Advertisements like the one in the attached photo have been appearing on Russian social media for some time now.
In it, an agency that seems private, ZAM (Central Agency for Migration), but which is in fact an emanation of the dictatorial Putinian regime, offers a contract that includes: “Free consultation to obtain repatriation within 3-6 months of the application, no obligation to reside in Russia, the guarantee of obtaining approval with a positive outcome in 99% of cases.” What a big-heartedness!
The offer is aimed at men and women, single and families of all over the world, but even and specifically to those based in Italy, as in the case of the photo reproduced here which literally says: “Citizenship of the Russian Federation without renouncing Italian citizenship.”
By clicking the button you get more information: the offer is aimed at Russian-speaking Italian citizens, second citizenship without any restrictions. All guaranteed by a written contract – and we very well know what an ironclad and trustworthy guarantee Mr. Putin’s Russian Federation offers in respecting the agreements! By entering your contact details you will be called back and the process of obtaining citizenship begins.
Who the possible candidates are? They are those who were born or lived in federal or Soviet Russia (which is the same nation, only the name has changed, but the methods are always the same, as we well know), personally, or together with their parents. Possible candidates are also those whose ancestors were born or lived in federal or Soviet Russia. And also those who in Federal Russia were not born or lived there, but who have their own relatives or parents still living there. Finally, why not, even those who do not belong to any of these categories, but who have a mad desire to become rams and ewes of the Putinian ringleader.
Obviously, after you have compromised with your freedom you must submit to all the questions that will then be used by the FSB (i.e. the late KGB with a more acceptable name but same methods) to insinuate themselves into all the private and public things that concern you: what is your citizenship, how many members are in your family, relatives, age, residence, occupation, employer’s address, etc. etc. And of course by clicking on “send” you accept all the overt and covert conditions of the contract, including the processing of personal data and their transmission to unspecified state offices. Sum-up, you put your head into the lion’s mouth.
At this point the basic question that one asks is: why does the great Russian Federation made up of over 140 million inhabitants and many ethnic groups and different republics, a world’s power of significant framework, starts publishing such adverts as if it were a small or medium-sized business, desperately short of staff?
Obviously, first of all one assumes that the Federation does it because it feels disadvantaged precisely due to its demographic scarcity compared to other large countries such as the United States and China, that is, nations smaller by territory that on the contrary have many more inhabitants. But surely the reasons are not only these; there must be other much more important ones. Of a defensive and aggressive nature. Let’s try to hypothesize them.
I would attribute the rebalancing of the land/population ratio to the defensive ones, as well as the reintegration of educated young people who fled abroad because of the mobilization for the war in Ukraine.
Among the aggressive forms, I would consider the appropriation of educated youth of a Western country as an unconventional warfare through which one aims to impoverish their capacities: of production, economic growth, development of new technologies, etc.
Leaving aside the forms of the second category which deserve a separate study, the trigger for the first category of reasons is the demographic decline that has become evident in Russia in recent years. But we must also add the failure of the program of specialized secondary education and training, which has led to the emergence of a large part of the population with insufficient general and professional education, which as a consequence determined a large number of vacancies in manufacturing services.
Until recently, the Russian Federation limited itself to facilitating low-level immigration from smaller neighboring countries with weak economies and high unemployment, i.e. populations that cannot find a good job in their homeland. These newcomers had the advantage of already being able to speak the language, albeit imperfectly, of being content with starvation wages and of accepting jobs that Russian citizens refused for reasons of repulsion or superiority. Among them, the majority were individuals from Central Asian countries struggling with poverty. With this system, Russia ensured itself easily available and low-cost labor. However, there were some drawbacks: this immigration could also constitute labor for terrorism, as was seen in March 2024 in the case of the tragedy at the “Crocus City Hall”, when immigrants from Tajikistan caused a massacre (certainly inferior to those committed and repeated by the Russians, first in Chechnya and now in Ukraine) killing hundreds of people, including women and children. Furthermore, they could transport weapons and drugs, goods which are not in short supply in those countries.
Instead, with this new advertising initiative, Mr. Putin no longer intends to settle for low-level labor: he wants to attract professional immigration.
First of all, they want back all those educated young people who left Russia! 10-20 years ago, many Russians emigrated to Western countries, especially to Canada, the United States or Europe: these were all professionals with excellent degrees and ended up serving other countries and paying taxes there! Mr. Putin, who at the time was not enough skillfull to hold them back, is simply furious about this and wants them back! He pursues the unlikely dream of seeing these people who have now settled in countries far more attractive than Russia for a series of reasons, not only economic (freedom of speech, democracy, respect for human life, etc.) return to Russia and pay taxes there, so that Mr. Putin can cover his huge military expenses, those expenses that are the real reason why Russians’ monthly pensions are actually a tenth of those of Westerners – without their knowledge, however, because in Russia the comparison is totally absent.
Secondly, Mr. Putin wants to appropriate all those bilingual children, born to Russian or mixed parents, who have learned Russian at home and have received a good education in the host Western state: thereby obtaining the secondary (if not primary) advantage of impoverishing the country that educated them through a significant expenditure of public resources.
But there are other reasons. Russia is in deep trouble. Not only does it see its population aging without replacement, but it also fears the Chinese invasion: today, Siberia is almost totally colonized by the Chinese. This is an unprecedented emergency: Russians like the Japanese and Italians no longer have children, but unlike them, Russians have a large territory almost inhabited in contact for thousands of kilometers with China. It is Siberia, a land equipped with great resources and an enormous capacity for demographic absorption. Its small and distant cities (as in the entire federation), are literally dying from depopulation. Beyond the smiles and hugs between Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi Jinping, there is an ongoing insidious war of invasion to which Mr. Putin cannot react. For him, it is a catastrophic emergency that he must resolve without alienating his main ally, to whom, today, because of the war in Ukraine, he is tied hand and foot and cannot react on the field. This is why Mr. Putin must take cover in another way and absolutely increase the population by granting citizenship to Russians and Russian-speaking people from Western countries and balance the Chinese invasion.
An invasion that is not only demographic: in Russia everything that once came from the West now comes from China: car traffic is practically made up of Chinese cars, household appliances as well, not to mention food.
Chinese exuberance contrasts with Russian resignation. Anyone who has been to Russia, to small towns, villages in the never-ending countriside, has realized with dismay what a state of abandonment they are in today, true Russia is not Moscow or Saint Petersburg or the towns of the Golden Ring: in the rest of Russia nothing has changed since the Second World War, possibly it has worsened. The proud rulers marching in the pomp of the Kremlin, the heirs of the Great Patriotic War have not shown themselves to be the least bit patriotic towards their fellow citizens; they have not brought them the well-being that they reserved only for themselves and their clapping nomenclature and to their oligarchs who roll in dough. Everything is crumbling, old houses, gravel or non-existent roads. In the West, if you go to a small town, say of five thousand inhabitants, there are paved roads, shops, functioning infrastructure and everything necessary for living, with a pleasant landscape, immersed in nature that they tend to preserve. In Russia it is a mess, at home you live without running water, without toilets (you share with other families the pit toilet in the courtyard, in summer and winter with snow), without gas! Incredible for a country that exports gas abroad with huge pipelines earning huge revenues.
How do Russians tolerate all of it without rebelling? They tolerate it because they are not aware of it, and in any case, even if they knew it, they are atavistically accustomed to submitting without protest, zombified as they are by the one-way information from the regime media.
And since they can’t protest against the government, they take it out on each other, but especially on the immigrants! They damage or set fire to their houses and cars. They do not take it out on the government that caused them all this (and cyclically even took their children away to send them to war and be killed or mutilated). Instead they hate other poor suckers, who are victims of the government like them. And that not only happens in the province but also in the large cities.
How can they go on like this? Easy. They take to the bottle, they drink and for a while they don’t think about it anymore, like their parents did during the Soviet Union and probably also the serfs during tsarism. And those who hang out with them or who go to live in those lands are psychologically forced to conform, to become like them, under penalty of social ostracism. Only in the big cities are people some more polite and kind, but even there strangers, immigrants are kept under observation and they feel on themselves the disapproving looks and attitudes of the residents.
An acquaintance who went to work in a city like Volgograd, in the Far East of Russia, and who previously seemed to be a teetotaler, was forced to adapt and today drinks vodka as if it were water! In Russia in some places if you want to live you have to integrate, otherwise you explode.
All this happens in distant and separate places, without anyone talking about it openly, even though it is a mass attitude of the entire population. Why? Because there is no official and collective awareness of the phenomenon, even though everyone knows about it. The news is and remains local and is transmitted orally, because in Russia the free media have been completely zeroed and gagged by state mafia intimidation, and those subservient to the regime talk about something completely different, only frivolous and useless topics: fashion, cooking, holidays, gossip and soft sex, lots of soft sex everywhere, especially with young and captivating images, swingers clubs and websites, and so on. Everyone has learned to ignore politics, it is stuff they willingly leave to the few who are eager to challenge the government and get their fingers burnt, like Mr. Alexei Anatolievich Navalny. Because nothing would change anyway, because you cannot risk losing your job, your peace of mind, your life.
While in the villages, in Siberia, the old people think about their own business in this way, accustomed as they are to crying in private and to submitting, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, those who are lucky enough to live there (without being sent back to their home province), always minding their own business like the others, have everything they need and can even think about the superfluous: those who live in the city can live peacefully at the expense of the rest of the country and no one is surprised or complaints.
Nothing will change until people in general, across the country, especially in big cities, are also affected by the problem.
High-level immigrants, if they want to take citizenship, will do so to live in Moscow and only for well-paid jobs or highly prestigious companies, which are in any case very limited in number.
But they will have to be careful, because Russia has always been a racist country and the situation is getting worse as time goes by. A couple of high graduated friends (a Russian husband and a Kazakh wife) who went to work and live in St. Petersburg had a bad time and are still suffering from the psychological consequences: because of the woman’s Asian face, one day someone spat on her in public for no reason! And the husband couldn’t do anything because the police are more racist than ordinary people. Also, since he looks like a Turk, every time he goes out on the street the police stop him to check his documents! When he goes out he already knows that he can expect anything! So if he is bullied he has to put up with it and pretend nothing happened.
For now it is impossible to say whether the population of the big cities, faced with the expected influx of new citizens from abroad, will increase their racism and aversion towards foreigners, fearing that the government’s immigration policy favoring the newcomers will put their privileges at risk. But it is to be expected, and the consequences as usual will be individual, not mass protests against the government.
In any case, these foreigners will not be many. Excluding the men, who will not accept the offer for fear of mobilization, it is not believed that many young women are willing to emigrate to live alone in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
Yesterday, Russian television announced that 1.2 million Ukrainians died because of the war, without considering all the wounded and amputees no longer able to work. The figures are probably exaggerated, but as far as Russia is concerned they will be more or less the same, if not higher, with families today deprived of their only source of sustenance and reduced to resorting to social assistance that in Russia is conceptually and practically non-existent. All this workforce will have to be replaced in one way or another, and all these families assisted, both in small towns and in large cities.
And this phenomenon is added on the one hand to the endemic shortage of low-cost labor for the factories on the outskirts and on the other of qualified personnel for the city bureaucracy. An inextricable puzzle for Mr. Putin in this moment of crisis, which adds up and revolves around the pre-existing major problem of generational turnover, taking into account the mass of pensioners who have gradually left the world of work and have not been replaced in their roles: a point that is and will be crucial for Mr. Putin in the near future and which weighs, together with the sanctions, and Chinese invasion on his ability to carry on the war indefinitely.
