In which areas of Moscow are the most migrants registered?
- NNews
Hundreds of migrants staged riots near the Food City food market in Moscow
- Elena Voropaeva
- 15.05.2020
Official data on which areas of the capital most often register migrants is rarely made public. The last time this issue was covered in detail was in 2013. Then the statistics greatly surprised those who expected that the most densely populated areas by foreigners would be the outskirts - in first place was the very center of Moscow, the Tverskoy district. However, as government officials explained, this situation arose more likely due to the fact that many legal entities have official residence in this area and register foreign workers at their place of employment.
Officials do not yet know how to collect data for statistics on the real place of residence of labor migrants. After all, cases when a person registers in one place and lives in another occur all the time. In March 2021, the Moscow prosecutor’s office made an attempt to identify “places of concentration” of illegal labor migrants using a digital trace. Namely, to track from which areas of Moscow money transfers to Central Asian countries most often come.
In first place was the southeast of the capital - Pechatniki and Lyublino. However, all experts talk about the South-Eastern, North-Eastern and Southern districts as centers of attraction for visitors.
The reason is relatively cheap housing.
“Black Dacha”: migrant ghettos have already formed near Moscow
This is not the first year that I have been writing about the problem of the emergence of migrant ghettos in Moscow. But there is such a moment - no, no, and you will come across a kind of skeptic who will say: “Yes, all this is your subjective perception, not to say fantasy. Give us scientific research, data from sociologists!” Well, now we have such data.
The journal “Sociological Review” (2020, volume 19, no. 2) published an article “Places of residential concentration of migrants in Russian cities: is there a pattern?”, prepared by researchers from the Center for Regional Studies and Urbanism of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President Russian Federation - Evgeny Varshaver, Anna Rocheva, Natalia Ivanova and Maya Ermakova. It is worth mentioning separately that the article was prepared with the support of a grant – not from the US State Department, but from the Russian Science Foundation – “Analysis of the mechanisms of formation of ethno-migration enclaves in Russian cities.”
The authors studied one migrant area in three million-plus cities - Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk. It is interesting that in the Moscow region the subject of their research is a separate article by the same authors, “Are Kotelniki an ethnomigration enclave?” published in the journal of the Higher School of Economics “Urban Research and Practice” (2020, volume 5, No. 1, the journal is currently posted online due to the coronavirus epidemic) - Kotelniki, which I mentioned in an article published in July 2019 on the website “Zavtra” " Let me remind you of the quote:
“Kotelniki are “concrete jungles” built in an open field. I remember how in 2014, residents of the science city of Dzerzhinsky fiercely resisted the merger into one urban district with Kotelniki precisely because of the criminality of this “new ghetto”, in which cheap apartments were bought up by immigrants from various countries.”
This is my information, gleaned from working during the elections in Dzerzhinsky in the summer of 2014, when I regularly traveled to this town near Moscow. Just before this, in the winter of 2013–2014, the main wave of protests took place against the merger of Dzerzhinsky and Kotelniki announced by the regional authorities. The authorities presented the merger as a settled issue, but in the end it failed due to resistance from citizens.
I remember Dzerzhinsky as an amazingly quiet and cozy city - low-rise (nice Stalin-era houses), surrounded by greenery. I remember ripe apples that had fallen from the trees lying on the roofs of cars parked next to the houses...
The city traces its origins to the Nikolo-Ugreshsky Monastery, according to church tradition, founded in 1380 by Dmitry Donskoy during a campaign against the Kulikovo Field. However, in the 20th century the city experienced a rebirth associated with the development of rocket manufacturing enterprises there. It is interesting that in the minds of the townspeople these two symbols of the city calmly and even somehow harmoniously coexist side by side.
And now a new Horde looms on the horizon!
In Dzerzhinsky, they told me terrible things about Kotelniki - entire houses filled with nothing but migrants, where the police are afraid to come. Everything is like in the “best examples” of classic ghettos in the West!
However, I already foresee the objection of a conventional skeptic: “Fear has big eyes! They saw 100 migrants - then they thought of 1000! Have you personally been to Kotelniki? And even if they were, did they personally go around all the houses? Did you look at the residents door to door? No? This means that all this is the fruit of a fevered xenophobic imagination.”
But so, the researchers I mentioned worked for many days “on the ground” in Kotelniki, communicating with residents and concierges, and actually visited some houses door-to-door! I will quote an article in Sociological Review: “In Kotelniki, 165 express, 36 expert and 14 in-depth interviews were conducted, and 155 hours of observation were carried out. After several such interviews, it was possible to generally draw conclusions regarding a particular entrance or house and express them as a percentage, being aware of the approximate nature of such calculations. A more detailed use of this methodology was a door-to-door walkthrough in one of the entrances of a house in Kotelniki, considered the most migrant one.”
So, how did people in Kotelniki come to live like this?
“The period of economic growth of the 2000s is marked by the beginning of mass housing construction on the territory of Kotelniki, while mainly territories that were previously state farm fields were built up (which is why the city clearly distinguishes areas of old and new buildings). This period coincided with the “settlement” of the first, mainly Transcaucasian, wave of migration to Russia, and thus a contingent of Armenian migrants appeared in the city, buying relatively inexpensive real estate in new houses at that time. At the same time, small businesses owned by Armenian migrants began to appear in the city.”
In an article in Urban Research and Practice, this moment is described more emotionally from the words of local residents: “According to the testimony of informants, it was during this period that the first migrants appeared in the city: in particular, Armenians are mentioned who fled the war and “entire villages” bought apartments in new buildings in Kovrovoye.”
It is worth explaining that Kovrovy is the name of the microdistrict in Kotelniki.
But that was just the beginning. “The life of the city changed significantly in 2009, when wholesale trade from the Cherkizovsky market was moved to the territory of the previously small Sadovod street market. This coincided with the increase in the housing stock with new apartment buildings, which began to be occupied, among others, by migrants from Sadovod - businessmen and hired workers.”
The article in Urban Research and Practice contains an important clarification: “The real “surge” of migration happened later - according to informants, in 2014-2015. When discussing the influx of migrants during this period, many informants characterize it as an “invasion” and “invasion” and most often associate it with the “Gardener”. Most likely, this influx was associated with the reconstruction and expansion of Sadovod in 2013 - 2021, which, among other things, took place against the backdrop of the ongoing fight against “wild” markets throughout Moscow. At the end of 2016, instead of non-permanent buildings and sparse rows of tents, colossal indoor shopping complexes appeared here, thanks to which Sadovod became one of the largest markets in Moscow and Russia.”
Indeed, it was precisely at this time that the alarm began to sound in Kotelniki. On August 2, 2013, an open appeal to the president of the country for help was published on the Internet: “Today, the city of Kotelniki has turned into a ghetto of illegal migrants from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and other CIS countries, as well as Vietnam, China...”.
The situation in Kotelniki was noticed even on the second television button, where on August 23, 2013, a report was released “New buildings in Kotelniki are teeming with migrants.” Unfortunately, it is not possible to embed a video player in articles, so I recommend going to the link and viewing it. Moreover, just as they swarmed seven years ago, they still swarm now.
At that time, the Podmoskovye TV channel also filmed reports from Kotelniki. To no avail.
Russia has risen from its knees, is fighting in Syria, resolving important issues in Africa, sending strategic bombers to the shores of America, but cannot do anything about the illegal migrants who have settled in the “soft underbelly” of its own capital. And all because someone (we will not name names) has a fabulous income from these wholesale markets, where hordes of migrants from various countries work, which he generously shares with the “right people” in high bureaucratic offices.
Let's return to long-suffering Kotelniki. As noted in the article in Urban Research and Practice: “The highest proportion of migrants is observed in the block of 2nd Pokrovsky Proezd and the new buildings of Belaya Dacha and Yuzhny, which appeared in 2010 – 2014.” A specific example from an article in Sociological Review: “A Chinese migrant owns eight apartments in a building on 2nd Pokrovsky Proezd, which she also rents out mainly to migrants.”
The Chinese are almost always wholesalers, and they prefer to work “on the spot”. In recent months, for example, they have been driving medical masks by the truckload, selling them at the same “Gardener” for cash – straight from car to car.
And here is the data obtained for specific houses: “In one of the entrances, according to an interview with the concierge, Russian owners live in about half of the apartments, Armenian owners live in a quarter, and the rest of the apartments are rented by migrants. In another, 30% of the apartments are owned by Russians, another 20% of the apartments are lived in by owners from Armenia and Azerbaijan, 40% are rented by migrants from Central Asia, mainly in the “dormitory apartment” format, the rest are occupied by visitors from China and Vietnam (6% apartments, both owned and rented), the North Caucasus (approximately 6% of apartments are rented), as well as Afghanistan and Cuba. In addition, a door-to-door search was made in one entrance. According to its results, the share of migrant apartments out of those about which it is known who lives there was 42%, despite the fact that about this entrance, as well as based on other data, it is known that if the apartment is rented and migrant, then the number of residents in it is greater than if the owner lives in the apartment.”
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The authors of the study make a justified conclusion: “If we take houses commissioned in the 2010s, according to rough estimates, the proportion of apartments in which ethnic migrants live can reach up to half. Taking into account the fact that some of the apartments are mostly dormitories, the share of ethnic migrants in the actual population of these houses may be even higher.”
It is not surprising that the indigenous population feels very uncomfortable here. In 2021, a photo of the first class of secondary school No. 3 from Kotelniki appeared on social networks. Of the 28 surnames of the students, only two are Slavic, and even then the first-grader with the surname Volkov has the typically Azerbaijani name Bogdat.
Moreover, it is not even necessary that 90% of the class be migrant children. “Many informants openly say that the presence of 15–20 non-Russian-speaking children in a class negatively affects the educational process, while others only complain about poor education and overcrowding in schools. Both of them, however, prefer to send their children to other schools - in Zhulebino, in Dzerzhinsky, in other areas of Moscow and the Moscow region. Living in Kotelniki and taking children to study elsewhere is a common strategy among our informants, although there are also families who are ready to leave or have already left the city just to send their children to school.”
Simply put, white people are leaving the ghetto where they feel like a minority. This is directly stated in an article in the Sociological Review: “It is difficult to say to what extent in Kotelniki - in the old and new areas - there is an “outflow of whites,” however, firstly, cases of “avoidance by whites” have been recorded when families did not settle in Kotelniki, making the decision, among other things, due to the fact that many migrants live in the city; secondly, it is not easy to separate dissatisfaction with the neighborhood from dissatisfaction with the infrastructure, including because residents associate the transport and infrastructure collapse with the influx of migrants, including ethnic ones, thirdly, the “outflow of whites” characterizes the situation in schools - old-timers and non-ethnic migrants en masse send their children to study at schools in neighboring cities, where there are fewer migrants and, therefore, better education. In the new parts of the city, a migrant infrastructure is taking shape, the most visible part of which is halal cafes. Old-timers and non-ethnic migrants predictably believe that the share of ethnic migrants in the population has increased in recent years, and, in particular, they joke that Belaya Dacha - an area where there are many new buildings - should be called Chernaya Dacha. It is also known that some mothers go for walks with their children to playgrounds located next to less migrant houses, of which there are more in the old part of the city, because they believe that the children of migrants are poorly educated and have conflicts.”
Here’s a little to get a feel for life in migrant neighborhoods: “On the street and in the courtyards of these houses you can almost always see women in hijabs and national headscarves, and in city minibuses, visually distinguishable migrants of other ethnicities are usually at least half... On the first floors of the houses there are halal shops, “ ethnic" cafes, small grocery stores owned by migrants... In total, for nine houses there are five cafes that can be classified as "ethnic" - "Didor", "Rakhat", "Amina", "Dushanbe", "Eurasia", and in the local the gym after six is “solid Gardener,” as informants say. Children on playgrounds - from all over the CIS - from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, etc.”
I would not like to plunge the reader into a state of hopelessness with this text, so I will only note that after Cherkizon was closed in 2009, the Izmailovo district was abandoned by traders and loaders from the market, once again becoming quiet, safe and cozy. All we need is political will to make the lives of our citizens calm and comfortable in their own country, protecting themselves from the emergence of migrant enclaves, which then inevitably turn into a stronghold of militant Islamism and terrorism.
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