A new housing development on the outskirts of Moscow is being built by migrants from the former Soviet Union member states for Russian military families.
Photograph by Misha Friedman for Bloomberg
Russia Wants Immigrants the World Doesn’t
While Europe and the U.S. tighten border controls, former Soviet states are encouraged by Moscow to send their workers.
On a brutally cold February day, hundreds of laborers from Uzbekistan mill around in the snow and mud of a construction site 10 miles outside Moscow. Surrounding them are a series of unfinished 18-story apartment blocks meant to serve as homes for Russian military officers.
Work has stopped because the men haven’t been paid in weeks. With nowhere to go, they stand around smoking and chatting at the vast project locals call Samolyot, Russian for “the plane,” after a nearby monument to World War II pilots. At night, they hole up in a nearby shantytown of corrugated steel cabins. There’s no shower, sink, or toilet—instead there’s a row of blue portable outhouses, each half-filled with stalagmites of frozen excrement. In the morning, the men shiver over a fire cooking carrot gruel and melting ice from a nearby stream to drink. Most are poorly dressed for the 10 degree weather—one laborer emerges with nothing on his feet but wool socks and flip-flops.