21st-Century Diaspora

Trains take hundreds of people from Kyiv to Moscow nightly. Some are going for a visit, but many more for work. Following two wake-up calls at border control in the dead of the night, Ukrainian passengers get up to three months of visa-free stay in Russia.

For years, the flow of emigrants has waxed as the Ukrainian economy dragged its feet, prompting citizens to run for the train (or  plane) in search of a better life – be it to Russia, Canada or Spain.

Some never come back.

The best estimates are that at least 3 million Ukrainians are living abroad, legally and illegally, many of them lured by American and European dreams.

The exodus contributes to a population that continues to slip – down from 52 million people in the last decade to today’s 46 million people. While high mortality rates and low birthrates are contributing factors, so is the robust emigration of Ukrainian citizens.

Natalya Polyanina, 30, is part of the modern-day diaspora.

She boarded an outbound train 10 years ago for reasons that will not surprise many Ukrainians. But they were still depressing, nonetheless.

“Nobody wanted me in Ukraine. I could not find a decent job and had to work as a nanny and a trolleybus conductor,” said Polyanina, who was trained to be an accountant. As a street vendor in Moscow, she was making $10 a day – twice as much as in Ukraine. Now she runs a small textile business.

Back in Cherkasy, a town in central Ukraine, she left her parents and a younger brother behind. With time, her mother has joined her in the suburbs of Moscow. Her brother, Oleksiy, settled in Canada.

She is happy with her choice.

“We don’t miss Ukraine that much, only salo [pig’s lard – a staple national cuisine],” said Polyanina’s mother, Galyna Shmatova, 61. “It was a rare happiness to eat chicken in Cherkasy. We got used to ready-made noodles there, but here (in Russia) we can buy whatever we want.”

Their story is typical for millions in Ukraine. According to the Kyiv Institute of Sociology, some 16 percent of all families have at least one member working abroad. “This number is not catastrophic, but still very high,” said migration expert Oleksiy Poznyak, comparing Ukraine to Moldova, where a third of the working population makes money abroad.

Official statistics show a moderate fivefold increase in labor migration from 12,000 people in 1996 to 62,000 two years ago. But, according to the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations watchdog, these figures do not even remotely mirror the actual number of people on the move.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, analysts say that millions have gone abroad, although the exodus is believed to have slowed in recent years.

“Even if the economic situation in Ukraine suddenly improves, they won’t come back immediately,” Poznyak, of the Kyiv Institute of Sociology, said. “It’s easier for them to find a job abroad where they know their sector.”

Many don’t go far. Neighboring Russia and Poland, and the nearby Czech Republic, attract the highest number of migrants. Italy, Portugal and Spain are among the favorites too.

Some of these countries are so welcoming that they loosen up immigration laws to encourage the imported labor force to stay.

Russia has recently made changes to its law on citizenship. Foreigners applying for a residency permit no longer need to live there for five consecutive years, show income statements or pass tests in the Russian language.

To make things even easier, “compatriots” who were born in Russia at the time of the Soviet Union are accorded a red-carpet reception. There are at least three million of them in Ukraine right now.

Polyanina’s mother, Galina Shmatova, is one of them. She said that she was happy to go back.

“It was good there (in Ukraine) when we were a part of a big state (the Soviet Union). Now, a mess in politics is taking its toll on the people’s lives,” said Shmatova, babysitting her four-month-old granddaughter, already a Russian citizen.

In theory, people with a Soviet birth certificate like hers can grab their rucksacks and board an evening train.

“This law is aimed at those workers who are already there, not the people who spent most of their lives in Ukraine,” said former Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk. He is doubtful of a mass exodus. “However, they should remember that Russia is easing up rules not to satisfy these people’s interests, but to achieve their political and military goals.”

Whatever the agenda of an employer country, Ukrainians are happy to abide if they can provide better for their families back home.

An English writer born to Ukrainian parents had an experience of her own.

Maryna Lewycka, 62, took note of westward migration in a fictional novel “The Short History of Tractors,” which draws heavily on her life. A blend of comedy and desperation, it tells about two quarreling sisters who reconcile to save their father from a late marriage to “a fluffy pink grenade” from Ukraine called Valentyna.

“I used to be liberal about immigration,” said one of the sisters, Nadia. “But now I imagine hordes of Valentynas barging their way…pouring off the boats, purposeful, single-minded, mad.”

Lewycka said that some British people may think of migrants as intruders. Others are usually welcoming because they provide cheap labor. Yet most do not even encounter them as they “tend to inhabit a separate world of work, and live with other migrants.”

Ukrainians dissatisfied with their lot in life have reason to expect welcome mats abroad for the foreseeable future, thanks to demographic slides all around them.

By 2050, the European Union nations are expected to need some 50 million migrants and Russia another 35 million to keep the biological clock ticking at the same level.

For some, leaving Ukraine helps them to put their homeland in a different – but not always better – light.

Such was the case with linguist Oleksandra Frolova, 26.

Frolova left Ukraine three years ago. She took a long bus ride to join a league of Ukrainian conquistadors in Spain. Her mother, formerly an assistant to the general manager of a champagne plant, was already there working as a babysitter. Frolova got a job as a shopkeeper.

In Saragossa, she started to understand Ukraine’s shortcomings as never before.

“The contrast with Europe is huge. Prices are higher, the service industry died before it was born, the people are evil,” Frolova said. “I have no moral right to bring my child into a country where the state experiments on its own people through (dubious) vaccinations and where environmental conditions are a threat to life.”

It may be hard to induce families like the Frolovs to come back.

The head of the Lviv Oblast administration, Mykola Kmit, is in charge of the district in western Ukraine where migration is some of the heaviest. “We already have Chinese migrants working in the mines, gas and oil fields in Lviv. The minus is that, when they come, they don’t leave and they don’t die,” he said, summarizing with exaggeration the consequence of a shortage in the local workforce.

Kmit hopes that preparations for the football championship Euro 2012 will bring at least the “shuttle” migrants back (people engaged in regular trade trips).

Kyiv head of the International Organization for Migration, Jeffrey Labovitz, also thinks that labor migration in Ukraine is starting to diminish. “With construction workers, for example, wages in Ukraine have become competitive to those in countries where they traditionally go,” he said, sounding positive that blue collar workers will eventually come back.

British writer Lewycka has suggested that Ukraine should be made a part of the EU to let people move to work legally and return home freely to be with their families, like the Poles or the Czechs do.

“When I visited Ukraine, I could see that life was hard in the rural areas, but I could see that there was also a level of mutual support and kindness which enabled people to survive, which inevitably is missing in the U.K.,” Lewycka said, commending both the spirit of Ukrainians and their attachment to the homeland.

When her books came out, she half expected her family to ask her for work opportunities in Britain. “Funnily enough, they did not,” she said. "And no one from Ukraine has ever asked me for help.”

While Russia and other nations have attempted to get their expatriates to return home, there is no cohesive plan in Ukraine. So, for the foreseeable future, the red warning billboards at the train station in Lviv are likely to stay in place. They announce simply: The country is short of labor hands.