The Siberian Curse by Fiona Hill

Author:Fiona Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

The Propiska System Lives On

In spite of numerous legal challenges in the 1990s, residency within Moscow is still governed by a version of the propiska system.29 Like Boris Yeltsin before him, Moscow's mayor, Yuriy Luzhkov, has personally spearheaded the effort to preserve the Soviet-era policy of restricting residency, citing the risk of untrammeled migration's overwhelming city services and undermining security. After a series of apartment bombings in Moscow in the summer of 1999—linked by the Russian government to Chechen rebels—residency permits were explicitly tied to efforts to combat terrorism. In September 1999, Luzhkov decreed that visitors to Moscow would have to submit to questioning and obtain new residency permits within a three-day period.30 In addition, Moscow's police effectively barred nonresidents from entering the capital, and the Moscow city government later passed an emergency measure calling for the deportation of all those who had failed to register for the new residency permits.31 Immigration control points were established at Moscow's railway and bus terminals, while vehicles entering Moscow on the major highways into the city were searched with greater frequency.32

Luzhkov's attempts to restrict migration into Moscow were given a further boost in 1999–2002 by an influx of refugees from the renewed war in Chechnya, which erupted in the wake of the apartment bombings. Of the estimated three million “nonresidents” in Moscow in the preliminary data from the 2002 census, as many as two million were reported as originating in the Russian North Caucasus and in the South Caucasus states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.33 In July 2002, new regulations on the “Legal Status of Foreign Nationals” were introduced, ostensibly to combat the risk of further terrorist acts, but they were widely viewed as an effort to stem and reverse the tide of migration from the Caucasus. These regulations initially stipulated that a “migration card” be issued to all foreigners (citizens of countries other than Russia) entering the country.34 However, the seizure of a Moscow theater by a group of Chechen terrorists in October 2002 led directly to calls for even tougher enforcement of the existing restrictions on the residence of Russian citizens migrating to the capital. In a speech in November 2002, Mayor Luzhkov declared that Moscow and other large Russian cities “must have” a “mandatory residence-registration system” like the propiska system “to ensure security and prevent terrorist acts.”35

All this continues to complicate the efforts of migrants to move to new places of their personal choice within the Russian Federation—especially to Moscow, the one city that offers real opportunity of housing and employment in the Russian Federation. Russians need to be able to move freely for Russia to develop. If people are stuck in place, there is no competition and no incentive for development without coercion. At the same time, however, mobility itself initially has negative consequences: the movement of people and businesses away from towns and cities means a decline in both population and services. In Russia, if people were allowed true freedom of movement, Moscow's growth would likely continue, while population decline would be dramatic in some cities and regions.

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