5Everyday nationalism in Russia in European
context: Moscow residents’ perceptions of ethnic
minority migrants and migration
Natalya Kosmarskaya and Igor Savin
This chapter examines how ordinary residents of the Russian
capital relate to the sharply increased influx of migrant workers
to Russia, and to Moscow in particular. For several decades now,
Western academics have scrutinised cross- border migration to
Western European countries through the prism of local residents’
perceptions. However, far more attention has been paid to the
problems of the migrants themselves than to the attitudes of the
host populations.
Similarly in Russia: despite the growing volume of academic lit-
erature on diverse aspects of the lives of migrant workers,^1 efforts at
viewing this issue through the eyes of the host population are fairly
rare. Well- established centres for the study of public opinion (Fond
‘Obshchestvennoe mnenie’ (FOM), the Levada Centre and others)
periodically conduct large- scale surveys nationwide or within spe-
cific regions, and the collated ‘percentages’ are then commented on,
above all in the press and online media,^2 as well as in social media.
Less often are such ‘official’ surveys, or surveys conducted by teams
of researchers, analysed in academic literature (see, for example,
Leonova 2004; Tiuriukanova 2009; Grigor’eva et al. 2010). There
are practically no studies that for comparative or analytical pur-
poses draw on Western experience of studying public attitudes
towards migrants, and employ the conceptual approaches used in
these works to explain the reasons for various public sentiments.
Instead, research on perceptions of migration in Russia consists
overwhelmingly of works of a polemical- conceptual nature, in