They Clean things while you sleep.

The 2010 Moscow census has the population of the city at 11,503,501 which has increased from  10,382,754 a decade back. Add in visitors, guest workers and such and they admit to  13.3 million, and concede the likelihood of a further 1 million unregistered people, which brings it to 14.3 million. I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks this is not an excessively conservative estimate.

Most of the newcomers are from the four countries on the south of this map, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Tajikis and Kyrgyz. They have Asian faces, that a westerner might take for Chinese or Mongolian and they are Sunni Muslims for the most part. They work. Many of them work ceaselessly and for long hours in menial jobs in construction, street cleaning or fairly low level service industries, and a poll of about 30 Russians produced adjectives to describe them such as: unskilled, poorly educated, uncultured, along with, quiet, hard working and sober.

There is a brilliant photo essay from Reuters showing these people at work and play in the city which you can see here. http://blogs.reuters.com/photographers-blog/2012/02/01/russias-untouchables/

I have wondered for years about their place in the scheme of things here. For a start many of them are unregistered in the city, yes, you have to register to live here, even Russians from other cities must do this. And being unregistered they are illegal, and if that word rings any bells that’s as it should be. There is a Mexican/American/Spanish film called “A Day Without A Mexican” that imagines a day in California when all the Mexicans disappear and the state grinds to a halt. It’s hard to watch the streets of Moscow for long without seeing a parallel. In the morning they wake you early clearing snow from the streets, or hacking through the ice with metal bars, they clean out the bottom of the rubbish shoots that most apartment buildings have in each entrance, they pile the heavy snow into mountains on the roadsides and they never seem to stop. In summer they are gardeners for the public spaces, and out in dacha land they cut people grass and dig the earth over or cut down trees and all very cheaply.

There is a chain of cafes here where the majority of the staff is from these countries and it is here that the change I n their status and a possible future became apparent to me. 6 or 7 years ago when I first started going to the branch around the corner from us, the staff were predominantly young Russian guys and girls, and the only central Asian in there was the cleaner. Over the years the percentages reversed until now it is only the manger that is Russian. I had assumed it was simply a chance progression, driven by economics until I spoke with a friend who knows the owner of this chain and heard from him that it was a quite deliberate strategy. They work hard and they work cheap, being Muslim they seldom drink, and here not drinking is sometimes worth putting on a resume when applying for low level jobs. Moreover, they are, as a rule, polite unassuming and competent, reminding me of waiters in Chinese or Indian restaurants when I was young in England.

 Some complain that they speak Russian poorly, and it is true that some do, but when I hear people say that they are threatening or aggressive I am bewildered for in 15 years I have never come across a case of a dangerous seeming central Asian. But as with Turks in Germany, Arabs in France and south east Asians in Britain they have arrived in large numbers and many locals react as did the inhabitants of those western nations.

Finally, the streets are far, far, far cleaner than they were 15 years ago.