Central Asia and its Russian dependenceRemittance man

PICK a village in either of the former Soviet Union’s two poorest and frailest successor states, Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan, and the chances are you will not find many men about. It is not that they are busy in some workshop. Rather, they have left for Russia.

According to the World Bank, Tajikistan is more dependent on remittances than any other country in the world. Last year migrant workers sent home the equivalent of 47% of Tajikistan’s GDP. Perhaps half of working-age males are abroad, most in Russia. Kyrgyzstan is third in the World Bank’s rankings, behind Liberia. One-fifth of its workforce are migrant workers.

The economic dependence of these two countries gives their former imperial master great influence. Whenever it is unable to wangle a favourable deal for a military base abroad, or it wants to play up nationalism at home, Russia threatens to introduce visas for Central Asians. And though Russia needs cheap labour, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan need jobs much more.

In addition, President Vladimir Putin has made reasserting Russian influence over countries once in the Soviet empire a big part of his foreign policy. One result of this is the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, set up in 2010. Last year the union liberalised the three-way movement of goods, services, labour and capital. Mr Putin has made no secret of the fact that he would like more members, especially Ukraine, but also Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. He hopes for a supranational club, the Eurasian Union, modelled on the European Union, by 2015.

The motivation behind such a block combines the emotional and the practical—but with no sense that the two actually mix. Its backers include Russian lawmakers intent on resurrecting empire, and hard-nosed types out to control the region’s mineral resources and markets. For the pragmatists, one consideration is staving off China, now the main economic partner for all the Central Asian republics bar Uzbekistan, often by a large margin.

But at least two things make integration tricky. One, says Nargis Kassenova of Kazakhstan’s KIMEP University, is that Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are both so poorly governed, with such porous borders, that they will jeopardise Mr Putin’s project thanks to smuggling rackets and weak enforcement.

The other is xenophobia. Fyodor Lukyanov, a foreign-policy analyst in Moscow, says that with millions of Central Asian Muslims flooding into their cities, ordinary Russians are increasingly hostile to the official doctrine of ever-closer union.

For the leaders in Bishkek and Dushanbe, the capitals of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan respectively, ensuring that Russia continues to accept migrants is justification enough to cosy up to Mr Putin. But the affection is grudging at best: Emomali Rakhmon, the president of Tajikistan, is so embarrassed by the cash addiction that his government has stopped publishing remittance data.

Kyrgyzstan, which has seen two presidents overthrown in the past decade, most recently with the Kremlin’s nudging, says it has no choice but to join the customs union, even though its businessmen complain. It was the first post-Soviet country to join the WTO and has a robust re-export trade, moving Chinese goods to post-Soviet markets, notably Russia and Kazakhstan. Joining the customs union would devastate that trade. With China accounting for half of all Kyrgyzstan’s trade, compared with Russia’s 17% share, the economic advantages to Kyrgyzstan are by no means obvious.

Kyrgyzstani businessmen, says Ms Kassenova, should beware of what happened to businesses in Kazakhstan, their vast northerly neighbour. Its membership of the customs union has actually made trade less liberal, as Russian businesses have been protected and Kazakhstani entrepreneurs have been tied into a “stagnant” Russian economy.

Meanwhile, Central Asian migrants look very much like pawns. Russia’s Federal Migration Service recently estimated that out of 5m migrant workers, 3m are illegal. Moscow has maintained visa-free agreements with most former Soviet republics, but unscrupulous employers and red tape have left many in jeopardy, with police periodically staging publicised raids. Russian officials often spout anti-migrant rhetoric, especially around election time, and many ethnic Slavs see the newcomers as likely to commit crimes, steal jobs or flout local mores. Almost 80 racially motivated murders of Central Asians have been logged since 2009.

Yet still the migrants keep coming. A young Tajik at a bazaar near Dushanbe shuddered when describing his three years as a taxi driver in St Petersburg. There, he preferred working nights so that police would not notice his darker skin. Yet he was home only briefly, to find a wife, and will soon leave his bride for more work. “Without Russia, we’d die.”