Outsiders in Their Own Land

As Russians retreating in humiliation from the Soviet empire’s lost outposts began to settle here a few years ago, fearful voices at a town meeting demanded a “sanitary cordon” to strangle the new colony.

The newcomers, they said, were Russians. But not like us. After all, they’re from Central Asia and talk with their hands. They might impose Islam. They’ll bring disease, maybe guns and drugs, and take our jobs, our bread, the water from our wells.

But the settlers kept coming, and they now number 6,000. This spring, they will start moving out of cramped trailers on the edge of town and into a stylish village of brick cottages and apartments that has its own school and hospital--the largest Russian community ever created by and for migrants.

Instead of a burden, the colony has become a boon to this industrial town of 75,000 people, where unpainted wooden fences line the streets and horse carts slow traffic.

A settlers’ network of 18 companies pays local taxes. The settlers have restored a stadium, rescued the town from a flood and busted costly local monopolies on road paving and cement mixing.

“This used to be a sleepy, provincial town; the migrants woke it up,” Mayor Valery Lebedev said. “They have broken the old stereotypes of what life should be like. They are creating good living conditions like the ones they had. To tell the truth, there is not a single problem the migrants cannot help us solve.”

The biggest Europe-bound migration of the late 20th century--the flow of Russians to a weakened, insecure motherland--is shaking up towns and villages from the Baltic Sea to the Ural Mountains, with no letup in sight.

Pushed across borders by ethnic violence and the uncertainties of life in what suddenly became foreign countries, more than 3 million Russians have arrived in a homeland many had never seen. There, because of an urban housing crunch, this displaced colonial elite--which includes some of Russia’s best doctors, teachers and engineers--must reinvent their lives in the backwaters.

About two-thirds have settled with relatives or on their own. The rest have banded together to build a few hundred pioneer “compact settlements” across the map.

The new colonies are met almost everywhere by suspicion, jealousy and inadequate public assistance. Russia’s Security Council warned in a 1994 report that migrants frustrated by a lack of jobs and housing could become “a destabilizing factor in political life,” strengthening forces that agitate to restore the Soviet Union.

International migration specialists echo the concern that Russia might be unable to handle the influx without more Western aid.

But recent interviews with migrants resettling in six Russian regions paint a less alarming picture.

Many, indeed, are frustrated by the cold welcome.

They say they often are shocked by the poverty, passivity and drunkenness of their new neighbors, who in turn tend to resent the migrants’ determination to rise above them.

It is this drive, however, that makes the organized migrants, by their own definition, a reformist force in small-town Russia rather than a lobby against the post-Soviet order.

Their energies go into self-help schemes for getting on their feet. Their politics are local.

Some settlements, little more than trailer camps next to construction sites of unfinished homes, are on the verge of bankruptcy and despair. Most, however, eke out profits from small businesses that help finance home building.

“I would say most of them are successful, unless you define success as driving a Mercedes-Benz,” said Boris Sergeyev, chairman of Compatriots, a private agency that channels loans and foreign assistance to migrant settlements. “What they have is the ability to survive in the tough conditions Russia presents today.”

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Migrants have cornered the dumpling market in Pskov and the plastic sheeting trade in Saratov. Ninety entrepreneurs have received $700,000 in chain saws, ovens, sewing machines and other start-up equipment from the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration. They employ other migrants and are starting to trade among themselves. Fifteen nonprofit migrant associations offer members legal and employment services.

“A national network is developing,” said Richard Morris, the Geneva organization’s field officer in Russia. “Migrants understand each other like combat veterans. They’re going through a crisis in their lives when they’ve lost almost everything.”

Still, no migrant settlement survives without federal aid.

Migrant leaders contend that President Boris N. Yeltsin’s administration limits subsidies to discourage further migration and thus maintains a neo-imperial Russian presence in the former Soviet republics.

Moscow does, in fact, pressure those new nations to curb discrimination against the 22 million ethnic Russians still living there.

But Tatyana Regent, director of the Federal Migration Service, denies any deliberate neglect of Russians coming home. “It’s sad,” she said. “Our migrants count on Russia, believing that it is too great a country to leave them in trouble. But our desires do not always coincide with our possibilities.”

Last year, the migration service outlined needs totaling $750 million, parliament budgeted $228 million, and the Finance Ministry delivered $96 million. A third of that money went to an unexpected need--accommodating 400,000 people fleeing the war in Chechnya.

Far less of the federal money reaches migrants, considering the rural politics of regions such as Lipetsk, a few hours’ drive away.

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Gennady Rachilov, who once administered the migration program in Lipetsk, said authorities there would divert much of the federal funding allocated to help migrants build private farm settlements to the failing Soviet-type collective farms of well-connected locals.

“The regional bosses viewed the migrants as potential competitors,” Rachilov said. “Their attitude with Moscow was: ‘Give us the money and we’ll find a better way to spend it.’ My job was to find compromises, but I rarely had a say in how this money was distributed.”

In Lipetsk, hostile authorities have taken away land and barred new settlers from Zov, a migrant community of city-folk-turned-farmers. The 4-year-old settlement is isolated and near collapse, its 38 members near default on bank loans and its founder near tears as she tells the story. Most of the colony has turned on her, some with lawsuits.

The fate of any migrant settlement depends a lot on the personal relationship between its leader and the mayor. In most places it is civil.

Here in Borisoglebsk, in an eastern Russian grain-growing region, the two men have become friends and share the dream of building the finest town hall in Russia.

But even this colony, a model of success for Russian migrants, struggles against deep-seated local prejudices.

The colony grew out of a 1990 decision by 15 Russian architects and designers to move their cooperative from the then-Soviet republic of Tajikistan in Central Asia after civil strife broke out. They wanted to build anew in Russia.

The company and the colony are known by the Russian acronym Khoko. Each month, a train car arrives filled with new migrant families. Khoko’s branch in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, selects them to settle here and work for the expanding company, which now has 960 employees.

Anatoly Balashov, 49, a gruff, man who resembles former Polish leader Lech Walesa, is the driving force of this venture. His parents, banished by Stalin’s police, took him as an infant to Tajikistan, where he grew up to study math and practice interior design.

“I used to work in a bright, clean, warm studio,” he said with a laugh, tromping through mud and snow on a tour of his sprawling project. “I used to drive past construction sites like this, see workers in rubber boots and think, ‘Boy, am I lucky I don’t do that for a living!’ Now my life has changed completely.”

Now Balashov is learning to navigate Russia’s wild capitalism.

He also is trying to fend off the town’s ultranationalist Cossack chief, who claims that migration is a CIA plot to pit Russians against Russians, weaken the nation and make towns like Borisoglebsk “explode.”

As the settlement prospers, such phobia has given way to envy and greed.

A woman phoned a call-in debate on television in December to ask how, if these migrants are supposed to be so poor, can they build such nice homes?

Citing a need to upgrade its service, the phone company is demanding $10,000 for a single line to Khoko’s new health clinic.

Powerful utility bosses “are trying to turn Khoko into a milk cow,” said Sergei Mikhailov, a local businessman in partnership with the settlers.

But attitudes toward the migrants are improving, thanks to their civic deeds and the support of the local Russian Orthodox priest, who blessed Khoko’s cornerstone.

Migrant children go to the town school, and a migrant leader sits on the elected town council.

Khoko employs about 100 townspeople who have left dying Soviet-era factories; when Khoko’s village is finished, half the 4,500 homes will be offered for sale to locals.

If a poll were taken today, Mayor Lebedev said, “it would be pretty even, for and against them,” a shift in the migrants’ favor.

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The settlement’s biggest problem is no longer social prejudice but survival in Russia’s free-for-all market.

Army paratroopers sold Khoko the site of a radar station for $225,000, took the money, then refused to move. The Federal Migration Service reneged on agreements to pay Khoko $12 million in construction subsidies last year.

Khoko’s ability to sustain such losses owes much to Balashov’s strategic planning and rigid discipline.

He checked 12 rural sites before deciding to set up in Borisoglebsk.

The 350-year-old town has a dwindling, graying population and dozens of historic buildings in need of the settlers’ restorative talents.

In return for free trailers and work credits to be exchanged for permanent housing, Khoko employees accept six-day workweeks, low wages and a long wait.

Rather than build in a hurry, Balashov chose to transform Khoko piece by piece into a fully integrated construction conglomerate with enough regular clients all over Russia to survive after the village is finished.

The conglomerate started in a converted stable, where architects produce state-of-the-art blueprints on German-made computers for one-tenth the salary they could earn in Moscow.

It branched into workshops in Quonset-like huts that fabricate every construction item from nails to roof tiles. It owns the biggest fleet of trucks, cranes and bulldozers in town, along with a printing press, jewelry shop, baby food factory and sewing co-op.

The Peter Principle is a risk here. A brilliant restoration specialist was put in charge of the warehouse but lost track of the inventory.

“Not a single nail leaves here without a receipt!” Balashov exploded, his face turning red. “You want to bankrupt us? Go to jail? Listen, it’s a privilege to work at what you were trained for. You must earn it!”

Balashov orders background checks on all future settlers and has them searched for guns and drugs when they arrive.

He prowls his factories, breaking up domino games and sniffing for alcohol. Fifteen workers have been expelled for drunkenness. His 32-member security force follows certain settlers to town to keep them out of trouble.

Ultimately, what keeps Khoko and other colonies going is collective spirit and a belief that Russia, no matter how inhospitable, offers far better opportunity than the places the settlers fled.

Of Khoko’s 15 founders, all but one--a man whose marriage failed--are still together after years of sacrifice.

Ivan Ranzhin and Tatyana Kulik owned two spacious apartments in Dushanbe, where he was chief air traffic controller and she trained Aeroflot flight attendants.

Today he is the overqualified custodian of Khoko’s motor pool, but he dreams of building remote-controlled gliders to rent as crop dusters.

“We’re different from other Russians. We’re ambitious. We work together,” said Kulik, the Khoko trailer camp supervisor on call round the clock in case of medical emergencies and other calamities.

A tall, elegant woman, Kulik proudly welcomed a visitor into the 10-by-30-foot trailer the couple share with Ranzhin’s mother and their son. It’s a tidy two-room box, brightened by Central Asian carpets and the complete works of Sir Walter Scott in Russian--a hint of how well they once lived.

“Dushanbe was cleaner, neater than this town,” she said. “But it became impossible to live there.”

Alexander Salmanov, Dushanbe’s deputy chief architect, is also surrounded by memories of Tajikistan. Landscapes of its towering Pamir mountains, painted by his father, decorate his Khoko design studio.

But home is here.

“When I sleep, I dream of Dushanbe,” he admitted. “But when I wake up, I look at this town with a fresh eye and think how we can infuse it with culture. There should be park benches, trash bins, billboards, fresh paint on all those nice, old buildings.”