Immigration policy of a non-Bolshevik Russia?

The Avenger

Banned
If Russia escapes Bolshevism and holds out in WWI until the very end, and if Russia was able to develop and grow its economy throughout the 20th century (it doesn't matter if Russia remains a democracy or become a dictatorship, as long as it doesn't go Red) to the point that it became a developed country by the year 2000 (a trajectory similar to that of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece in our TL), what would Russia's immigration policy during the 20th and 21st centuries be in this TL?

Could liberals and ethnic minorities (such as Muslims and Ukrainians) in Russia push for an open immigration policy in this TL? Or is Russia likely to remain largely closed to immigrants in this TL just Japan is in our TL?

Thoughts?
 
I don't think there is going to be much immigration to Russia for a long time. According to Richard Pipes in The Russian Revolution, it seems paradoxical, but as huge as Russia was, it was suffering from overpopulation--which makes the idea of it receiving substantial numbers of immigrants rather fanciful (what it actually needed was more of its own peasants emigrating):

"The explanation of this seeming paradox lies in the fact that in agricultural countries population densities acquire meaning only by relating the number of inhabitants to that share of the territory which is suitable for farming. Viewed in these terms, Russia was hardly a country of boundless expanses. Of the 15 million square kilometers of European Russia and Siberia, only 2 million could be cultivated and another 1 million used for pasture. In other words, in the homeland of the Great Russians, only one square kilometer out of five was suitable for agriculture. Once allowance is made for this fact, the figures for Russian population densities change dramatically. In Siberia, the average density in 1900 was 0.5 per square kilometer, a negligible figure. In the fifty provinces of European Russia, it rose to 23.7 per square kilometer, which exceeded slightly the figure estimated by economic geographers to be optimal for the region. But even this figure misleads because it includes the sparsely populated provinces of northern Russia. The regions which really mattered, because they held the great mass of Russian peasants, were the central provinces, and here the population density ranged from 50 to 80. This figure matches that of contemporary France and exceeds that of Ireland and Scotland. In other words, had St. Petersburg given up Siberia and the northern provinces, its population densities would have equaled those of Western Europe.

"Densities of this magnitude might have proven tolerable were it not for pre-revolutionary Russia’s extraordinary population growth. With an annual excess of births over deaths on the order of 15 per 1,000, Russia had the highest rate of natural increase in Europe.† The implications of such a rapid population growth for agriculture can be demonstrated statistically. In the Empire of 1900, three-quarters of the population was employed on the land. With an increase of 15 per 1,000 each year and a population of 130 million, 1,950,000 new inhabitants were added annually, 1,500,000 of them in the countryside. Allowing for the very high infant mortality rate, we are left with a million or so additional mouths which the countryside had to feed each year. Given that an average Great Russian household had five members and tilled ten hectares, these figures mean that Russia required annually an additional 2 million hectares of arable land.

"In Western Europe, the pressures generated by a somewhat smaller but still rapid population growth from the middle of the eighteenth century onward was solved in part by overseas migration and in part by industrialization...

"Russia had neither safety valve. Her citizens did not migrate abroad: they preferred to colonize their own country. The only significant groups to leave Russia were non-Russians from the Western provinces...

"Nor could Russian industry absorb significant numbers of excess peasants. In the 1880s and even more so in the 1890s, rapid industrial growth led to a rise in industrial employment: in 1860, Russia had 565,000 industrially employed, and in 1900, 2.2 million (of the latter, about one-half were factory workers). Using the same figures for households as above, this means that during the closing four decades of the nineteenth century, the number of Russians freed from dependence on agriculture grew from 3 to perhaps as much as 12 million. But with an annual accretion of 1 million rural inhabitants, it also meant that industry at best absorbed from the land one-third of the new population."

http://www.rulit.me/books/the-russian-revolution-read-291095-41.html
http://www.rulit.me/books/the-russian-revolution-read-291095-42.html
 
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The Avenger

Banned
I don't think there is going to be much immigration to Russia for a long time. According to Richard Pipes in The Russian Revolution, it seems paradoxical, but as huge as Russia was, it was suffering from overpopulation--which makes the idea of it receiving substantial numbers of immigrants rather fanciful (what it actually needed was more of its own peasants emigrating):

"The explanation of this seeming paradox lies in the fact that in agricultural countries population densities acquire meaning only by relating the number of inhabitants to that share of the territory which is suitable for farming. Viewed in these terms, Russia was hardly a country of boundless expanses. Of the 15 million square kilometers of European Russia and Siberia, only 2 million could be cultivated and another 1 million used for pasture. In other words, in the homeland of the Great Russians, only one square kilometer out of five was suitable for agriculture. Once allowance is made for this fact, the figures for Russian population densities change dramatically. In Siberia, the average density in 1900 was 0.5 per square kilometer, a negligible figure. In the fifty provinces of European Russia, it rose to 23.7 per square kilometer, which exceeded slightly the figure estimated by economic geographers to be optimal for the region.* But even this figure misleads because it includes the sparsely populated provinces of northern Russia. The regions which really mattered, because they held the great mass of Russian peasants, were the central provinces, and here the population density ranged from 50 to 80. This figure matches that of contemporary France and exceeds that of Ireland and Scotland. In other words, had St. Petersburg given up Siberia and the northern provinces, its population densities would have equaled those of Western Europe.

"Densities of this magnitude might have proven tolerable were it not for pre-revolutionary Russia’s extraordinary population growth. With an annual excess of births over deaths on the order of 15 per 1,000, Russia had the highest rate of natural increase in Europe.† The implications of such a rapid population growth for agriculture can be demonstrated statistically. In the Empire of 1900, three-quarters of the population was employed on the land. With an increase of 15 per 1,000 each year and a population of 130 million, 1,950,000 new inhabitants were added annually, 1,500,000 of them in the countryside. Allowing for the very high infant mortality rate, we are left with a million or so additional mouths which the countryside had to feed each year. Given that an average Great Russian household had five members and tilled ten hectares, these figures mean that Russia required annually an additional 2 million hectares of arable land.‡

"In Western Europe, the pressures generated by a somewhat smaller but still rapid population growth from the middle of the eighteenth century onward was solved in part by overseas migration and in part by industrialization...

"Russia had neither safety valve. Her citizens did not migrate abroad: they preferred to colonize their own country. The only significant groups to leave Russia were non-Russians from the Western provinces...

"Nor could Russian industry absorb significant numbers of excess peasants. In the 1880s and even more so in the 1890s, rapid industrial growth led to a rise in industrial employment: in 1860, Russia had 565,000 industrially employed, and in 1900, 2.2 million (of the latter, about one-half were factory workers).17 Using the same figures for households as above, this means that during the closing four decades of the nineteenth century, the number of Russians freed from dependence on agriculture grew from 3 to perhaps as much as 12 million. But with an annual accretion of 1 million rural inhabitants, it also meant that industry at best absorbed from the land one-third of the new population."

http://www.rulit.me/books/the-russian-revolution-read-291095-41.html
http://www.rulit.me/books/the-russian-revolution-read-291095-42.html
Very interesting!

I wonder, though, if Russia could have solved its overpopulation problem by industrializing more rapidly and promoting birth control (the older kinds, such as condoms and the withdrawal method) among its population.

Also, just how much people can 2 million km2 of cultivated land and 1 million km2 of pasture land support using modern technology? I mean, I haven't heard of massive Central Asian starvation even though their population grew extremely rapidly since 1900!
 

The Avenger

Banned
I really want to know what the comparable figures for countries such as the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and Canada are.
 
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The Avenger

Banned
I want clarification from David T, please--do you think that Russia would have experienced a famine or something along those lines had it avoided the demographic losses of the 20th century? Or would improved technology be enough to prevent a famine in Russia throughout the 20th century in such a scenario?
 
A Russia(n Empire) involved in global trade could easily have avoided famine as it has oil, gold, diamonds, natural gas, timber, furs, titanium, rare earth metals, nickel, manganese .....
Not to mention a number of decent engineers for manufactures. Don't underestimate the role of tractors and combine harvesters in pushing peasants off the land. France and Italy aren't good comparitors (except for Armenia and Georgia /Caucasus) because they have warm Mediterranean climates which lend themselves to relatively high margin and labour intensive agriculture like fruit and nut growing and vitriculture.
 
An anecdotal data point: after the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, there was significant Chinese immigration to European Russia. Really. I thought this was a complete fantasy, but the person who brought it up pointed me to references on the participation of Sino-Russians in the Russian Civil War. (There weres entire battalions of Sino-Russians in the Red Army.) Wiki sez that a lot of them came during WW I to work in Russian munitions factories (Russians having been called up for army service).

I suggest that Russia as a nation did not worry about keeping the country free of "foreign" demographic influences, because there were such influences going back for centuries.

For instance, the Volga Tatars, incorportated into "Russia" in the 1500s. Bashkirs, Mordvins, Kalmuks, Votiaks... Then as Russia expanded to the west and south, it incorporated the Baltic peoples, and the German upper class in that region, the
Crim Tatars, Georgians and other Caucasus peoples, Romanians, Greeks, and the vast Yiddish-speaking Jewish community of Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. Catherine the Great imported German colonists (the Volga Germans). There was a village on the eastern Black Sea coast of blacks, descended from slaves imported from Africa by the Ottomans. (I've seen photographs.) I have read that the chimney sweeps of St. Petersburg were all Finns.

With all this going on, I can't see Russians getting excited about immigration unless it became really massive.
 
...Of the 15 million square kilometers of European Russia and Siberia, only 2 million could be cultivated and another 1 million used for pasture. In other words, in the homeland of the Great Russians, only one square kilometer out of five was suitable for agriculture. Once allowance is made for this fact, the figures for Russian population densities change dramatically. In Siberia, the average density in 1900 was 0.5 per square kilometer, a negligible figure. In the fifty provinces of European Russia, it rose to 23.7 per square kilometer, which exceeded slightly the figure estimated by economic geographers to be optimal for the region. But even this figure misleads because it includes the sparsely populated provinces of northern Russia. The regions which really mattered, because they held the great mass of Russian peasants, were the central provinces, and here the population density ranged from 50 to 80. This figure matches that of contemporary France and exceeds that of Ireland and Scotland. In other words, had St. Petersburg given up Siberia and the northern provinces, its population densities would have equaled those of Western Europe.
Well, 2 million square kilometers of cultivable or arable land is a massive amount. That is a higher amount of arable land than the U.S., China, or India individually. Or the rest of Europe added together (excluding other former Russian Empire countries, such as Poland or Ukraine).

While population density in certain areas of the Russian Empire was a problem due to susceptibility to drought in the south and harsh winters in the north, other factors were probably more determinant of Russian Empire's famines and scarcities related to high population. For example, poor infrastructure (mitigating response to famine and limiting the proliferation of agricultural machinery and modern fertilizer), outdated farming methods some of which were direct holdouts from the late medieval era, communal land ownership (which did not incentivize mechanization), and Tsarist policy (during the 1891-1892 famine, high taxation, conscription of peasants, and a failure to enact a ban on grain exports before it was too late).

I really want to know what the comparable figures for countries such as the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and Canada are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country

Arable Land (km²)
1. India: 1,753,694 km²
2. United States: 1,652,028 km²
3. Russia: 1,248,169 km²
4. China: 1,084,461 km²
5. Brazil: 732,359 km²
6. Canada: 469,281 km²
 
Arable Land (km²)
1. India: 1,753,694 km²
2. United States: 1,652,028 km²
3. Russia: 1,248,169 km²
4. China: 1,084,461 km²
5. Brazil: 732,359 km²
6. Canada: 469,281 km²

Quality matters though. China has an enormous amount of arable land in the South where they can grow rice. The United States has temperate agricultural land near the Atlantic which is better watered than anything Russia has as well as a sizeable sub-tropical agricultural region where the most productive rice farms in the world are.

Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus (the main arable regions of the old Soviet Union and add in Congress Poland for the Russian Empire) has plenty of arable land, but none of it is sub-tropical, very little of it is temperate and the vast bulk of it is sub-arctic.

That said, I do think that with better crop choices (the Russian diet had way too much wheat) and less meat a non-Bolshevik Russia could support more people - maybe double the Soviet population on the same acrage. But that's likely what the Russian population would be without immigration.

(Has anyone ever tried to do a serious non-Bolshevik Russia timeline? I am seriously tempted to do a surviving Tsarism or a Left SR dominated Russia timeline to explore what a real non-Bolshevik economic history of Russia might look like.)

Anyway... I can't see the Russian state limiting immigration much, since I don't think they'd ever get enough of an influx to really worry them. Maybe a few hundred thousand a year on average over the century (so on the same level as the UK, but of course diluted in a much larger population). The reason for this being that Russia is at the time of the PoD and will remain relatively poor, but is neighbour to lots of places that are even poorer.

If this alt-Russia ever grows so populous that it can't feed itself only on its own resources, it would do what normal capitalist European states did and import food from abroad - starting with luxury foods like meat.

fasquardon
 
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Interestingly before WWI around 100 000 Czechs and Slovaks from Austro-Hungary were living in Russia. They moved there for better paid jobs or as a settlers.
I watched documentary about some Christian/ protestant? sect moving there from A-H Slovakia sometimes in 19 century.
 
That's what happens when you persecute your Ashkenazi Jews, though.

Persecution was not the entire story--after all, there was also heavy Jewish emigration from Hapsburg lands where they enjoyed greater freedom and security than under the Romanovs: "Antisemitism too played a role. Jews were excluded from a long list of trades and professions, and rigid quotas for Jewish students restricted opportunities for higher education. Nevertheless, the extreme poverty of the east European Jews, the pressure of mounting population and the constant narrowing of economic opportunities, probably caused more Jews to leave than did antisemitism. In Galicia, from 1890 to 1914, over three hundred thousand Jews came to the United States although there were no pogroms and modest civil and religious freedom." https://books.google.com/books?id=HbkRAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA53
 

The Avenger

Banned
Quality matters though. China has an enormous amount of arable land in the South where they can grow rice. The United States has temperate agricultural land near the Atlantic which is better watered than anything Russia has as well as a sizeable sub-tropical agricultural region where the most productive rice farms in the world are.

Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus (the main arable regions of the old Soviet Union and add in Congress Poland for the Russian Empire) has plenty of arable land, but none of it is sub-tropical, very little of it is temperate and the vast bulk of it is sub-arctic.

That said, I do think that with better crop choices (the Russian diet had way too much wheat) and less meat a non-Bolshevik Russia could support more people - maybe double the Soviet population on the same acrage. But that's likely what the Russian population would be without immigration.

(Has anyone ever tried to do a serious non-Bolshevik Russia timeline? I am seriously tempted to do a surviving Tsarism or a Left SR dominated Russia timeline to explore what a real non-Bolshevik economic history of Russia might look like.)

Anyway... I can't see the Russian state limiting immigration much, since I don't think they'd ever get enough of an influx to really worry them. Maybe a few hundred thousand a year on average over the century (so on the same level as the UK, but of course diluted in a much larger population). The reason for this being that Russia is at the time of the PoD and will remain relatively poor, but is neighbour to lots of places that are even poorer.

If this alt-Russia ever grows so populous that it can't feed itself only on its own resources, it would do what normal capitalist European states did and import food from abroad - starting with luxury foods like meat.

fasquardon
Great post!

Also, I think that Russia will follow the trajectory of Italy and/or Spain during the 20th century in this TL. In fact, this might even be an understatement since Russia has a lot of oil and other natural resources whereas Italy and Spain don't.
 

The Avenger

Banned
Great post!

Also, I think that Russia will follow the trajectory of Italy and/or Spain during the 20th century in this TL. In fact, this might even be an understatement since Russia has a lot of oil and other natural resources whereas Italy and Spain don't.
For the record, I meant both economic and immigration trajectory here. Italy and Spain began getting a lot of immigrants in the late 20th C as a result of the good quality of life in these countries.
 
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People mentioned food, the biggest difference imo is that a non communist Russia isnt putting people like Lysenko in charge of agricultural development, instead they fully partake in the green revolution, as productivity increases food prices and the labor on farms needed decreases and the peasants flood into the cities in search of factory jobs.
 
People mentioned food, the biggest difference imo is that a non communist Russia isnt putting people like Lysenko in charge of agricultural development, instead they fully partake in the green revolution, as productivity increases food prices and the labor on farms needed decreases and the peasants flood into the cities in search of factory jobs.

Hm, I thought the Soviets participated as much as they could under Khrushchev?

fasquardon
 
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