Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire

^{c. Deklaratsiya Gosudarstvennoy Dumy Federalnogo Sobraniya Rossiyskoy Federatsii “O podderzhke rossiyskoy diaspory i o pokrovitelstve rossiyskim sootechestvennikam,” http://igrunov.ru/gdrf/sng/sngarchive/declar_sng.html.}

^{d. Ibid.}

^{e. Postanovleniye Pravitelstva Rossiyskoy Federatsii ot 17.05.1996 № 590 “O programme mer po podderzhke sootechestvennikov za rubezhom,” http://www.lawmix.ru/pprf/108396/.}

^{f. Ibid.}

^{g. Ibid.}

^{h. Followed by a number of amendments, the most significant in July 2010 (see below, Table 2). Federalnyi zakon ot 24.05.1999 № 99-FZ “O gosudarstvennoy politike Rossiyskoy Federatsii v otnoshenii sootechestvennikov,” http://base.consultant.ru/cons/cgi/online.cgi?req=doc;base=LAW;n=150465.}

Despite some initial delay, Stankevich’s policy document did not go unnoticed. In February 1994, Yeltsin officially declared to the Federal Assembly the necessity of formulating a policy toward compatriots abroad. He also determined the future conceptualization and discourse regarding Russia’s compatriots: Russia should help its compatriots not with coming back to the “historically native land,” but with settling down in foreign states. In his speech, Yeltsin issued a call that “everywhere, where our compatriots live, they should feel themselves full and equal citizens,” and defined a range of tasks of foreign policy aimed to support the “interests of Russians in the CIS countries and the Baltic states.”⁴⁷ Although at the time these measures were probably mostly intended to assist Russians in settling into their countries of residence, the seeds of Russian compatriot policy as a means of influence in the former Soviet republics were planted for future use by Putin’s regime. Since then, Russian politicians have maintained the notion of a certain duty to defend the rights of Russians and Russian speakers against the ethnic elites of the former Soviet republics as they pursued in Moscow’s eyes a “decolonizing” process.⁴⁸

The mechanisms to support Russian compatriots, however, were lacking, until in August 1994 the government passed a resolution approving two documents: “Guidelines on State Policy regarding Compatriots Living Abroad” and “List of Primary Measures to Support Compatriots Abroad.” The government also established a Governmental Commission on Affairs of Compatriots Abroad composed of government, presidential office, and social organization officials and representatives of other groups.⁴⁹ Regardless of the failure to clearly define “compatriots,” the documents maintained that state policy would be implemented toward two categories of people: emigrants from Russia and the USSR (including their descendants) and the Russian-speaking population of the former Soviet Union republics.⁵⁰ Two different policies were proposed regarding these two categories of compatriots. Emigrants to the West were to be encouraged to regain Russian citizenship and return to the “historically native land” of Russia. Probably few emigrants to the United States and Europe were actually expected to return to Russia. In contrast, for Russian speakers in the near abroad, the policy focused on “prevention of mass migration” from the former Union Republics to Russia. Sociologist Hilary Pilkington aptly noted that at the time the Russian government was in favor of preventing “compatriots” becoming “repatriates.”⁵¹ This policy of limiting repatriation was named as one of the main factors in changing the migration dynamics of the Russian population from Central Asia, which had rapidly decreased but at a slower rate after the limits were imposed in 1994. In that year 234,000 Russians migrated from Kazakhstan to Russia, but in 1995 this number fell to 144,000; 93,500 Russians left Uzbekistan in 1994, but in 1995 only 64,200; 42,900 left Kyrgyzstan in 1994, and 13,400 in 1995.⁵² Still, most Russians who wanted to repatriate had already done so in the early 1990s.