Poverty and prejudice

In a tiny hut in the woods where he survives without fixed address or running water, Abdul Malek keeps a neatly pressed suit hanging on the wall above his thin mattress, an emblem of the respectable life that should have been his, destroyed by the aftershocks of the Soviet planned economy. Malek, a 22-year-old from Tajikistan, was only 2 when the Soviet Union disintegrated under its own unsupportable weight in 1991, leaving outposts of the far-flung empire stranded economically, many in the future generations doomed to destitution. The Central Asian countries, a source of raw materials with little manufacturing capacity and heavily subsidised by Moscow, were left particularly vulnerable.

Twenty years after independence, a flood of Central Asians looking for work washes over Moscow, turning it into a city of migrants, Malek among them. "You can survive," he said, standing outside his hut in the quiet woods as a summer evening faded into night. "You can earn something here."

Moscow, a city of 11.5 million, according to last year's census, has as many as 5 million migrants, more than half of them undocumented. The migrants, many of them from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, exist on the fringes of society, harassed by police, victimised by employers and disliked by Russians, once their fellow Soviet citizens. The flawed policies of the old system, where the two countries were turned into cotton fields for the empire and dependent on Moscow, haunt the new nations still, long after the old ideology was discarded. In Moscow, deep-seated prejudice against Central Asians (and people from Russia's Caucasus mountains) gives restive young nationalists a target for their anger. Ethnic tension has been rising, giving the city a dangerous edge. About one Central Asian is killed every month in a racially motivated attack in the city and many are beaten up, with numerous assaults unreported. Others die in accidents.

Last year, according to the SOVA Centre for Information and Analysis, a Moscow non-profit organisation, 37 people were killed in Russia in racially motivated attacks and 368 reported injured, most of them Central Asians. In one horrifying incident, a 20-year-old Tajik was stabbed and then beheaded on his way home from work in December 2008, apparently by ultranationalists. That year 600 Tajiks died in Russia, 84 of them because of hate crimes, the Tajik government said.

The migrants come anyway, driven by desperation. Despite all obstacles, they have created an important economy of their own. There are more Uzbeks than Tajiks: Uzbekistan has a population of nearly 28 million. But Tajikistan is one of the world's poorest countries, and close to a million of its 7 million people are working in Russia. Last year they sent home $2.3 billion (Dh8.4 billion), about 45 per cent of the country's GDP, according to the National Bank of Tajikistan. Russia has become an important source of such remittances, amounting to about $18.6 billion in 2009, according to the World Bank. Malek made his way 3,200 kilometres to Moscow a year ago and lives just outside the city's outer ring road with two other men from the Khatlon region of Tajikistan — Kurgan Tyube in Soviet times — the poorest, cotton-growing part of the country, southwest of the capital Dushanbe. Most migrants are too frightened to give their names, certain the police will find them, shake them down or, worse, beat them up and throw them out of the country. But Malek, 29-year-old Odil Sattorov and 43-year-old Makhmud Mamedov are unable to deny their sense of hospitality, and they welcome this foreign reporter who improbably finds them in the woods, lamenting they have no shish kebab to offer a guest.

Tapping into a nearby power line — they are construction workers — has provided a single light bulb and a small stove in their hut, which barely has room for three mattresses. Next, maybe, they can get a simple computer — and Skype. They set off for work every morning by 5, and lucky ones that they are, they have gotten on a construction crew that pays them a few hundred dollars more than the $300 to $500 a month most migrants earn. "He has golden hands," Malek said of Sattorov's skill. Sattorov is hoping to earn enough to marry soon. Mamedov, a former policeman who lost his job as his country grew poorer, supports three children and a wife at home. Malek's pay goes to his parents and younger brother and sister. And he has his suit, ready to wear home proudly, if only on a yearly visit.

They work together to make their modest quarters pleasant — a wooden plaque with a picture from a Tajik fairytale is nailed above their door. They have what they need — money to send home. "We enjoy life here," Sattorov said with his easy smile, as if he were living in a snug forest cottage instead of a thin-board shack hidden among the trees.