Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Russian nationalism is back – but precisely what does that mean?
- 1 The ethnification of Russian nationalism
- 2 The imperial syndrome and its influence on Russian nationalism
- 3 Radical nationalists from the start of Medvedev's presidency to the war in Donbas: True till death?
- 4 Russian ethnic nationalism and religion today
- 5 Everyday nationalism in Russia in European context: Moscow residents’ perceptions of ethnic minority migrants and migration
- 6 Backing the USSR 2.0: Russia's ethnic minorities and expansionist ethnic Russian nationalism
- 7 Rallying ’round the leader more than the flag: Changes in Russian nationalist public opinion 2013–14
- 8 How nationalism and machine politics mix in Russia
- 9 Blurring the boundary between civic and ethnic: The Kremlin's new approach to national identity under Putin's third term
- 10 Russia as an anti-liberal European civilisation
- 11 Ethnicity and nationhood on Russian state-aligned television: Contextualising geopolitical crisis
- 12 The place of economics in Russian national identity debates
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Everyday nationalism in Russia in European context: Moscow residents’ perceptions of ethnic minority migrants and migration
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction: Russian nationalism is back – but precisely what does that mean?
- 1 The ethnification of Russian nationalism
- 2 The imperial syndrome and its influence on Russian nationalism
- 3 Radical nationalists from the start of Medvedev's presidency to the war in Donbas: True till death?
- 4 Russian ethnic nationalism and religion today
- 5 Everyday nationalism in Russia in European context: Moscow residents’ perceptions of ethnic minority migrants and migration
- 6 Backing the USSR 2.0: Russia's ethnic minorities and expansionist ethnic Russian nationalism
- 7 Rallying ’round the leader more than the flag: Changes in Russian nationalist public opinion 2013–14
- 8 How nationalism and machine politics mix in Russia
- 9 Blurring the boundary between civic and ethnic: The Kremlin's new approach to national identity under Putin's third term
- 10 Russia as an anti-liberal European civilisation
- 11 Ethnicity and nationhood on Russian state-aligned television: Contextualising geopolitical crisis
- 12 The place of economics in Russian national identity debates
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines how ordinary residents of the Russian capital relate to the sharply increased influx of migrant workers to Russia, and to Moscow in particular. For several decades now, Western academics have scrutinised cross-border migration to Western European countries through the prism of local residents’ perceptions. However, far more attention has been paid to the problems of the migrants themselves than to the attitudes of the host populations.
Similarly in Russia: despite the growing volume of academic literature on diverse aspects of the lives of migrant workers, efforts at viewing this issue through the eyes of the host population are fairly rare. Well-established centres for the study of public opinion (Fond ‘Obshchestvennoe mnenie’ (FOM), the Levada Centre and others) periodically conduct large-scale surveys nationwide or within specific regions, and the collated ‘percentages’ are then commented on, above all in the press and online media, as well as in social media. Less often are such ‘official’ surveys, or surveys conducted by teams of researchers, analysed in academic literature (see, for example, Leonova 2004; Tiuriukanova 2009; Grigor'eva et al. 2010). There are practically no studies that for comparative or analytical purposes draw on Western experience of studying public attitudes towards migrants, and employ the conceptual approaches used in these works to explain the reasons for various public sentiments.
Instead, research on perceptions of migration in Russia consists overwhelmingly of works of a polemical-conceptual nature, in which – from a constructivist position – the authors analyse and criticise discursive practices widespread in Russian society (see, for example, Karpenko 2002; Malakhov 2007, 2011; Shnirel'man 2008; Regame [Regamey] 2010; Demintseva 2013). These discourses have an alarmist character – employing concepts of ‘territorial ethnic balance’, ‘ethno-cultural safety’, ‘critical share of immigrant population’, ‘ethnic criminality’ and the like – thereby furthering the ethnification of social relations and the growing migrantophobia among the populace.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The New Russian NationalismImperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism 2000–2015, pp. 132 - 159Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016