Titular ethnicities of the South Caucasian countries in Russia: comprehensive analysis of migration and settlement

Abstract

The authors discuss the specifics of migration and settlement of the titular ethnicities of the South Caucasian countries-Armenians, Azeris, and Georgians- in the territory of the Russian Federation and rely on their own system of polyscale geoinformation monitoring of migration and ethnodemographic processes. The geographic information system (GIS) relies on a poly-scale approach; its structure is organized on the principle of subsystems, one of which is a subsystem for collecting, storing, and updating information based on the results of All-Union and All-Russia population censuses, indicating the numerical strengths of the ethnicities in the regions between 1939 and 2010. This has made it possible to analyze the changes in the dissemination of individual ethnicities and identify the territories of noticeable changes in the local ethnic structure. It is highly important to structuralize the indices relating to migration flows, in particular, in order to determine the number of incoming and outgoing migrants, the ethnic and age structure of migration flows, etc. Today, after the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the international migration inflow into Russia is fed mainly by our "new" closest neighbors, that is, the former Soviet republics.The migration trends have changed direction from east to west and gradually lost their repatriation nature (which existed until 2006), while the share of Russians has dropped to less than 50%. At all times, migration has been ethnic, since the other 50% of migrants consisted of people of all the ethnicities living in the Near Abroad, Central Asia, and the Southern Caucasus in particular. The South Caucasian countries have been living in conditions of socioeconomic instability, enduring one political crisis after another. Unsettled territorial disagreements have regularly provoked armed conflicts and flows of forced migrants. In fact, the huge number of new arrivals and concentration of ethnic diasporas within certain territories added urgency to the problems of ethnic interaction. This means that the current spatial-temporal specifics of migration and geographic distribution in Russia of the titular ethnicities of the post-Soviet states (including the Southern Caucasus) must be identified and studied