Proletarian Internationalism in Action? Communist Legacies and Attitudes Towards Migrants in Russia

Abstract

The goal of the paper is to investigate the effect of the Communist legacies on the attitude towards migrants in the present-day Russia. Since mid-first decade of the 2000s, Russia established itself as an attractive center of labor migration, with hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from Central Asia, Southern Caucasus and Moldova entering the Russian labor market. This rise of migration triggered an upsurge in the xenophobic sentiment and nationalism. This paper, looking at the variation of anti-migrant sentiments across the regions of the Russian Federation, concludes that it is to a large extent triggered by the legacies of the Communist regimethe spread of the CPSU membership in the Russian regions in the 1970s. The effect is highly robust and confirms that parts of Russia with higher share of CPSU members in the past show lower tolerance to migration today.

The Porous Border Woven with Prejudices and Economic Interests. Polish Border Admission Practices in the Time of COVID-19

“…Polish xenophobia has its roots in centuries-old antisemitism (Bilewicz et al 2012) and the legacy of the communist regime. Not only did communism render Poland a nationally and ethnically homogeneous state, but it also combined it with a homogenic and nationalist ideology, which strengthened the society's suspicion of others, including foreigners, and even made some groups national enemies (Libman and Obydenkova 2020;Burjanek 2001;Zarycki 2008). All this is combined with the process of Poles abandoning European values, set in motion in 2015, known as de-Europeanisation, which includes departure from tolerance (Vermeersch 2019).…”

Global governance and Eurasian international organisations: lessons learned and future agenda

“…Finally, a set of studies connects the nature, development, and effects of Eurasian regional governance to a number of profound historical issues that make the Eurasian regionalism critically different from regional governance elsewhere in the world. The literature on historical legacies in general and on post-Communist legacies in particular, has been growing in the last decades to explain democratic development, attitudes, behavioural patterns (e.g., corruption), economic development (e.g., inequality, firm innovation, development of bank sector, foreign direct investment), the mass media, political discourse and even entertainment in Central European States and in the former Soviet republics (Beissinger, 2002;Beissinger & Kotkin, 2014;Lankina et al, 2016a;Libman & Obydenkova, 2019a, 2019bObydenkova & Libman, 2015;Pop-Eleches, 2007;Pop-Eleches & Tucker, 2013). Among other issues, these studies have also indicated at the persistence and survival of profound economic and social links, especially the channels of foreign trade created during the USSR and the importance of migration and lingua franca that survives due to the mass media in Russia as well as the use of cyber-space as an entertainment.…”

Inequality and historical legacies: evidence from post-communist regions

“…On the other hand, a different set of studies looked into historical roots of success and failure in democratic development of post-Communist regions. This includes a vast literature focusing on corruption, intolerance to migrants, the democratic and governance deficits in post-Soviet Eurasia and on the role of various historical legacies explaining these phenomena (Beissinger and Kotkin 2014;Dinino and Orttung 2005;Hellman 1998;Segbers 2001;Trochev 2008;Bunce and Wolchik 2011;Hough 2004;Fish 2005;Obydenkova and Swenden 2013;Wilson 2005;Hale 2005Hale , 2006Hale , 2015Libman and Obydenkova 2019;2014;Nazarov and Obydenkova 2020;Allina-Pisano 2007;Abdelal 2010;Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2017) in addition to studies looking into legacies of the Cold World War at the world-wide level (e.g., Ben-Artzi 2016; Obydenkova and Vieira 2020). In the universe of historical legacies, the paper focuses on the specific group of Communist, or, following Jowitt (1992), Leninist, legaciesthat is, the persistent social and political phenomena that are observed in post-Communist countries in spite of the disappearance of the original political and social environment of the Communist regimes.…”