Russian Emigration at the Turn of 21st Century

Abstract

The article deals with the evolution of the Russian emigration processes at the turn of the 21st century. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Russian emigration flows over the past 25 years, the authors highlighted five emigration waves characterized by their main emigrant categories and emigration channels. Attention has been given not only to the size of the emigration flows but also to the emigration flow’s own compositional characteristics, especially age structure. The authors’ benchmark analysis of the Russian emigration data provided by the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation and the data on Russian immigrants provided by the national statistics services of foreign countries showed the overwhelming quantitative discrepancies in the migration flows set out in the Russian statistics, thus underestimating the intensity of emigration.