Vietnamese Migrants in Modern Russia: Resettlement, Institutions and Social Boundaries

Abstract

In the post-Soviet period, migrants from Asian countries were unevenly distributed across Russian regions, which influenced the emergence of ethnic markets in the 1990s. In order to advance the field of migration and border studies, it is important to understand why communities of Vietnamese rather than Chinese or Central Asian migrants have formed in some cities. The presence of migrants suggested designating certain places with ethnic terms, etc. The paper is intended to answer the following questions: what is the geography of the settlement of migrants from Vietnam, in what cities and why exactly were Vietnamese markets formed and what migration institutions arose thanks to them. The archival documents from the post-Soviet era, and the results of the Autor’s field work in Magnitogorsk, Orenburg and Ufa made the source base for the research. The materials collected in Moscow, Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg provided great assistance. The methodological basis of the manuscript is the theory of mobility. Vietnamese communities were formed by migrants who did not leave Russian cities after 1991. The Vietnamese in these cities were engaged in commercial entrepreneurship, established Vietnamese markets and social infrastructure, invited compatriots through these institutions, and provided various kinds of support to “their own” people. However, the economic instability in Russia led to the immobility of the Vietnamese, both intentionally or involuntarily, which had a profound impact on the geography of the Vietnamese settlement in Russia and the ways of organizing social ties.