Valentin Napalkov, presented to journalists by the Krasnoyarsk administration as the first swallow of the compatriot resettlement program, waited several years for the opportunity to return to Siberia, where he was born. He was waiting specifically for the state program approved by Presidential Decree No. 637 in June 2006. According to this program, each resettler to Krasnoyarsk Krai is entitled to 40,000 rubles in relocation assistance from the federal budget, plus an additional 15,000 rubles for each family member. "In January 2007, I gathered the documents," Napalkov says. "And now I've been living in a rented apartment for a month, working at a local dairy plant."
According to the 56-year-old engineer who returned from near Odessa, the district administration treated him kindly and with understanding, and the regional migration service promised to finish processing his Russian citizenship in about two or three months. Although he did not fail to note the bureaucracy of Russian migration services abroad. Now Valentin Napalkov plans to settle down within a year, and then suggest that his wife and three adult children also move. However, the responsiveness of the district administration, which effectively bore the responsibility for receiving the migrant, is unlikely to improve the impression of the absurdity of the federal project as a whole.
The need for a state program for resettling compatriots is obvious. At the beginning of the year, the region's governor, Alexander Khloponin, opening the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum, directly stated that the main obstacle to the economic development of Siberia in the coming years would be a labor shortage. Suffice it to mention the projects of building a new Boguchany aluminum plant in Krasnoyarsk Krai or beginning the development of the Vasilyevskoye gold deposit — in total, a reference provided by the Krasnoyarsk administration mentions 35 ongoing investment projects. They need to find 32,000 workers in the next decade. For 2007-2009, the resettlement of 2,283 program participants plus 6,849 family members to Krasnoyarsk Krai is planned, with 10 billion rubles in federal funds allocated. Of these, only this year, 860 qualified resettlers plus 2,580 family members were supposed to arrive. So far, only one has arrived. "They invested a ruble, but got a kopeck's worth of effect," briefly commented Yevgeny Gontmakher, head of the Center for Social Policy at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The awkward position in which officials of the Federal Migration Service and the Ministry of Regional Development find themselves could be corrected by reorienting the program to expand the pool of potential migrants. "Moreover, far from all of them will be of Slavic ethnicity, which the current program is implicitly aimed at," believes Gontmakher, who deals with migration issues.
"This state program is hopelessly late. Everyone who needed to return to Russia did so in the mid-1990s," the expert is confident. "And if we want to achieve the goal of increasing the population and supplying regions with labor resources, then, first, we should raise the standard of living within the country. And second, it would be advisable to use the methods of migration services in Western countries, which have long perfected working with foreign migrants."