MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Yuri Filippov.)
Can Russia learn a lesson from the current unrest in France? Is there a lesson to be learned for anyone at all?
Several respected Russian politicians and a great number of journalists started looking for similarities between the night acts of vandalisms perpetrated by teenagers in French suburbs and the situation in the big Russian cities, where the share of Muslim immigrants has reached 10% or more.
I would say that the situation in Russia, which faced an uncontrolled influx of immigrants in the mid-1990s and has not yet come to terms with its consequences, differs radically from the events in France and other countries of the European Union.
The French are reaping the fruit of an ineffective immigration policy, which their authorities have pursued for decades, while the Russian leadership is only "sowing the wind" and are yet to learn from their own and others' mistakes.
The French suburbs are being ransacked by the children of the immigrants who came to France from North Africa in the 1960s to 1980s after Paris decided to pull out from Algeria. The fathers of these teenagers never gave a thought to participating in student riots, which swept Europe and the United States in the 1960s in a kind of unsuccessful "orange revolutions."
Arab and African immigrants wanted to settle in Europe, whose economy was on the rise, so as to work and earn what was a good living for them. They did not count on getting unemployment benefits because there was almost no forced unemployment in the rapidly growing Western economies in the 1960s. Therefore, there was no developed social legislation that gives the jobless an opportunity to spend their unemployment benefits in the daytime and demand social justice by burning cars at night.
The situation is very similar in Russia today. Though there are hardened criminals and ordinary hooligans among immigrants in Russia, most of them do not come to this country to undermine its stability or demand social justice with the help of "Molotov cocktails". They come to earn money, as even the worst paid manual job here earns an Uzbek or Tajik immigrant enough to provide for their families at home.
Moscow and St. Petersburg are among the most expensive cities in Europe, but what little these people earn here will make them rich men in the poor villages of Central Asia and South Caucasus. Russian television has recently showed a house that Gadji, an average trader on an outdoor market in Moscow, is building in a suburb of Baku, Azerbaijan. His backyard is about 600 square meters, as much as the Soviet government used to allot to an ordinary Muscovite for a dacha.
Moscow's fears that the illegal immigrants would never leave Russia and would eventually demand social justice in the streets are groundless, at least in the foreseeable future. It is pointless for the immigrants to stay in Russia because of the high cost of living. But the money they can earn here will make them respected people at home or at least enable them to guarantee a future for their children.
There is one more major difference from France. The Marx boulevards and Lenin streets where the cars are burning are the heritage of the French social tradition, the welfare state into which the immigrants from North Africa tried to become integrated.
Modern Russia is departing from socialism with a dizzying speed. The cancellation of benefits in kind and the transition to reliance on competitiveness and market mechanisms of distribution have shown even to the most obtuse that the number of social dependents will be quickly minimized in Russia. The country is working hard to help its own unemployed and has no time or money for immigrants. It has adopted harsh immigration legislation and created barriers to obtaining Russian citizenship. In fact, it has long been pursuing a policy that keeps immigrants at an arm's length and precludes the development of conditions in which their social, political or rebel ambitions might grow.
The arguments against immigration to Russia are common knowledge. The main one is that immigrants take away the jobs from the Russians. Sergei Mironov, the Speaker of the Federation Council (upper house of the parliament), has said recently: "We must create conditions to encourage our women to have more children, and then there would be no need to look for more workers."
But do Russian women - or French, German and other European women for that matter - want to have more children, who would grow up to become the country's "working class"? Demographic statistics show that they would rather raise their children to become economists, lawyers, journalists, businessmen, managers, oil and gas specialists, office staff, state officials and security specialists. There is nothing wrong or surprising in that.
Like France and the rest of the Western world, Russia is moving to a post-industrial stage of its development, when manual labor is seen as unattractive and of secondary importance. Ordinary workers were not the driving force of the recent victorious "color" revolutions in some countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, which the West supported as proof of mass democratic aspirations. The conservative working-class Donbass region of Ukraine, which supported Viktor Yanukovich at the presidential election, lost to the onslaught of Kiev intellectuals who had made a deal with the independent businessmen from western Ukraine.
Russia went through the stage of industrialization with a giant workforce that made the authorities respect its rights during the socialist period of its history, with its huge social guarantees and a state policy of egalitarianism. Socialism coupled with a powerful persecution mechanism and ideological pressure ensured a relatively conflict-free development of Russia in the greater part of the 20th century. Now Russia is entering a stage of post-industrialization, when a big workforce is not needed in conditions of capitalism, which will never provide workers (even domestic ones) with the social guarantees they had under socialism.
Economists have calculated that if Russian businessmen gave West European wages and a complete package of benefits to their staff, most of them would quickly become bankrupt. It is no coincidence that the West has moved its basic production that requires a substantial workforce to Asia Pacific, where labor is cheap. Russia, which wants to become competitive and promote its economy with minimum outlays, is importing cheap labor from the South Caucasus and Central Asia.
This has suited all sides so far. Russia still has a few decades before the French events are reenacted on its streets and should use the time to learn from France's mistakes.
