Population and Migration

Abstract

At the heart of Russian immigration and demographic policy is a collision between two historical approaches to “population administration” in Russia—the first liberal, and the second conservative. The liberal approach works from the premise that Russian society is a self-organising whole, with policy-makers having to work only in support of this self-organisation by incentivising desirable trends and frustrating undesirable ones. The conservative approach, on the other hand, holds that Russian society requires strong restrictions in order to ensure its stability.