From: simon1@acs2.bu.edu (Simon Streltsov) Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish,soc.culture.soviet Subject: The Heritage Foundation,Russians are coming, 1991. long Date: 23 Jul 1993 17:23:45 GMT The Heritage Foundation Policy Review 1991 Fall SECTION: No. 58; Pg. 44 HEADLINE: THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING; Millions of Soviet Refugees Will Be Fleeing to the West BYLINE: LEON ARON; LEON ARON is Henry Salvatori senior policy analyst in Soviet studies at The Heritage Foundation. Portions of this article have appeared in the Washington Post and Moscow News. BODY: The largest-ever peacetime migration of ethnic Russians to the West has begun, and is likely to accelerate as a result of the democratic revolution that followed the unsuccessful hard-line Communist coup. The scale of the exodus may surpass even the emigration of 1918-1920, when, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, nearly two million Russians left their motherland. West Eastern and Western Europe will be the first stop for the Russian exodus, but the United States is the country of choice for many prospective Russian European specialists on migration estimate that as many as seven million will flee the Soviet Union within the next two years. Polls from within the USSR indicate that from as few as two million to as many as 11 million may emigrate from the Russian Republic alone. The Russians are fleeing the Soviet Union for a variety of reasons: poverty, economic collapse, the disastrous state of the public health care system, and the severe shortage of housing. Another important factor is the collapse of the Soviet domestic empire and the forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians from such outlying non- Russian ethnic republics as Azerbaijan, Tadzhikistan, and Uzbekistan. Some 60 million Soviet citizens, including 26 million Russians, live in republics dominated by another nationality. And with the dizzying breakup of the Soviet Union, they are finding themselves in newly created independent states that they consider foreign. For many Russians, heading West may be a matter of survival. And if the Soviet government upholds a recently enacted law that gives the right to emigrate and travel freely beginning January 1, 1993, many will indeed go West. Eastern and Western Europe will be the first stop for the Russian exodus, but the United States is the country of choice for many prospective Russian immigrants. Attracted, like the rest of the world, by the American dream of dignity and prosperity, millions of Russian emigrants will try desperately to get to America -- legally or illegally. The United States must prepare itself for the incoming wave of refugees. Europe alone will be unable to cope with the Russian exodus; the United States, with its vast land mass and economic resources, will have to handle the overflow. No other country is capable of accommodating several hundred thousand refugees. Moreover, Soviet freedom to emigrate has come about largely through U.S. pressure; in some ways we have a moral responsibility to welcome the refugees. To achieve greater efficiency and lessen human suffering, the U.S. should make plans now to cope with this flood. Food Shortages Several factors push Russians to emigrate. One is the low standard of living. The Soviet Union's personal consumption is ranked 77th in the world, and its people are among the poorest in the industrial world. Compared with the average American, for example, the Soviet citizen has to work 10 to 12 times longer to buy meat, 18 to 20 times longer to buy poultry, three times longer for milk, seven times longer for butter, 10 to 15 times longer for eggs, and two to eight times longer to buy bread. More than 100 million Soviet citizens, or about one out of three people, have less living space than the meager Soviet "sanitary minimum" of nine square meters, or 97 square feet, per person. (By contrast, the households classified as "poor" by the U.S. government have 405 square feet per person.) The lack of prospects for improvement and the ability to travel more freely make the urge to emigrate stronger still. As more and more Soviets visit the West, the affluence they see tempts many of them to leave. The economic collapse, which Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has expedited and sharpened through half-hearted and inconsistent economic reforms, aggravates the already miserable standards of living. The economic interregnum, in which the stick of the command economy is already gone, but the carrot of the market has not yet materialized, has produced only further impoverishment, including shortages of food and galloping inflation. For example, the food prices in the farmers' markets in September 1990 grew by 34 percent over the previous year. This past January, a pound of beef cost approximately 15 rubles at farmers' markets in St. Petersburg -- almost one-tenth of the average Soviet monthly salary of 200 rubles a month. Even such staples as eggs, butter, milk, and cooking oil are either not available at all or can be purchased only after several hours of standing in line. The situation is especially bad in Russia. While food shortages have plagued the Russian heartland for six decades, now the shortage has spread to such showcase cities as Moscow and St. Petersburg. The latter introduced food rationing in December 1990, restricting each person's monthly allotment to 3.3 pounds of meat, 2.2 pounds of sausage, 2.2 pounds of cereals and pasta, 1.1 pounds of butter, and 10 eggs. Moscow introduced rationing at about the same time, including the sale of vodka. According to Stephen Miller at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, January 1991 brought hints of proposed new rations for Moscow that were below the levels allocated in 1942, when Hitler's army was deep inside Soviet territory and the system was stretched to its limit. Bloodshed in Central Asia While poverty and a free-falling economy provide a backdrop for the emigration from the Soviet Union, the decisive factor pushing Russians to leave for the West is the likely dissolution of the Soviet internal empire. According to the latest Soviet census, taken in January 1989, 25.7 million ethnic Russians live outside Russia. There they increasingly feel like unwelcome foreigners. This is especially true of the 9.7 million ethnic Russians in the Central Asian Moslem republics of Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenia, and Uzbekistan, and the 475,000 Russians in Azerbaijan. In the past decade, 1.6 million more people left the Soviet Central Asian republics than moved in. Apart from several hundred thousand ethnic Germans in Kazakhstan who went to West Germany, most of those who left were ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. Following the Central Asian republics' passage of a number of legislative measures since 1989 to increase their political, economic, and cultural independence from Moscow, the outflow of ethnic Russians has increased sharply. For example, anticipating a law making Farsi the state language of Tadzhikistan, more than 10,000 Russians moved out of that republic to Russia in the first half of 1989. Ethnic violence also contributes to the migration. Riots in January 1990 in Baku, the Azerbaijan capital, and in Dushanbe, the Tadzhikistan capital, a month later, swelled the flow of Russians from Central Asia to Russia. Russian speakers were reported "besieging" the employment office in Dushanbe demanding jobs in Russia after the February riots. A special society called "Migration" was established in Dushanbe to help Russians leave. Russian Parliament Deputy Ilya Konstantinov disclosed last year that the parliament was swamped by letters from ethnic Russians "requesting help in moving to [the Russian Republic] and finding work there." Following the 1989 and 1990 bloody riots in the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan, 80,000 ethnic Russians were reported to have left Uzbekistan for Russia by the fall of 1990. So many Russians tried to leave that the waiting list for railroad containers, in which household effects are shipped, was reported to be "many months" long. The Russian expatriates are right to be frightened. In Dushanbe, for example, rioters demanded the expulsion of all non-Moslems from Tadzhikistan. "The local authorities 'forgot' about the Russians and threw us to the wolves. There was a veritable hunt for . . . the Russians, " wrote an eyewitness of the Dushanbe riot. A Russian who had lived in Dushanbe for 30 years wrote in a local newspaper: "We are reminded: you are in a foreign country, and from now on this factor is going to determine your existence here." Conflict among ethnic groups in Central Asia is certainly nothing new. In the Osh region in Kirghizia, for example, a protest by Uzbeks against housing for Kirghiz in a predominantly Uzbek area resulted in at least 186 dead. A rumor that Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan were receiving priority in obtaining apartments in Dushanbe caused a clash among workers, students, and the unemployed. Twenty-two were killed and 568 were injured. There has been at least one reported case of angry mobs of nationalists attacking and burning ethnic Russians. The Kazakh Tide In March1990 then-Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov estimated the total number of internal Soviet refugees to be 500,000. This included Russians from the non- Russian republics and Armenians who had fled Azerbaijan. Two months later, Chairman of the Coordinating Committee for Refugees of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR Peter Rudev reported 600,000 bezhentzy, or refugees. People's Deputy of the USSR Galina Starovoitova said last November that there were over one million domestic refugees in the Soviet Union. The flow of internal Russian refugees could swell to mammoth proportions in the coming months. For example, 38 percent of the Russians polled in the Ukraine last fall were against the republic's secession from the Soviet Union. This means that of the 11.3 million ethnic Russians in the Ukraine, 4.3 million may choose to leave the Ukraine and return to Russia if the Ukraine becomes independent. Anti- Russian feelings in the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan, meantime, have intensified so much that ethnic Russians in Kazakhstan now talk about the "Solzhenitsyn solution." It is so called because last year, the exiled Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn suggested in an essay entitled "How Should We Make Russia Livable?" to split the territory of the republic into two separate entities: Russian North and Kazakh South. If the 1947 division of formerly British India into Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan, during which millions were forced to flee their homes, is any lesson, Russia should expect at least a few million refugees out of Kazakhstan's six million ethnic Russians. No Room for Internal Refugees On the verge of economic collapse, plagued by unemployment, poverty, and shortages of everything, Russia is utterly incapable of accommodating the hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring in from Central Asia. By far most difficult is the problem of housing. In Moscow, where many of the refugees come seeking food and shelter, the housing waiting list already contains 344,800 families. These families account for 12 percent of the Soviet capital's population. The Moscow city council is preparing to ration food and clothing. Today a refugee arriving in Russia is given a one-time assistance of 100 rubles in cash and 200 rubles' worth of clothes and footwear. With state stores empty, a carton of ten eggs in the market now costing 12 rubles, a pound of meat 15 rubles, and winter boots 600 to 800 rubles, it is no wonder that a year ago Pravda called the refugee assistance "puny." Refugees are left to sleep in government offices or sent to live in children's summer camps, which lack heat, hot water, and often indoor plumbing. The Ministry of Defense has placed in the barracks the families of soldiers and officers evacuated from such dangerous places as Baku. There were already 35,420 families living in barracks in early 1990. The notorious Soviet red tape makes the refugees' lot harder still: over 60 local and all-Union ministries are responsible for helping refugees. A law on refugees has been discussed in the Soviet parliament since January 1990, yet still has not been passed. Laments the popular weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta: "Our poverty-stricken state has gone to pieces and is incapable of fulfilling its obligations to its own citizens." The last straw prompting the displaced ethnic Russians to leave the Soviet Union may be psychological: the bitter feeling that they are not welcome in Russia. As one Russian refugee who had fled ethnic riots in Baku told the New York Times in March this year: "They always yelled at us [in Azerbaijan], 'why don't you go back to your Russia,' though we were born there, and our fathers were born there. When we came to 'our' Russia, everybody says, 'We don't need refugees; go back to where you came from; we can't help you.' I'm afraid to say I'm a refugee, honest to God." A Russian from Central Asia said, "In Tadzhikistan we are foreigners but in Russia we are not needed." An All-Union Center for the Study of Public Opinion poll taken a year ago in Moscow found that only 21 percent of the respondents thought that refugees are entitled to special assistance from the state. The Muscovites expressed fear that the refugees will deplete the Soviet capital's already dwindling resources, especially housing and food. The pro-reform Moscow News sadly commented on the situation: "A state which is reluctant to bear any responsibility for those who have become refugees in their own country . . . is naturally bound to lose its people." The Russian republic recently passed legislation to provide assistance to refugees in and around Moscow who fled from outlying republics. But given the severe shortage of housing, it is clear that the Russian republic will be all refugees in and around Moscow who fled from outlying republics. But given the severe shortage of housing, it is clear that the Russian republic will be all but helpless to help most of its internal refugees. Free to Go, But Where? Fortunately, the state has made it legal for these refugees to leave for a better life elsewhere. In May 1991, the Supreme Soviet, after two years' discussion, passed by a vote of 320 to 37 the "freedom-of-movement" bill. The measure, which is not to take full effect until January 1, 1993, sets specific time limits for issuing passports and gives strict guidelines for refusing permission. The "Law on Exit and Entry of the USSR Citizens" gives every Soviet citizen the right to a foreign passport valid for five years for travel anywhere in the world for any reason. Only the narrowly defined "risks to national security," such as work on classified government projects, may delay emigration. (And even in those case, the government's decision may be appealed in courts.) Concerns about a mass exodus of the "best and the brightest" had initially help up passage of the measure. Soviet opponents of the bill argued that passage would lead to the departure of as many as eight million within the first year. Supporters of the bill said such claims were greatly exaggerated, put the number at about 500,000 emigrants a year, and stressed the need for the bill from a human-rights perspective and as a provision for gaining most-favored-nation (MFN) status from the United States. If present application rates are any indicator, supporters of the freedom-of-movement bill may have greatly underestimated the number of potential emigrants. According to Moscow News, 500,000 Soviet citizens applied for exit visas in the first six months of 1990, but only 203,000, or 41 percent, were allowed to leave because Soviet law at that time recognized "family reunification" as the only legal basis for emigration. The New York Times estimates that the number of emigration permissions reached 400,000 by the end of 1990. Under the present rate of rejection of 59 percent, this means that a total of one million Soviets applied to emigrate in 1990. The overwhelming majority of the 400,000 allowed to leave were Jews, Germans, and Armenians; almost never get sent back because governments cannot face the outcry in the media an dsympathy in the public, so what can you expect when Soviets turn up, partly as a result of Western pressure on Moscow to let Soviets travel?" Indeed, with full European economic integration only one year away, replacing the Soviet -made barbed wire fences with those of Western making is something the West European governments are loath to do. The experience of Germany proves the futility of police measures. Excluding ethnic Germans, who repatriated legally, almost 200,000 immigrants from Eastern Europe came to Germany to seek asylum in 1990. So far only 5,000 -- mostly Jews -- are from the Soviet Union, with 10,000 more reported awaiting approval of their visa applications at the German embassy in Moscow. This number undoubtedly will grow several-fold overnight once everyone -- not just Jews, Armenians, and ethnic Germans -- can leave the Soviet Union permanently. Germany once could have easily absorbed many of the incoming refugees. But reunification has proved costlier than first thought. In order to pay the skyrocketing bills, Germany raised its income taxes by 7.5 percent; the average German now pays nearly 45 percent of his annual income in taxes, and in eastern Germany, more than one in three workers is unemployed. Germany is not the only nation likely to see a massive influx of ethnic Russian refugees. Trying to circumvent legal immigration procedures, refugees will travel to the West by trains, buses, and cars through the Eastern European states of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. The latter shares a 540-mile border with the Soviet Union and is for this reason especially attractive to Russian emigrants. Izvestiya reported in April that in the first two months of 1991 alone, of the 517,000 Soviet "tourists" to visit Poland, 40,000 did not return. Most of them stayed behind to work in the underground economy as manual laborers, at wages between $ 40 and $ 150 a month, which in real terms is four to 15 times the average Soviet wage. Preparing for a massive flow of immigrants, the head of Poland's Office of Refugees, Colonel Zbigniew Skoczylas, said last December: "We are making arrangements for this as though it were a second Bolshevik Revolution. We expect the Russians to come marching barefoot across the snow . . . as they did in 1917." Such fears led ministers from 24 member states to the Council of Europe to gather in Vienna last January to discuss migration from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Austria has already deployed 4,000 soldiers along its borders with Czechoslovakia and Hungary to control the wave of immigrants from the East. America's Moral Responsibility While the first waves of the great Russian migration will burst upon Western Europe, they will soon reach American shores. The infatuation with America and things American that permeates Soviet society assures that the United States will be many Russian immigrants' country of choice. If Russians cannot gain permanent residence legally, they will resort to the same ruses that would-be Americans from all over the world have practiced for decades: illegally overstaying tourist visas or student visas, creating fictitious relatives and spouses to obtain residency permits, and even crossing over into the United States from Mexico and Canada, as did the Poles in the 1980s. The numbers of Poles overstaying their visas has grown so large that the U.S. Department of State will no longer give visas to Polish males aged 20 to 40. The exodus to the United States already has begun. Soviet citizens have picked up so many emigration forms from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that they have become scarce. Enterprising black-marketeers now photocopy the forms and sell them for a handsome price. As of June 1991, the Washington Processing Center in Rosslyn, Virginia, established specifically for the purpose of processing immigration applications from the Soviet Union, had 404,000 applications for emigration from Soviet families. This represents approximately 600,000 men, women, and children. For years the United States demanded freedom of emigration from the Soviet Union. The 1975 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, for example, denies the Soviet Union MFN trade status until it liberalizes its immigration policy. Now that free emigration from the Soviet Union will soon become a reality, the U.S. should take concrete measures that would help Russian immigrants to settle in the United States. First, Washington could work to develop a joint U.S.-West European immigration strategy. While the Russian emigrants' country of choice may be America, it is Western Europe that will bear the initial brunt of the exodus because of its proximity to the Soviet Union. If denied entry to the United States, most emigrating Russians would try to settle, legally or illegally, in Western Europe. It would serve West European interests to coordinate their immigration policies with the United States. This could be done by cost-sharing. Until now, the United States alone provided financial support for former Soviet citizens who left the Soviet Union and waited for their U.S. visas in Vienna and in Rome. The average cost of providing food, housing, and transportation to the United States is $ 2,600. In the coming months the number of Russian emigrants in Western Europe may increase dramatically and most of them will want to come to the United States. If the U.S. decides to accept them, the West European governments should help by financially supporting the Russians while they wait for entry to America. The West European financial assistance could pay for food, housing, and a plane ticket to the United States. Since Germany is likely to have more illegal Russian emigrants on its territory than any other country of Western Europe, the German government's contribution to the resettlement of the Russians in the United States should be the largest. Open the Gates Congress could help alleviate a Russian emigration crisis through the creation of a special immigration category for such countries as the Soviet Union that have restricted emigration. Soviet Jews have filled so many of the allotted slots for refugees from the Soviet Union that there is at least a five-year waiting period before a non- Jewish Russian can schedule his first U.S. immigration interview. With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1990, Congress raised the total number of immigrants allowed to settle in the United States from 270,000 a year to 700,000 for 1992-1994 and 675,000 from 1995 onward. Yet would-be Russian immigrants are not likely to benefit from this increase because 70 percent of the new immigration quota is allocated to those with family members in America, and another 20 percent for those with rare labor skills. Few prospective Russian emigrants have either relatives in this country or skills that would qualify them for the entry. Representative William O. Lipinski, the Illinois Democrat, introduced a House bill in January 1990 to allot 200,000 immigration visas per year for five years to "prospective immigrants from countries that, since World War II, have traditionally denied freedom of emigration." These immigration visas would not reduce the number of immigrants from other countries, but would be given in addition to the normal number of immigrants permitted to settle in the United reduce the number of immigrants from other countries, but would be given in addition to the normal number of immigrants permitted to settle in the United States. Although the bill died in the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law, the Immigration Act of 1990 did establish the so-called diversity immigration category. Created to "diversify" the immigrant population in terms of the country of origin, this category gives preference in immigration permits to citizens of countries from where no more than 10,000 people a year come to the United States. There may be different reasons for the small number of immigrants from a particular country to the U.S., but in most cases it is due to a country's restrictive emigration policies. As a result, citizens of those countries have little or no family ties to the United States, which disqualifies them as immigrants. The "diversity" program was designed to correct the situation. However, the total number of immigrants that could enter the U.S. with "diversity" visas is very small: 40,000 for 1992-1994 and 55,000 from 1995 onward. To assure an orderly and legal entry of Russian immigrants, Congress needs to use the "diversity" precedent and create a special immigration category. It could be what the Refugee Policy Group, a Washington-based, nonprofit private organization, calls "humanitarian immigrants. " Eligible for this category would be citizens of nations, such as Russia, that for decades prevented their citizens from immigrating to the United States. Within a designated nation, 1991 The Heritage Foundation, Policy Review 1991 Fall additional qualifying factors may include hardship due to the loss of livelihood and shelter, as is the case with Russian repatriates driven from the national republics. Not a Burden If the experience of 15 years is any indicator, it is unlikely that the new wave of Russian emigrants will be a long-term burden on the United States. Refugees from the Soviet Union adjust extremely well to life in the United States. One of the indicators of their success is the high rate of eligibility for permanent residence, which the Immigration and Naturalization Service determines. Of the former Soviet citizens who entered the U.S. in 1987-1988, the INS judged 95 percent to be eligible for permanent residence in 1989. This is the highest proportion of permanent residents of any major refugee group. Another indicator of rapid adjustment is economic success. Here, too, former Soviet citizens did very well. According to a 1989 survey, two-thirds of adult Soviet refugees were working within a year after their arrival in the United States. The median household income of Soviet refugees who arrived between 1977 and 1981 was $ 34,000 in 1988. This means that half of all families surveyed earned that much money or more. (By comparison, the 1988 U.S. median household income was $ 29,000.) Thus half of all refugee families from the USSR generate at least $ 7,750 a year in direct federal taxes. Most of those surveyed were ethnic Jews. But these Soviet Jews are highly assimilated and much like well-educated and skilled urban Russians -- precisely the category that would be the first to leave outlying republics for the United States. Leading the Russian exodus from Uzbekistan in 1990 were 30,000 college graduates between 22 and 30 years of age. Opening the door to Russian immigrants, driven from their land by political upheaval, poverty, e