Migration of the Russian Diaspora After the Breakup of the Soviet Union

When the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991, 25.2 million Russians became part of a large diaspora population without moving an inch or leaving their homes. They went from being members of a privileged majority who arguably saw their homeland as the entire Soviet Union to minority members of 14 newly independent nation states. There have been a number of recent works examining the Russian diaspora. While all of these allude to migration as a strategy of adaptation, and some include data on Russian migration, none provide a comprehensive treatment of post-Soviet migration patterns of the Russian diaspora population. The levels, shares, sources, destinations, socioeconomic characteristics, and causes of the Russian diaspora's return to Russia are examined. In many cases, data from the last Soviet population census conducted in January 1989 are used as a benchmark to describe the Russian and Russian-speaking populations in the non-Russian former Soviet Union states. This is done with the realization that those who declared their nationality to be Russian on the census may not have Russian on the passports they present to the Ministry of Internal Affairs upon entry to or exit from the country.