in migration policy.

Though Tatarstan’s political maneuvering is remarkable, this chapter should not appear to proclaim Tatarstan as the exemplar for immigrants' incorporation within

Russia. Though the Assembly of Peoples and the Houses of Friendship provided spaces for socialization and education, as well as legal aid and avenues for representation, the majority of labor migrants are seasonal. Such temporary populations are less likely to have access or utilize the services offered by these institutions, particularly for migrants living in rural areas. The integrative institutions established in Tatarstan function best for permanently-settled, urban migrants,93 and the evolution of these institutions has not followed the needs of the majority of migrants, such as the agency providing legal aid,

RAELAM, was redirected towards ensuring foreign investment projects have access to appropriate labor in light of a shift towards economic development.94

Despite these continued struggles for labor migrants, the case of Tatarstan from

2002 to 2012 offers considerable evidence to consider the autonomy of a regional political machine as determinative. As the next chapter will demonstrate, the loss of

93 Interview with Migration Expert, Kazan, Russia. 94 Interview with Staff Member, Assembly of Peoples, Kazan, Russia.

162 autonomy prevented the development of an independent migration policy in

Bashkortostan, despite its economic wealth, demographic pressures to accept more migrants, and its once-formidable political machine’s regionalist agenda. These cases in tandem assist this project in isolating the necessity of a political machine’s autonomy to the development and execution of an independent migration policy.

163 CHAPTER 4:

BASHKORTOSTAN: THE IMPORTANCE OF AUTONOMY

The Republic of Bashkortostan and its lack of activity in regional migration policy since 2003 stands as a foil to the efforts and initiatives of Tatarstan. Despite a robustly healthy economy, a history of regionalist political behavior, a high emigration rate, and a powerful political machine, Bashkortostan fails to maintain an independent regional migration policy into 2012 as the other three cases in this project. Despite beginning the study period with a House of Friendship and embarking on an ambitious housing construction project for refugees and internally-displaced peoples, the Nagaevo project, we observe a cessation in engagement in 2003. This surprising development comes as a result of the collapse of autonomy for Bashkortostan’s political machine.

Headed by Murtaza Rakhimov, this machine was among the most powerful and influential in Russian politics through the 1990s, but entering the 2003 presidential elections, Rakhimov encountered political competition and relies federal intervention to survive the Untied Russia run-off election.

Despite a robust agricultural sector, strong economic growth, and a negative growth demographic scenario, we do not observe Bashkortostan maintaining its engagement in migration policy. Instead, we observe a withdrawal from 2003 until the end of the study period in 2012. Even as Rakhimov is removed from power and replaced by Rustem Khamitov in 2010, the shift towards an economic development model does

164 not coincide with the creation of new institutions or increased engagement in migration politics. Khamitov’s status as an outsider for the Bashkortostan political machine forces his administration to rely on the federal government to maintain control over his agents, preventing him from re-establishing autonomy. This strengthens this dissertation’s claims for the paramount importance of a political machine’s autonomy in determining whether a regional government can pursue an independent migration policy.

5.1 Regional Characteristics

Bashkortostan is a remarkable region in Russia, due to its ethnic composition, demographic characteristics, and economic stability. Bashkortostan’s titular ethnic group, the Bashkirs, are a minority of the population, accounting for approximately 30% of the population in the 2010 census. A Turkic and nominally Muslim ethnic group the

Bashkirs are culturally and linguistically proximate to Tatars, who constitute 25% of the region’s population. Though ethnic Russians are the largest ethnic group in

Bashkortostan, representing 36% of the population, the combined Tatar and Bashkir populations have a substantial majority. As later sections in this chapter will demonstrate, this ethnic composition has shaped the political development in

Bashkortostan since Russia’s independence.

Neighboring Tatarstan to the east and sharing a lengthy border with Orenburg to the southwest, the Republic of Bashkortostan has also played a foundational role in furthering regionalist agendas in the 1990s and structuring contemporary Russian politics. As the most populated ethnic republic in Russia, with over four million residents, Bashkortostan offers a substantial electoral prize, a point of leverage used by the region’s inaugural president, Murtaza Rakhimov. Nestled between the Volga River

165 basin and the foothills of the Ural Mountains, Bashkortostan ranks as one of the most productive agricultural regions and as the top producer of oil in Russia. These economic resources have allowed Bashkortostan to act as a reliable donor region to the federal budget since Russia’s independence, just like Samara and Tatarstan.1

Bashkortostan’s population distribution reflects the agricultural strength of the region but serves to exacerbate differences between the region’s three dominant ethnic groups. Unlike Russia’s population, of which approximately 26% was rural in 2010,

Bashkortostan’s population is 40% rural. The region’s rural-urban distribution amplifies the dominance of Ufa, the capital and historic political center, which has a population of just over one million - four times the size of the next-largest city, Sterlitamak. Ethnic

Russians are concentrated in urban areas, accounting for nearly half of Ufa’s residents, whereas the Bashkir population is largely rural and dominant in the southeast and northeast areas. Tatars are more urbanized than Bashkirs but the rural population is dominant only in the western areas. This geographic depiction of Bashkortostan is grossly oversimplified, as these three main ethnic groups do not live separated from one another, devoid of contact. Instead, this simplified description serves to highlight that the concentrations of the three dominant ethnic groups add a level of complexity that we do not observe in Tatarstan, and this chapter will demonstrate the political ramifications of this heterogeneity.

Supporting this diverse society, Bashkortostan’s economy has been among

Russia’s most productive and forms one of the critical nodes for the oil and agriculture

1 J. Paul Goode, Decline of Regionalism in Putin’s Russia (New York: Routledge, 2011).

166 sectors. After oil was discovered in Bashkortostan in 1932, the region became top oil- producing region in Russia by 1962, when the annual output was 40 million barrels.2

Developing these fields catapulted Bashkortostan to one of the Soviet Union’s top oil- producing regions and ushered in a period of dramatic industrialization. Reflecting the importance of these fields to Soviet oil production, three oil refinery complexes were built in Ufa. This refining infrastructure now belongs to the region’s most profitable corporation, Bashneft, which is Russia’s sixth-largest oil company. Outside Ufa, there is significant petrochemical manufacturing in Salavat and automobile manufacturing in

Sterlitamak. Bashkortostan is also the fourth-most productive agricultural region in

Russia, leading in the production of honey, second in dairy production, and fourth in meat processing. This constitutes a diversified manufacturing sector and a robust agricultural sector that together assist in keeping Bashkortostan unemployment low compared to the national average. Though the oil fields in Bashkortostan are considered past peak production, the refining and petrochemical industries and agricultural sector sustain the region’s status as one of the most stable in Russia.3

4.2.1 Soviet Political History

The 20th century would be a defining period for Bashkortostan, as the region sought greater recognition for its titular ethnic group and emerged as an economic dynamo. Ufa served as the capital of the Bashkiria guberniya under tsarist rule, which cemented the city’s importance in Russian political development. Unlike Kazan,

2 Stephan Sievert, Sergey Zakharov, and Reiner Klingholz, The Waning World Power: The Demographic Future of Russia and the Other Soviet Successor States (Berlin: Berlin Institute for Population and Development, 2011). 3 Ibid.

167 however, Ufa’s history of economic development languished in comparison to its neighbor, observable by the considerably smaller core of historic brick and stone buildings and the lack of a stone-walled kremlin. After the 1917 Revolution,

Bashkortostan lobbied for the recognition for its titular ethnic group, the Bashkirs, in exchange for supporting the nascent Bolshevik state. Linguistically and culturally proximate to Tatars, Bashkirs sought recognition from the Bolshevik state “to prevent the creation of a Tatar-dominated Turkic republic in the Volga-Ural region.”4 In 1919, this culminated towards Bashkortostan becoming the first region within the fledgling

Communist state to receive the designation of ASSR. As the central regime shifted from

Bolshevik to Soviet control, the Bashkir ASSR was merged with the Ufa province to create the current borders of Bashkortostan, as well as the demographic situation in which

Bashkirs became a minority ethnic group in the region.5 Yet as part of the reorganization into the Soviet state, Bashkortostan pioneered state recognition of minority ethnic groups in the Russian Soviet Republic, a path that Tatarstan and another 14 ethnically-defined regions would successfully follow.

Just as in Tatarstan, the disintegration of the Soviet Union was a time of opportunity for the political mobilization of minority ethnic identities, and the Bashkir nationalist movement began marshaling resources to pursue an ambitious political agenda. Unlike Tatarstan, however, the Bashkir nationalist movement did not enjoy a demographic majority, impeding the movement’s accumulation of political and social influence. Murtaza Rakhimov, the region’s chief executive at the time of transition from

4 Dmitry P Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pg 34. 5 Ibid.

168 the USSR to the Russian Federation, had to balance regional demands for sovereignty, just as Mintimer Shaimiev, but with the added difficulty of balancing the demands of three ethnic communities. Though Rakhimov constructed a powerful regional political machine in the 1990s, the strategies utilized were unable to maintain the machine’s autonomy or stability, thus endangering the regionalist policies and agenda the region had embarked upon, including initial migration policies.

4.2.2 Post-Soviet Politics: Bashkir Ethnic Mobilization

Just as Bashkortostan had been a pioneer for minority ethnic groups during the early Soviet state, the region was one of the focal points for the “parade of sovereignties,” as a Bashkir national movement emerged to defend the recognition the ethnic group had gained during the formation of the Soviet state. The Bashkir movement was slow to form, organizing in response to the neighboring Tatar national movement, which utilized networks formed through the Tatar Public Center to open numerous branches in

Bashkortostan.6 As a reaction to Tatar political mobilization, the Bashkir movement organized around the need to defend Bashkir culture and language against any

“Tatarization,” and generally supported resistance to centralization by the Yeltsin administration to ensure autonomy in pursuit of these goals. The Bashkir movement did have radical factions that grabbed headlines in the national press, demanding full independence, suggesting Bashkortostan could become another Kuwait.7 Though the

Bashkir movement was active in protests and eventually created a network that reached

6 The TPC in Bashkortostan sought to encourage the expression of Tatar culture and were generally pro- democracy groups. These branches were among the nearly 93 branches outside of Tatarstan to encourage the fostering of Tatar ethnic identity and promote political activism broadly. See Ibid. 7 Ibid.

169 every district in the region, the Bashkir national movement did not form in tandem with a pro-democracy movement.8 This provided Rakhimov with the ability to secure the support of Bashkir nationalists without having to consider integrate the movement’s leading voices into the administration. Perhaps for the lack of pressure from Bashkir nationalists, or simply to avoid a political contest of any sort, Rakhimov refused to allow for elections to be held for his position. Rather than creating new political institutions,

Rakhimov entrenched his administration in Soviet-era political structures, maintaining a tight grip on the political reins.

The situation allowed Rakhimov to pursue a strategy that balanced the nationalist movements in Bashkortostan against the federal government’s desire for political support within the two-level principal-agent system. By refusing to hold early elections or referenda, as Shaimiev had done, Rakhimov used the Soviet-era political arrangement to claim the political authority to refuse paying taxes to the federal government in 1991 and

1992, giving his administration tremendous financial resources to consolidate power.9

By delaying elections, Rakhimov could shore up support among those already in office without the public pressures of campaigning amidst nationalist movements. This consistency in the regional political landscape provided the stability necessary to negotiate with the Yeltsin administration. Rather than refusing to sign the Federation

Treaty in 1992, as Tatarstan had, Rakhimov negotiated an addendum that guaranteed the

8 Hale suggests this is a result of Bashkirs being well-placed within government and major economic enterprises. Bashkirs may have felt well-represented, and therefore not in need of elections to gain their access to such political resources. See Henry E. Hale, “Bashkortostan: The Logic of Ethnic Machine Politics and the Consolidation of Democracy,” in Growing Pains: Russian Democracy and the Election of 1993 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), 599–636. 9 Henry Hale, “Explaining Machine Politics in Russia’s Regions: Economy, Ethnicity, and Legacy,” Post- Soviet Affairs 19, no. 3 (January 1, 2003): 228–63, doi:10.2747/1060-586X.19.3.228.

170 regional control of Bashkortostan’s natural resources and state-owned enterprises.10 As a result of gaining these concessions, Bashkortostan began paying federal taxes, and

Rakhimov scheduled regional elections in 1993, albeit under significant pressure from the

Yeltsin administration.

The results of the 1993 elections suggest that ethnicity was indeed a second-order issue of political salience, but Rakhimov advanced the demands of the Bashkir nationalist movement instrumentally to assist his campaign. The biggest winner in Bashkortostan was the Agrarian Party, which took nearly half of the delegates to the federal Duma and the largest number of votes in the regional legislature. This outcome suggests that a political party focused on providing support for rural communities and agriculture performed well in a region with a nationally-significant agricultural sector and more rural population, but it also reflected the gerrymandered electoral districts Rakhimov had drawn, which “heavily over-represented rural area (a core base of his support) and underrepresented the dissent-prone capital city”.11 In the races where the Agrarian Party primary was competitive, ethnic Bashkir and Tatar candidates emerged triumphant over ethnic Russian candidates, suggesting that ethnicity could have played a role in voters’ preferences. When these triumphant Agrarian candidates faced opponents campaigning primarily on a Bashkir nationalist platform, the voters favored Agrarian Party candidates.

10 G. Sharafutdinova, “Subnational Governance in Russia: How Putin Changed the Contract with His Agents and the Problems It Created for Medvedev,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 40, no. 4 (September 1, 2010): 672–96, doi:10.1093/publius/pjp036. 11 Ildar Gabdrafikov and Henry E. Hale, “Bashkortostan’s Democratic Moment? Patronal Presidentialism, Regional Regime Change, and Identity in Russia,” Reconstruction and Interaction of Slavic Eurasia and Its Neighboring Worlds. Hokkaido: Sapporo University Slavic Research Center, 2006, 85.

171 Thus, these results suggest that campaigns focused on economic concerns attracted more votes than issues relating to ethnic nationalism.

While this generated hope for the emergence of a “civic nationalism” in a region with a high likelihood, Rakhimov instrumentally utilized the Bashkir national movement to reduce competition in the race for President of Bashkortostan. Though Rakhimov’s campaign was sensitive to the Bashkir and Tatar nationalist movements, the public agenda generally reference economic and political independence from Moscow with few long-standing platform positions on ethnic issues. Yet prior to the election, Rakhimov passed a law requiring the new President of Bashkortostan demonstrate fluency in

Bashkir. Though this gesture resonated within the Bashkir nationalist movement, this act served to reduce Rakhimov’s competition in the 1993 election for the presidency, as the knowledge of Bashkir varies significantly in the region. For example, twenty percent of

Bashkirs claimed Tatar as their native language in 1989, and Rakhimov’s largest competitor in the election was ethnically Russian but nevertheless fluent in Bashkir.12

Furthermore, the fluency requirement also frustrated ethnic Tatars, as their language was without the legal and political recognition afforded to Bashkir and Russian. Nevertheless,

Rakhimov emerged triumphant, winning 64% of the vote.

Rakhimov’s political strategy for the 1993 elections contrasted with Shaimiev’s strategy, who used elections early to secure legitimacy and made use of referenda to contest Moscow, but these differences reflect the more complicated political reality in

Bashkortostan. The Tatar nationalist movement’s early association with the pro-

12 Hale, “Bashkortostan: The Logic of Ethnic Machine Politics and the Consolidation of Democracy.”

172 democracy movement and its grassroots political organization gave Shaimiev considerable political advantages when he aligned with the movement. These advantages translated into electoral victories for Shaimiev’s campaign and referendum on Tatarstan’s sovereignty, while Shaimiev worked to ensure that ethnic Russians did not feel marginalized categorically.13 For Rakhimov, the Bashkir nationalist movement emerged as a response to the Tatar movement, exemplifying a more complicated ethno-political reality. Since the Bashkir movement did not demand elections as a fundamental aspect of their platform, Rakhimov had the political leeway to recognize the movement while delaying elections. Critically for Bashkortostan’s political development, the delay in holding regional elections gave Rakhimov and his administration time to consolidate political and economic resources before the political space became competitive.

4.2.3 Actors of the Machine

Rakhimov’s political strategy of leveraging nominal support for the federal government with a delay in elections allowed his administration to build a powerful political machine. Paramount to this endeavor was successfully gaining control of

Bashkortostan’s extensive petroleum sector, and when the administration then sought a bilateral treaty, as Tatarstan had done in 1994, the energy and petrochemical sectors remained at the forefront of the administration’s priorities. As a result of successful negotiations by Rakhimov’s administration, the federal treaty in 1994 stipulated that

Bashkorstan’s regional government maintained the authority to “resolve issues of possession, use and disposal of the land, mineral resources, water, forest, and other

13 Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation.

173 natural resources of the Republic, which are property of its multinational people.”14

Crucial to this strategy of gaining regional control over profitable enterprises was the oil company Bashneft, one of the largest producers of oil in Russia. Bashneft had been the largest producer of oil in Russia during the 1960s, producing nearly 30 million barrels of oil a year. Though the majority of Bashkortostan’s remaining oil fields are past-peak production, the company owns fields throughout the Volga Federal District and still produces 12 million barrels a year. Taking advantage of the legal agreements with the federal government, Bashkortostan was able to guarantee that Bashneft would remain regionally-controlled, safe from the shock-therapy privatization policies enacted by

President Yeltsin in the 1990s.

Having successfully defended regional ownership of Bashkortostan’s significant energy and petroleum-related sectors, the Rakhimov administration began consolidating the largest companies under a single vertical management structure. The regionally- owned holding company Bashneftekhim was created in 1993 and combined several of oil-refining and petrochemical plants in Ufa. Five years later, a second public holding company was created, Bashkir Fuel Company (BTK), and this company included one of the largest oil companies in Russia, Bashneft, the regional energy supplier,

Bashkirenergo, and Bashneftekhim.15 This enormous company controlled the majority of

Ufa’s oil-processing plants and oil deposits, ensuring the regional government’s control

14 “ДОГОВОР Российской Федерации И Республики Башкортостан От 03.08.94 ‘О РАЗГРАНИЧЕНИИ ПРЕДМЕТОВ ВЕДЕНИЯ И ВЗАИМНОМ ДЕЛЕГИРОВАНИИ ПОЛНОМОЧИЙ МЕЖДУ ОРГАНАМИ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ ВЛАСТИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ И ОРГАНАМИ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ ВЛАСТИ РЕСПУБЛИКИ БАШКОРТОСТАН’ | Правовая система ‘Референт,’” accessed March 24, 2016, https://www.referent.ru/1/6301. 15 Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, “Elite Management in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes: A View From Bashkortostan and Tatarstan,” Central Asian Affairs 2, no. 2 (March 13, 2015): 117–39.

174 over Bashkortostan’s most lucrative enterprises. The direct link to Murtaza Rakhimov himself, however, was maintained by his son, Ural Rakhimov, who had been CEO of

Bashneft until 1998, when he became chairman of BTK in 1998. Thus, Tatarstan and

Bashkortostan had the most profitable firms managed directly by the inaugural leader’s sons.

The petroleum-refining enterprise Salavatneftorgisntez (SNOS) could not match

Bashneft’s scale of production, but the firm’s profitability could nevertheless threaten the political machine. Just as NefAZ employed a significant proportion of Neftekamsk’s workforce, the success of SNOS gave rise to the city of Salavat. For the political machine to have access to the most profitable firms and reduce the likelihood of political competition, SNOS had to be incorporated into the machine. The position of CEO for

SNOS changed hands over five times in the 1990s, but in most cases, the departing CEO took a high-echelon political position in the regional government.16 By 2002, SNOS was led by Marat Hafizovich, who would then be elected to the regional legislature in 2003 as a member of the United Russia party. This revolving door at SNOS, despite its high turnover, reveals a close relationship between the firm and the regional administration.

As such, Rakhimov’s machine kept one of the region’s largest refining operations securely within its patronage network.

Ufa Engine Building Association (UNPO) is located in Ufa and employs

16 Prokopiy Tyugaev led the firm during the early transition period, from 1977 to 1993. Leadership then passed to Valentine Pavlychev from 1994 until 1996, though he served in the regional legislature until 1997. Nail Kutlugildin assumed the helm from 1996 to 1997, when Vitaly Zakharov would take control until 1998, when Kutlugildin would again lead the company. Kutlugildin was elected to the legislature in 1999. Though he stopped working as CEO in 2002, he became the Chairman of the Committee on Industry, Construction, Transportation, Communications, Energy, and Entrepreneurship in 2003, as a member of United Russia.

175 approximately 22,000 people, making it one of the largest employers in Bashkortostan.

The firm is the leading manufacturer of aircraft engines in Russia, produces for military companies such as Sukhoi, the jet-fighter manufacturer, and combat helicopter companies, Kamov and Mil. At the time of the transition, the CEO was Vladimir

Paraschenko, who would remain until 1998, when Valery Lesunov would assume command of UNPO. Lesunov was appointed the First Deputy Prime Minister of

Bashkortostan in 1994, shortly after the 1993 elections selected Rakhimov as President.

Placing a senior official at the helm of UNPO granted access to the profits from federal defense contracts to assist the machine’s patronage and ensured that UNPO and its employees would be less likely to align with an anti-Rakhimov political rival.

Another key firm that the administration sought to control was the NefAZ plant, a nationally-dominant bus and dump truck manufacturer and subsidiary of KamAZ.

Located in Neftekamsk, located upstream along the Kama River from Chelny, NefAZ employs approximately 8,000 people and undergirds the municipal economy.

Maintaining control of this enterprise was important to ensure that Neftekamsk did not rally behind political competitors, particularly among Tatars, given the enterprise’s relationship with KamAZ. Raif Malikov would become CEO of this subsidiary in 1998 and the following year would be elected to the legislature, eventually joining the ranks of

United Russia in subsequent elections.

Having integrated the region’s most profitable firms into its political network,

Rakhimov built one of Russia’s most powerful regional political machines. Rakhimov used his political and economic power to stall any of the federal government’s “shock therapy” programs during the 1990s, meant to privatize the Russian economy quickly. In

176 doing so, Rakhimov’s administration was able to restrict the likelihood of strong political and economic rivals from emerging in the economic and political chaos of the Yeltsin years. So powerful was Rakhimov’s control over Bashkortostan’s political affairs that the Russian Association of Journalists ranked Bashkortostan’s press freedom as the lowest in all of Russia in 1999.17 With his political machine intact, Rakhimov’s capacity to resist Moscow’s attempts towards centralization made him a nationally-significant politician and placed Bashkortostan among Russia’s most defiant and autonomous regions.

This political pugnacity and notoriety placed Rakhimov on a similar path as

Shaimiev, so much so that Bashkortostan and Tatarstan have been described as “Siamese twins”18. Rakhimov, along with the President of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiev, President of Ingushetia Ruslan Aushev, and the governor of St Petersburg, Vladimir Yakovlev, founded the All Russia political party. This bloc would merge with the Fatherland Party, headed by the mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, to create the Fatherland-All Russia bloc for the national legislature elections in 1999. Seeking to help protect the gains made by the regions and resist the centralization of power, the party captured 68 seats, the third- largest party in the legislature, just behind the pro-Kremlin United Party. After supporting Vladimir Putin in the 2000 presidential election, the Fatherland-All Russia bloc would merge with the Unity Party to create the United Russia Party. Though

Rakhimov would not enjoy status as one of United Russia’s inaugural chairmen,19 as a

17 Julia Antonovskaya and Nataliya Mytova, eds., “Public Expertise: The Anatomy of Freedom of Speech” (Typography Science, 2000), http://freepress.ru/arh/book_2000/index.shtml. 18 Sharafutdinova, “Elite Management in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes,” p. 122. 19 Shaimiev, Luzhkov, and Unity Party architect Sergey Shoigu would share the title of Party Chairman for the first term.

177 founding member of the All-Russia bloc and in control of a political machine governing one of Russia’s most populous regions, Murtaza Rakhimov maintained his position as one of the most powerful and recognizable politicians in Russia.

4.3 Amidst Nationality Movements, Migration Politics Emerge

As the Rakhimov administration assembled its political machine via the region’s powerful industrial enterprises, the administration would also begin addressing the political ramifications of the minority national movements that assisted Rakhimov’s rise to prominence. Principally conceived as split amongst Tatars, Bashkirs, and Russians, the diversity of Bashkortostan’s population supported the construction of multiple institutions seeking to promote and protect ethnic identities. As discussed previously in this chapter, the Bashkir national movement has a long history in the 20th century of pursuing political recognition. One of the central motivations for this political activity, however, is the looming fear of Tatar ethnic identity subsuming the numerically smaller

Bashkir population. This fear is reinforced when the neighboring Republic of Tatarstan claims to be the representative government for all Tatars in Russia, a claim that covers nearly one-fourth of Bashkortostan’s population. Responding to these conflicting claims of ethnic representation, the Rakhimov administration embarked on creating cultural institutions to support Bashkir and Tatar ethnic groups, respectively. For example, the

Bashkir National Theatre was established in Ufa in 1935 to celebrate Bashkir-language productions, but a Tatar National Theatre was built in 1991 in Ufa in recognition of

Tatars and offer equity in cultural institutions.

As an extension of this strategy, Rakhimov decreed the construction of a House of

Peoples in the example of the Houses of Friendship in neighboring Tatarstan.

178 Established by presidential decree in 1994, the House of Friendship was dedicated to sought to recognize the various nationalities living in the region, reflecting the original model established in Tatarstan. At the forefront of these ethnic groups, the House of

Friendship emphasized the equity of Bashkir and Tatar ethnic groups alongside the constellation of smaller ethnic groups, both domestic and international. Given the influx of international migrants into Bashkortostan as a result of the First and Second Waves, this commitment represented a standing commitment to supporting the ethnic and cultural diversity in Bashkortostan, even as the number of ethnic communities expanded.

The recognition of Bashkortostan’s ethnic diversity through the House of Peoples also served to increase the monitoring of minority nationalist sentiments and depoliticize ethnic identities. Though Tatar and Bashkir ethnic groups would remain culturally significant communities, as the respective drama theatres reflect, the House of Peoples became the principal institution for expressing ethnic identity and culture, reducing Tatar and Bashkir ethnic identities to equitable status with the vastly smaller ethnic communities found in the House. By creating institutions that equate cultural representation to political representation, the House of Peoples assisted the Rakhimov administration marginalize potential political opponents seeking to mobilize with more radical ethnic identity discourses.20 The House of Peoples, though itself a normatively positive organization in its recognition of minority communities, provided the Rakhimov administration the means to undermine the nationalist movements that had undergirded

Rakhimov’s political ascension.

20 Sergei Filatov, “Religion, Power and Nationhood in Sovereign Bashkortostan,” Religion, State and Society: The Keston Journal 25, no. 3 (1997): 267–280.

179 Unlike in neighboring Tatarstan, however, the House of Friendship in

Bashkortostan would not experience an expansion of its mission or its facilities. Since its founding, the House of Friendship has been in the same building, which placed limits on the organization’s ability to offer space to recognized ethnic groups, particularly newly recognized communities. More importantly for immigrant communities, the House of

Friendship did not develop new offices, such as the Migrant Assistance Office in

Tatarstan, nor did the mission of the House expand beyond cultural representation. In comparison to the evolving institutional framework for Tatarstan’s House of Friendship, these two regional institutions share motivations for providing recognition and physical spaces for minority ethnic groups to celebrate their heritage, but in Bashkortostan, it did not become a vehicle for the development of a migration policy by way of an expanding nationalities policy.

Instead, Bashkortostan’s ambitious foray into migration issues would be through the cooperation of an international aid agency and a regional civil society organization to provide housing for internally-displaced peoples (IDPs). As explained in Chapter 1,

Bashkortostan received an influx of international migrants from across the post-Soviet space from the First and Second Waves. Seeking to gain recognition of the needs of these populations, a group of immigrants who received internally-displaced person status founded the Society of Refugees and Internally-Displaced Persons in the Republic of

180 Bashkortostan (SfR).21 This organization aimed to assist one another in acquiring22 legal status, enrolling children in school, and finding work in Ufa. As a marginalized community organizing during a tumultuous time political and economically, the SfR nevertheless was able to attract the attention of the regional government and raise the profile of the issue of forced migration.

The relative notoriety of SfR’s work was such that the issue of forced migration became one of the points of cooperation between the Republic of Bashkortostan and the

Swiss Confederation. Beginning with an agreement of cooperation in 1994, the two parties agreed to increase trade and seek to address the issues of education and forced migration in the Republic of Bashkortostan. The primary vehicle for this cooperation would be the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), which maintained an active program for supporting Russia’s regions with the transition towards a market- based economy and democratic society. In 2002, the SDC signed grant agreements with several NGOs in Russia, including the SfR.23 This agreement would culminate into

Bashkortostan’s initial and ambitious step into migration politics.

In cooperation with the SDC, the Republic of Bashkortostan would create the village Nagaevo outside Ufa, a community built with the expressed purpose of providing permanent housing for internally-displaced persons in the region. Beginning with the initial grant in 2002, the funding for Nagaevo was secured in an agreement between the

21 For the sake of brevity, I will refer to this organization as the Society for Refugees (SfR) for the remainder of this dissertation. This shortened name reflects the gradual shift in the population served, as internally-displaced persons became a more difficult status to receive from the Russian government. Furthermore, a representative for SfR indicated that though the longer title is still the official name of the organization, the activities and priorities of SfR are focused on the needs of refugees in the Republic of Bashkortostan. Interview with Member of Society of Refugees of the Republic of Bashkortostan, 2014. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid.

181 Rakhimov administration and the Swiss government in 2003, in which the Swiss government contributed 500,000 francs to cover 80% of the project’s budget.24 The remainder of the project’s funding came from Ufa’s municipal budget, and these funds were utilized to purchase the land on the outskirts of Ufa and connect gas and water lines to the community. The Swiss contribution, which was the single-largest financial commitment for the SDC in Russia, was utilized to build roads to the community and distribute block grants to the households selected to live in the village, numbering approximately 550 people. Nagaevo was also proclaimed as the pilot project for a wider

SDC program to support the construction of housing for displaced populations.

The construction of Nagaevo was an unprecedented effort to provide for the material and social needs of immigrants in Bashkortostan and an undeniably public affair.

The first brick laid for Nagaevo was set in place by Erwin Hoffer,25 the Swiss

Ambassador to the Russian Federation, and part of a week of delegation visits, all of which received extensive news coverage in regional newspapers. Touted as a sign of

Rakhimov’s ability to bring international recognition to Bashkortostan, coverage of

Hoffer’s visit and the Swiss delegation highlighted the agreements on economic development and support for social programs, of which Nagaevo was at the center for the latter. Given Rakhimov’s control over the regional press at this time, had the administration wished to obscure the construction of Nagaevo in the news coverage, it certainly had the capacity. Instead, the Rakhimov administration celebrated the construction of Nagaevo as an act of international cooperation for a humanitarian cause.

24 Gulnara Khasanova, “Tatar-Bashkir Report: October 5, 2004,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, accessed May 26, 2017, https://www.rferl.org/a/1346747.html. 25 Ibid.

182 In comparison to the regional responses in Tatarstan, Orenburg, or Samara, the

Nagaevo project was unprecedented in its provision of material goods to immigrants and in its involvement of a variety of actors. Though Bashkortostan had constructed a House of Friendship to recognized the ethnic diversity within the region, the Nagaevo project generously provided necessary material goods to a marginalized population of immigrants. As the region’s initial engagement with migration politics directly, this carried considerable risks, particularly in triggering perceptions of resource scarcity within Ufa. This government intervention assists immigrants in building homes in the suburbs of Ufa, a form of assistance that native citizens do not enjoy. Though Rakhimov administration could claim that the majority of funding came from the Swiss, by allowing

SfR to make connections with an international actor and by becoming an intermediary between the parties, the Rakhimov administration displayed a willingness to engage in issues relating to recent immigration streams. Had the administration insisted, it is possible that the Swiss would have funded another project in Bashkortostan that would benefit the well-being of native-born citizens. Unable to determine what sort of behind- the-door negotiation occurred, we should nevertheless consider the Nagaevo project a foray into migration politics by the Rakhimov administration, since approving and participating in the initiative were deliberate actions that involved the regional government, all of which was broadly reported.

4.4 Election Uncertainty: The Political Machine Breaks Down

As Bashkortostan’s involvement in migration politics was beginning in earnest, the political machine Rakhimov constructed showed clear signs of distress. The 2003 presidential elections in Bashkortostan were an unexpectedly competitive affair, as

183 Rakhimov faced two strong challengers. Despite the formidable resources Rakhimov and his political machine had accumulated, this combative primary threatened the regional executive and the entire structure of the political machine. As events quickly unfolded, the 2003 presidential election in Bashkortostan led to Rakhimov’s once-formidable machine to lose its autonomy in the principal-agent relationship with Moscow.

Rakhimov’s competitors in the 2003 presidential race had extensive resources outside the region, reducing the efficacy of Rakhimov’s powerful political machine, forcing Rakhimov to gain the personal favor of Vladimir Putin. One competitor, Ralif

Safin was an extraordinarily wealthy businessman, having co-founded one of Russia’s largest oil companies, Lukoil. As a native of Bashkortostan with extensive business and political connections in Moscow, Safin was able to pass the stringent requirements to gain entry onto the ballot, only one of seven out of the original twenty candidates. The other competitor for Rakhimov was Sergei Veremeenko, co-owner of Mezhprombank, one of Russia’s largest banks. Though Veremeenko was prevented blocked from the candidate list by the Central Election Committee, Veremeenko’s extensive contacts in the federal security services were able to secure a federal overrule, revealing the limits of

Rakhimov’s political machine against an increasingly combative federal government.

Though the regional media launched an aggressive propaganda campaign against

Veremeenko and Safin to the benefit of Rakhimov’s campaign, Veremeenko and Safin were able to afford campaign ads in national-level media, again counteracting

Rakhimov’s tight control over regional resources. These resources allowed Veremeenko and Safin to maximize the coverage of a disastrous scandal just four days before the

184 election, in which Rakhimov’s administration was caught printing approximately 800,000 false ballots.26

With a national-level magnifying glass over the election, Rakhimov lost his grip over the legal proceedings and was unable to mitigate this disaster, forcing him to meet with Putin personally, ceding the autonomy of his political machine. The first round of the election left Rakhimov shy of a majority of votes, advancing Rakhimov and

Veremeenko into a run-off. Days later, Rakhimov flew to Moscow for an extensive private meeting with Putin. While the discussion was off the record, in the days following the meeting, members of Putin’s presidential administration traveled to Ufa and gave laudatory speeches on Rakhimov’s behalf, the federally-controlled gas company

Gazprom gained management of several petrochemical plants, and Veremeenko suddenly suspended his campaign.27 Without Veremeenko and federal authorities challenging the results of the run-off election, Rakhimov was able to secure just shy of 80% of the vote, demonstrating the functional capacity of Rakhimov’s political machine to deliver tremendous electoral margins to an embattled candidate.

The 2003 presidential election fundamentally affected Rakhimov’s political machine, reducing its autonomy and its reliance on ethnic identity mobilization. The coordination between Rakhimov and Putin, obviated by Rakhimov’s admission to his campaign staff that “Rakhimov’s chances of winning the second-round vote would be very low without federal center’s intervention,”28 clearly reveals the loss of autonomy for

26 For a more thorough account of this race, see Gabdrafikov and Hale, “Bashkortostan’s Democratic Moment?” 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid, pg 93.

185 Rakhimov’s political machine. Further altering Rakhimov’s political machine, Salif as an ethnic Tatar received votes from ethnic Tatars and Tatar-speaking Bashkirs, while

Veremeenko, as an ethnic Russian, attracted the votes of ethnic Russian and urbanized

Tatars.29 With opposition candidates successfully rallying votes against Rakhimov’s support from the Bashkir national movement, the lesson for the regional political machine was to distance itself from ethnic identity politics. Combined, these developments transformed the political autonomy of Rakhimov’s political machine, as it had lost one of its primary sources of legitimacy, representing Bashkir ethnic interests, while also displaying fatal vulnerabilities without federal support.

For the two-level principal-agent game, Rakhimov’s continued survival rested on maintaining federal support. As the runoff election demonstrated, Rakhimov could still deliver electoral returns to United Russia even in a hostile electoral environment, and this made him a useful agent for the federal government. Yet to maintain control over his regional agents as the regional principal, Rakhimov had to demonstrate continued favor with federal authorities, otherwise, the regional executive would be imperiled by perceptions of weakness and inefficacy, increasing the likelihood of defection by regional actors. Rakhimov maintained his close ties to the federal government, and Putin appointed Rakhimov to serve another term in 2006, which was confirmed by the regional legislature.30 In return, Rakhimov’s machine remained a reliable electoral ally for United

Russia, as the party gained 82% of the vote in the 2007 Duma elections.

29 Ibid. 30 As discussed previously, gubernatorial elections were suspended in the wake of the Beslan terrorist attack, and a presidential appointment system was established, further increasing the federal government’s control over the regions.

186 4.5 Wrenches in the Machine: Rakhimov Loses Control

Maintaining favor with the federal government came at an ever-increasing cost for Rakhimov’s political machine, as key business enterprises fell under federal control.

The ownership for the cornerstone firm for Rakhimov’s political machine, the lucrative energy giant BTK, fell into question in 2003, as Rakhimov decreed the enterprise could be privatized, and the state-owned shares in BTK were transferred to Bashkir Capital, a new holding company owned by his son, Ural Rakhimov. In 2005, however, Murtaza

Rakhimov reversed his decree and sought to return the shares to BTK in arbitration court, in effect de-privatizing the energy giant and removing his own son from ownership.

After months of court battles, in which Ural was ordered to return control of the main assets to BTK, the shares remained with Bashkir Capital in exchange for a payment of

450 million USD.31 While the original disagreement within the Rakhimov family is unclear, the timing of the payment coincided with the expiration of Bashkortostan’s bilateral treaty with Moscow, which eliminated the negotiated tax rates and left the region with a massive deficit, a first for the region.32. To finance this payment, Bashkir Capital sold shares to the holding company, AFK Sistema, which ushered in years of lawsuits, as the Audit Chamber and Federal Tax Service investigated Ural Rakhimov’s ownership of

Bashkir Capital.33 After numerous decisions in the arbitration court system, in 2009

Sistema purchased the remaining shares from Bashkir Capital, “stripping the Rakhimov family of its control over Bashkortostan’s energy assets.”34 This was a cataclysmic loss

31 Sharafutdinova, “Elite Management in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes.” 32 Khasanova, “Tatar-Bashkir Report.” 33 For a more complete explanation of events, see Gabdrafikov and Hale, “Bashkortostan’s Democratic Moment?”. 34 Sharafutdinova, “Elite Management in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes,” pg 135.

187 for Rakhimov’s political machine, as the regional executive no longer had the revenues from one of the most lucrative enterprises in Bashkortostan to finance its system of patronage.

Further eroding Rakhimov’s political machine, UNPO would be integrated into the United Engine Company, as part of the federal government’s accumulation of highly technical and military-related manufacturing. Prior to this consolidation, Yuri

Pustovgarov was promoted to the position of CEO in 2004 and remain in the position until 2006. At this time, UNPO was firmly within the Rakhimov administration’s control, evidenced by his promotion to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Industry and Economic Development at the end of his tenure as CEO. UNPO would then be led by Alexander Artyukhov in 2006, who would be elected to the legislature under the

United Russia ticket, ensuring this enterprise remained within Rakhimov’s reach and loyal to the political machine’s goal of providing votes to United Russia. In 2007, controlling shares of UNPO were purchased by the federal government, bringing UNPO into a vertical integration with other gas turbine producers under the management of the

United Engine Company. The United Engine Company is a subsidiary of Oboronprom, an industrial conglomerate of aerospace firms, particularly those involved in the manufacturing of rotary aircraft, which is itself a subsidiary of Rostec, the federal government’s state corporation for military or high-tech civilian manufacturers.

Though Artyukhov would remain CEO of UNPO, and therefore integrated into

Rakhimov’s political machine favoring United Russia, Rostec’s oversight certainly impedes UNPO from participating in political actions that would be adversarial to the federal government. Similarly, with financial issues stemming from the 2008 crisis,

188 KamAZ was brought under the control of Rostec, and therefore the KamAZ’s subsidiary in Bashkortostan, KefAZ. Raif Malikov would remain as CEO, however, thus maintaining some important continuity for Rakhimov’s political machine. Though

KefAZ suffered a similar loss of autonomy as UNPO, Rakhimov still maintained access to the executives managing two firms that could deliver considerable votes for United

Russia. Thus, stability amongst Rakhimov’s actors in his political machine was maintained, but the autonomy of the entire machine was imperiled.

Though Bashkortostan’s political machine was still intact and able to deliver votes to United Russia, Murtaza Rakhimov’s position as regional executive became increasingly unsustainable, leading to his removal by President Putin in 2010. Given his inability to fend off political competitors in the 2003 presidential election, Rakhimov was on the defensive in his relations with Moscow. Knowing his position in Bashkortostan less secure than in the previous decade, Rakhimov worked to ensure that a natural successor never appeared. For example, Rady Khabirov, Rakhimov’s chief of staff who dutifully accepted the blame for the ballot falsification scandal in 2003, was selected to a position overseeing relations with regional governments within the office of deputy of chief of staff to President Putin. Fearing Khabirov was being groomed to replace him as

President of Bashkortostan, Rakhimov fired Khabirov and filed criminal charges against

Khabirov regarding corruption in the 2007 elections. Arguing that Khabirov was offering positions in exchange for bribes and assisting the Communist Party, Rakhimov was able to have Khabirov banned from the United Russia Party. Khabirov would still join the

189 staff of Sergei Surkov, Putin’s deputy chief of staff, but he was effectively stripped of his ability to succeed Rakhimov.35

Though the dismissal of Khabirov removed an immediate threat, Rakhimov rapidly lost the capacity to resist Moscow, especially as his political machine increasingly fell under federal influence. Perhaps in retribution for the Khabirov affair and

Rakhimov’s rebellious public statements, the national media began reporting on compromising details regarding the Rakhimov family, particularly the son Ural

Rakhimov. Reported to have embezzled and laundered money in the midst of the

Bashkir Capital dispute with his father, Ural Rakhimov fled to Austria in 2009, where he would be put on the Russia’s international wanted list.36 Embattled, weakened, and having obstructed the rise of any natural successor, Murtaza Rakhimov was could not manage the appointment of his successor as his peer Mintimer Shaimiev had done.

Instead, Rakhimov was forced to resign from his post and President Dmitry Medvedev appointed Rustem Khamitov to serve as the second President of Bashkortostan in 2010.

The appointment of Rustem Khamitov as the regional executive signaled a total loss of autonomy for the political machine Rakhimov had constructed, but also revealed the priorities for the two-level principal-agent game. Since Murtaza Rakhimov’s actions had prohibited his personal selection of a successor, Moscow had the capacity to choose anyone to replace him. His political machine was still intact and able to deliver a considerable number of votes to United Russia, but promoting actors from within the

35 Nikolay Petrov, “Rakhimov’s Double Mutiny,” Carnegie Moscow Center, accessed June 17, 2017, http://carnegie.ru/2008/07/22/rakhimov-s-double-mutiny-pub-20315. 36 “Austria Grants Former Bashneft CEO Ural Rakhimov Residency Permit - Report | Russian Legal Information Agency (RAPSI).,” http://rapsinews.com/news/20150520/273754595.html.

190 machine was unnecessary due to the degree to which the federal government had already gained oversight. Furthermore, promoting from within the machine carried the risk of appointing an official with better connections and allegiances within Bashkortostan than with the center. Rustem Khamitov is an ethnic Bashkir born in the Siberian region of

Kemerovo but received his engineering education in Ufa and began his varied career in

Bashkortostan. Khamitov would leave for Moscow to work within the Ministry of

Emergency Situations, but he would quickly be reassigned to work for the Volga Federal

District as chief federal investigator for Bashkortostan in 2000. In this position,

Khamitov supported the harmonization of Bashkortostan’s legal code with the federal legal code, essentially working to reduce the gains made by Bashkortostan’s campaign for greater autonomy from Moscow. Khamitov’s experience within the federal government left no doubt that his political priorities aligned with Moscow and not the sovereignty movement in Bashkortostan. Khamitov’s Bashkir ethnicity, however, also suggests that Moscow did not want to risk the ire of the minority nationalist movements and took such a risk seriously. Having already co-opted much of Rakhimov’s political machine, the federal government selected a loyal official to ensure that Bashkortostan would no longer be among the most rebellious regions within Russia.

Under Khamitov’s leadership, the regional government relaxed its grip on the economy and the political machine dutifully delivered votes for United Russia in 2011 elections. Continuing in the duties of his position as chief inspector, Khamitov’s administration opened Bashkortostan to investment and reduced the government’s control over key industries. For example, the petrochemical company SNOS had been one of few lucrative firms that had avoided federal cooption during Rakhimov’s struggle to

191 maintain power. Since 2005, SNOS was led by Damir Shavaleev, a native of the company’s headquarters, Salavat. Shavaleev never sought public office, unlike his predecessors, but under his leadership, SNOS funded many youth activities in Salavat, earning the company considerable good will in the community, assisting in maintaining a

United Russia stronghold. In 2011, SNOS became a subsidiary of Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas behemoth, which is majority owned by the federal government. Though still led by Shavaleev, demonstrating yet again the stability in the regional political machine, the loss of SNOS as an independent, regional enterprise heralded the cooption of

Bashkortostan’s final autonomous and lucrative firm. On a regional level, Khamitov’s leadership had immediate results for the investment climate in Bashkortostan, as Ufa went from being ranked as the 19th best city for business in Russia in 2010 to the second best in 2012.37

Economic reforms reversed Rakhimov’s policies that sought to maintain regional control over significant enterprises, but the political machine he constructed buttressed

United Russia during the tumultuous 2011 and 2012 elections. In a closely watched election, United Russia lost its constitutional majority and received just shy of 50% of the popular vote. In such an electoral climate, the most powerful political machines must be able to ensure high turnout and high returns for United Russia. Despite the change in regional leadership, Bashkortostan’s political machine yielded a turnout of nearly 80%, well above the national average, and United Russia received just over 70% of votes.38

37 “10 Богатейших Семей России: Рейтинг Forbes,” accessed January 23, 2017, http://www.forbes.ru/rating-photogallery/266461-10-bogateishikh-semei-rossii-reiting-forbes. 38 For complete election results, see “Сведения О Проводящихся Выборах И Референдумах” (Moscow: Federal Election Commission, 2012), http://www.vybory.izbirkom.ru/region/region/izbirkom?action=show&root=1&tvd=100100028713304&vr

192 Even as the 2011 election results generated some of the largest protests in Russian political history,39 Ufa did not have large-scale protests, and the machine reliably provided Putin with 75% of the vote in Bashkortostan in the 2012 presidential election.

Though the political machine Rakhimov built no longer had autonomy from the federal government, it was still a stable and powerful political machine for United Russia.

The collapse of Bashkortostan’s political autonomy from 2002 to 2012 earns the region a dependency score of 3, the highest of the four cases considered in this project.

To remind the reader, the dependency score measures gubernatorial elections decided by less than 10% of the vote, run-off gubernatorial elections, the dismissal of a governor, and the appointment of the outsider. Murtaza Rakhimov’s competitive 2003 election necessitated a run-off election, and his dismissal before the end of his term indicates further loss of autonomy. The appointment of Khamitov also represents the appointment of an outsider, as he worked for the federal government in Moscow, bringing regions into compliance, for over ten years. Though this score is the highest of the four cases, it reflects only a loss of autonomy, not collapse of the political machine’s capacity to deliver votes. Though Bashkortostan’s political machine would be embattled for much of

2002 to 2012, it still delivered electoral victories by massive margins to United Russia in each election.

4.6 As Goes Autonomy, So Goes Migration Policy

n=100100028713299®ion=0&global=1&sub_region=0&prver=0&pronetvd=null&vibid=10010002871 3304&type=233. 39 Julia Ioffe, “Snow Revolution,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/snow-revolution; “Dissecting Russia’s Winter of Protest, Five Years on,” Open Democracy Russia, December 5, 2016, https://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/editors- of-opendemocracy-russia/dissecting-russia-s-winter-of-protest-five-years-on.

193 The sudden collapse of autonomy for Rakhimov’s political machine during the

2003 election was the crucial obstacle for developing a migration policy in

Bashkortostan. The loss of autonomy made engaging in migration politics a high-risk venture for Rakhimov’s administration, one that the administration could not afford to mount in a political climate of dwindling support. As an embattled administration was unwilling to take political risks in a high-risk policy arena, Bashkortostan’s nationalities policy did not become an initial vehicle for a migration policy, a key distinction from neighboring Tatarstan. Furthermore, Khamitov’s economic reforms did not advance a migration policy either, since his administration owed its existence to federal intervention and risking potentially unpopular migration policies in a tumultuous election cycle could endanger the new administration’s first test of the principal-agent relationship with

United Russia.

The Bashkir nationalist movement buoyed Rakhimov’s political career, yet the

2003 election results and loss of autonomy limited his administration’s capacity to leverage Bashkir nationalism against Moscow and to legitimize his rule. Though

Rakhimov constructed a House of Friendship similar to institutions in Tatarstan and other

Volga District regions, the Bashkortostan’s House was not the beneficiary of increasing financial support as in Tatarstan. The 2003 election, in which votes against Rakhimov followed strong ethnic lines, demonstrated that Rakhimov’s approach to Bashkortostan’s nationalities policy had not reinforced his position as president, but rather threatened it.

Though Rakhimov could have engaged in more inclusive policies or constructed institutions to gain greater support from ethnic Tatars in the wake of the 2003 election, his administration failed to do so.

194 Though he still maintained Moscow’s support by giving United Russia the votes it needed, Rakhimov had lost the leverage with Moscow vis-à-vis the minority ethnic groups in Bashkortostan, stripping his political machine of a valuable source of support.

The most obvious indicator that Rakhimov had lost leverage with Moscow was the inability to sign a second bilateral treaty, as Tatarstan was able to negotiate and sign by

2007. Though Tatarstan’s success generated promises that Bashkortostan would follow suit, no treaty was negotiated. The legal battles concerning the control of

Bashkortostan’s energy sector, the vertical integration of high-tech manufacturing firms by the federal government, and the ability to claim support of only one of three ethnic groups left Rakhimov without the points of leverage to negotiate a second bilateral treaty.

Without this political win to breathe fresh air into his administration and demonstrate a continued capacity to resist Moscow, Rakhimov had clearly lost the ability to leverage the Bashkir ethnic nationalist movement and it would not be a vehicle for migration policy.

These pitfalls only reinforced the need to avoid ethnic nationalist issues for the

Khamitov administration. Though an ethnic Bashkir, Khamitov was ill-suited to attempt a reinvigoration of Bashkir ethnic nationalism or a more inclusive nationalities policy.

As a political appointee with an extensive federal background that focused on reversing the progress sovereignty movements had won in the 1990s, Khamitov would have struggled to convince the ethnic groups in Bashkortostan that he would fight for enhanced sovereignty. By avoiding the ethnic nationalism question, Khamitov also attracted the suspicion of Bashkir nationalists that saw his administration as a threat to their movement, most publically in a hunger strike involving 150 Bashkir activists in

195 2011.40 This also had the opposite effect, as five bloggers were arrested on extremism charges in 2010 for posting that they support the creation of a new regional government that no longer recognized ethnic Bashkirs.41 In such a political climate, Khamitov would not risk wading into migration politics via an expanded nationalities policy, particularly ahead of the 2011 and 2012 elections.

Though Nagaevo project was the only step made towards an integrative migration policy in Bashkortostan, the success of the project is undeniable. Visiting Nagaevo in the summer of 2014, the development resembles more of a village than a suburban development one can find outside large cities in Russia. Lacking a wall surrounding the village or a gate, Nagaevo appears as a comfortable middle-class community with exterior paint showing only gentle wear, appropriate given all the homes were built in the past twenty years. The size of the homes varies substantially; the most modest are comfortable one-story homes, and the largest are expansive two-story brick houses. My guide in Nagaevo, an active member in SfR, invites me into a home of a resident and fellow internally displaced person. Inside, the house shares the wooden floors and walls that I have seen in villages in the Volga District, albeit with a modern wood paneling and a more open layout. Gathered in the large living room, I met several men from Nagaevo, all were ethnic Tatars and Bashkirs from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, or Kyrgyzstan. Their life stories varied, but most were born in Bashkortostan, had moved to Central Asia as children, and upon the dissolution of the USSR, returned home.

40 “Bashkir Nationalists On Hunger Strike,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, https://www.rferl.org/a/bashkir_nationalists_hunger_strike/2335498.html. 41 “Five Sentenced In Bashkortostan For Online Extremism,” RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty, https://www.rferl.org/a/bashkortostan-extremism/24653855.html.

196 For the refugees and displaced persons fortunate to receive a plot of land and the allowance for construction materials, Nagaevo gave a sense of community. Those selected varied with respect to age, education, and socio-economic background, but the primary selection factor appeared to be active membership within the SfR. Walking through Nagaevo, I was shown an addition being built to a household with assistance from across the refugee community. The social support from within the community was high and clearly beneficial for migrants, though Nagaevo also provided a rare means for social inclusion with elites in Ufa. Wealthier families in Ufa had built cottages amidst the community, as it was considered, “eco-friendly, elite settlement,”42 and the resettled refugees spoke highly of their wealthy neighbors, that community trust was high. Yet the refugees insisted that they were “not parasitic,”43 identifying as hard-working and conscientious. To make this point clear, those refugees I met gestured to the homes around them, since this physical manifestation of their social and moral standing, giving them access to the trust and respect of wealthier citizens in Ufa. While this language reflects the social difficulties migranti endure while in Russian society, the Nagaevo project provided the financial and political support necessary for a segment of this marginalized immigrant community to establish itself and integrate peacefully within the local population.

The visit to the Nagaevo project, however, also revealed significant shifts in language regarding political agency and responsibility. The project only provided housing for approximately 550 people, a drop in the bucket given that ten percent of

42 Interview with Member of Society of Refugees of the Republic of Bashkortostan. 43 Ibid.

197 Bashkortostan’s population arrived during the First and Second Waves.44 Yet in describing the process of building Nagaevo and its continued success, the immigrant community spoke of the continued progress on issues related to migration as falling on local authorities, citing continued municipal and regional leaders. As my guide stated emphatically,

“The administration gave the elite location, partly funded the [utility] network. The Swiss Confederation is also partially funded the engineering networks, roads, supported by the republic's leadership. That is, you realize that the administrative resources in Russia means a lot. The administrative resource was on our side, and it indicates that, in general from the outset the republic was set up not against migrants. It welcomed the migration processes.”

In comparison to the interviews with regional experts and bureaucrats in Bashkortostan, this is a unique perspective on the responsibility of migration policy. All other experts and officials referenced federal bureaucracies as the institutions responsible for addressing concerns in migration policy or migrant populations. These differences in discourse reveal differences in experience. For the community that received assistance through SfR’s advocacy, the municipal and regional governments played an active role in financing and supporting the Nagaevo project. This is perhaps why there remains the belief that “prospects are good for public solutions.”45 For those experts observing migration politics after the collapse in autonomy for Rakhimov’s political machine, the situation was clear – migration policy is a matter for federal authorities, not regional or municipal. This reveals the fundamental importance of an autonomous political machine.

Without the political capacity to take risks and establish independent budget priorities,

44 Жанна Зайончковская, “Регулирование Миграционных Процессов В Республике Башкортостан,” in Общество Беженцев И Вынужденных Переселенцев (Уфа, 2006), http://migrocenter.ru/conferences- m_bash. 45 Interview with Member of Society of Refugees of the Republic of Bashkortostan.

198 the title of Bashkortostan’s only engagement in migration policy from 2002 to 2012 remains with the Nagaevo project.

4.7 Economic Concentration

Bashkortostan’s engagement in migration policy and its cessation cannot be explained by the concentration of economic resources, as per Stoner-Weiss’s argument.46

Bashkortostan’s major economic firms are concentrated in the petroleum and heavy manufacturing sectors, which ought to simplify consensus-building among the related firms and the regional government. There is no evidence to suggest that firms in these sectors had an interest in lobbying for an independent migration policy or an interest in obstructing an expansion of the Rakhimov administration’s migration policy.

Similar to the case of Tatarstan, the concentration of Bashkortostan’s economy in two sectors does provide the capacity for broad consensus, but it also incentivized the construction of a political machine. The concentration of lucrative enterprises in these two sectors certainly contributed to the Rakhimov administration’s focus on securing regional control over these assets as part of its negotiation for a bilateral treaty with the

Yeltsin administration. This would create the foundation for Rakhimov’s powerful political machine, reducing the spectrum of economic interests amongst the involved firms. The economic concentration in Bashkortostan facilitated Rakhimov’s decision to consolidate the majority of the region’s oil and petrochemical firms under a single holding company, initially under the Bashkir Fuel Company (BTK) and then later under

Bashkir Capital, and to give management of this company to his son. Undoubtedly, the

46 Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance (Princeton: Princeton Univesrity Press, 1997).

199 concentration of economic resources played a crucial role in constructing the Rakhimov political machine.

The changes in firms’ management structures did not contribute to the cessation of Bashkortostan’s engagement in migration policy, though the restructuring disrupted the likelihood of consensus-building. The legal battle over Bashkir Capital contributed to a sense of uncertainty in the administration’s economic interests, since the reason for the father-son feud were unknown.47 Compounding this uncertainty, the regional government lost the management of SNOS, KefAZ, and UNPO to federally-owned industrial conglomerates, altering the orientation of the firms’ interests. These shifts in management reduced the likelihood of consensus-building among these firms and the regional government, which could have contributed to the lack of engagement in migration policy but not the administration’s activity in migration policy.

Thus, we observe Stoner-Weiss’s argument carrying weight in how the political machine Rakhimov constructed would develop and even collapse, it does not offer explanatory leverage with regards to migration policy from 2002 to 2012 in

Bashkortostan. The concentration of lucrative economic enterprises in two sectors provided clarity to Rakhimov’s strategy for constructing a political machine, just as it made federal cooption a less daunting task. Yet we do not gain insight into the region’s initial policies in migration politics by observing the relative concentration of economic actors, as it involved cultural recognition and refugee settlement, nor does it explain a lack of activity after the construction of Nagaevo.

47 Sharafutdinova, “Elite Management in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes.”

200 4.8 Marginalization in the Politics of Ethnicity

Mobilizing Bashkir ethnic identity played a pivotal role in legitimating Murtaza

Rakhimov’s leadership in Bashkortostan, but as his power is threatened in the 2003 election, it is difficult to understand the role identity politics in play in the region. As explained previously, the Bashkir national movement was largely a response to the Tatar national movement in Tatarstan, but Rakhimov utilized the movement’s demands for recognition to maintain his hold on power. By making fluency in Bashkir a requirement for the presidency and gerrymandering voting districts to favor Bashkir populations in the countryside, Rakhimov instrumentally used ethnic identity politics to secure his political power and build his political machine. The 2003 election revealed that Rakhimov was not immune to challengers, however, as his marginalization of ethnic Tatars and Russians bolstered the voting totals of his competitors.

Rakhimov’s actions eroded his legitimacy, and the subsequent dismantling of his machine contributed to a marginalization of ethnic politics, closing a pathway for increased engagement in migration policy. The House of Friendship was not the beneficiary of an expanding mission to represent the needs of Bashkortostan’s diverse population as was the case in Tatarstan with the Assembly of Peoples. Though House of

Friendship was expected to be the space of expression of ethnic identity, and it also served to depoliticize ethnic identity, just as in Tatarstan, by placing ethnic identities on an equal playing field. Yet the lack of investment in the House of Peoples by expanding its institutional mission or even updating its physical space suggests that the Rakhimov administration had lost interest in the politics of ethnicity.

201 As a result, we don’t have sufficient evidence from the Bashkortostan case to suggest that the region’s ethnic diversity or the political autonomy gained from the mobilization of that diversity contributed to Bashkortostan’s involvement in migration politics or its cessation. The political meaning of ethnicity did not disappear in

Bashkortostan, as Rustem Khamitov’s Bashkir ethnic identity certainly assisted his selection by Moscow. Khamitov’s initial priorities, however, focused on economic reform rather than engaging in ethnic politics, as the former benefited the center and the latter exposed both his administration and the federal government to unnecessary certainty. Bashkortostan’s diverse population or its status as an ethnic republic does not have clear explanatory leverage on why it ceased to engage in migration politics.

Focusing on the collapse of autonomy for Bashkortostan’s political machine, however, provides us insight into a lack of progress for migration policy since 2003.

4.9 Demographic Pressures: A Need for Immigrants

Unlike Tatarstan, however, Bashkortostan’s population is shrinking due to high rates of emigration to other Russian regions, undercutting the region’s otherwise stable fertility rates, and this demographic pressure ought to encourage government engagement in migration policy. Bashkortostan’s fertility rate in 2002 stood at 1.42, above the

Russian average of 1.29, and by 2012 it would improve to 1.86, again beating the national average of 1.69.48 Though these rates are below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per mother, Bashkortostan was not among the regions with critically low fertility

48 “ФЕДЕРАЛЬНАЯ СЛУЖБА ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ СТАТИСТИКИ,” Центральная База Статистических Данных, May 5, 2017, http://www.gks.ru/dbscripts/cbsd/dbinet.cgi?pl=2415002.

202 rates, and so the regional demographic scenario was considered healthy by national standards.

Yet Bashkortostan’s population is more rural than the national average, and as the economy gained steam, working age adults left the region in search of higher wages. The depopulation of rural communities has occurred throughout Russia, as financial and logistical support for these communities has waned since Russia’s independence.49

Bashkortostan’s agricultural productivity is the fourth highest in Russia, just behind

Tatarstan, 50 providing a source of employment in the rural countryside. Low wages, however, have driven a regional chain migration pattern in which rural residents migrate to medium-sized cities for employment, residents of medium-sized cities move to large cities, and residents of large cities leave for other large cities. This chain migration is not limited to Bashkortostan’s borders, as residents have migrated to nearly every surrounding region and far beyond to Moscow and St Petersburg to seek permanent employment. As a result of this internal emigration rate, Bashkortostan’s population shrank by over 40,000 between the 2002 and 2010 censuses, and its rate of regional emigration was ranked as Russia’s second highest.51

49 Anne White, Small-Town Russia: Postcommunist Livelihoods and Identities: A Portrait of the Intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubstov, 1999-2000 (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); David J. O’Brien and Valery V. Patsiorkovsky, Measuring Social and Economic Change in Rural Russia: Surveys from 1991 to 2003 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006); Timothy Heleniak, “An Overview of Migration in the Post-Soviet Space,” in Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia, ed. Cynthia J. Buckley, Blair A. Ruble, and Erin Trouth Hofmann (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008); Seema Iyer, “The Permanence of the ‘Frostbelt’ in Post-Soviet: Migrant Attraction to Cities in the Irkutsk Oblast, 1997-2003,” in Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia, ed. Cynthia J. Buckley, Blair A. Ruble, and Erin Trouth Hofmann (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008), 123– 60. 50 Sievert, Zakharov, and Klingholz, The Waning World Power: The Demographic Future of Russia and the Other Soviet Successor States. 51 Р.Г. Сафиуллин et al., География Миграционных Процессов Республика Башкортостан: Собержание, Еволюция, Политика (Уфа: Уфимская Государственная Акакемия Экономики И Сервиса, 2012).

203 Bashkortostan’s population loss as a result of emigration was extraordinarily high by national standards, and we would expect such demographic processes to encourage further involvement in migration policy. Whether by seeking to reduce emigration rates or attracting migrants, Bashkortostan does not engage in these policies from 2002 to

2012. Though Khamitov’s administration opened the economy to investment from outside the region, it did not pursue policies designed to affect migration, whether domestic or international. This lethargy in the face of a demographic process that erodes

Bashkortostan’s economic vitality, as its educated and productive leave for higher wages elsewhere, is surprising. Given the gravity of the situation, I argue that Bashkortostan’s inactivity reflects the difficulty of enacting migration policies without an autonomous political machine. Even with economic reforms under Khamitov, we do not see movement towards an independent migration policy, as such a development would expose the center-dependent administration to the risks of involving itself in a contentious debate that would affect international and internal labor migration.

4.10 Exogenous Shocks: Fear Doesn’t Override

Though Bashkortostan’s population was experiencing demographic pressures from emigration rates, exogenous shocks did not generate threat perception in regional newspapers, unlike in Tatarstan, nor did these events appear to shape migration policy in the region. Investigating the newspaper reporting52 in the three months before and after the 2004 Beslan terrorist attack, the 2008 recession, and the 2012 assassination attempt reveals an increasing interest in migration and migrants, as reporting frequency and

52 I consulted the following newspapers: Bashinform, Evening Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, Ufa Weekly, and Sunday Newspapers.

204 length of articles increase over time. This growth is unsurprising, since the growth in the labor migrant population and the increasing public attention to the issue. Arrests of undocumented migrants were reported across newspapers, particularly in cases of an entire factory or medium-scale enterprise, but just as in Tatarstan, the nationality of every migrant was reported. Given the lack of details in these reports generally, the journalistic purpose of such specificity is unclear.

Surprisingly, the reporting in newspapers surrounding the events of violence, the

Beslan attack and the assassination attempt, the reporting regarding migration was largely neutral, if not positive. For the period of time prior to the Beslan attack, the regional government was promoting the upcoming visit by the Ambassador of Switzerland. As a result, the subsequent reporting on his visit, which occurred nearly a month after the attack, lauded his visit and mentioned migration only in reference to the beginning of the

Nagaevo project, yielding overall positive associations with migrants. Similarly, the assassination attempt in Tatarstan increased public concern about radicalism, but migration and migrants themselves were not connected directly to the violence. Instead, regional officials expressed concern for Islamic radicalism writ large, while suggesting

Bashkortostan’s chances of exposure to radical violence was less than in Tatarstan, due to the regional security policies.

Proving that these three exogenous shocks had no effect on the region’s migration policy is difficult, as there is the possibility that these shocks dissuaded the increasingly embattled Rakhimov administration, and the newly-installed Khamitov administration, from engaging in migration policy. What can be demonstrated, however, is that these exogenous shocks did not contribute to the outbreak of violence, substantially shift the

205 journalistic account of migration in Bashkortostan, or generate an independent migration policy in the wake of these negative shocks. As a result, I do not have sufficient evidence to claim that exogenous shocks played a role in the emergence or cessation of

Bashkortostan’s independent migration policy.

4.11 Conclusion

Bashkortostan’s experience in migration policy from 2002 to 2012 reveals the paramount importance of a region’s autonomy in determining whether a region will engage in migration policy. In 2002, at the onset of this project, the policies of

Bashkortostan and Tatarstan were largely identical, having created Houses of Friendship and gained the stated authority to engage in migration policy in their 1994 bilateral treaties. Bashkortostan even appeared ready to take a step ahead of Tatarstan with the agreement to construct the Nagaevo project in 2002. Tthe inability of Rakhimov to win the presidential election in 2003 outright began a series of events that eroded his autonomy from federal influence and defection among his agents. In this defensive position, Rakhimov was unable to take unnecessary political risks for fear of losing the support of his principal, which was the last bastion source of patronage he could offer his agents.

Though Rakhimov was replaced by Khamitov in 2010, we would not see an independent migration policy develop in Bashkortostan. Though Khamitov made economic reform the priority of his administration, as the sale of SNOS to Gazprom and the rapid rise in Forbes business rankings reflect, yet migration policy was not included in this reform process. This is the opposite response in Tatarstan, where focusing on attracting foreign direct investment assisted the expansion of migration policy under the

206 Shaimiev and Minnikhanov administrations, even in violation of the 2007 bilateral treaty.

I argue this lack of engagement in migration policy reflects a new administration’s lack of autonomy and the corresponding inability to engage in contentious politics. Even if the interests represented in the composition of a political machine change, as they did in

Bashkortostan towards economic reform, without autonomy, we will not see engagement in migration policy. To further illustrate, the next chapter considers the Samara and

Orenburg Oblasts as shadow cases, demonstrating further the importance of political autonomy and the role composition plays in the machine politics surrounding migration policy in Russia.

207 CHAPTER 5:

SAMARA AND ORENBURG: PERSISTENT ENGAGEMENT

In comparison to the long-standing and undoubtedly hierarchical political machines that were built in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, the political machines in

Samara and Orenburg emerge in response to the rise of United Russia as a political force.

Prior to the rise of United Russia, Samara and Orenburg were combative political spaces, as conflicts between municipal and regional politicians were common. The dynamic political environment nevertheless yielded networks that assisted in the construction of political machines in the wake of United Russia’s rise to prominence. Though conflictual in origin, these networks gave rise to consensus on some issues, including migration policy.

The engagement in migration policy was persistent for both regions, and despite similar initial exposure to international migration, we observe completely different strategies, which reflect the composition and interests represented in each machine.

Samara is a highly urbanized and industrialized region, wealthy enough to be a peer to

Tatarstan and Bashkortostan as one of the few “donor regions” throughout Russia’s independence. Orenburg is a more rural region and its economy is near the Russian average despite its energy resources. Due to their geographic proximity to Central Asia,

Orenburg and Samara experienced considerable forced migration flows in the 1990s,1

1 Hilary Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia (New York: Routledge, 1998); Moya Flynn, Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation: Reconstructing “Homes” and “Homelands” (London: Anthem Press, 2004).

208 beginning each region’s involvement in migration policy from the onset of Russia’s independence.

Samara’s approach reflected the region’s long-term commitment to economic development, resulting a migration policy similar to Tatarstan’s, but because of a late- developing political machine, Samara’s regional executive would create fewer institutions. Samara’s political development in the 1990s reflects Stoner-Weiss’s model,2 in which the concentration of the regional economy in export-related manufacturing encourages a consensus towards economic development and reform, and we observe

Samara constructing integrative institutions for its immigrant population, like a House of

Friendship. The rise of United Russia disrupted prior regional political behavior and initiated the construction of a political machine, which included a cohort of fellow economic reformers and businessmen. Instability in the regional executive leading up to the 2007 Duma elections left the political machine in an exposed position politically, but the machine’s coherent interests in economic development encouraged continued engagement in migration policy – leading the region to pursue migration policy largely through encouraging civil society groups to provide services with the government’s support. Coordinating through regional bureaucracies, civil society groups, and the

House of Friendship, Samara fostered networks to offer migrants free legal aid, language courses, and representation to roundtables of federal bureaucracies. This policy shared commonalities with Tatarstan, explained by the mutual commitment to economic development, but the lack of a strong political machine influenced by a minority nationalism movement yields Samara’s less politically risky approach.

2 Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

209 Orenburg’s approach is unique among the cases in this project, as it is the only region that implements an independent migration policy legislatively, but its approach also reflects the need for increased access to federal funds and investment in its political machine. In comparison to the other three cases, Orenburg has half the population, considerably less wealth, and no nationally-prominent firms, all of which reduce the importance of Orenburg in the eyes of the federal government. The region’s lengthy border with Kazakhstan and status as the first stop in Russia on the main railway lines between Central Asian and Moscow, however, represents an opportunity for the region to raise its profile with the federal government. Though the construction of Orenburg’s political machine was delayed as in Samara, the centrality of migration as an issue in regional politics generated an independent migration policy through the legislature, a policy that claims authority to direct and supervise the Federal Migration Service. This act was a bold act of regionalism and carried a considerable political risk, yet the region successfully leveraged its importance as a “buffer region” to increase federal funding and raised its profile with the federal government. This approach reflects the relative strength of Orenburg’s political machine and demonstrates that engagement in migration policy is possible in regions with fewer resources.

This chapter will present the Samara and Orenburg cases more briefly than in the previous chapters regarding Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. I will present the case of

Samara first, considering its regional characteristics, the actors in its political machine, and the strengthening of its political machine alongside the development of its migration policy. I will then present the Orenburg case, its characteristics, the actors in its machine,

210 and its migration policy. I will consider the alternative explanations for these cases together to conclude the chapter.

6.1 Samara – Regional Characteristics

The Samara region borders Tatarstan to the southwest, connected by the Volga

River, and the rolling hills of the European plain. Once a primary grain-growing region in Russia, the region’s capital, Samara City, was a bustling river port on the Volga. The city industrialized rapidly during World War II as hundreds of factories were moved to the city in advance of the German army.3 Samara City’s population swelled and, in the aftermath of the war, became the center of Russia’s aerospace manufacturing, particularly in missile production. Samara City would thus become a closed city during the second half of the twentieth century, restricting Soviet citizens’ movement and banning visits by foreigners altogether. Despite this status, Samara City grew to become one of the largest cities in Russia, currently home for nearly 1.1 million residents.

In 1966, the region’s industrial portfolio was expanded significantly after being selected as the site for the largest car factory in the Soviet Union, AvtoVAZ, built in cooperation with the Italian firm Fiat. The city built around the factory, named Tolyatti after the long-serving secretary of the Italian Communist Party, has grown into the largest city in Russia that does not serve as an administrative center for its region, home to over

700,000 residents. Located along the Volga River only an hour’s drive from Samara

City, the Samara-Tolyatti metropolitan area is Russia’s third-largest by population, behind Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The tremendous population growth and

3 Famously, an enormous underground bunker was built in Samara supposedly to host Stalin and the entire Soviet government were Moscow to have fallen. The bunker remains a popular tourist destination within the city.

211 industrialization in this region during the twentieth century has generated comparisons with Chicago and Detroit for Samara City and Tolyatti, respectively.

In comparison to the rest of Russia, Samara’s population is more ethnically diverse and its economy is more productive than the national average. Bordering

Tatarstan to the east, Samara does have a sizeable ethnic Tatar population that accounts for nearly 5% of the regional total, but ethnic Russians have the overwhelming majority at 85% of the population. With 80% of the regional population living in urban areas,

Samara is the most urbanized region among the four cases in this project. The region’s economic profile relies heavily on manufacturing, but its economy is among Russia’s most productive and its unemployment rates are consistently low in comparison to the national average. While Samara City does not have a dominant industrial enterprise,

Tolyatti is a mono-industrial town as AvtoVAZ employed 250,000 in 1999.4 As home to over three million people and containing one of Russia’s most famous industrial enterprises, the Samara region is critical as a symbol of Russian industrial strength.

6.2 Samara’s Post-Soviet Politics

Samara’s political engagement in the post-Soviet period was less confrontational with the federal government than in Tatarstan or Bashkortostan and ranked highly in its democratic outcomes. Though Samara’s Tatar population did engage in the TPC and send delegates to the Tatar Congress meetings in Tatarstan,5 the region’s lack of a minority ethnic mobilization did not drive the region to pursue a regionalist agenda in the early years of the Russian Federation. At the time of the USSR’s dissolution, Konstantin

4 R. Duane Ireland, Robert E. Hoskisson, and Michael A. Hitt, Understanding Business Strategy: Concepts and Cases, 1st ed. (Cincinnati: South-Western College Pub, 2005). 5 Dmitry P Gorenburg, Minority Ethnic Mobilization in the Russian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

212 Titov was the mayor of Samara City and supported the economic and political reforms promoted by then-President Boris Yeltsin. This political support led Titov to be appointed as Governor of Samara, one of Yeltsin’s first appointments, and Titov defied the statist economic policies of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan and opened the region to privatization in earnest. As reflected in his initial political party membership in the

Russian Movement for Democratic Reform, Titov did not seek to construct a political machine at the onset, and as a result, the mayors of Tolyatti and Samara were often members of opposing parties, and the Communist Party enjoyed a representation in the legislature and city councils.6 As a result, Samara’s political environment was among

Russia’s most democratic, as races were competitive and there were few ties between municipal and regional political leaders.

As a supporter of Yeltsin, Titov’s administration did not pursue a bilateral treaty with the federal government initially, but after several notable oblasts signed treaties, such as Sverdlovsk Oblast, Titov negotiated a strong bilateral treaty. Though lacking claims of multinational sovereignty or seeking regional ownership of industrial enterprises and natural resources as Tatarstan and Bashkortostan’s treaties had done,7

Samara’s treaty offered the region special tax rates, allowing it to keep more of

AvtoVAZ’s revenues.8 This was critical for the Titov administration as AvtoVAZ

6 Elizabeth Pascal, Defining Russian Federalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); Molly O’Neal, Democracy, Civic Culture and Small Business in Russia’s Regions: Social Processes in Comparative Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2016). 7 Katherine E. Graney, “Ten Years of Sovereignty in Tatarstan: End of the Beginning or Beginning of the End?,” Problems of Post-Communism 48, no. 5 (2001): 32–41; Elise Giuliano, Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia’s Republics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 8 “О Разграничении Предметов Ведения И Полномочий Между Органами Государственной Власти Российской Федерации И Органами Государственной ...,” accessed March 24, 2016, http://bestpravo.ru/rossijskoje/bh-zakony/e1r.htm.

213 accounted for 18% of regional tax revenues.9 Signed in 1997, Samara’s bilateral treaty was one of the last, but having won the inaugural gubernatorial election handedly in

Samara in 1996, having supported Yeltsin in his 1996 presidential campaign, and having chaired the Federation Council’s Committee on Budget, Tax Policy, Finances, Customs,

Currency, and Banking,10 Titov was in a position to negotiate a favorable bilateral treaty for the region.11

The 2000 presidential election, however, set the stage for a politically tumultuous period in Samara’s regional politics, in which oppositional oligarchs come to the fore.

With national-level political ambitions and an opposition to the centralization of federal power, Titov ran for President of the Russian Federation in 2000 against Vladimir Putin, who had become President following Yeltsin’s resignation. Campaigning on a center- right platform, seeking to further economic reform without centralization, Titov ran as an independent, but had an abysmal electoral showing: coming in third in Samara with 20% of the vote, but not attracting more than 1.5% of the national popular vote. Though this ended his bid for national prominence, Titov could not have made his opposition to

Putin’s administration any clearer.

Further highlighting Samara’s increasingly conflictual role in national politics, the region’s economic resources created two of Russia’s most consequential oligarchs: Boris

Berezovsky and Mikhail Khorodovsky. Berezovsky’s wealth began in Samara, as he founded a private car dealership in cooperation with AvtoVAZ, which generated

9 Pavel Romanov and Irina Tartakovskaya, “Samara Oblast’: A Governor and His Guberniya,” Communist Economies & Economic Transformation 10, no. 3 (1998): 341–61. 10 Philip Hanson, “Samara: A Preliminary Profile of a Russian Region and Its Adaptation to the Market,” Europe-Asia Studies 49, no. 3 (May 1997): 407–29, doi:10.1080/09668139708412448. 11 For a far more comprehensive account of this negotiation, see Pascal, Defining Russian Federalism.

214 considerable wealth for Berezovsky. Increasing his ties to AvtoVAZ, Berezovsky joined with the CEO of AvtoVAZ, Vladimir Kadannikov, and the soon-to-be Chief of Staff to

President Yeltsin, Alexander Voloshin, and created the venture fund All-Russia

Automobile Alliance (AVAA), which came to control nearly 30% of AvtoVAZ’s shares.12 Expanding into numerous other ventures, most notably in media, Berezovsky became a billionaire and member of Yeltsin’s inner circle, supporting Putin’s run for president in 2000. Within weeks of the election, however, Berezovsky publically rejected Putin’s desires to centralize economic and political power through scathing reporting via his media empire. In response, the Putin administration reopened a previous case of embezzlement, and Berezovsky was forced to sell control of his empire and seek exile in Britain.13

In a similar meteoric rise and sudden fall, Mikhail Khorodovsky became Russia’s richest man by the early 2000s and would embody Putin’s use of state power to bring the oligarchs under control. Khorodovsky opened one of the first private banks in Russia in

1989, allowing him to be at the forefront of Russia’s transition to a market economy.

Taking part in the “loans for shares” program, in which federally-owned enterprises were sold to commercial banks to reduce the 1995 budget deficit, Khorodovsky purchased control of the Yukos oil company, which controlled oil extraction in western Siberia and all three of Samara’s refineries,14 which the Titov administration had not sought control over, unlike in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. As oil prices soared and Yukos acquired an

12 Ireland, Hoskisson, and Hitt, Understanding Business Strategy: Concepts and Cases. 13 Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2016). 14 Yukos derives its name from the titles of its major assets: “Yu” representing its extraction operation, Yuganskhneftegaz, and “kos” representing KuybyshevnefteOrgSintez, located in Samara.

215 ever-greater market share, Khorodovsky also created the philanthropy organization,

OpenRussia, which sought to support Russia’s civil-society development through internet cafes in the countryside, supporting the training of journalists, and by some estimates supported somewhere between 50% and 80% of Russia’s NGOs in the early 2000s.15

This involvement in political and social life reached a zenith in early 2003, when

Khorodovsky argued with Putin as to whether there was widespread corruption in government. In October 2003, Khorodovsky was arrested on tax evasion and fraud charges and Yukos would be seized by the federal government in the following months.

6.3 The Machine in Samara

Though Samara had competitive elections at the local level and no lucrative state- owned firms, the Titov administration had developed robust political networks that would only become more powerful with the rise of United Russia. In comparison to Shaimiev and Rakhimov, Titov did not prioritize the control of lucrative regional enterprises to create patronage networks. Instead, Titov focused on privatization and encouraged the growth of small-and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), and in so doing Titov’s administration was able to undercut the power of oppositional mayors by controlling access to federal funds and the powerful Samara Chamber of Commerce. These networks solidified into a political machine, one that resisted federal control, but still delivered control of Samara’s political space to United Russia.

Key to the development of Samara’s political machine was the control over city managers, making life difficult for opposition mayors, and keeping the loyalty of local elites, who benefited from further privatization. Titov’s early commitment to economic

15 Masha Gessen, “The Wrath of Putin,” Vanity Fair, April 2012, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2012/04/vladimir-putin-mikhail-khodorkovsky-russia.

216 reforms focused overwhelmingly on the economies of Samara and Tolyatti, a reasonable focus since this metropolitan area is home to two-thirds of the regional population. Yet his focus on industrial enterprises and privatization left the countryside neglected, and

Samara was only one of six regions in all of Russia that did not subsidize its agricultural production in the 1990s.16 This stark policy essentially handed the countryside to any candidate opposing Titov’s reforms, and thus the Communist Party maintained a presence in the regional politics, but limited power given the lack of influence in either major city.

Titov’s desire for electoral certainty became clear in 1996, in the first gubernatorial election for Samara and the Yeltsin’s second presidential election. Though

Titov was a member of Yeltsin’s “Our House- Russia” Party (NDR), his election focused on his economic management of Samara, distancing himself from Yeltsin,17 but in three districts in which the Communist Party’s candidate, Zhuganov, outperformed Yeltsin,

Titov immediately dismissed the chief district administrators.18 Following the 1996 election, however, 80 percent of the Titov’s nominees to mayor and rural district managers were elected,19 and most reflected his political career’s background and priorities: former Communist Party members that had remained in office through the transition and supported continued privatization.20

This network had an unlikely mediating nexus, the Rotary Club of Samara, and this acted to connect Titov’s regional administration to the Samara Chamber of

16 Romanov and Tartakovskaya, “Samara Oblast’: A Governor and His Guberniya.” 17 Kimitaka Matsuzato, “Local Elites Under Transition: County and City Politics in Russia 1985-1996,” Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 8 (1999): 1367–1400. 18 Kimitaka Matsuzato, “Regional Politics and Municipal Building: The Reshuffling of Local Chief Administrators in Russia, 1990-1996,” in The Politics of Local Government in Russia, ed. Vladimir Gel’man and Alfred B. Evans, Jr. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004), 169–202. 19 Romanov and Tartakovskaya, “Samara Oblast’: A Governor and His Guberniya.” 20 Matsuzato, “Regional Politics and Municipal Building: The Reshuffling of Local Chief Administrators in Russia, 1990-1996.”

217 Commerce and its members, creating a powerful alignment of economic interests through regional institutions. The Rotary Club of Samara, founded by the owner of a construction company, Boris Ardalin, became a central social fixture among regional economic and political elites. Reflecting the Rotary Club’s popularity, Ardalin was elected to head the

Samara Region Chamber of Commerce, a powerful institution in political affairs with a that membership included 220 firms by 2011.21 These connections through the Rotary

Club assisted Titov in gaining seats on the board of directors for AvtoVAZ, Yukos, and a

Samara City-based aeronautical manufacturing company, Aviakor.22 Through interactions between the Samara Chamber of Commerce and the regional administration,

Titov would begin to consolidate political and economic power in the region despite a lack of direct control over the region’s lucrative enterprises.

By pursuing a reciprocal relationship with the Samara Chamber of Commerce,

Titov secured political access to the region’s largest firms, reducing the avenues for political opponents to acquire political resources. Due to Titov’s commitment to privatization and supporting the development of SMEs, by 1995, “the region had 17,400 small companies and by 2000, they numbered 27,600, although the total number of such companies across Russia rose only insignificantly over the same five years.”23 This economic success reinforced Titov’s political agenda, but only a handful of these small companies had membership in the Samara Chamber of Commerce. A later president of the Chamber of Commerce described membership to the Chamber as dependent on

21 O’Neal, Democracy, Civic Culture and Small Business in Russia’s Regions: Social Processes in Comparative Historical Perspective. 22 Romanov and Tartakovskaya, “Samara Oblast’: A Governor and His Guberniya.” 23 O’Neal, Democracy, Civic Culture and Small Business in Russia’s Regions: Social Processes in Comparative Historical Perspective, 87.

218 whether the business had regional aspirations, and that the Chamber’s relationship to the regional administration was therefore less helpful for smaller enterprises.24 Thus, Titov’s political machine ushered the growth of Samara’s SMEs to such a scale that cooption of the entire sector was unlikely, retained his popularity among this increasingly important sector for employment, but his network of businessmen and administrators ensured that the rise of political opponents would be unlikely.

6.4 Migration Policy in Samara: Integration at the Initiation

In comparison to the other three cases in this dissertation, Samara begins in 2002 with the least engagement in migration policy, but the region nevertheless displayed a concern with migrant integration. Responding to the First Wave of migration immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Samara City administration issued a decree “Concerning the Primary Measures of Preparation for the Mass

Population Migration to the Territory of Samara City” in 1992, which sought to direct the

“general management on the organization of reception, temporary accommodation, and provision of evacuees and refugees”25 through the city’s Commission on Emergency

Situations. This document merely outlined that the city administration was concerned with the arrival of refugees and internally-displaced persons, even as early as 1992, but beyond assigning logistical responsibility, the document does not establish any institutions to oversee refugees or migration in the long-term.

Even as Titov’s administration finalized negotiations concerning the bilateral treaty with the Yeltsin administration in 1997, five years after Samara City’s decree,

24 O’Neal, Democracy, Civic Culture and Small Business in Russia’s Regions: Social Processes in Comparative Historical Perspective. 25 О.Н. Сысуев, “О ПЕРВООЧЕРЕДНЫХ МЕРАХ ПО ПОДГОТОВКЕ К МАССОВОЙ МИГРАЦИИ НАСЕЛЕНИЯ НА ТЕРРИТОРИЮ Г. САМАРЫ.” (East View Information Services, 1992).

219 migration was not at the center of the political agenda. In the bilateral treaty, the Titov administration focused on tax policy, primarily concerning AvtoVAZ, and compared to

Tatarstan and Bashkortostan’s bilateral treaties, Samara’s had a more limited social agenda. Rather than outlining a comprehensive list of social issues that the regional administration would seek to address jointly with the federal government as its neighboring regions had, Samara claimed authority to address, “matters of pensions and employment of the people of the Samara region.”26 By 1997, the region had experienced the majority of immigration from the First and Second Waves, and perhaps the scale of this migration deterred the Titov administration from wishing to negotiate for authority in migration policy, as it would have exposed the administration to the financial costs of receiving so many refugees and internally-displaced persons. Similarly, negotiating the treaty during an election year for Titov may have encouraged Titov to avoid the topic of migration, as his administration was unwilling to take on additional risks in his inaugural election.

Regardless of the motivation, it was not until 2001 that Samara would follow the lead of its neighbor and create a House of Friendship. Modeled on Tatarstan’s example, the House of Friendship was based in Samara and acted as an umbrella institution, sheltering the independent ethnic associations that had formed in the 1990s.27 As a space for cultural expression, Samara’s House of Friendship began as a site to support the socialization and integration of immigrant communities. The later construction date in

26 “О Разграничении Предметов Ведения И Полномочий Между Органами Государственной Власти Российской Федерации И Органами Государственной ...” 27 Lyailya G. Khusnutdinova et al., “Regional Policy on Socio-Cultural Adaptation of Migrant Workers in the Volga Region (Based on the Material of Samara Region),” Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, May 1, 2015, doi:10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n3s4p223.

220 comparison to its peers in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan suggests that the House’s construction was less proximate to reducing the political salience of a politically mobilized ethnic group. Thus, entering 2002, Samara’s modest integrative migration policy had just begun to take shape, and it had opted to emulate the activities of its neighbors and create an integrative House of Friendship.

6.5 United Russia, Titov’s “Demotion,” and Strengthening the Machine

Vladimir Putin’s desire to bring the regions under federal control began in earnest after the 2000 election, and Konstantin Titov demonstrated a desire to reconcile and correct the relationship with Moscow. Putin sought to eliminate the bilateral treaties early on in his presidency by creating the seven federal districts and appointing commissions to eliminate regional laws at odds with the federal constitution.28 Offering little resistance to this process, Titov annulled Samara’s bilateral treaty ahead of schedule in 2002,29 reflecting the conciliatory approach Titov hoped to take and the treaty’s lack of political weight for Titov’s political machine.

The general approach pursued by the Titov administration, supporting privatization and avoiding long-term party affiliations, did offer a route for some political opponents, and coupled with United Russia’s weak showing in the 2003 Duma elections, the Titov administration would create a more structured political machine to survive the two-level principal-agent game in Putin’s transformation of Russian politics. While

Tolyatti had a Chamber of Commerce with 700 members and representation in the

28 For an excellent account of this process, see Adrian Campbell, “Vertical or Triangle? Local, Regional and Federal Government in the Russian Federation after Law 131,” in Federalism and Local Politics in Russia, ed. Ross Cameron and Adrian Campbell (New York: Routledge, 2009), 263–83. 29 Mizuki Chuman, “The Rise and Fall of Power-Sharing Treaties between Center and Regions in Post- Soviet Russia,” Demokratizatsiya 19, no. 2 (2011): 133.

221 Samara Chamber of Commerce, Samara City lacked a separate entity for SMEs. One of

Titov’s opponents in his gubernatorial election, Viktor Tarkhov, founded a Samara chapter of OPORA, the Russian Union of Small- and Medium-sized Businesses, in 2002 while serving in Samara’s legislature. Clearly, Tarkhov’s political agenda also reflected a support for privatization, but Tarkhov objected to the Titov cadre and their embrace of

Putin.30 The OPORA-Samara chapter became a nationally-respected chapter and represented Samara City’s burgeoning SME population more directly than the Samara

Chamber of Commerce. By 2007, Samara City had “17,000 small companies, or 59% of regional total, as well as 19,000 individual entrepreneurs . . . almost 40% of the workforce.”31 Though OPORA-Samara was not a purely political organization, Tarkhov raised his political profile in the region considerably, threatening to provide a legitimate alternative to Titov that would not seek to dismantle the economic successes Samara had won. To increase his control over the region, Titov amended the structure of regional government, reducing the number of deputy governors from 7 to 1, giving him near absolute control over the regional agenda, giving himself a super position with which to interact with Putin in a two-level agent-principal game.32 These developments occurred just prior to the 2003 Duma election, in which United Russia only gained 33% of the vote,33 placing greater pressure on Titov to align himself with United Russia, lest he be outmaneuvered by rivals.

30 O’Neal, Democracy, Civic Culture and Small Business in Russia’s Regions: Social Processes in Comparative Historical Perspective. 31 Ibid., 87. 32 Mikhail Stoliarov, Federalism and the Dictatorship of Power in Russia, Routledge Studies of Societies in Transition (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2003). 33 “Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation,” Elections, Referendums, and Other Direct Voting, n.d., http://www.izbirkom.ru/region/izbirkom.

222 In a political shake-up, Titov would resign as governor in 2007, but this event revealed the autonomy of his political machine. Slow to accept the new reality in

Russian politics, Titov joined United Russia in 2005, just ahead of his reappointment as governor by Putin. The reasons for supporting Titov for reappointment are unclear, as

Titov was being tried on corruption charges, but a likely motivation was Titov’s ability to turn his entire political machine to United Russia. This gave United Russia control of the regional administration, and the resources of two of the Samara region’s most powerful businessmen, Vladimir Avetisyan and Oleg Dyachenko, the latter of whom was deputy chair of the regional legislature and the wealthiest representative in Samara.34 Despite this offering to United Russia, Titov could not escape his corruption charge, and in 2007, he resigned from office to avoid this charge affecting United Russia’s turnout in the

December 2007 elections. Putin swiftly appointed Vladimir Artyakov, who was the acting CEO of AvtoVAZ, and though the regional legislature approved Putin’s appointee, they also elected Titov to serve in the Federation Council, as the corruption charges were dismissed. Titov’s resignation smacks of federal interference, but Titov’s political machine was so robust and coherent, it avoided federal cooption and acted in defiance, allowing Titov to remain a force in Samara politics.

Titov’s political machine became more aggressive in eliminating political rivals and secured significant electoral wins for United Russia. Despite Titov’s resignation and appointment of Artyakov, Titov’s machine delivered 60% of the vote to United Russia in the 2007 Duma election, doubling the 2003 electoral turnout for United Russia, and in the

2008 presidential election, Medvedev won 75% of the vote, improving on Putin’s 2004

34 O’Neal, Democracy, Civic Culture and Small Business in Russia’s Regions: Social Processes in Comparative Historical Perspective.

223 turnout of 63%.35 Opposing these electoral wins for United Russia, in 2006, the anti-

Titov candidate and OPORA-Samara founder, Viktor Tarkhov, won Samara’s mayoral election, thus becoming one of the only mayors of a major city not aligned with United

Russia. Needing to address such developments, the Titov political machine was able to convince Tarkhov’s former deputy in Samara City, Dmitry Azarov, to run under United

Russia, and Azarov would go on to win with nearly two-thirds of the vote.36

Furthermore, Tarkhov’s greatest supporter was billionaire Yuri Kachmazov, the CEO of the massive industrial conglomerate SOK Group, and shortly after the election, criminal charges were brought against Kachmazov for fraud, and Kachmazov would flee to the

UAE.37

Though Titov’s political machine delivered votes in the 2007 and 2008 elections, it exhibited considerable autonomy, resisting Artyakov’s control and displaying a lack of political will to counter the swell of anti-United Russia sentiment in 2011. Vladimir

Artyakov was not a total outsider, as he had worked as CEO of AvtoVAZ, and the firm’s interests favored continued export-oriented business and investment echoed the agenda of

Titov’s cadre. Undoubtedly, the importance of AvtoVAZ to Samara’s economic health and political identity was meant to lend credibility to Artyakov, yet Artyakov lacked the political acumen to bring Titov’s political machine under his thumb, reflected in his inability to appoint a new United Russia party secretary.38 Artyakov was not paralyzed, however, as he secured the construction of a special economic zone in Tolyatti and

35 “Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation.” 36 Ibid. 37 Герман Петелин et al., “Вице-Президент СОКа Умер Под Пытками,” Известия, September 1, 2011, http://iz.ru/news/499152. 38 Cameron Ross and Rostislav Turovsky, “Centralized but Fragmented: The Regional Dimension of Russia’s‘ party of Power,’” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 23, no. 2 (2015): 205–223.

224 marshalled federal support for Renault’s 25% stake in AvtoVAZ, but he was not able to command exclusive control over regional political affairs. The 2011 Duma elections were highly contested, and in order to deliver a sound victory to United Russia, regional executives needed to utilize every strength at their disposal. With limited control over

United Russia in Samara and a political machine unlikely to take risks on his demand,

Artyakov only secured 39% of the vote for United Russia, while the Communist Party gained 23%, and the parties Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia gained approximately 15% each. This electoral failure was only repeated in the 2012 presidential elections, as Putin received 58% of the vote, less than his 2004 electoral win.39 Artyakov resigned in the months that followed, and Nikolai Merkushkin was appointed governor in December of 2012. Merkushkin had been governor in the neighboring Republic of Mordovia, where he secured 91% of the vote for United Russia in 2011 and 87% of the vote for Putin in 2012.40 Merkushkin was clearly brought in to bolster United Russia in Samara, as he had no connection to the region and had demonstrated the ability to all but guarantee votes to Putin’s regime.

This series of events at the end of 2011 and 2012 result in a higher dependency score, but nevertheless reflects the autonomy that Titov’s political machine had secured, which elicited a response from Moscow to place a more capable and federally-aligned governor at the helm. The circumstances surrounding Titov’s reappointment by Putin in

2005 and Titov’s continued political career after his resignation as governor do not lead me to code this event as gubernatorial dismissal, nor does Artyakov’s appointment in

2007 code as appointing an outsider. Artyakov’s resignation and Merkushkin’s

39 “Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation.” 40 Ibid.

225 appointment, however, indicate a hostile takeover was underway. Artyakov’s would resume his career at AvtoVAZ and Rostec, however, suggesting was not dismissed because he had opposed the federal government, but rather, he was removed because he was unable to bring Titov’s political machine under his control. Merkushkin’s clear status as an outsider, however, must be scored as such accordingly, as it is a sign that

Moscow was taking the autonomy of Titov’s political machine very seriously. Thus, I give Samara’s dependency score a 1, scoring as having less autonomy than in Tatarstan, but much lower than Bashkortostan.

6.6 Samara’s Migration Policy: Expanding through Civil Society

As Titov’s political machine demonstrated greater autonomy, Samara’s engagement in migration policy would increase, but it would empower civil society organizations to take the lead, helping to insulate the regional administration from potential political backlash. As the 1992 order from Samara City reflects, migration had been an issue of importance for the Samara region for some time, but the regional administration had not become involved, as the 1997 bilateral treaty reflects. The creation of the House of Friendship in Samara was the first step into migration policy for the regional administration, but it sought to house the civil society groups that had already been formed by the various ethnic groups living in the region. The construction of AvtoVAZ and the need for a massive workforce created a diverse and active array of diaspora communities, leading business leaders to conclude that ethnic tolerance in

Samara was high.41 Though the House of Friendship was built only in 2001, the institution was quickly utilized by these various organizations. The Azeri association

41 O’Neal, Democracy, Civic Culture and Small Business in Russia’s Regions: Social Processes in Comparative Historical Perspective.

226 was particularly active, winning a grant in 2007 to create a “Migrant School,” which provided free classes to offer “information and legal support to migrants arriving . . . for the purpose of carrying out their work and obtaining Russian citizenship.”42

In 2008, the House of Friendship began offering more programming to assist migrant communities in celebrating their cultural heritage, but it also began addressing labor migration more concertedly. Borrowing from the Tatarstan House of Friendship,

Samara’s House coordinated Sunday school language classes for more than 17 languages, each being taught by volunteers from respective ethnic communities, and the ethnic associations began newspapers, which are estimated to have a circulation of 15,000.43

The same year, the House of Friendship began producing brochures, “Migrant

Communities in the Samara Region: Ethnic and Religious Features,” for migrants and the native population in the hopes of supporting better understandings between the groups, as the brochure covered sensitivity to cultural norms and interethnic business etiquette.44

As the House of Friendship was providing the space for ethnic communities, the regional administration worked with the regional branch of the Federal Migration Service to create a Public Advisory Council. This Council was developed in 2007 to provide an advisory and consultative function in the implementation of migration policy, but the founding document refers to a number of specific agendas, including:

“Development of interaction of the FMS with public associations, scientific institutions and business in the following areas: - control over the fulfillment of state obligations provided by the laws on refugees and internally displaced persons;

42 “В Самарском Доме Дружбы Народов Открылась Школа Мигранта,” Association of Russian Ethnic Communities, October 10, 2008, http://www.interethnic.org/News/100108_6.html. 43 Л.Г. Хуснутдинова, “Роль Национально-Культурных Центров В Соцоикультурной Адаптации И Интеграции Мигрантов В Самарской Области,” Актуальные Проблемы Гуманитарных И Естественных Наук 9, no. 68 (2014): 87–89. 44 Khusnutdinova et al., “Regional Policy on Socio-Cultural Adaptation of Migrant Workers in the Volga Region (Based on the Material of Samara Region).”

227 Friendly reception and arrangement of returning compatriots; - successful implementation of the law enforcement practice of legislation relating to labor migrants; - involvement of socially responsible business organizations in the formation of Effective migration infrastructure; - Promoting the regularization of the situation of migrants who do not have any legal status; - assistance in the formation and development of a civilized market of non- governmental services in the sphere of labor migration in the Russian Federation.”45

The Council was chaired by the chief and deputy chief of the Samara regional office of the FMS and included the director, deputy director, and public relations officer of the

House of Friendship, the head of the Department for Work with Public and Religious

Organizations of the Mayor's Office of Samara City, and the chief consultant of the

Government of the Samara region.

The Council would expand to include more members in 2009, and critically among these was the legal organization Migrants and Law, which provided free legal aid to migrants. The Migrants and Law chapter in Samara was part of a wider network, organized and managed by the famous Russian human rights organization, Memorial. As it seeks to provide legal aid to migrants, whether refugees or labor migrants, Migrants and Law seeks to

“provide the conditions for the integration of migrants in society, to achieve a solution to their problems on the basis of universally recognized legal standards, eliminate discriminatory approach and arbitrariness on the part of officials at all levels.”46

45 “Положение об Общественно-консультативном совете при УФМС России по Самарской области” (УФМС Самары, August 23, 2007), https://web.archive.org/web/20120113023101/http://www.ufms63.ru/sovet/topic_8. 46 “О Сети «Миграция И Право»,” Правозащитный Центр «Мемориал», September 1, 2015, https://memohrc.org/specials/o-seti-migraciya-i-pravo-1.

228 In 2008, as part of an expansion of services provided to migrants, the Samara regional administration designated Migration and Law as a partner in its migration policy, partnering the organization within the House of Friendship and gave the organization a permanent seat on the Council. In its first year, Migration and Law provided free legal assistance to more than 600 migrants in Samara,47 and the organization joined briefing sessions at the House of Friendship regarding legal norms and successfully joining society in Samara.48 In addition to adding Migration and Law, the Council doubled in size, including the President of the Samara Chamber of Commerce, head of OPORA-

Samara, four social science professors from regional universities, the head of the Kyrgyz association, and the Chairman of the Council became the head of the Azeri association instead of the chief of the Samara FMS.

The minutes from these expanded Council meetings reveal the difficulties faced by migrant communities, but they reveal a collaborative and productive exchange. The second meeting of the then-expanded Council in 2009, the Council agreed to pass along a recommendation through the FMS office that the registration period in Russia be extended from three days to five days and a database was established in which regional employers could post requests for migrant labor, which would be distributed through the respective ethnic associations. The FMS also read the first draft of the proposed patenti reform, which was well-received by those in attendance since members of the business

47 Хуснутдинова, “Роль Национально-Культурных Центров В Соцоикультурной Адаптации И Интеграции Мигрантов В Самарской Области.” 48 Khusnutdinova et al., “Regional Policy on Socio-Cultural Adaptation of Migrant Workers in the Volga Region (Based on the Material of Samara Region).”

229 community expressed disappointment with the quota system.49 Yet the meeting also discussed the results of a survey of 400 police officers in Samara, which revealed,

“inconsistency and lack of informed view on interethnic relations among a significant number of survey participants, the obvious manifestation of migrantphobia. And as it appears, more significant manifestations of intolerance in young people under 25 years of age. In addition, manifestations of intolerance exist in relations between colleagues in units with a multinational composition.”50

Such frank conversations regarding the treatment of migrants arise commonly in minute meetings from 2009 to 2012, though a meeting in 2010 mentioned the desire to create a temporary accommodation center for stateless persons, which the Council agreed to take up with Governor Artyakov.51 This center as discussed was never constructed, but as part of a public-private venture, a large hotel, “Second Capital,” was constructed in 2012 with direct access to the regional FMS to assist migrants register with the authorities and ensure their legal status, while providing affordable temporary and/or seasonal housing.52

By creating the Council and incorporating the regional administration, the Samara

Chamber of Commerce, the House of Friendship, the FMS, and the ethnic association,

Samara created an ambitious integrative migration policy, but one that is less far-reaching than Tatarstan’s policy. Empowering civil-society organizations to take charge via the

House of Friendship, Samara worked to provide free legal aid, spaces for cultural celebration, language education, and access to the regional FMS. This policy reflects the

49 “В Самарском Доме Дружбы Народов Прошло Второе По Счёту Расширенное Заседание Общественного Совета При УФМС России По Самарской Области” (УФМС Самары, August 2009), http://www.ufms63.ru/sovet/topic_3. 50 Ibid. 51 “Cостоялось расширенное заседание Общественного Совета при УФМС России по Самарской области, Рабочей комиссии Общественного Совета ГУВД по взаимодействию с национальными, религиозными организациями и общественными объединениями, Cовета” (УФМС Самары, October 22, 2010), https://web.archive.org/web/20120113020408/http://www.ufms63.ru/sovet/topic_6. 52 Khusnutdinova et al., “Regional Policy on Socio-Cultural Adaptation of Migrant Workers in the Volga Region (Based on the Material of Samara Region).”

230 cohesion in Samara’s political machine, but the distant relationship with Governor

Artyakov, and the lack of a minority nationalist movement separates Samara’s approach from neighboring Tatarstan. Samara’s approach to providing free legal aid, for example, assists a fraction of migrants in comparison to Tatarstan’s publically-funded legal aid agency. Shaimiev’s political machine had the political legitimacy of a minority nationalist movement to assist the regime in implementing its institution-specific migration policy through an evolving nationalities policy. Furthermore, Samara’s approach created a consultative body for a federal agency, while Shaimiev’s 2009

Agreement declared regional migration institutions as equal partners to federal bureaucracies. While we observe the relative autonomy and composition between regional political machines in these differences, the similarities between the policies implemented in Samara and Tatarstan reflect the paramount importance of economic development for the political machines in both regions.

6.7 Orenburg: Regional Characteristics

Bordering Tatarstan and Bashkortostan to the south and Samara to the east,

Orenburg’s territory stretches horizontally from west to east, largely encompassing the winding basin of the Ural River. Unlike the other three regions in this project, Orenburg maintains an international border, which stretches for over a thousand mile along

Kazakhstan’s northwestern border, and its topography is steppe. Orenburg’s horizon evokes the sense of frontier, as it stretches in every direction.

This frontier quality is reflected in the region’s population structure and economy.

With just over two million inhabitants, Orenburg has half the population of the other regions in this study, and Orenburg City is home to over 550,000 residents. Orenburg’s

231 population is more ethnically diverse than the Russian norm as Kazakhs are 6% of the population and Tatars are 7%, but ethnic Russians still constitute 75% of the regional population. Only 60% of Orenburg’s population lives in urban areas, far below the national average of 73%. Agriculture, therefore, is a more important facet of Orenburg’s society, similar to Bashkortostan, but the energy sector dominates Orenburg’s economy.

Orenburg’s territory encompasses the world’s fourth-largest natural gas field,53 which produces approximately 3% of Russia’s natural gas, and the region produces over 3% of

Russia’s oil.54 Along with mining and steel manufacturing, Orenburg regularly places within the top 30 regions in Russia for gross regional product.

6.8 Orenburg: Post-Soviet Politics

Similar to Samara, in the immediate years following Russia’s independence, the region would not attempt to exert regional ownership over major economic enterprises, but it would be active in regionalism. The regional executive at the time of the Soviet

Union’s dissolution was Vladimir Yelagin, and with a background in Orenburg’s gas sector and as a centrist within the Communist Party, he was well-positioned to maintain his seat at the helm of Orenburg. In his regional administration, Yelagin kept a considerable number of fellow centrists from the former Soviet administration, and though he tried to bring in specialists to bolster his administration with experts, these appointees were well-ingrained with business strategies that did not accelerate privatization.55 This left little distance politically between Yelagin and his primary

53 Yulia Grama, “The Analysis of Russian Oil and Gas Reserves,” International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy 2, no. 2 (2012): 82–91. 54 “Geography and Natural Resources,” Investment Portal of the Orenburg Region, June 20, 2017, http://www.orbinvest.ru/en/orenburg_region/geography_and_natural_resources.php. 55 Leokadiya Drobizheva, “Comparison of Élite Groups in Tatarstan, Sakha, Magadan, and Orenburg,” Post-Soviet Affairs 15, no. 4 (1999): 387–406.

232 political opposition, conservative Communist Party members, but Yelagin would maneuver to place Orenburg in the center of national political trends.

Yelagin would develop close ties with Governor Rossel of the Sverdlovsk region, and this would influence the direction that Orenburg’s regionalist politics would take.

The capital of the Sverdlovsk region, Yekaterinburg, is commonly referred to as the capital of the Urals, and its industrial might and large population was similar to Samara

City. Observing the minority nationalist movements sweeping through nearby

Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, Rossel began articulating a Urals identity and sought to pressure the Yeltsin administration to recognize the contributions of the Urals.56 One of the first moves in this direction involved the proposal to create a Urals Republic, which would combine the territories of Sverdlovsk, Kurgan, Chelyabinsk, Perm’, Tyumen, and

Orenburg, an area that would have accounted for most of Russia’s productive oil and natural gas fields and “45 percent of the nation’s ironworks and about 12 percent of the nation’s mechanical engineering projects.”57 Yelagin signed an initial agreement to support the creation of this republic, and when this endeavor failed, Yelagin began making inroads to gain more influence with the federal government.

To gain a greater profile with the federal government, Yelagin continued to pursue a regionalist agenda, culminating in a bilateral treaty in 1996. To reconcile for his participation in the Urals Republic incident, Yelagin joined Yeltsin’s party, Our Home –

Russia (NDR), but Yelagin wished to solidify his political position at home. On the heels

56 For an excellent studies of the political ramifications of this “Urals identity” and Sverdlovsk Oblast’s regionalist politics, see Yoshiko M. Herrera, Imagined Economies: The Sources of Russian Regionalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Alexander Kuznetsov, “The Meltdown of the Russian Federation in the Early 1990s: Nationalist Myth-Building and the Urals Republic Project,” Demokratizatsiya 19, no. 1 (2010): 23–36. 57 Kuznetsov, “The Meltdown of the Russian Federation in the Early 1990s,” 29.

233 of Rossel, Yelagin became the second governor to receive permission to hold an open election for governor, which he won handedly, giving Yeltsin’s party a helpful electoral victory.58 Shortly after this electoral win, Rossel began negotiations for a bilateral treaty, and, yet again, Yelagin rode Rossel’s coattails. Sverdlovsk became the first oblast to receive a bilateral treaty with Yeltsin’s administration, Orenburg was the second.

Signed in 1996, Orenburg’s bilateral treaty was the only treaty to aggressively claim authority in migration policy of the four cases in this study. Orenburg had already experienced the First Wave of migration as a border region with Kazakhstan, and by this point, the Second Wave was reaching its zenith. Unlike Samara’s bilateral treaty, which did not specifically mention migration, Orenburg’s bilateral treaty declared that the regional government and the federal government would share “joint jurisdiction” in

“setting the conditions for regulating the migration of foreign Citizens and stateless persons in the territory of the Orenburg region as Frontier subject of the Russian

Federation.”59 The treaty goes on to state that Orenburg has the right to create joint commissions and working committees with the federal government on equal footing,60 resembling the other three cases in this project. Asserting this newly negotiated power,

Yelagin’s administration succeeded in passing a law that gave local authorities the ability

58 “Персоналии - Елагин Владимир Васильевич – Глава Администрации Оренбургской Области В 1991-1999 Годах,” Оренбургская Политика, April 20, 2015, http://orenpolit.ru/persons/item/438-elagin- vladimir-vasilevich-glava-administratsii-orenburgskoj-oblasti-v-1991-1999-godakh. 59 “О РАЗГРАНИЧЕНИИ ПРЕДМЕТОВ ВЕДЕНИЯ И ПОЛНОМОЧИЙ МЕЖДУ ОРГАНАМИ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ ВЛАСТИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ И ОРГАНАМИ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ ВЛАСТИ САМАРСКОЙ ОБЛАСТИ. Договор. Президент РФ. 01.08.97 :: Инновационные Проекты - Финансирование, Гранты, Венчурные Форды,” accessed May 8, 2016, http://projects.innovbusiness.ru/pravo/DocumShow_DocumID_52714.html. 60 Ibid.

234 to coordinate with localities in Kazakhstan to secure Orenburg’s vast border, a clearly regionalist statement of political authority.61

Yelagin was unable to maintain his political momentum, however, and he lost the

1999 gubernatorial election in a run-off election to the Agrarian Party candidate, Alexi

Chernyshyov. Yelagin had encountered serious opposition from Pavel Gurkalov, CEO of the largest metallurgy enterprise in Orenburg, and Chernyshyov, but Chernyshyov edged out Gurkalov to force a run-off. Uniting the opposition votes against Yelagin,

Chernyshyov won Orenburg’s second gubernatorial election in 1999. As an Agrarian candidate favoring collectivization, Chernyshyov was more to the left of Yelagin, leaving even less political distance between himself and his primary party opponent – the

Communist Party. As a result of this less than competitive political environment,

Orenburg remained a member of the “Red Belt,” regions where the Communist Party retained a significant electoral presence in the 1990s.62 In the 2000 presidential election,

Putin barely won Orenburg with 45% of the vote, just ahead of Communist Party candidate Gennady Zhuganov’s 43%.63 With this unexpected victory, Chernyshyov began constructing a political machine that would implement an aggressive migration policy.

6.9 Orenburg’s Political Machine: The Power of Mayors

Similar to Samara, Orenburg’s political machine derived its power from the political networks it created rather than from regional control of lucrative firms. To

61 Alexander A. Sergounin and Mikhail I. Rykhtik, “Foreign and Security Policies as a Legal Problem between Center and Regions,” Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research, no. 22 (2002): 1–45. 62 Ralph S. Clem and Peter R. Craumer, “Regional Patterns of Political Preference in Russia: The December 1999 Duma Elections,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 41, no. 1 (2000): 1–29. 63 “Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation.”

235 consolidate his control over the region, Chernyshyov passed laws in 2001 that required mayors “be elected by members of city council only at the recommendation of the governor”64 and allowed these mayors to also serve in the regional legislature.65 These reforms gave Chernyshyov the chance to gain the political allegiance of Yuri

Mishcheryakov, who had won Orenburg City’s mayoral election in 2000 despite having lived in Moscow for several years prior.66 Ensuring that the new mayor did not become a political opponent was key to Chernyshyov’s consolidation of political influence, a move only reinforced by his decision to keep Yelagin’s administration intact, staving off political controversies and earning loyalty.67

Avoiding political conflagration was important for Chernyshyov, as his ability to incorporate enterprises into his political machine quickly escaped his grasp. The most obvious resource to Orenburg was its natural resources, and in the 1990s, the state-owned company ONAKO was formed by combining all the energy holdings in Orenburg.

Protected by then-Prime Minister Chernomyrdin, a native-born son of Orenburg,

ONAKO remained 85% federally-owned, and 15% regionally-owned, but in 1999, after

Chernomyrdin left the position of Prime Minister and Yelagin was embroiled in a tough election, ONAKO was privatized, sold to energy giant TNK and would eventually be controlled by the TNK-BP venture. Further humbling the region’s ability to incorporate lucrative enterprises into its political machine, the copper-mining firm Gaisky GOK was

64 Gordon Hahn, “The Impact of Putin’s Federative Reforms on Democratization in Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 19, no. 2 (January 1, 2003): 147, doi:10.2747/1060-586X.19.2.114. 65 Hahn, “The Impact of Putin’s Federative Reforms on Democratization in Russia.” 66 “Персоналии - Мищеряков Юрий Николаевич – Депутат Государственной Думы От Оренбургской Области,” Оренбургсая Политика, accessed July 9, 2017, http://orenpolit.ru/persons/item/455-mishcheryakov-yurij-nikolaevich-glava-orenburga. 67 “Персоналии - Чернышёв Алексей Андреевич — Российский Политический Деятель,” Оренбургсая Политика, accessed July 9, 2017, http://orenpolit.ru/persons/item/515-chernyshjov-aleksej- andreevich.

236 sold to the Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company in 1999, and the steelworks, Ural

Steel, which supported the mono-industrial town of Novotroitsk, was purchased in 2006 by the manufacturing conglomerate Metalloinvest in 2006.

Without these resources, Chernyshyov joined the United Russia party in 2003 in order to shore up support for his administration with the federal government, reflecting the proliferation of the two-level principal-agent model with the rise of United Russia.

The effect of Chernyshyov’s allegiance to United Russia is obviated by the election results between the Duma election in 2003 and the presidential election in 2004. In 2003,

United Russia won only 27.5% of the vote, while the Communists gained 19% and the

Liberal Democratic Party of Russia gained 16%. In the months following, Chernyshyov would run under Untied Russia and handedly win with 63% of the vote, and shortly thereafter in 2004, Putin would win Orenburg with 59% of the vote, while the

Communist Party’s candidate, Nikolai Kharitonov, came in second with 25%.68

Kharitonov’s electoral capture was nearly half of Zhuganov’s vote total in 2000. In the wake of Chernyshyov’s identification with United Russia, Orenburg’s place in the “Red

Belt” was no more, and Chernyshyov had proven his ability to deliver his legislature and mayors to United Russia, and for such success, he was re-appointed governor by Putin in

2005.

One of the reasons undergirding Chernyshyov’s gubernatorial victory in 2003 was the multiple of candidates running from the city of Orsk, Orenburg’s second-largest city.

This chaos reduced the power of the “eastern vote” in comparison to the “western vote” of Orenburg, but allowed Chernyshyov to work towards gaining the loyalty of a city with

68 “Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation.”

237 oppositional political forces. Chernyshyov would assist the campaign of United Russia’s candidate, Yuri Berg, who won the election in the 2005. With both major cities under his control and proving his ability to deliver the region to United Russia, Chernyshyov would work towards implementing an ambitious migration policy.

6.10 Orenburg’s Migration Policy: Persistent Engagement

Following the 2003 elections, Orenburg pursued a multi-faceted migration policy that sought to increase Orenburg’s profile within migration policy and, by extension, the federal government. In 2002, Like Titov, Chernyshyov annulled Orenburg’s bilateral treaty, which had an unusually strong commitment to migration policy relative to the other three cases in this project. In the aftermath of the 2003 election, Chernyshyov’s administration pursued a concentrated strategy with regional governments in Tajikistan, seeking to build on the economic exchanges between the two societies. In 2004,

Chernyshyov arranged an agreement between Orenburg City and Tajikistan’s second- largest city, Khujand, to become international twin cities, in which the two cities agreed to open representative offices in each city to coordinate on a range of broadly described issues relating to trade and culture. Yet the article of the agreement that stipulates opening mutual offices of representation is the article that discusses the need to

“implement and development cooperation provided for by the Agreement between the

Republic of Tajikistan and the oblast of the Russian Federation regarding migration.”69

In 2005, the Chernyshyov administration affirmed their commitment to engaging in migration policy by passing a migration policy through the regional legislature, a law that claimed the authority to direct the regional FMS office. The Targeted Regional

69 V. V. Amelin, Tadzhiki v Orenburzhʹe: (Ocherki Sovremennykh Ėtnoso︠t︡sialʹnykh Pro︠t︡sessov) (Orenburg: Universitet, 2013), 72.

238 Migration Program (2006-2010) for the Orenburg region was only one of two formally codified regional migration policies in all of Russia after 2002, the other passed in

Moscow City.70 The policy’s stated purpose was to address the migration system in

Orenburg in order provide for the “socio-economic and demographic development of the region.,”71 and it details the priorities of the policy, ranging from providing housing for the third-largest forced migrant population in Russia to providing health screenings at the border,72 and designates the responsibilities of this comprehensive policy to various regional and federal bureaucracies. The law stated clearly,

“The program is not a strictly administrative barrier to the movement of migration flows. Its main purpose is to increase the stability of regulation and control over migration processes based on taking into account the balance of interests of the region and migrants, public organizations and diasporas representing the interests of migrants.”73

Through this law, Chernyshyov’s administration directed federal agencies to follow its migration policy, even supplementing their budgets with regional monies to ensure the law could be implemented. In comparison to the other cases in this project, Orenburg’s migration policy is a statement on the importance of migration to the region, as this was not a decree by Chernyshyov. Instead, the regional legislature also stood behind the policy, which deputizes federal bureaucracies, and this is a bold step that echoed the regionalist politics of the Yeltsin administration.

The following year Chernyshyov’s administration pursued greater cooperation with Tajikistan to support the migration flows into Orenburg. Two years after the twin

70 Vladimir Mukomel’, “Ethnic and Migration Policy in the 2000s Viewed in the Context of Relations Between the Federal Center and the Regions,” Russian Politics and Law 51, no. 3 (May 1, 2013): 66–79, doi:10.2753/RUP1061-1940510304. 71 “ЗАКОН ОРЕНБУРГСКОЙ ОБЛАСТИ ОБ ОБЛАСТНОЙ ЦЕЛЕВОЙ МИГРАЦИОННОЙ ПРОГРАММЕ НА 2006 - 2010 ГОДЫ” (East View Information Services, November 23, 2005). 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid.

239 cities agreement, Chernyshyov’s administration signed an agreement with the Sughd

District in Tajikistan, where Khujand is the district capital. This second document went further than the original agreement, as it listed explicitly that Chernyshyov’s administration and the Sughd District administration would:

“carry out cooperation in the field of migration and employment in the following main areas: - assistance in employment of highly qualified specialists - citizens of the Sughd region of the Republic of Tajikistan in the territory of the Orenburg region of the Russian Federation; - Exchange of information on the availability of vacancies and the needs for highly qualified specialists; Exchange of legislative and other normative legal acts in the field of migration; - assist in accelerating the implementation of procedures related to execution of documents for citizens of the Sughd region of the Republic of Tajikistan, necessary for carrying out labor activity in the territory of the Orenburg region of the Russian Federation.”74

The Chernyshyov administration was taking an active role in determining partners for cooperation and strengthening ties between the two societies in order to better facilitate labor migration flows. The need for this cooperation was readily apparent, as labor migration rates into Orenburg were growing at 7% annually in 2006, local estimates suggesting as many as 100,000 permanent labor migrants,75 and construction firms in

Orenburg City utilizing Tajik labor migrants for 80% of their workforce.76

Orenburg’s engagement in migration policy was multi-faceted, but it was purposefully provocative in order to raise the region’s profile in the eyes of the federal government. Chernyshyov’s political machine was being constructed as the FMS was beginning its Reorganization phase, in which the newly reestablished bureaucracy sought

74 Amelin, Tadzhiki v Orenburzhʹe, 74–75. 75 Igor Savin, “Labor Migration From Central Asia To Russia: Mutual Social Perception in the Orenburg Oblast.,” China & Eurasia Forum Quarterly 8, no. 3 (2010): 173–84. 76 Amelin, Tadzhiki v Orenburzhʹe.

240 to monitor and control migration policy.77 Chernyshyov sought to become a regional leader in migration policy to raise Orenburg’s profile in the eyes of the federal government. The efforts bore fruit, as Orenburg hosted to the Second Inter-Parliamentary

Forum between Tajikistan and the Russian Federation entitled, “Tajikistan-Russia:

Potential for Interregional Cooperation.” Over the proceedings of this two day meeting between legislators of the respective nations, Orenburg was at the center, synonymous with the labor migration exchange, precisely what Chernyshyov wanted. Orenburg has the first stop along the Tashkent-Moscow passenger train runs, by which hundreds of thousands of labor migrants travel to Russia. As the proceedings reveal, his administration brought to light the inadequacy of the FMS in Orenburg, as “in 2006, 996 thousand persons passed through Ileck-1 [the first and only checkpoint in Orenburg], and by September 1, 2007 – 1,042 thousand persons.”78 In the subsequent federal budget,

Orenburg received 8 billion rubles to construct new border stations and expand current facilities.79

Though provocative, Chernyshyov’s political risk in engaging in migration policy was well-grounded as his political machine delivered the high electoral results for United

Russia. In the 2007 Duma elections, United Russia received 64% of the vote, more than double its vote count in 2003, and the Communist Party’s vote decreased by more than a third to only 11%. In the 2008 presidential election, Medvedev received 61% of the vote,

77 This project designates the Reorganization phase as between the years of 2002 and 2006, ending with the quota reform, which ushers in the period of Centralization. 78 “Россия - Таджикистан: потенциал межрегионального сотрудничества” (Издания Совета Федерации, 2007). 79 Орен.ру, “Обустройство Оренбургского Участка Российско-Казахстанской Государственной Границы | ОРЕН.РУ - Первый Региональный,” Оренбург, March 30, 2007, https://oren.ru/obustrojstvo- orenburgskogo-uchastka-rossijsko-kazahstanskoj-gosudarstvennoj-granitsy/.

241 improving upon Putin’s election results in 2004.80 Chernyshyov’s political machine remained intact, his mayors sailing through their respective elections, giving him the political coverage to continue his engagement in migration politics.

In 2007, Orenburg opened the Nationalities Village to celebrate its ethnic diversity and join its neighbors in constructing integrative institutions for migrant communities. The Village is a collection of ten houses, each designed, built, and run by the respective ethnic community association, and Orenburg’s village represented the

Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian, Bashkir, Tatar, Mordvin, German, Chuvash, Armenian, and

Belorussian communities. Construction began in 2005, and the respective houses were completed in three phases between 2007 and 2009. Each house was built in an architectural style indicative of its ethnic community’s heritage, and the houses offer restaurants to try cuisine of each nationality as well as a newspaper for each community to assist in promoting awareness for cultural events and celebrations in each community.81 While a positive step forward, as the Village celebrates the ethnic diversity of Orenburg in a positive and public fashion, the Village is not designed to act as an association for ethnic communities to engage with the regional government.

Additionally, the lack of houses for other Central Asian communities, now present in

Orenburg as labor migrants, leaves these communities isolated, uncelebrated, and possibly identified as “unwanted” in comparison to the other ethnic groups represented in the Village.

80 “Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation.” 81 “Культурный комплекс ‘Национальная Деревня’ - Модель Мира И Согласия | Город Оренбург,” accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.orenburg.ru/town/sight/cultural_complex_of_the_quot_national_village_quot/.

242 Though the Nationalities Village was not inclusive of every migrant community,

Chernyshyov’s administration would continue to expand its connections with Tajikistan.

The 2006 agreement between the Sughd District and Chernyshyov’s administration was emulated in a 2008 agreement with the Khatlon District, the most populous district in

Tajikistan. The 2008 agreement sought to establish similar communications between employers in Orenburg and potential workers in Khatlon, as had been done in Sughd.

For the Khatlon administration, however, an important phrase was added that requested

“consideration of the issue of professional and language training of labor migrants from

Khatlon region, who are currently employed in the Orenburg region.”82 For the authorities in Khatlon, the 2006 Sughd agreement had focused too heavily on future migration patterns, at the expense of ongoing and prior migration, and likely reflected the lack of services provided to migrants in Orenburg.

6.11 Subtle Shifts in the Machine

Chernyshyov’s multi-faceted migration policy served to increase federal spending in Orenburg, increased the profile of the region in an increasingly important policy sphere, and consolidated political power through his political networks. The successful increase in federal spending in Orenburg was all the more important, as it occurred just before the 2008 crisis, which had a far greater impact on Orenburg’s budget than the wealthier regions included in this study. Orenburg was not a donor region, unlike the other three regions in this project, and though Orenburg had embarked on an aggressive migration policy despite its relative wealth, it could not afford to keep this in perpetuity.

In 2009, the regional legislature suspended funding for Orenburg’s migration policy,

82 Amelin, Tadzhiki v Orenburzhʹe, 79.

243 though it did not officially curtail the program. While federal spending had increased significantly in the field of migration for Orenburg, suspending the program and relying on federal dollars suggests the policy may have been more concerned with migration control than its language had argued.

The stability of Chernyshyov’s political machine would be tested ahead of the

2011 Duma elections, as he stepped down as governor. In May 2010, just before his term as governor ended, Chernyshyov announced he would vacate the position and claimed he did so voluntarily, though speculation at the time considered it a matter of his age.83 In stepping down, Chernyshyov selected Yuri Berg, the long-time ally and mayor of

Orenburg’s second-largest city, to act as governor, a decision approved by the regional legislature. Upon taking the position, Berg announced he was going to appoint

Chernyshyov to the Federation Council, a move resembling Titov’s resignation and subsequent appointment. While the motivations for the resignation were unclear,

Chernyshyov had maintained such political control that he was able to select his successor, reflecting a considerable degree of power akin to Shaimiev’s selection of

Minnikhanov.

The 2011 Duma elections, however, revealed weaknesses in Orenburg’s political machine. One of the potential motivations for removing Chernyshyov in 2011 was to attempt to bring new energy and popularity to United Russia. If this was the case, it failed to impress the electorate, as turnout in Orenburg fell to 50%. United Russia received just 35% of the vote, the Communist Party trailing in second place with 26%, and Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia receiving approximately 17%

83 “Уход Губернатора Чернышева: Самостоятельный И Неизбежный?,” ИА REX, May 11, 2010, http://www.iarex.ru/articles/4517.html.

244 each.84 Such a disastrous electoral result for United Russia does not provide clarity, however, as to whether Berg’s leadership was the issue or whether Chernyshyov’s political machine just was not able to deliver votes. United Russia maintained the majority in local offices, so control was maintained, but the 2011 election demonstrated the flaws in Orenburg’s political machine.

In 2012, Berg announced the construction of a House of Friendship, suggesting that his control of the political machine was well under his control. Orenburg was not alone in the disappointing United Russia turnout for the 2011 Duma election, and Berg appeared to maintain control of the region. In the 2012 presidential election, just months after the dismal Duma election, Putin received 58% of the vote, copying his 2004 vote total, which suggests Berg’s leadership was better prepared to ensure a predictable win.

Shortly thereafter, Berg announced that a House of Friendship would be built, a positive step forward from the limited mission of the Nationalities Village.85 Whether Orenburg’s

House of Friendship was envisioned to act as a cultural institution or a conduit for

Orenburg’s migration policy was not made clear. The construction of the institution nevertheless suggests Berg was interested in improving upon the migration policy pursued by Chernyshyov.

Despite the change in leadership in 2010, Orenburg scores well on the dependency index. Chernyshyov’s resignation as governor resembles Titov’s experience, since Chernyshyov was also elected to the Federation Council after stepping down as governor. Unlike Titov, however, Chernyshyov was able to designate his successor, and

84 “Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation.” 85 “В Оренбуржье Появится Дом Дружбы Народов,” ИА REGNUM, January 27, 2012, https://regnum.ru/news/polit/1492645.html.

245 this situation convinces me that the resignation of Chernyshyov does not merit a count on the dependency index. Since Chernyshyov handedly won his election in 2003, avoided any run-off elections, was not dismissed, and avoided the appointment of an outsider,

Orenburg’s dependency score is 0, the lowest possible.

6.12 Economic Concentration

Considering alternative explanations for these two cases, Stoner-Weiss’s argument86 has limited explanatory power, though it resonates better than in the cases of

Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. The original argument for Stoner-Weiss focuses on the experience of the Nizhniy Novgorod region, which resembles Samara in many ways, given its majority Russian population, significant industrial enterprises, and more competitive electoral atmosphere in the 1990s. Titov’s administration did not attempt to capture Samara’s industrial enterprises, as his commitment to privatization was far greater than Shaimiev’s or Rakhimov’s, and the pursuit of privatization led to consensus on a regional policy of SME growth and focusing on economic development. Similarly, as Chernyshyov came to prominence in Orenburg, the lucrative enterprises were quickly absorbed by larger industrial conglomerates. This increased the concentration of remaining firms in construction, light manufacturing, and agriculture, assisting

Chernyshyov in building consensus on migration policy.

The emergence of political machines and United Russia, however, limits the applicability of Stoner-Weiss’s argument, since it does not integrate the emergence of such a federal-regional political dynamic into the model. Orenburg and Samara had more competitive electoral spaces than in Bashkortostan or Tatarstan in the 1990s, but the

86 Stoner-Weiss, Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance.

246 political space became less democratic, particularly with the rise of United Russia, and elite consensus contributes to the calcification of regional politics in Orenburg and

Samara in favor United Russia. Samara’s long-term commitment to trade, economic development, and foreign investment could contribute to Samara’s migration policy formation, as the shift to a development framework advanced Tatarstan’s migration policy. Yet the manner in which Samara implemented this policy, favoring civil society groups and in a less confrontational manner with federal bureaucracies reflects Samara’s political machine, which did not rest its political legitimacy on a nationalities policy or its institutions, unlike Tatarstan. Furthermore, Orenburg’s engagement in migration policy, particularly its aggressive nature, is best understood by considering the two-level principal-agent model and the relationship between regional and federal governments.

6.13 Ethnic Identity

For Orenburg and Samara, ethnic politics appear to play less of a role than in

Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, but more importantly for this project, we do not observe such considerations as steering migration policy. Samara and Orenburg do have more diverse populations than the Russian average, and given the presence of Tatars and

Bashkirs in both regions, there is no reason to believe that these communities were apathetic to the movements in Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. Yet ethnic identity politics did not play a substantive role in the formation of either political machine in Orenburg or

Samara, nor do we observe a clear pattern of engagement in migration policy that could be derived from variation in the intensity of minority ethnic identity mobilization.

Nevertheless, we do observe emulation of Tatarstan’s institution-building, since

Samara constructs a House of Friendship and Orenburg begins the process of doing so

247 within the time period of interest. The long-standing ethnic diversity in Orenburg and

Samara surely assisted the decision to construct institutions that recognize the importance of minority communities. In Samara’s case, this institution would become the regional administration’s conduit for engaging in migration policy. Yet the presence of diversity is not a guarantor that a region will engage in an independent migration policy. To understand that behavior, I argue that the autonomy of a regional machine is more determinant, and the study of a machine’s composition informs more of the dynamics motivating the policy development we observe.

6.14 Demographic Motivations

In comparison to Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, Samara and Orenburg have more troubling demographic realities, which could motivate some of the engagement in migration policy. As majority Russian populations, Orenburg and Samara exhibit demographic characteristics along the national average. Fertility rates were critically low in both regions in 2001, as Orenburg’s stood at 1.33 and Samara’s cratered at 1.08, far below the replacement rate of 2.1. Though the situation improves in later years, as

Orenburg’s fertility rate increases to a stable 1.95 and Samara’s to 1.54, neither society is experiencing natural population growth.87 This demographic scenario is disastrous for either economy and the labor market will increasingly need labor migration inputs to survive. These economic concerns, rather than existential ethno-demographic concerns, appear to motivate Samara and Orenburg’s migration policies.

Yet such a negative demographic outlook does predict either region’s migration policies, however, as neither region’s policies are centered on attracting permanent

87 “ФЕДЕРАЛЬНАЯ СЛУЖБА ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЙ СТАТИСТИКИ,” Центральная База Статистических Данных, May 5, 2017, http://www.gks.ru/dbscripts/cbsd/dbinet.cgi?pl=2415002.

248 migration. The labor-sending societies of Central Asia have higher fertility rates than the

Russian average, and a society wishing to bolster its demographic outlook could seek to attract the permanent resettlement of families and young couples. Yet Samara and

Orenburg do not pursue such programs, but rather seek to provide services and arrangements to better incorporate temporary labor migrants. This reflects that economic concerns are overpowering demographic concerns, at least during this time period.

Perhaps as population ageing and labor stocks decrease we will see more activity on this front, but not in these two cases from 2002 to 2012.

6.15 Exogenous Shocks: Economy Matters

In both cases, exogenous shocks do not appear to motivate migration policy inherently, but the effect of the 2008 recession was more apparent in the migration debate than in Tatarstan or Bashkortostan. The reporting on the topic of migration in the three months before and after the Beslan terrorist attack, the 2008 recession, and the 2012 assassination attempt in Tatarstan reveal similar dynamics in Tatarstan and

Bashkortostan.88 Overall, articles regarding immigration increased in length over time, unsurprising given the increasing spotlight shone onto migration in Russian politics.

There was similar reporting of the ethnicity of any arrested immigrants, possibly leading to a conflation of ethnicity and legal status in the population, and large-scale raids were documented, but frequency did not appear to increase noticeably in the aftermath of any event.

88 This project reviewed articles from two Orenburg newspapers, “Evening Orenburg” and “Southern Ural,” and from four newspapers in Samara: Volga Commune, Business, Social Newspaper, and Vestnik Otradnogo.

249 Yet the 2008 crisis does reverberate in both Samara and Orenburg, though the event does not determine the policy in either. Orenburg’s 2006 migration policy, enacted by law, was suspended in 2009, but budget constraints were the central issue – not the policy itself.89 As a less wealthy region, Orenburg did not have the capacity to maintain its policies throughout their intended span, and the consequences of the 2008 crisis hit

Orenburg’s budget more acutely as it relied on federal dollars more than the other three regions in this study. Yet we observe Orenburg engaging in migration policy despite its relative wealth, and in 2012, the region commits towards the construction of a House of

Friendship. The 2008 recession, therefore, affected the capacity of Orenburg to pursue its policies, but it did not determine the nature of those policies. Similarly, minutes from a

2009 meeting of the Samara’s Public Advisory Council reveal that the chief consultant of the Samara regional administration became more committed to engaging in migration politics in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, as she observed a shift in public perception surrounding migration and wished to combat such xenophobia.90 This shift was not apparent in the event-focused newspaper analysis conducted in this project, but the perception therein did increase one of the regional administrator’s interest in migration policy. Most importantly for this project’s concern over threat perception, the 2008 crisis did not affect migration policy due to a threat-driven response, but we cannot be surprised that these events had effects overall.

6.16 Conclusion

89 Mukomel’, “Ethnic and Migration Policy in the 2000s Viewed in the Context of Relations Between the Federal Center and the Regions.” 90 “В Самарском Доме Дружбы Народов Прошло Второе По Счёту Расширенное Заседание Общественного Совета При УФМС России По Самарской Области.”

250 Samara and Orenburg’s political machines are radically different than those constructed in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, yet we observe an engagement in migration policy despite these differences. Lacking large ethnic minority populations and the political mobilization of such populations, Orenburg and Samara did not pursue a regionalist agenda that focused on a concept of sovereignty. Nevertheless, we observe each region utilizing the opportunity regionalism provided to meet political goals. For

Samara, its bilateral treaty allowed it greater revenue streams to support its manufacturing and export-led economy. For Orenburg, it provided greater recognition of the region and permitted greater authority to address the concerns of its society. Without direct control over lucrative enterprises, Samara and Orenburg’s political machine was built around networks of politicians and controlling access to a seat at the political table.

For Samara, its center-right political environment developed networks supporting privatization, while Orenburg’s center-left political environment favored collectivization from an agrarian perspective.

As United Russia altered Russia’s political landscape, the political machines in

Samara and Orenburg would strengthen and exercise their capacity to engage in migration politics. Samara’s political machine engaged in migration policy to reinforce its macro-economic goals, hence its migration policy provided services to assist migrants maintain legal status and more readily adjust to life in Samara. Orenburg’s migration policy sought to increase its importance and authority to the federal government, while also cooperating with local government in Tajikistan to meet its future needs. Samara’s approach, despite the extent of services provided, reflects its less vertical political machine. The machine could not risk the public provision of services as Tatarstan had,

251 because the change in leadership from Titov to Artyakov reduced the political risks it could withstand. Orenburg’s political machine needed to prove it could influence national policy and play the two-level game to the benefit of regional agents. Rather than focus on provision of services to migrants, Orenburg’s approach sought increases in federal spending and improving access to migrant labor. Despite the differences between these two oblasts, their low dependency scores from 2002 to 2012 and the extent of their engagement in migration politics adds evidence in support of my key argument: engaging in migration politics requires an autonomous political machine.

252 CONCLUSION:

LOOKING FORWARD

This dissertation was inspired by the empirical puzzle of variation in Russia’s regional migration policies at the turn of the century. Despite the centralization of power under Putin’s rule and nearly universally hostile public opinion regarding immigration, we can observe a spectrum of migration policies. More puzzling still, along this spectrum we observe integrative migration policies for migrants in spite of these macro- political forces. This project set out to identify critical factors driving the differentiation in migration policies utilizing a comparative case study of the Republics of Tatarstan and

Bashkortostan and the Oblasts of Orenburg and Samara from 2002 to 2012.

As a result of this study, I argue that in order to understand the proliferation of independent migration policies in Russia, we must focus our attention to regional political machine and ascertain the respective machine’s autonomy and its composition.

If a political machine has autonomy from federal influence and defection from its connected actors, it will be able to engage in migration policy. Absent this autonomy, regional government will not engage in migration policy, as the risks are too great. In the years of interest to this project, the federal government under Putin actively sought to rein in the “parade of sovereignties” from the Yeltsin administration and reassert its authority across a range of policy arenas, including migration policy. Public opinion regarding immigration has been overwhelmingly negative, but it is also mercurial, as respondents

253 see migration as both helpful and harmful in response to different survey questions.1 In such an inhospitable political climate, only regional executives with autonomous political machines will engage in migration policy.

Furthermore, I argue that the relative autonomy of a political machine overpowers all other explanatory factors and that by investigating the composition of a political machine, we can better understand the development of a region’s independent migration policy. Evaluating arguments regarding the concentration of economic resources, the power of ethnic identity politics, demographic concerns, and perceived threat perception, this project finds sufficient evidence to suggest that the autonomy of a political machine determines whether a region will engage in migration policy. This project does not find evidence to suggest that these competing explanations have no insight or are irrelevant to the political processes within these four regions. Rather, I argue that we learn too little by favoring alternative explanations, and scaling such investigations to the national level would not adequately explain the range of policies we observe. The relative autonomy of political machines explains why we observe the poorer, smaller, and less historically prominent region of Orenburg engaging in a multi-faceted migration policy that deputizes federal bureaucracies, while the Republic of Bashkortostan fails to engage in migration policy after its political machine loses autonomy in 2003.

Additionally, by focusing on political machines as the unit of interest, we gain considerably more knowledge regarding the motivations behind a region’s independent migration policy. Since political machines by their very nature favor a narrower set of interests than exists in a given polity, by first identifying regions with a high degree of

1 See Chapter 1 for a more detailed overview.

254 autonomy, we can isolate the possible interests included in the machine and compare those to the policy outcomes we observe. This can assist us in evaluating the relative power of a set of actors in a machine to another, but it can also better alert us to unpredicted outcomes, helping advance the field by more clearly identifying divergent cases or untheorized factors of importance. An analysis of an autonomous political machine’s interests allows us to understand why Orenburg and Tatarstan pursue drastically different migration policies despite receiving the same score on this project’s proposed autonomy measure. Tatarstan’s machine became focused on an economic development model as the actors in its machine shifted, while Orenburg’s machine was focused on improving its access to migrant labor and influence with the federal government. Despite different autonomy scores, Tatarstan’s migration policy is closer to

Samara’s, reflective of the mutual interests represented in their political machines. Thus, in order to understand the dynamics of regional migration policies in contemporary

Russian politics, we must first ascertain the degree of autonomy to identify the regions that are most likely to engage in migration policy. Once these regions are identified, an examination of the interests represented within each machine will illuminate the development of a region’s independent migration policy.

7.1 Theoretical Contributions

This project has several theoretical contributions to offer the literatures in contemporary Russian politics and migration politics. To begin, this project offers additional evidence for the continued study of regional politics in Russia as a study of political machines.2 Considering these four cases, it is reasonable to understand why

2 Grigorii V. Golosov, “Machine Politics: The Concept and Its Implications for Post-Soviet Studies,” Demokratizatsiya 21, no. 4 (2013): 459.

255 investigations of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan utilized the label “political machine” readily.3 Yet the rise of United Russia has led to a neglected use of the theoretical concept, as we became accustomed to the most powerful political machines in Russia behaving as the opposition to the federal government. This project includes two regions not typically associated with machine politics and demonstrates that despite the relative lack of vertical hierarchy, a political machine is at play, seeking to guarantee election results and serving a narrow set of interests. As this project shows, these machines have formed across all four cases and serve the same political party, United Russia, and this trend has been advanced nationally to become the dominant form of regional politics in

Russia.

This project also reinforces the need to conceptualize center-periphery relations in contemporary Russian politics as a two-level principal-agent game. United Russia has become the dominant political organization in Russia, and it has brought even the most powerful of political machines to its banner. Regional executives act as a principal, and they construct political machines through a network of patronage among regional agents; yet regional executives act as agents for United Russia, delivering electoral results in exchange for a mutually-beneficial relationship. Should this relationship cease to be beneficial for United Russia, the regional executive is at risk, as its principal will seek to dismantle the regional executive’s power. Regional executives in Russia, therefore, are caught in a terrible political position, working to advance their agendas while maintaining the loyalty of their agents in order to deliver votes to United Russia. Shaimiev played

3 Henry Hale, “Explaining Machine Politics in Russia’s Regions: Economy, Ethnicity, and Legacy,” Post- Soviet Affairs 19, no. 3 (January 1, 2003): 228–63, doi:10.2747/1060-586X.19.3.228; Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, “Getting The‘ dough’ and Saving the Machine: Lessons from Tatarstan,” Demokratizatsiya 21, no. 4 (2013): 507.

256 this game very well, as did Chernyshyov and Titov, whereas Rakhimov could not recover from his stumble. The risks are great, and this reinforces the importance of autonomy for the implementation of a migration policy. Politics is already precarious for regional executives, engaging in migration politics only increases the chances for a misstep.

A contribution of this project to the contemporary Russian politics literature is displaying a continuation of regionalist politics, despite the emergence of Putin, the demise of bilateral treaties, and United Russia as a party of power. Regionalism as a political force was undoubtedly stronger in the 1990s, as regional governments questioned federal authority in nearly every policy arena, refusing to pay taxes or printing alternative passports. Putin’s administrations have ended the questioning of this sort of

“high politics,” as tax rates were normalized and sovereignty movements were quashed.

I argue, however, that just because federal power was exercised in these policy arenas did not mean the end of regionalism. Instead, regionalism would be expressed in other policy arenas in which the federal government has not properly consolidated its authority and control and where benefits are to be had for regions. Despite reforms to centralize control over migration, the lack of a consistent policy or execution thereof has left regions with the opportunity to engage in and benefit from an independent migration policy. If the federal government does not wrest control of migration policy from regional governments, as it did with tax codes, the demographic realities of the Russian population guarantee that the benefits of engaging in migration policy exist in the medium to long-term. Thus, dissertation argues that regionalism will continue to manifest itself in Russian politics, and we can observe a continuation of these politics in migration policy.

257 For the migration politics literature, this project is an important contribution as it focuses on a subnational unit of analysis and explores the political dynamics at play in an authoritarian regime type. The migration politics literature has rightly focused on national-level migration policies, but as international migration has increased significantly in the 21st century, we observe political responses at every level of government. We observe subnational units rebelling against migration policies that they determine unfit for their respective societies, exhibiting a similar cost-benefit understanding as Cornelius et al discuss in the “gap hypothesis.”4 My project not only seeks to identify these dynamics of Russian regions responding to perceived inadequacies of federal policy, but as a theory-building exercise, I am able to draw upon a more manageable universe of cases and better control for competing hypotheses.5 By selecting four regions in Russia with similar exposure to migration prior to 2002, this project stands on firmer ground to make its claims regarding important factors determining migration policy in less democratic regimes. Though there is considerable good work to be done in studying migration policy at the national level across cases, looking beyond the black box of national-level government also allows us to observe experimentation in migration policy, and this can have national-level consequences.

7.2 Where to Go from Here

This project focused on regions with integrative independent migration policies, and this focus leaves much to be explored, which my research agenda sets out to accomplish. I investigated integrative regions because of my own questions regarding

4 Wayne A Cornelius, Philip L Martin, and James F Hollifield, eds., Controlling Illegal Immigration: A Global Perspective, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 5 Richard Snyder, “Scaling Down: The Subnational Comparative Method,” Studies in Comparative International Development 36, no. 1 (2001): 93–110.

258 why these regions would undertake the effort of doing so, as such initiatives would generate perception of competition, as the native population observes expenditures on behalf of foreign citizens but feel domestic needs have not yet been addressed. Yet in focusing on integrative policies, this project fails to consider control policies, as per

Hammar’s bifurcation of migration policies.6 I believe my theoretical conceptualization remains applicable to whether regions engage in independent migration policies focused on controlling migration, but I expect that other factors will emerge as influential to such policies, as the pathways for control policy development are believed to be different.

The liberalization reform and the implementation of the patenti system has remained consistent since 2010, and this provides an opportunity to test this dissertation’s arguments quantitatively at the national level. Regions are now allowed to set the fee for obtaining a patenti, though regions can default to the federally-determined price. For regions, this provides a price incentive, as they can attract labor or seek to discourage migration, and we can observe the annual price changes in patenti fees across all units of

Russia. This is an excellent opportunity to test what drives the relative fee of a patenti and begin to explore the consequences this for regional engagement in migration control policies. Additionally, recent changes to federal migration law allow regions to initiate deportation proceedings at the police level, permitting regions to establish harsh control policies. By investigating deportation outcomes, a statistical study of Russian migration policies could include deportation rates and patenti fees, providing a means to test this

6 Tomas Hammar, European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Tomas Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens, Denizens, and Citizens in a World of International Migration (Adershot: Avebury, 1990).

259 dissertation’s arguments regarding the importance of political machine autonomy on the national level.

There is also much work to be done on the inadequacies of Russian migration policy at the federal and regional level. Though the integrative regional policies examined in this dissertation are normatively positive, they remain ill-suited to their stated goals and the needs of the populations they serve. While Samara and Tatarstan provide legal aid to migrants, neither system of provision delivers on a scale that changes the everyday life of labor migrants, most of whom are seasonally employed. Similarly,

Houses of Friendship are worthy institutions, but they serve small communities relative to the size of the populations they seek to represent. For the vast majority of labor migrants in Russia, their experience is one of corruption, neglect, extortion, and abuse.

Regional migration policy is unlikely to overcome these obstacles in their entirety, but more work can be done to identify meaningful and cost-effective policies to benefit labor migrants and the societies to which they contribute. As host to the world’s third-largest immigrant population, finding answers to these questions for labor migrants in Russia is a pressing matter and merits further study and attention.

7.3 Limits of the Study

As a theory-building project, this project has sought to bring political machines and their characteristics to the fore as an explanatory factor, but we must acknowledge the limitations of the argument. In selecting these four cases, I controlled for a similar exposure to migration streams prior to the Third Wave, when migration streams into

Russian became dominated by labor migration. This project did not consider cases that have not experienced migration prior to the Third Wave, nor did this project include

260 cases that have not engaged in migration politics at any point. Conducting studies to include such cases is necessary, as the majority of Russian regions have no engaged in migration policy and have limited exposure to international migration. Yet this project’s case selection does allow it to convincingly argue that based on the experience of these four cases, the autonomy of political machines outweighs other explanations.

In its evaluation of alternative explanations, this project does have clear limits. In evaluating the role of exogenous shocks, this project utilized newspaper archives in the hopes of capturing an objective record of events and a broader set of interpretations. Yet we know that Russians absorb most media via television programming,7 and the blogosphere in Russia has emerged as a potent political forum. By investigating the three months before and after an event, I am better understanding the effect of the singular event. My methods cannot discuss the shift in reporting over the ten years of interest, nor can it evaluate the cumulative effect of exogenous shocks. The effect of repeated shocks in a short duration or continual exposure to media reporting on non-local events, i.e. blog posts on Chinese migration in Vladivostok, cannot be evaluated. These are important dynamics to account for, and they undoubtedly merit further study. This project’s methods sought to account for the effect of exogenous shocks in an otherwise highly institutional analysis. Furthermore, this project’s conceptualization of machine politics and threat perception remain open to exogenous shocks and shifts in perception for all actors involved. We have plenty of anecdotal and empirical evidence to show that these factors matter, but in the case of these four units and in the systemic shocks selected, we can observe their reverberations in the migration debate, but not in the policy outcomes.

7 Ellen Mickiewicz, Television, Power, and the Public in Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

261 The scope conditions of this project are considerable, but as a theory-generating exercise, it succeeds in adding clarity. As a comparative study of four most-likely cases, this project is motivated largely by Bashkortostan’s cessation of engagement in migration policy. This empirical puzzle is very helpful for identifying political machines as a factor of importance, but as a study of integrative migration policies, I am observing four cases of a very select group. Most regions in Russia do not have a House of Friendship, all four of the regions selected for this project seek to build one, if it doesn’t exist already, by 2012. These are unusually diverse regions in Russia, unusually wealthy, and unusually populous.8 That is precisely what drives this project, however, is the empirical puzzle we find amongst unusual units. As an initial theory-generating exercise, there are limits to generalizability, but its findings are consistent and merit additional testing.

8 Though Orenburg has half the population and a smaller economy than its peers, in comparison to the Russian average, it stands out on these metrics.

262