9 - Attitudes Toward Migrants

Summary

While in the previous chapters we look at how the CPSU legacy affects the functioning of the state in Russian regions (and, in particular, the way subnational bureaucracy operates), in this chapter we look at the impact of the CPSU legacy on public attitudes, and in particular attitudes toward migrants. Russia is an important magnet for labor migration from the former Soviet Union. While from the point of view of ideology former Communists should embrace this migration, due to the importance of the proletarian internationalism in the Communist ideology there is also an alternative hypothesis: Communists, due to their stronger involvement in the Soviet power structures, could to a larger extent have internalized the actual day-to-day practices of ethnic discrimination that existed in the Soviet Union. Our results indeed show that CPSU legacies are associated with greater intolerance toward labor migrants.