Outlining the tasks of the coordinating headquarters, Dmitry Gusev, the first deputy head of the “A Just Russia – For Truth” faction in the State Duma, noted that one should not persuade those who do not love her to return to their homeland, but help those who consciously want to move to the Russian Federation. Since such a decision is closely related to the worldview and religious affiliation of potential migrants, their immigration is called ideological.
As an incentive for resettlement in Russia, D. Gusev at the end of January proposed to provide migrants from the USA and Europe with 10 hectares of land, hoping that up to 7 million people could take advantage of this offer. This proposal was not mentioned in the announcement about the creation of a coordinating headquarters for ideological immigration. Although the work of the headquarters was planned to be discussed at a closed meeting with representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The main argument in favor of such a policy is the high demographic losses that Russia suffered during the COVID-19 epidemic, as well as two waves of “anti-war” emigration. Moreover, the real picture is much worse than the one that D. Gusev painted in his January statement. For seven years – from 2016, when the excess of deaths over births was again recorded in Russia, to 2022, the natural decline in the country’s population, according to Rosstat, amounted to more than 3 million people. Most of this natural loss is the result of the COVID-19 epidemic. For 2020-2021 only. As a result of the excess of deaths over births, the population of Russia has decreased by more than 1.7 million. Over the past 2022, when the epidemic seemed to have ended, but its consequences continued to affect, the population of the Russian Federation decreased by another 600 thousand people. More than 1 million, and possibly more, was the population decline as a result of “anti-war” emigration.
https://www.ritmeurasia.org/news–2023-02-24–kto-poedet-v-rossiju-ideologicheskaja-immigracija-64849
Comment: Holy crap on a cracker! What an opportunity for all those who can’t stop singing Putin’s praises, the forever angry, the forever victimized. Tucker can put his money (and his ass) where his mouth is. Large Marge can get her national divorce and ten hectares of good Russian land in the property settlement. Sorry, no mule.
I’m surprised how clearly this author laid out the reasons for this proposal. Demographic changes are happening in most, if not all European countries, the US and even China. But Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exacerbated demographic trends in Russia.
This ideological immigration proposal probably builds on Putin’s Far East Hectare program of 2016, but that act was only open to Russian citizens and foreigners of Russian extraction. That was an excellent idea and a vast improvement over the forced resettlements of Imperial Russian and Soviet times.
TTG
https://ecominded.net/the-truth-about-land-giveaway-in-russia
Leaving out the people gained taking over parts of Ukraine. Could be in the millions when this winds down.
I expect the Russians will be invited to repatriate all those Ukrainians (in particular the kids) after they lose the war. Compliance will not be optional.
Tucker could have a great future in Russia!!!!
I am sure Russia will not tell these immigrants that they will need to bring their own toilets. Outside of the major cities, you will find very few.
But I agree that Carlsonski should jump at the opportunity.
Lars, in very small rural villages that is true, but in larger settlements, septic tanks are generally used. Where I live, only 33km from the centre of Brisbane, all houses have septic tanks. The mistaken belief that a huge proportion of Russian households use outhouses, comes from a study that referred to centralised sewerage systems, not whether other forms of sewerage were used.
Mad Vlad seems to be in need of more Russians. I wonder how many Europeans and Americans could actually engage in large scale farming like that? Oh, musn’t criticize Putin either.
Not for me. I’m suspicious that Xi is going to reclaim all that land in Siberia that the Tsars stole from the Chinese back in the day. Once he realizes how inept Putin has been in Ukraine, he’ll come knocking.
25 acres (10 hectares) ain’t gonna tempt Tucker. And not many others either considering the climate in Siberia. Un-farmable I’d say. All the good river bottom there is probably already taken. Probably not even big enough for a woodlot. Why is Putin so chintzy with that land anyway? He should be giving out ten times that much to make it anywhere worthwhile. Criminy! The US with just half the area of Russia gave out plots of 160, 320, and in some cases 640 acres. Even that was not enough for farming in the high plains.
Tucker could pull in Big $$ sitting on his “hectares” and prognosticating wildly on Russian TV. Might be an out for him if the Dominion axe takes him out.
I wonder if bow ties are stylish in Russia?
Leith,
It’s not for me, either, at least at this point in my life. This calls for the “Mother Earth News” crowd. That Russian Ecominded blog I linked to reminds me of Mother Earth News, so the type must exist in Russia. I hope these homesteaders get quick help in building a shelter and Russian stove to make it through their first winter. Ten hectares isn’t too shabby if you’re only going to work it with hand tools. Still a tough life, though.
25 acres in real money. On the small side for real “back to the land” living and a family of any size. Most of the produce has to be sold these days to pay for the doctors and teachers and all the other people we can’t do without in a comfortable modern society.
We’ve not seen real peasant living off the land for a long time. I remember when the children were reading the “Little House on the Prairie” books. It was a rough raw life but in no sense self-sufficient. Saw mills and ploughs and such like coming from some big industrial centre and sent in by rail. They’d have starved had they had to farm peasant style.
It still bred the archetypical self-reliant can-do American that is still around, it seems, in flyover country. And increasingly out of place in woke America.
Biden and Putin ought to do a deal. The Atlanticists, mostly progressives and determinedly so, are fleeing Russia in droves, a disconsolate Chubais at their head. Bet a lot of them will end up in the States. Only fair for Biden to send over a few million of his Midwesterners to replace them. That’d get them out of his hair and all would be happy.
EO, you are so wrong in Russia. Doctors and teachers are provided by the State from General Welfare. Could my extended family live on 25 acre, I suspect YES! Everything is based on a sot, 100 sq.m. In a nearby village, my MIL and Aunt grow on 20 sot, potatoes, cabbages, onions, beetroot, carrots, onion, garlic etc.
My daughter’s MIL does the same on 40 sot, except that she raises pigs for slaughter.
Almost everyone owns or has access to a sadik (a small garden) of 6-8 sot. Different fruit, vegetables and berries are grown there.
Then there is foraging. Different fruits, berries and fungi. I come back from foraging with enough food for several meals. My daughter’s MIL enjoys cooking with me after a foraging session.
China is not going to try and “reclaim all that land in Siberia”. They are already permitted to set up farming enterprises there, but they cannot get workers to stay there for more than one season, and often not even one season.
Peter Williams – It’s not just the Amur Valley in Siberia. For 400 years Russia has been butting heads with the Chinese over land and influence: Turkestan, Xinkiang, Mongolia, Peking, Manchuria, Liaodong Peninsula, Korea, Viet-Nam. Maybe you are right and Xi won’t use irredentism like Putin does? But I wouldn’t count on it as the Chinese have a similar record.
TTG – I’ve seen families in Southeast Asia eke out a living from farms of much less than a hectare. But it’s not Siberia.
Al – Tucker was raised in the elite beach community of LaJolla, overlooking the tennis club. He’s the son of a lobbyist and stepson of a millionaire heiress. He might accept ten or even just one or two hectares of Sochi beachfront – but that’s the land of the golden fleece, it’s not Siberia.
I never mentioned the Amur Valley, where did you get that?
Peter W – From the BBC.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50185006
Where were you talking about if not somewhere not far from the Amur River?
For years, Russian Oligarchs took Russia’s wealth and gave it to the U.S. / U.K. rather than invest it in their own country. Is it irrational to encourage domestic investment?
I get that you do not like how it is packaged but we have rolling B.S. in the U.S. Just a few minutes ago, Brett Baer, reported that there are ‘concerns’ about how Russia is helping Iran to develop nuclear weapons ‘within days.’ That story will fade but the message, ‘Russia and Iran are crap countries threatening the U.S.’ will remain.
We are all in on the Cold War and only one of us will emerge intact.
They should have made the offer sooner, before Putin needed bodies to throw at his Ukraine project. Guess we’ll see how many patriots from the ideological near abroad show up.
I’m not one to advocate the love it or leave it philosophy. I didn’t like it when it was aimed at anti-war hippies and I don’t advocate it for the likes of Tucker, Large Marge and the rest of the angry, oh so victimized haters.
If this plan for ideological immigration to Russia is better publicized, it will make the Tucker crowd answer the question as to whether they love Putin’s Russia more than they hate the libs. I don’t expect many will become Siberian homesteaders just to own the libs.
TTG, you take the words of a minor politician from a minor party, and make out that it’s official Russian policy. You are getting desperate. Maybe you should look at the demographics of your beloved Lithuania, that is truly scary!
Peter Williams,
You missed the parts where it is called a proposal in the article and my commentary. Read better. But Lithuania is losing population faster than Russia, about 1% decline a year, 25% since independence,
TTG – there is a population decline all over due to us having smaller families. Children cost money and for some there’s not a lot of that around. For the Baltics and Eastern Europe, however, there’s a devastating effect superimposed on that population decline.
This is the result of what happened when those countries were free of the old Soviet Union. The transition was mismanaged. Their industry was exposed too quickly to the more efficient industry of Western Europe.
If you (as is likely, given what I’ve picked up of your woodworking skills!) can make a table faster than I can, and a better table at that, I’m not going to be able to sell my tables any more. All I can do, if I want to keep body and soul together, is to get along somehow without making tables or come and work for you.
After the wall came down that’s what happened to those old Eastern bloc countries. At one time it was reported that entire engineering year classes in Latvia had jobs lined up abroad to leave to as soon as they graduated.
Happened in East Germany too. And with the loss of market went the loss of job security and to an extent of automatic access to medical services. The lower income groups of half a continent were plunged into the cold bath of full on neoliberal economic prescription.
Hence millions upon millions of people scrambling abroad if they wanted to keep body and soul together. That has a knock on effect. Good foreign workers, not always having to bother with tax since they often have no fixed abode, the money they send home buying more in their home countries than it buys where they work, replacing locals. The locals, who don’t fancy living stuffed into sheds and sometimes working for a gang master, then being told they’re benefits scroungers.
High quality cheap labour, those Balts and Eastern Europeans. I saw Hungarian fencing teams round where I live doing good work, living rough, making the job pay at rates the locals couldn’t match. Same with Polish agricultural workers, brickies, tradesmen generally. On a nearby large scale chicken farm, Latvian workers.
In Germany, when I lived there, Croatians tended to be called in for small works generally. German tradesmen are more expensive. And even years ago the Poles picking their asparagus for them were slowly being replaced by even cheaper Ukrainians.
The whole shooting match now going down further because the Germans have taken like ducks to water to the old American/British disease. Outsourcing. And the problems of fiscal transfer and the Target 2 balances still lurking in the background however much the ECB tries to magic them away..
With all that going on there aren’t as many children around in Europe as there used to be. The lower income groups are getting hammered. It’s true that it’s the economy stupid and we’ve screwed ours up. What happened to Eastern Europe is just a foretaste.
If they throw Maria Butina in, I’ll take that offer!
Peter VE,
I can only go with Dark Brandon’s comment concerning Large Marge, “Ooph.”
https://twitter.com/wolfejosh/status/1200807887527989249?s=21
Curious how the Russian and Ukrainian armies are performing on this score?
US already forgot about Ukraine. Pivoting to the CCP. We are not in the business of winning wars if nobody has noticed yet. Uniparty got what they wanted. Stole billions from taxpayers. As for anyone moving to Russia they are an idiot. We are just as corrupt but there are ways to protect yourself from all of it here. I’m not vaccinated, never wore a mask and D.C. has no impact on my life. Their power dries up quick out of the cities.
Wattsamatta with those Russkies, don’t they have a Southern Border?