PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION OF RUSSIAN EMIGRANTS IN YEREVAN

ABSTRACT

The article considers the peculiarities of the application of participant observation in such a little-studied and hard-to-reach field as the society of Russian emigrants in Armenia. Studies of this group are of interest in academic circles, but at the moment Russian migrants in CIS countries do not often become an empirical object within the framework of this approach. The article fills this gap and analyses the specifics of this method as applied to the environment of Russian emigrants in Yerevan, as well as its advantages and limitations. Several limitations of the method of participant observation as applied to the emigrant environment are mentioned, such as reluctance to disclose details of the motives for departure, channels of communication with Russia, as well as opportunities and desire to return to the country due to the uncertainty of the situation; concealment or understatement of information regarding the status of migrants in Armenia, non-systematic observation, subjectivity of the researcher and limited access to certain spheres of migrants' life. The article provides a concrete experience of first-person empirical research that can be used in conducting similar research. The article is based on the materials of the author's field research in different locations of Yerevan city, as well as on the experience of domestic and foreign colleagues studying migrants using qualitative methods.

Keywords: field research on migrants, participant observation, ethnic migration, emigration, emigrants, Russian emigrants, international migration, brain drain, intellectual migration.

Introduction:

After the start of the partial mobilisation campaign, quite a large number of highly qualified Russian citizens decided to migrate to CIS countries. According to the assessment of independent demographer Alexei Raksha, the number of those who left in 2022 was 550 to 850 thousand people. According to the data of the Armenian Ministry of Economy, the net relocation to the Republic of Armenia was 108-110 thousand people.

In the current situation, Armenia and Yerevan, in particular, turned out to be convenient options for many people to relocate: the cost of living even after the first wave of migration in early 2022 was not so high, the attitude of the local population was and remains predominantly friendly, the majority of the population speaks Russian, communication with Russia can be made by all convenient means; despite the high unemployment rate, migrants in most cases are not discriminated against in relation to the titular nation, and if we take into account that Russian migrants were mostly highly qualified personnel, for whom Armenia has an acute need, the employment prospects for our compatriots become even better. As a result of the above-mentioned factors, the city has become a temporary shelter for many people for an indefinite period of time, and for others a convenient transit point for travelling further - to Georgia, Turkey, UAE or Europe.

This article analyses the situation of legal migrants to the Republic of Armenia after the beginning of 2022. The research was carried out by the method of participant observation, during which primary data on the problems and difficulties faced by Russian emigrants were obtained. The fieldwork was carried out in the winter of 2023 when the study group had locally stabilised in Armenia (by this time, most of those who had returned had already done so, thus increasing the likelihood of meeting the target group). In the course of the study, a number of informal interviews were conducted with Russian emigrants, as well as with local residents who encounter them most closely - landlords, neighbours, and staff in restaurants and cafes.

Features of participant observation of Russian emigrants:

In this study, I have chosen as my main method the method of participant observation as interpreted by K.M. DeWalt, namely as a method in which the researcher takes part in the daily activities, rituals, interactions and events of a group of people as one of the means of exploring explicit and implicit aspects of their life routines and their culture [2, p. 1]. I also followed the general methodology for the use of participant observation in the study of migrants proposed by Paolo Boccagni and Mieke Schrooten [1].

As in any other field, the participant observation in the emigrants' environment is not systematic, so it requires supplementing with other research methods. These can be, for example, questionnaires, analyses of documents or interviews. Communicating with emigrants can be difficult for various reasons, as it is not always easy to obtain consent for an interview.

When using a participant observation method, it is necessary to keep in mind such a peculiarity of studying the emigrant environment in a given location as seasonality: as closer to summer there are quite a large number of tourists who mix with the group under study and complicate the research, as well as there is a temporary exodus of the group under study to neighbouring countries. At the same time, it is most convenient to interview in summer, when many employed migrants are on holiday and are ready to socialise.

In addition, the researcher himself and the subjectivity of his perception limit participant observation. A good way to address this issue is to discuss the results of one's observations with colleagues who work in the same field, but due to the small number of researchers of this phenomenon, it may not be a mistake to involve the informants themselves in this process in order to interpret the data most accurately.

It is also not possible to study the various aspects of emigrant life in their entirety. The hard-to-reach aspects that are likely to remain out of the researcher's field of vision include problems arising with the relocation of migrant families, issues of financial transactions, long-term rent, employment, and the processes of obtaining documents for legal stay in the territory of another country. The status of the researcher and the conditions of observation may also vary depending on the mood of the informants, as for most people the social researcher is often not trustworthy, as he is suspected of espionage and working for the secret services.

It is worth noting that in addition to the above-mentioned points, there are also problems related to representativeness, as it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to fully include representatives of different subgroups of the studied group in this kind of research [5, pp. 201-203].

Also, due to the fact that a researcher from Russia in this context is difficult to distinguish from the subject of his/her research, some of the problems described in the article by A. Sadyrin become more acute [4]. Thus, the researcher should take special care to refrain from definitively associating herself with the informants, since within this field it is particularly easy at a certain point to become guided by common human interests rather than scientific ones. In addition, because of the heterogeneity of the field, the researcher needs to blend in with several sometimes contradictory groups of informants in order to get the most complete understanding of what is going on.

Russian emigrants in Yerevan:

Armenia and Yerevan were chosen as the places for the research based on the analysis of many posts in social networks and chats of re-locants, who at that time had built a certain hierarchy in terms of countries for migration, as well as distributed them according to various criteria, such as opportunities for crossing state borders, cost of living, communication difficulties/attitude of locals towards Russians, difficulties in terms of paperwork, and a number of others.

The first informant was a friend of my relative, who is a second-wave Russian emigrant (among those who emigrated after the mobilisation campaign started in September 2022). In Armenia, he did not find a job in his speciality, but, according to him, he found a job as a loader salesman at the local branch of Sportmaster without any problems, even without knowing the language.  He invited me to stay at his place for the duration of the research, which I accepted in order to learn more about the life of one of the members of this group.

The informant's flat was located in the residential neighbourhood of Avan. It is quite far from the city centre, but it has a number of advantages: lower housing prices, quietness and good ecology. Among the significant disadvantages mentioned by the informants are: underdeveloped transport infrastructure, which is nevertheless "compensated by taxi prices" (the first informant), as well as old housing stock, which is also not too much of a problem, as Armenia has a rather mild climate and even in winter the cold does not have a significant impact on the life of the respondents.

Here I met my second informant - a man of conscription age, working in the field of information technology, working remotely for a Russian company. My informants met at the airport on the day of arrival - they both arrived in Armenia right after the mobilisation campaign started, i.e. on 23 September. Through chat rooms and acquaintances, they found a reasonably priced flat for the first time, but it turned out that by the time of the research they had been living there for about six months, as it was a good option, and they were lucky enough to make friends with the neighbours on the floor.

I even had the opportunity to interview A. and M. (the neighbours) informally, from which I concluded that they are middle-class Armenian intellectuals: M. is one of the brightest representatives of contemporary Armenian fine arts, and A. is a middle-class worker in the architectural and construction segment; they live in a well-furnished flat, speak Armenian and Russian at home, and are well versed in Soviet and Russian literature, cinema and painting. They always spoke about Russian migrants with understanding and benevolence, which was also expressed in their actions: M. donated some of her artworks to my informants to decorate the interior of their flat; she also constantly invited her neighbours for dinners and in general "fed us at every opportunity, despite the fact that we never complained about our condition"; A. offered to help with work when the first informant had not yet found a job, and also offered us a lift if he was going to work in the city.

I also want to mention an informant whom I met on the Internet before the start of the study. This young man left Russia in February 2022 because he feared the draft due to his experience in the military. At the time of the study, he was working in a private brokerage company, even though he was an agronomist by training. At work, he spoke mostly English and had little contact with colleagues of Armenian origin. In his daily life, he was able to establish contacts both within the Russian community and with locals. He also shared with me "that it is much easier to find people in chat rooms dedicated to certain topics or to come to events held in Russian language formats such as Stand-up and theatre performances". Thus, access to the study of Russian emigrants in Yerevan was opened for me and in the very first days of my stay there, I was able to receive information from informants both from the migrant community and from the local population, who for one reason or another had encountered Russians and had an idea about them.

In the process of interviewing and analysis, I came up with the hypothesis that people who find themselves as migrants try to stick together, even though their views on life and politics do not always coincide. This idea arose when I realised how different people are represented in this group: labourers and service workers who work on an equal footing with the local population, IT workers and entrepreneurs, banking sector workers, artists, engineers, scientists and even military personnel. It is also possible to distinguish them by their political views: although the majority of emigrants adhere to a left-liberal agenda, in general, it is not uncommon for people to assess the current situation with restraint and sometimes even support Russia, although most of them still consider themselves pacifists.

From the perspective of Armenian citizens, Russian migrants do more good than harm, it would be more accurate to say that Armenians themselves have generally been inclined to mitigate the negative aspects associated with the arrival of Russians (such as higher housing prices and potential job losses for locals), perhaps because of their hospitable and friendly mentality, or possibly because of Armenia's official policy, for which the arrival of migrants has generated GDP growth of approximately 3.2 per cent in 2022. In any case, I do not have a definite conclusion on this issue, and I hope that in the future we will be able to better understand the perception of Russian migrants by Armenians with the help of colleagues from the republic.

Therefore, based on the collected materials I could outline a generalised social portrait of an average Russian emigrant in Yerevan. In most cases, this is a man of conscription age with incomplete or completed higher/secondary education, who works remotely for Russia or states/works in a speciality within Armenia, with an average salary 2 or 3 times higher than the average in the republic (salaries in Russia are 2 times higher on average, and in the IT sector this gap becomes even greater); his employment allows him to devote quite a lot of time to walks and trips to neighbouring countries, as well as to spend his leisure time comfortably in Yerevan and other cities of the republic; often such a migrant comes only with his partner and quite quickly finds friends among others like him with the help of a well-developed network of re-locantes chat rooms, as well as predominantly Russian-speaking co-working spaces, bars, clubs, restaurants, improvised theatres, museums and exhibitions that have appeared since 2022. But in general terms, this group ranges from Russians who take any job and survive the economic turmoil within the country with considerable effort to highly successful start-up founders (e.g. in the field of crypto-businesses) who, in the process of migration, have increased their level of comfort and earnings thanks to the peculiarities of doing business in Armenia.

Conclusion:

In this article, I have analysed the features of the method of participant observation in conducting field research among Russian emigrants in Yerevan, Armenia. This method is one of the most effective and appropriate for studying Russian emigrants, as it is a rather flexible method of data collection, which allows interacting directly with informants and, under certain conditions, minimises disruption of the natural course of their lives. In the article, I have outlined some limitations in the application of the method of participant observation, among which are the seasonality of Russian migrants' lives, the non-systematic nature of observation, the subjectivity of the researcher's perception, and the incompleteness of access to certain spheres of a Russian emigrant's life. In addition, some subgroups of migrants were identified based on their labour and political affiliation, and a social portrait of the average Russian emigrant was compiled. Moreover, based on the data, it is likely that if the situation encouraging emigrants to stay in the territory of the Republic of Armenia persists, a more stable Russian diaspora will be formed in the near future. The author cautiously assumes that despite all the contradictions in this multilayered group, with sufficiently long interaction between subgroups, it will develop according to the stages identified in the work of Z. Levin [3].

Thus, we can conclude that the method of participant observation can be effectively used in the field of research of Russian emigrants, the study of which can help to optimise Armenia's policy in the direction of increasing human capital, as well as to expand opportunities for cooperation with Russia, in case of the need for reverse relocation of Russian migrants.

References:

1. Boccagni P., Schrooten M., Participant Observation in Migration Studies: An Overview and Some Emerging Issues. / R. Zapata-Barrero, E. Yalaz (eds.), Qualitative Research in European Migration Studies, IMISCOE Research Series, The Authors, Cham 2018. – 302p.
2. DeWalt, K. M., DeWalt, B. R. Participant observation: A guide for fieldworkers. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, Oxford 2002. – 300p.
3. Levin Z.I. Mentality of Diaspora (system and socio-cultural analysis). Moscow: Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences; Kraft+ Publishing House, 2001. – 170p.
4. Sadyrin A. Reflections on the Point of No Return: Included Observation as an "Anti-method" in the Study of Migrant Community // Labouratorium. 2020. №1. URL: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/razmyshleniya-o-tochke-nevozvrata-vklyuchennoe-nablyudenie-kak-antimetod-v-issledovanii-migrantskogo-soobschestva (date of address: 07.08.2023).
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