Moscow’s factories and construction enterprises were in desperate need of workers, and youth from the rural areas in the regions surrounding Moscow readily solved this problem in the 1970s. The State Planning Committee’s focus on the development of enterprises in cities often resulted in suffering conditions in the countryside. By the 1970s, authorities deemed some rural villages “villages without futures.” Such villages were liquidated and consolidated with other villages. For the majority of villages that remained, however, access to basic necessities, such as groceries, education, and medical care, was limited. This, coupled with the tough working conditions on collective farms and the promise of an overall better life in the city encouraged the exodus from the countryside to the city.
For the first time in Russian and Soviet history, the Soviet Union recorded a more urban than rural population in the 1970 census, a trend that only continued during the next two decades. Who were these migrants that fed the growth of urban centers like Moscow? They were primarily young, the bulk ranging in age from 17 to 22. Often, temporary labor migrants left after finishing high school and thus lacked higher education. Employment in Moscow offered them the chance to improve their workplace qualifications, if not enroll in a polytechnic school or university. More men than women arrived throughout the 1970s, but men were more likely to return home within 4 years. Therefore, the ratio of men to women came close to equilibrium.
Moscow served as a local, regional, and national migration point. Many residents of the Moscow Region commuted into the city limits every day for work. The bulk of migrants arrived from the rural parts of the regions surrounding Moscow. The migrants were significantly more likely to arrive on their own, relying on their personal contacts and networks to visit Moscow and find work there. This benefited the enterprises, which were then absolved of the requirement to pay for a migrant’s travel to their new job. Thousands still arrived from further afield, leaving Siberia, the Caucasus, and other Soviet republics for Moscow, but they tended to rely on organized labor recruitment since they most likely lacked contacts in the capital.
By 1980, the demographic decline in the Soviet Union began to affect labor migration to Moscow. Too many deaths and too few births in previous decades meant fewer working age people both inside and outside the capital. By 1985, Moscow was short 54,000 workers, compared to just 1,000 in 1971. During perestroika, the Moscow Executive Committee ended the practice of hiring out-of-town workers who arrived on their own. A few of the most migrant-dependent enterprises were granted permission to continue organized labor recruitment, and the bulk of migrants now hailed from Uzbekistan.
The chaos of the final days of the Soviet Union reversed the flow of migration, and for the first time since victory in the Great Patriotic War, more people left Moscow than arrived. Soaring unemployment rates – the result of pushes for efficiency and liberalization – decreased the need for temporary labor migrants. However, unemployment and labor openings coexisted. Muscovites continued to shun blue-collar labor, leaving these positions open. While Moscow officials complained that temporary labor migrants failed to come to the capital, they also bemoaned the influx of internally displaced persons and refugees from conflicts within the former Soviet Union. Such migrants were legally entitled to housing and social benefits that the city felt it did not have the resources to provide.
By 1998, migration began to fuel population growth in the capital once more, but the new capitalist regime changed how temporary labor migration functioned. Individual companies recruited workers, often illegally, and failed to provide housing and domicile registration, in violation of federal law. Moreover, migrants from the former Soviet Republics, Africa, and Asia eclipsed ethnic Russians as the main source of Moscow’s labor pool. Even the government officials charged with keeping track of migration viewed regional migration as less noteworthy. Statistics no longer noted migration to Moscow from specific regions within the Russian Federation. Instead, they only marked migrants from within the entire Russian Federation.
Below is a map that notes each region of the former Soviet Union and provides details of the number of migrants arriving from each in specific years. You can notice how some boundaries and statistic keeping methods changed over time.