Tajik migrants working in construction. Photograph by Rustam Samadov.

            The question with which we initiated our dialogue was about his motivations to work on the topic of migration, which he started between 2013 and 2014 as an MA student at the OSCE Academy. His initial focus was the impact of migration on the education of Tajiks. However, the roots of his interest are in the personal experience of growing up in a context where every member of his community was directly or indirectly affected by migration. “One by one, all my friends left Tajikistan. When I was a kid, and the process of migration had just started, I used to see migrants coming from Russia bearing gifts and candy for the children, to celebrate their return. Since nobody from my family was participating in this process of migration, I was kind of envious seeing these successful fathers”. Later in life, as he started working for international organisations, he noticed that the vastness of the impact of migration made it a recurrent and unavoidable topic. “I noticed that the meetings concerning Tajikistan were always connected to the topic of migration: ephemeral migration, women who are left behind, the issue of second marriages and wives in Russia, etcetera.” The accumulation of personal and professional experience eventually crystalised in the form of a PhD project that addresses the networks of solidarity among Tajik migrants and the matter of masculinity, an understudied aspect of gender studies in relation to Tajik migration.

The first issue that we addressed in our interview were the causes for migration. As a former Soviet Republic, the history of migration to Russian cities can be explained as a consequence of the USSR’s dissolution, as a fundamentally economic phenomenon. However, in the Tajik case, unlike other former Soviet republics, the five-year lasting Civil War also played a crucial role. State structures were impoverished and unable to provide people with social support, pushing the population into a massive process of migration. During the Soviet era, the Tajik economy was based on light industry, and especially on products like cotton, but during the Civil War, the demand for these goods dropped drastically.

According to Samadov, most Tajik migrants are young men. The post-Soviet history also has an influence here: in Soviet times, Tajik men were usually high-skilled workers and fluent Russian speakers. However, this changed after the independence of Tajikistan and the National Language Policy, leading to an increase in an impoverished population with less language skills to support them in Russia.

The topic of solidarity is a crucial aspect of migration studies. In our dialogue, we were curious to know if Tajiks who migrate to Russia build, like Mexicans in the USA, communities based on their regions of origin. This, however, is not an important aspect of how migrants from Tajikistan form communities in Russia, with the exception of the Pamiris (an Iranian ethnic group of the Gorno-Badakhshan region in eastern Tajikistan). Rather than region, kinship and friendship are the main criteria to build networks based on trust. “The reason is also that there is no state protection for labour migrants. That is why they need to establish relationships based on trust, it is better to work with your neighbours or relatives.” 

Tajik migrants working in construction. Photograph by Rustam Samadov.

            An important reason to establish networks of solidarity is that Tajiks are among the most vulnerable groups of migrants in Russia, and conflicts can always emerge among migrants from different Central Asian countries over matters such as business opportunities. Environments like markets, where different groups of migrants come together, are the ones more prone to produce this kind of conflicts. “This is why Tajiks prefer to work independently and avoid conflicts”, said Samadov. Yet when conflict is unavoidable, migrants might even seek solution from criminal groups who charge them for protection. When personal relationships are not enough to cope with the difficulties of life in Russia, “intermediaries” become a solution to find work or obtain legal documentation. The level of illegality of these groups varies, from people who have some connections to government officials to criminals. These solutions are of course dangerous, since the relationship with these groups is not regulated by the law.. Formal associations of migrants have been established, but there is not much trust in them, and there are rumours among migrants that these organisations are in fact working for profit.

On top of these difficulties, migrants face the problem of racial discrimination and the social structures that enable it. Discrimination occurs at different levels, but the upper level (government structures and its policies) sets the stage that enhances further expressions of racial violence. An example is the requirement of having health insurance (which, in effect, is a bureaucratic technicality that usually does not imply any significant protection), because they face discrimination when and if they try to use it. The conditions of illegality at work spaces are noteworthy: “if a Russian citizen works for eight hours (according to the Russian legislation), a Tajik or other migrants normally work for ten or twelve hours per day, and have only one day off in the week, if they have any, yet their salaries are significantly lower”. Workers from Central Asia are also a common target of aggression in Russian media: not only as a hot topic for political candidates to City Majors and the State Duma, but also in comedy shows like “Nasha Rasha” («наша раша», meaning “our ‘Rasha’ (Russia)”). One of the most recurrent forms of discrimination against Central Asian migrants in Russia is that of Police harassment. Migrants are often stopped by police officers who ask to see their documents and, even when their documents are in order, migrants are regularly coerced to pay bribes to be released. The scholar Rustamjon Urinboyev has published a book about on this phenomenon (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520299573/migration-and-hybrid-political-regimes).

One may wonder, given this context, what is the perception that Tajik population has towards Russians, and the answer is relative to space and time. Space in the sense that it is not the same to migrate to a small city like Kazan, Ufa or Novosibirsk, as to a megalopolis like Moscow. Likewise, Russians who were born and raised in Central Asia tend to have a more positive attitude toward migrants. That happens, in a similar way, with Soviet Nostalgia, present among those who were born in Tajikistan when it was still a Soviet Republic.

Lack of protection from the state or non-governmental organisations, as well as hegemonic xenophobia keep migrants on the margins of any form of political participation in their country of residence. Towards the end of our interview, we asked Samadov if the current conflict between the ruling party and the opposition leader Alexey Navalny elicited any response or debate among Tajik migrants. “I do not think they are interested in what happens to Navalny at all”, he told us. “The problem is that Navalny is not the first nor the only one to express anti-migrant attitudes. Almost everybody who is at the high level of politics in Russia has somehow demonstrated an anti-migrant attitude and if you follow any government or TV show in Russian First Channel, there is always an issue about migrants.” This hegemonic xenophobia does not leave any room to introduce an argument in favour of the rights of migrants, and the lack of educational opportunities for this community also prevents their engagement in political debates.

Tajik migrants resting at their workplace. Photograph by Rustam Samadov.

Another contemporary topic that we brought up to wrap up our conversation with Samadov was the film “Ayka”, directed by Sergei Dvortsevoy, which has received several nominations in film festivals such as the Cannes Film Festival, the Asian Film Awards, the festival of the Russian Guild of Film Critics, and the Nika Award. “Ayka” tells the story of a Kyrgyz woman that struggles with different obstacles as an immigrant in Moscow. We wanted to know Samadov’s opinion of this form of representation of the struggles of Central Asian migrants. Although films of the sort depict a crude reality that is widely ignored and therefore could have an important role as denunciators of racial violence, Samadov thinks that these films tend to overlook the positive aspects of migration such as hope and solidarity to increase their dramatic effect, thus reducing the agency of migrants and representing them as passive victims of the system.

Along the matter of hope, which is the main drive pushing migrants worldwide, Samadov told us that there are other topics that remain unexplored in intellectual and artistic representations of Central Asian migration. One of these topics, which he is currently analysing in his doctoral dissertation, is the construction of gender roles and masculinity among migrants. We look forward to reading his work.