I suspect these Istanbul experiences confirmed many of my earlier observations about the role of "street-level institutions" in the Russian migration regime. During my fieldwork in Moscow (January 2014–August 2018), I noticed that many Uzbek migrants approached protection racketeers, asking them to "solve questions" (*reshat voprosy*). Migrants interchangeably utilized the terms *reket* and *razborshik* to refer to protection racketeering groups who provided an alternative (to the state) justice, contract enforcement, and dispute settlement through threats and violence. The demand for protection racketeers' services was particularly high in sectors such as bazaars, construction, agriculture, and the informal document markets (e.g., Moscow's Kazansky railway station). Quite often, migrants asked Chechen racketeers to recover their money (typically their salary) from employers and middlemen, offering 20 percent of the total sum of money collected as payment for such services. Chechen racketeers were known as the informal street judges among migrants. In addition, I learned about several instances in which Russian police officers acted on an informal basis as protection racketeers in the migrant labor market, offering salary recovery and physical protection (from other extortion rackets and bandits) for a fee.

As part of my fieldwork in Moscow, I approached 100 Central Asian migrant workers in July and August of 2015, asking the following question (among 90 other questions): "What measures would you take to recover payment if you had not been paid for your work?" In total, 42 percent of respondents stated that they would seek redress from protection racketeers if they experienced problems getting paid for their work. Another 15 percent said that they might seek redress via formal legal institutions, although they were not confident that this strategy would solve their problem given their noncitizen status. Another 43 percent believed that migrants cannot do anything to claim payment for their work since many of them are without documents and work illegally without a written employment contract. Accordingly, the level of trust in formal legal institutions remained quite low among the migrants I interviewed. Thus, nearly half believed that protection racketeers were useful for addressing their problems, as shown in the following explanation proffered by one respondent:

The laws of the state are unjust and often punish innocent people. If you have money, you can easily bend state laws. But things are well-regulated on the street. Street law is fairer and more just than state law. The main aim of state law is to punish people, but street law is fair and makes a distinction between innocent and guilty people. Money cannot buy everything on the street, but you also need to comply with *erkakchilik* [manliness] rules and keep your word. Therefore, you find more justice and order on the streets than in state institutions. If you are honest and keep your word, the laws of the street will protect you, but if you swindle and exploit people, you cannot escape punishment, even if you have money. (Botir, 36, male, Uzbek migrant worker)

This example may be interpreted as not only a consequence of poorly implemented policies and a weak rule of law but also as a reflection of the existence of plural legal orders in the Russian migrant labor market. An extensive literature demonstrates the various dysfunctionalities of the Russian legal system (Humphrey and Sneath 2004; Ledeneva 2009; Gans-Morse 2012; Hendley 2012). In this respect migration laws are simply part and parcel of the weak rule-of-law environment in Russia (Gel'man 2004; Ledeneva 2013), which is characterized by the prevalence of informal rules and norms governing formal institutions. Under these circumstances we can assume that migrants do not deal with the rule of law but rather invent various tactics and strategies to organize their working lives and to seek redress for their problems. Since many migrants work informally and violate Russian labor laws, employers and intermediaries understand that no state body will enforce contracts and, therefore, have a penchant for swindling migrants. According to Russian legislation, transactions completed in the shadow economy—that is, beyond labor regulations and tax codes—cannot be heard in state courts. Moreover, migrants working in the informal sector are reluctant to seek legal protection from state institutions because they might be further punished by the state for working without an employment contract. Because of their inability to access formal institutions, migrants increasingly rely on street-level institutions such as protection racketeers to enforce contractual obligations in the (informal) migrant labor market.

This chapter explores the interconnections of the migrant labor market, the shadow economy, and street-level institutions and their implications for migrants' everyday working lives and legal adaptation strategies. I investigate these issues through the ethnographic study of the everyday lives and experiences of Uzbek migrant workers in Moscow, carried out between January 2014 and August 2018. Before proceeding to the empirical data, in the next section I review the literature on protection racketeering in post-Soviet Russia. This review provides the contextual information and defines key terms necessary for understanding the empirical material.

# PROTECTION RACKETEERS AND THE STREET WORLD IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA

An extensive literature exists on private protections (Buchanan 1980; Gambetta 1993; Fiorentini and Peltzman 1995; Asmundo and Lisciandra 2008). Gambetta's study on private protection in southern Italy has been particularly influential, a study in which he defined the Mafia as a "specific economic enterprise, an industry which produces, promotes, and sells private protection" (1993, 3). Russia has also received much attention through a wide array of research on private protections (Handelman 1995; Aslund 1997; Frisby 1998; Humphrey 1999; Frye and Zhuravskaya 2000; Skoblikov 2001; Frye 2002; Volkov 2002). The emergence of private protection in Russia coincides largely with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the ensuing chaos and institutional vacuum of the early 1990s, which compelled many Russian businesses to rely on criminal protection racketeering groups to provide alternative means of contract enforcement and dispute settlement (Gans-Morse 2012). Therefore, much of the scholarly literature on private protection in Russia tends to focus on developments in the 1990s, when under Yeltsin's leadership the Russian state weakened and lost its ability to ensure law and order. This, in turn, led to the emergence of protection racketeering groups that provided security, contract enforcement, debt recovery, and dispute settlement through threats and violence. In post-Soviet Russia, as Volkov (2002) describes, the transition from a state-controlled economy to a free market (e.g., the liberalization of prices and the privatization of assets) was quickly accomplished without adequate effort to establish efficient state institutions aimed at protecting private property. State institutions were simply inefficient in debt recovery and contract enforcement, subsequently producing a high demand from private businesses seeking alternative structures for enforcement and protection.

Another factor contributing to the proliferation of protection racketeering lies in the reforms of the state security and law-enforcement structures in the 1990s. These reforms aimed to diminish the power of law-enforcement structures by decentralizing and reducing their number of personnel (Volkov 2000). Such changes led many discharged security and law-enforcement officers to seek alternative employment in the "protection racket industry," where they discovered a way to convert their skills into a marketable asset. Volkov (2002) refers to such private protection structures as "violent entrepreneurs" or individuals who offered an "enforcement partnership," what became known in colloquial Russian as a *krysha* (literally, the Russian word for "roof " in relation to the protection racketeers provide to businesses). The types of protection racketeering groups consisted of the following: (a) units of discharged police and security officers acting as protection racketeers, (b) nonstate and legal private protection companies, and (c) organized criminal and bandit groups. As Volkov (2000) notes, in the 1990s up to 70 percent of all business contracts were enforced by protection racketeers, without involving formal state institutions. Thus, protection racketeering groups were viewed as more efficient than state law-enforcement bodies in solving the day-to-day problems faced by Russian businesses (Frisby 1998, Volkov 1999, Frye and Zhuravskaya 2000).

A review of the literature indicates that "the era of racketeering" ended with the 1990s in most Russian regions (Hendley, Murrell, and Ryterman 2000, 2001; Gel'man 2004; Volkov 2004; Gans-Morse 2012). The bulk of these studies showed a dramatic decline in the use of protection racketeers, and firms began to rely extensively on formal legal institutions and lawyers to resolve problems. In Skocpol's words, "the state was being brought back in" with the onset of Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia. Hence, the restoration of a strong state has become the distinctive feature of the post-2000 period in Russian politics and a major slogan of Putin's presidency (quoted in Gel'man 2004). As Gel'man (2004) notes, soon after Putin became president, agents of "state capture" were peripheralized, "oligarchs" lost their control over the political agenda, regional governors were subordinated to the center, and criminal protection racketeers were marginalized. Yet studies illustrate how that return to a strong state did not lead to the emergence of a rule-of-law environment in Russia; rather, state institutions turned into powerful tools of manipulation, and attacks and threats by high- and low-level state officials directed at property rights have become the dominant feature of everyday business life in Russia (Volkov 2004; Gans-Morse 2012). Understandably, issues such as corruption, kleptocracy, informal institutions, the unrule of law, and authoritarianism have become fashionable topics of research for scholars studying Putin's Russia (see, e.g., Gel'man 2004; Ledeneva 2009; Humphrey 2012; Morris and Polese 2015a). Research focusing on protection racketeers has significantly declined in the last decade.

Based on my ethnographic study of Uzbek migrants' daily experiences in Moscow, I argue that protection racketeers remain a salient feature of the Russian sociolegal environment. Protection racketeers are particularly visible in the informal migrant labor market, providing alternative means to enforce contracts, recover debt, and settle disputes for migrants, whose access to the formal legal system is constrained by multiple structural barriers. Two types of protection racketeers are quite common in the migrant labor market: Chechen and Dagestani protection racketeering groups and (former) police and security service officers acting as protection racketeers. Even though the Chechens and Dagestani are more visible, other ethnic groups such as Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and emerging Uzbek, Kyrgyz, and Tajik groups are also active in the street world. Despite these differences, the main functions of these groups consist of security, risk control, debt recovery, and dispute settlement. A review of existing scholarly literature indicates that there is a lack of research on the relationships among protection racketeers, migrant workers, employers, and intermediaries in the Russian migrant labor market. Existing research on the Russian migration regime focuses on push-and-pull factors of migration (Denisenko 2017); difficult living and working conditions among migrants (Round and Kuznetsova 2016); immigration laws and practices (Kubal 2016b); racism, xenophobia, and the exclusion of migrants (Agadjanian, Menjívar, and Zotova 2017); corruption and migration governance (Schenk 2018); the health status of migrants (Weine et al. 2013); the political economy of housing and migrants' everyday lives (Reeves 2016); female migrants' experiences (Tyuryukanova 2011); migrant illegality and the shadow economy (Heusala and Aitamurto 2016); the social and cultural adaptation of migrants (Mukomel 2013); migrant religiosity and the role of Islam in migrants' everyday lives (Aitamurto 2016); the Eurasian Economic Union and its impact on labor migration (Schenk 2017); the radicalization of migrants (Tucker 2015); transnational practices and the livelihoods of migrants (Urinboyev 2018a); and family migration (Nikiforova and Brednikova 2018). In this chapter I move beyond the existing research by reorienting the focus from "traditional migration research topics" to more hidden and difficult-to-access arenas, thereby providing a "thick description" (Geertz 1973) of the Russian migrant labor market "in action." That is, I provide an in-depth investigation of interpretations, experiences, and behaviors among migrants when they try to seek "law and justice" through street-level institutions.

### MIGRANT LABOR MARKET AND THE STREET WORLD

The Russian migrant labor market can be viewed as a small "state within a state" or a parallel legal order with its own informal networks of power, hierarchies, division of labor, and enforcement mechanisms. The role of ethnic cleavages remains crucial in these informal power relationships. Migrants from Azerbaijan and Armenia are well-established and occupy managerial positions in the migrant labor market. This stems from the fact that Armenian and Azerbaijani migrants came to Russia during Soviet times and established a strong position in the Russian migrant labor market. Bazaars in large Russian cities such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg are controlled by Azerbaijani migrants, while the construction sector is largely dominated by Armenian migrants. Central Asian migrants, who arrived in Russia relatively late in the 1990s and early 2000s, occupy a weaker position and are often employed by Armenian or Azerbaijani employers. Because many of these employment relationships occur informally (that is, outside labor and tax regulations), Azerbaijani and Armenian employers often withhold or delay Central Asian migrants' salaries. Even if migrants possess the required work documents, finding employers willing to employ them legally and pay the required employment taxes remains quite difficult. Given the absence of formal employment relationships, it is already common knowledge that many migrants are cheated and do not get paid for their work.

Under these circumstances Central Asian migrants frequently approached Chechens and Dagestanis, who act as *qozi* (a *qadi* or a judge) in the street world, providing contract enforcement and dispute resolution services for a fee. Chechens and Dagestanis (both citizens of the Russian Federation) enjoy a reputation as violent *bespredely* (limitless or lawless individuals) in the street world and act as a *reket/razborshik* (racketeer) in the migrant labor market. They are physically fit, skilled in the use of weapons, and some have a criminal record given their past violent behavior. The need for protection racketeers is particularly high in the construction sector, an industry with a high concentration of undocumented migrants and where salaries are frequently left unpaid. A prominent migrant rights activist in Moscow reported that at least 20 percent of Central Asian migrants have had some relationship with protection racketeers.1 While protection racketeers are viewed as an element of the criminal world, for Central Asian migrants in Russia who operate outside the formal legal system, seeking redress through protection racketeers represents a rational strategy. As Malakhov (2014) noted, the criminal world sometimes acts in positive ways, "covering" migrants in cases when they experience problems with contract enforcement or getting paid for their work. A recent video report by Ozodlik/Radio Free Europe Uzbek Service highlights the role of protection racketeers in the recovery of salaries, where one manager of a cleaning company, who owed Uzbek migrants 150,000 rubles (US\$2,250), was forced to pay 75 percent of the migrants' salaries after interference from *turmadagi zeklar*—that is, racketeers serving prison sentences (Ozodlik Radiosi 2018).

We must note, however, that protection racketeering groups may also act as extortionists. As reported by Ozodlik Radiosi/Radio Free Europe Uzbek Service (2015), in Ulan Ude, the capital city of the Republic of Buryatia (Russia), a group of Uzbek migrants declared themselves the *smotriashiy* (criminal authority) and demanded a monthly protection fee from Uzbek migrants working in Ulan Ude. This group regularly visited Uzbek migrants' workplaces, mediated in conflicts between migrants even if not requested to do so, and imposed *razborka* (showdown or final settlement) fees on migrants. Migrants who did not pay were beaten or blackmailed with threats of deportation since many migrants worked illegally. When demanding a fee from migrants, an Uzbek criminal group stated that a large portion of the money generated from migrants was distributed to the *obshak* (a mutual assistance fund among the criminal community) in prison, where their fellow Uzbek criminal authorities were serving prison sentences. This criminal group was eliminated following a special operation carried out by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).

Russian *siloviky* (security service officers) also constitute a key collective in the migrant labor market. Until recently, many bazaars and construction sites were controlled primarily by Azerbaijani and Armenian businessmen. In the last 10 years, however, 14 markets or bazaars were closed in Moscow by the *siloviky*. The closure of markets resulted from a "fight against contraband, crime, and drug dealing" (O'Flynn 2009). In reality, the main aim of these closures was to seize properties owned by Azerbaijani, Armenian, or Chechen groups. As a result, the *siloviky*, particularly officers of the FSB, gained control over some markets and construction companies in Moscow. For example, Moscow's largest wholesale food market, Food City (*Fudsiti*), where thousands of Central Asians work, is informally controlled by a high-level FSB officer.2 Many Uzbek migrants I encountered there worked without work documents since they fell under the protection (*kryshovanie*) of a high-level FSB officer who ensured that no raid by immigration officials would occur on the market's territory. Chechen and Dagestani protection racketeers were also absent from the Food City area, since it was an open secret that the market fell under the protection of a top FSB official. In that sense Food City provides an example of the growing role of Russian *siloviky* in the migrant labor market, as illustrated in the following extract:

Food City is a separate republic. It is safe here, and you can work without any documents. FMS [immigration officials] and police don't check us [migrants] here. Even Chechens cannot play a role here. As long as you stay inside the territory of Food City, you can be sure that you are safe from danger. We just pay a *dolya* [share or protection fee] to our *kuratori* [curators] and they make sure that we can work here without problems. One of our curators said that this market belongs to a very influential FSB official. (Arabboy, 34, male, Uzbek migrant)

Some Russian police officers also act as protection racketeers in the migrant labor market. They usually serve as an *advokat* (defense lawyer) during the *razborka*, defending the *posrednik* (middleman) and Russian employers vis-à-vis Chechen and Dagestani racketeers. This was clearly illustrated in the previous chapter when Misha, an Uzbek *posrednik*, described his reliance on the assistance of Russian police officers when his covillagers used Chechen racketeers against him. It should be noted that when police officers operate on the street, they use *pogonyalo* (nickname) and do not reveal their police identity. They also use an ordinary, basic Nokia phone and refrain from using smartphones, fearing that smartphones particularly iPhones—are tracked by FSB. Such police-based protection racketeering groups are called *krug*, a circle that operates covertly in the migrant labor market and represents an ally to *posredniks* and Russian employers needing protection from other street-level institutions. Not all *posredniks* can become an acquaintance of members of a police-related *krug*. Individuals must work in the construction sector and bazaars for many years in order to build networks and establish relationships with hidden street-level institutions.

My fieldwork indicates that the role and influence of Tajik migrants in the street world is growing. When walking through the streets and metros of Moscow, one can spot many Tajik migrants whose appearance resembles Chechens. Like Chechens, they grow a beard and wear sports clothes, white socks, and running shoes. Even their haircuts resemble those of Chechens. Tajiks imitate Chechens not only in their mannerisms but also in terms of racketeering. It is possible to find

Figure 7. Everyday life in Food City, Moscow: Shadow Economy Hotspot. August 2018. Photo by author.

many Tajik protection racketeers at construction sites and bazaars. In addition, some cases exist whereby a Tajik diaspora leader regularly recruits Chechen protection racketeers to settle salary-recovery disputes.3 One important explanation for the growing role of Tajiks on the street lies in their characteristically tight-knit community and their unity around their ethnic identity. This feature serves as a safety net when someone from the Tajik migrant community gets into trouble or needs help when there is a fight on the street.

A massive brawl between Tajik migrants and Chechens in Moscow's Khovanskoye cemetery on May 14, 2016, illustrates the growing role of Tajik migrants in the street world. Tajik migrants traditionally worked in Moscow's cemeteries by providing services such as grave digging, repairing enclosures around burial plots, or refreshing flowers. According to the *Moscow Times* (2016), the funeral business represents a lucrative sector in Moscow, generating 1 billion rubles (roughly US\$16 million) in profit annually. Officially, Moscow's funeral services are managed by the state-owned burial company Ritual, which enjoys a monopoly over the provision of funeral services. But, as the *Moscow Times* reported, up to 80 percent of the sector operates in the shadow economy, and Tajik migrants form only a small portion of that lucrative shadow business. The conflict between Tajiks and Chechens resulted from the fact that Tajik migrants refused to share 50 percent to 90 percent of their earnings with the newly appointed director of the cemetery, Yuri Chabuev. As a result Chabuev, with support from Chechen racketeers, decided to push Tajik migrants from the funeral services sector. Chechens arrived at the cemetery with guns and threatened to bury the Tajiks in the cemetery if they refused to pay a *dolya* (share). But the Tajik migrants, supported by a racketeer from Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan (Pamir) region, strongly resisted the Chechens and threw them out of the cemetery. These events indicate that the Tajik migrants' sphere of influence is growing, whereby they now compete with Chechens and Dagestanis at the street level.

Many similar cases emerged in the construction sector. For local Russians these incidents simply resemble a fight between migrants, but for migrants it represents a means of survival. Different migrant groups often engage in massive brawls and try to divide territories and spheres of work. These processes are often coordinated by so-called *chernie brigadiri* (black brigadiers) or *kuratori*—that is, various intermediaries and racketeers who divide the territories and sectors into spheres of influence and distribute jobs to migrant workers. For example, minibus (*marshrutka*) drivers in Moscow are primarily Pamiris, an Iranian ethnic group from Tajikistan's Gorno-Badakhshan region. Thus, a Pamiri *kurator* serves as a gatekeeper and does not allow migrants from other ethnicities (even ethnic Tajiks) to enter this sector. In turn, Pamiri migrants pay a monthly share to their *kurator* for protecting their interests. Similar situations exist in bazaars and construction sites, where migrants must pay a share (*dan' or dolya*) to the *chernie brigadiri* and *kuratori* on a monthly basis. This illustrates how things work in the Russian migrant labor market. These processes are regulated by street law and enforced via street-level institutions such as racketeers and various intermediaries.

Unlike the Tajik migrant community, however, no strong ethnic identity or solidarity exists among Uzbek migrants. Rather than organizing around their ethnic identity, Uzbek migrants form small communities that include migrants originating from the same region, district, village, or *mahalla*. Thus, place-based identity is stronger than ethnic identity among Uzbek migrants. For instance, migrants from Uzbekistan's Bukhara region do not mix with migrants from other regions such as Fergana or Kashkadarya. Because of the absence of a strong ethnic identity and solidarity, Uzbek migrants remain poorly organized, rendering them vulnerable to the whims of dishonest employers and middlemen. As a result, many cases of salary nonpayment plague the Uzbek migrant community. As a way to cope with the uncertainties and risks of informal employment, Uzbek migrants frequently approach Chechen and Dagestani racketeers in cases of the nonpayment of salaries. I describe these processes in the next section.

## BAHA AND HIS TEAM: SEEKING JUSTICE ON THE STREET

Baha is a 28-year-old male migrant construction worker from Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley. Between March and May of 2016, Baha, together with three of his covillagers, completed an *Evroremont* (an apartment renovation according to Western standards and design) in a midrise building located near Moscow's Tsaritsino metro station. Baha and his team members did not possess any work documents and were informally employed by Nuriddin, an Uzbek *posrednik* from Bukhara, an ancient city in Uzbekistan. In turn, this Uzbek *posrednik* worked for a small construction firm that belonged to a Russian woman, Anna Gennadiyevna. Baha and his team worked three months, but they received salary only for two months, while the third month's salary remained unpaid. Each worker should have received 35,000 rubles (roughly US\$550), 140,000 rubles (US\$2,200) for all four men. When Bana asked the Uzbek *posrednik* to pay their salary, the Uzbek *posrednik* said that he had not received payment and blamed the construction company for the payment delays. Then, Baha and his team contacted Anna Gennadiyevna, asking her to speed up the payment. But Anna Gennadiyevna refused to pay them, insisting that she had already paid their salary to the Uzbek *posrednik*. Thus, neither the Uzbek *posrednik* nor the construction firm showed any serious intention to pay their salary, bouncing Baha's team back and forth for two weeks.

Baha and his team did not even consider seeking legal aid from the Russian state institutions given that they all lacked immigration documents and worked without any formal employment contract. They believed that the Russian legal system was dysfunctional and would not protect them even if they possessed all of the required documents and worked legally. Given these circumstances, the most realistic option available to them to recover their salary was to approach a *razborshik*. Because Baha came to Moscow in 2011 and had worked on various construction sites, he had many friends and acquaintances. Frustrated with being ping-ponged between the Uzbek *posrednik* and the construction firm, Baha contacted his friend Tesha, a migrant from Uzbekistan's Kashkadarya region who was well-connected to the street world, asking him for a contact to a Chechen protection racketeer. This was not the first time Tesha was asked to serve as a bridge between migrants and Chechens; he had handled many similar requests in the past. But, before connecting anyone to the Chechens, Tesha carefully explained the basic principles of street law to Baha:

You need to be a real man (*haqiqiy erkak*) when you deal with street people. If you claim that you are a real man, you have to stay manly until the end (*raz muzhik do kontsa muzhik*). This is the law of Moscow. Honesty and decency are very important traits on the street. Before you tell your story to a Chechen *razborshik*, you must be 100 percent confident that all of the facts and details of your story are true. The main role of the *razborshik* is to establish justice and punish guilty people. If you provide false information and accuse the honest employer (*ish beruvchi*) of not paying your salary, you will pay a heavy price. As a punishment, they will first beat you and then force you to pay the amount you stated in your claim in relation to the employer. Also, you must pay monetary compensation for the time and effort Chechens spent handling your case. They can demand any amount they want for compensation, and you have to pay it. In some cases you will also be ordered to pay moral damage to the employer for tarnishing his name. Therefore, when you contact a *razborshik*, they ask you three times whether the information you have provided is correct. When you transfer your claim to a *razborshik*, you should stop your communication with the employer and follow the *razborshik*'s instructions. It is exclusively the *razborshik*'s call to investigate the case. The *razborshik* will invite both the claimant and defendant to the *razborka*. If the *razborshik* succeeds in recovering your money, you must pay him a fee. There is no fixed rate. Some *razborshiks* ask for 20 percent, while some others work at a rate of 50–50. On the whole, the average price currently is typically 20 percent to 30 percent of what they collect. Often, *razborshiks* also charge the employer as punishment for his dishonest behavior. But in cases when the *razborshik* cannot recover your money, he is expected to pay your money from his own pocket. So, the *razborshik* also has certain rights and obligations. You find more order on the street than inside state institutions.

Events unfolded exactly as Tesha described. After being connected to Chechens via phone, Baha and his team members were asked to provide all of the facts and details of their case. The Chechens repeatedly asked Baha whether he was providing a true story and warned him that he himself would have to pay the price if any of the details were inaccurate. After finishing this initial "manliness ritual," the Chechens asked Baha to provide them with the address and phone number of the Uzbek *posrednik*. Baha and his team were advised not to take any further action and to wait for the next steps. The migrants agreed to pay 30 percent of the total amount collected (i.e., 42,000 rubles, approximately US\$650) to the Chechens as payment for their work.

Two days later, the Chechens contacted Baha and asked him to come immediately to a designated place on the north of Moscow where the *razborka* would take place. The aim of the *razborka* was to determine the validity of Baha and his team's claim. When Baha arrived at the *razborka* site, he found that four Chechens and the Uzbek *posrednik* were already there. First, Baha and his team were given a chance to present their complaint. Then, the Uzbek *posrednik* was asked to comment on the situation and defend himself if he felt he was innocent. Rather than denying Baha's story, the Uzbek *posrednik* admitted that what was described was true, but he insisted that he too was a victim, blaming Anna Gennadiyevna and her construction firm for payment problems.

The Chechens did not accept the Uzbek *posrednik*'s justification as a valid excuse. In the Chechens' view Baha and his team entered into a "manly agreement" (*erkakcha kelishuv*) with the Uzbek *posrednik*, not with the Russian woman, implying that the Uzbek *posrednik* was responsible for payment to Baha and his team regardless of any other circumstances. The verdict was thus made by the Chechens that the Uzbek *posrednik* would pay Baha and his team's salary within a maximum of three days. In addition, the Uzbek *posrednik* was also ordered to pay 25,000 rubles (US\$400) to the Chechens for the time they had spent to *reshat voprosy* (solve the issue). The Chechens warned the Uzbek *posrednik* that his "throat would be slashed" if he failed to pay the stated amount by the deadline. The Chechens' confident voice relied on the firm belief that Uzbek migrants, like many other migrants in Russia, were rightless *chernie* (blacks), and no serious police investigation would follow should some Uzbek migrant be killed. The Chechens were even aware that the Uzbek embassy in Moscow would do nothing to protect the rights of its citizens in Russia. Not wanting to risk his life, the Uzbek *posrednik* eventually paid both Baha and his team as well as the Chechens, an outcome that would not have occurred if Baha and his team had not resorted to street-level institutions.

#### TIMUR: SEEKING JUSTICE THROUGH PRISON

Timur is a 26-year-old male migrant construction worker from the Fergana region of Uzbekistan. He arrived in Moscow in June of 2012, shortly after finishing vocational college. Unlike his fellow villagers in Moscow who shared common accommodations and pursued intertwined lives, Timur stayed in a communal, shared apartment where the majority of tenants (*kvartiranti*) were ethnic Tajiks from Samarkand (Uzbekistan) and Khujand (Tajikistan). His decision to stay away from his covillagers stemmed from his efforts to diversify his social network and connections (*tanish-bilish*) in Moscow, crucial for finding a decent job. This was where Timur made Tajik acquaintances and established an extensive network that later proved helpful when he experienced problems getting paid for his own work.

At the time of my fieldwork in 2015, Timur worked on a construction site in Shchyolkovo City, Moscow province. His main job was to install CCTV cameras in newly constructed midrise buildings. Timur's boss was a *posrednik* from Kyrgyzstan who, in turn, worked for the Russian construction firm. The employment relationship between all parties—Timur, the Kyrgyz *posrednik*, and the Russian construction firm—was based on a *po-rukam* (handshake-based) agreement, implying that these transactions were informal and took place beyond labor and tax regulations. Timur worked for the Kyrgyz *posrednik* for five months, but he was not paid for his last two months of work, an amount totaling 60,000 rubles (about US\$950). When Timur asked the Kyrgyz *posrednik* whether he was willing to pay his two-month salary, the *posrednik* stated that the Russian construction firm was delaying payment, not him. Timur waited for more than two months, hoping that the *posrednik* would pay his salary. But he continued telling the same story. It was thus apparent that the Kyrgyz *posrednik* was unwilling to pay the remaining salary, which led Timur to look for alternative ways of recovering it.

Because Timur shared an apartment with Tajik migrants, he became a part of the wider Tajik community.  Owing to his close relationship with Tajiks, Timur knew that he could rely on them to help recover his salary from the Kyrgyz *posrednik*. When Timur asked his Tajik roommates if they could do anything to help him, they gave him the phone number of their Tajik friend Farkhod, who was serving a prison sentence in one of the correctional colonies (prisons) in the Moscow province.

Farkhod was one of the most influential protection racketeers in Moscow. In 2013 he was sentenced to seven years in prison for racketeering and extortion-related crimes. The fact that he did not reveal the names of his partners in crime, taking individual responsibility for all of the charges, further increased his sphere of influence on the street. Despite being physically situated inside the prison, he was very much present in Moscow's migrant labor market and continued acting as the head of the Tajik racketeering group in Moscow. This was possible as a result of widespread corruption within the prison system. Farkhod and many other inmates had access to smartphones (with an internet connection), as well as to vodka, drugs, and sex workers. All of these "luxuries" were organized by *menty* (low-level prison officials), always looking for ways to supplement their meager incomes. Since a smartphone was considered a sensitive object that could reveal the secrets of the prison, its use and dissemination inside the prison was heavily controlled. Therefore, *menty* secretly carried it to the prison, hiding it in their anuses. Given these difficulties, smartphones were very expensive inside the prison. For example, if the cheapest Chinese Huawei smartphone cost 8,000 rubles (US\$125) in a store, *menty*  sold it to inmates for 24,000 rubles (US\$375). Given the difficulty of getting and keeping a smartphone in prison, Farkhod's phone was only on and available for conversations at three times each day: early morning (between 5:00 and 6:30), after lunch (between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m.), and in the evening (between 8:00 and 10:30). Thanks to the availability of a smartphone, Farkhod continued his racketeering activities and regularly received "warm-up money" (*grev*) both from his partners and migrants. Farkhod regularly used a smartphone-based mobile payment application and updated his social media accounts on a daily basis, posting his own photos and pressing the "like" button on pictures of Russian and Tajik girls.

In accordance with the instructions of his Tajik friends, Timur placed a call to Farkhod in the evening, a time when he was better able to solve street-level issues. After introducing himself and explaining how he found Farkhod's contact details, Timur recounted all of the problems he had experienced to Farkhod and politely asked whether he could help him recover his salary from the Kyrgyz *posrednik*. In turn, before taking on this challenge, Farkhod asked Timur whether he would be able to stand by his story during the *razborka* and whether he was ready to pay 20 percent of the disputed money recovered. Farkhod also explained the basic rules of street law, emphasizing that Timur must remain honest, behave like a man (*erkakchilik*), and avoid any contact with the police. After Timur accepted these conditions, Farkhod moved to the next stage, wherein Timur was asked to provide the *posrednik*'s ethnicity, full name and phone number, the name of the construction firm, the exact amount of the salary in question, and, most important, the name of the district in which Timur worked. Knowing the name of the district was crucial, since each district had its own *smotriashiy*, meaning Farkhod needed to be sure that he was not stepping on someone's toes. Finally, after checking all of the details, Farkhod accepted the challenge and asked Timur to await further instructions without taking any independent action.

The next day, Timur received a phone call from Farkhod. It was a conference call where Timur, Farkhod, and the Kyrgyz *posrednik* were on the line simultaneously. Before starting the investigation, Farkhod warned both Timur and the Kyrgyz *posrednik* to be honest and that they would be severely punished if they attempted to bend the truth. First, Farkhod asked Timur to describe what had happened and what claim he had in relation to the Kyrgyz *posrednik*. Then, the Kyrgyz *posrednik* was given the chance to respond to Timur's complaint. Unsurprisingly, the Kyrgyz *posrednik* blamed the construction firm, stating that he also did not receive his own salary from the Russians. Farkhod immediately interrupted the Kyrgyz *posrednik*, stating that Timur made an agreement with him, not with the Russians, so he was responsible for securing Timur's salary regardless of other circumstances. Farkhod did not continue the conversation any further and quickly moved to the final settlement and ended the *razborka*.

As a result of the *razborka*, the Kyrgyz *posrednik* was given a maximum of three days to pay Timur's salary. In addition, the *posrednik* was also ordered to top-up or deposit 15,000 rubles (US\$240) to Farkhod's phone number. Farkhod made clear to the *posrednik* that his life would be in danger if these two payments were not made by the deadline. Timur was also reminded that once he received his salary from the *posrednik* he must also deposit 20 percent of the salary recovered—that is, 12,000 rubles (US\$190)—to Farkhod's phone number so that he could continue using his mobile payment application. Not wanting to tangle with the *zek* (a Soviet term used in relation to persons serving a sentence in corrections facilities or prisons), the Kyrgyz *posrednik* quickly paid Timur's salary and deposited the stated amount to Farkhod's phone number. Timur also deposited money to Farkhod's number the same day.

### STREET LAW AND MIGRANT LEGAL ADAPTATIONS

As we have seen in this chapter, many migrants work without written employment contracts, which often results in the nonpayment of salaries. Given the complete lack of formal legal protections, many migrants seek redress from street-level actors who provide alternative (to the state) forms of contract enforcement, debt recovery, and dispute settlement through threats, violence, and street law. When observing everyday interactions in the migrant labor market, it becomes difficult to view the Russian state and its legal infrastructure as a coherent entity. Instead, what we see is an informal, parallel world of migrants based on its own noncodified but socially reproduced and legitimate forms of governance and legal order. From this perspective the apparent reinvigoration of street-level institutions in Russia may be viewed as a reaction to the Russian state's inability or unwillingness to provide decent working conditions for migrant workers. Hence, streetlevel institutions should not only be viewed as an element of the criminal world; they may very well constitute an alternative legal order when the state and its legal system fail to enforce the rules of the game of society.

Accordingly, one possible inference is that the Russian migrant labor market resembles a "state within a state," with its own informal networks of power, hierarchies, divisions of labor, and legal order. The street-level institutions act as enforcement mechanisms for informal employment relationships. Despite its almost mythical coercive power, the Russian state and its legal infrastructure remain "formally" absent in the street world of the migrant labor market. This argument, however, does not necessarily imply that street-level institutions are completely separate from the state. Rather, the Russian state actors are informally present in the migrant labor market, as numerous racketeers, "street networks," "intermediaries"' have varying levels of informal connections with officials and organs of power. The street-level institutions can thus be regarded as parallel legal orders, functioning in a close symbiosis with the state actors, which regulate the rules of the game in the migrant labor market. The intrinsic message of this chapter is that the legal adaptation of migrants in Russia must be understood not only through migrants' capacity to comply with immigration and labor laws but also in terms of their interactions with street-based legal orders that offer alternative forms of redress, legal adaptation, and economic security.

# Uzbek Migrants' Everyday Encounters with Police Officers and Immigration Officials

During my ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow (January 2014–August 2018), I frequently visited a construction site in Balashikha, a small city in Moscow province where dozens of Uzbek migrant construction teams performed various types of construction work in high-rise residential buildings. Because the construction of the residential buildings had already been completed, the primary task performed by these Uzbek construction teams entailed the final finishing and design work, such as window fitting, painting, flooring, wallpaper installation, plumbing, or electrical installation. Like many construction projects in Moscow, this Balashikha-based project was coordinated by a Russian intermediary who worked for a large construction company responsible for the overall project implementation. Because of language barriers and cultural differences, however, the Russian intermediary coordinated the construction project through several Uzbek migrant middlemen who were well-connected to migrant construction workers, enjoyed authority among them, knew their language, and could manage construction brigades. In turn, the migrant middlemen struck deals with various Uzbek construction teams (each consisting of 5–10 migrants), acting as an intermediary between different parties.

Nearly all of the Uzbek migrants I encountered there worked without any written employment contract and did not have an authentic residence registration or work permit. Migrants working there said that it was impossible to go "legal" (*qonuniy yurish*) in Balashikha, since they all, regardless of whether they were documented or not, had to pay a bribe to police officers. In the words of the migrants, Balashikha used to be a forbidden military zone during the Soviet times, where foreigners were not allowed to live or work, and this Soviet legacy was strategically used by police officers who always sought reasons to extort money from migrants. When stopped by the police, migrants were often warned that they were working in a forbidden zone and that they needed special permission from the Russian state—permission created to justify the police demands for bribes from migrants. The police typically demanded 2,000 rubles (US\$30) to ignore this "infraction," but migrants often managed to get away with paying 500 rubles (US\$8). When police officers approached the construction site, everyone hid. Migrants typically spent most of their time inside the apartments where they simultaneously worked and lived. Unless a Russian complained or a letter arrived from a prosecutor, the police did not enter and check the apartments.

Given their daily experiences with corruption, migrants developed multiple strategies to avoid the police. If they needed something from the market, they usually checked the area thoroughly to make sure no police officers were around. When they saw the police on the street, they quickly informed one another. But it was not always possible to avoid hungry police officers, who frequently wander around markets and bus stops. If a migrant was caught when buying food stuff for the construction brigade, all of the migrants shared the cost of the bribe paid to police, viewing it as part of their food expenses. Whenever I visited my key informants (migrant brigades) in Balashikha, they quickly brought up the subject of police corruption and talked openly about situations in which they had paid bribes to Russian police officers. Migrants often told different stories and anecdotes about police corruption. During my visit to Balashikha in April of 2014, I organized a small *pilaf* (a festive Uzbek rice) party for several migrant brigades as a way to socialize and establish a close relationship with them. We sat at a nicely decorated table, eating *pilaf* and talking about the migrants' daily lives and adventures in Russia. Spontaneously, one of the migrants provided an anecdote about police corruption:

There was one Russian police officer who made his fortune extorting money from Uzbek migrants. He worked near construction sites, where many migrants lived and worked. Due to the existence of thousands of migrants in his territory, he generated lots of income and became very rich, to the extent that he managed to buy a villa in Rublevka, an elite residential area in the western suburbs of Moscow where many Russian billionaires live. This was an unexpected turn for the police officer, who was not actually a Muscovite, but from Siberia. He was very proud of his achievement and continued to extort money from migrants on a daily basis. However, one day his 12-year-old son, his only child, died in a car accident. This tragic event left the police officer deeply saddened. Because the police officer shared his revenues with many people in the government, many state officials showed up to his son's funeral. Even Sergey Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, attended his son's funeral to express his condolences. When the funeral was about to end, suddenly more than 100 Uzbek migrants arrived at the funeral, all of whom were sad and crying as if they had lost their own child. The police officer recognized many of the migrants as individuals from whom he had regularly extorted money. But, still, the policeman could not understand why so many migrants felt sorry for him and cried even though he had terrorized them on a daily basis. When the police officer asked the migrants why they had come to the funeral despite their bad experiences with him, one migrant replied, "Of course, we must be here. True, he is your son, not ours. But do not forget the fact that we raised him for many years, paying for his food, clothes, toys, and all of the other expenses related to his childhood. We invested more money in your son than you."

That last phrase was accompanied by loud laughter and nodding, showing the migrants' awareness of the widespread police corruption slyly hinted at in the anecdote. This anecdote indicates that police corruption has become something of a norm, whereby finding migrants who have not paid a bribe to Russian police officers remains difficult. The anecdote also clearly provides a clue regarding the existence of a plethora of interests and networks within the Russian government that benefit from informal transactions involving police officers and migrant workers. This anecdote thus begs the question of how migrant legal adaptation takes place within a legal environment characterized by corruption and lacking a rule of law. In this chapter I provide illustrations of this process by presenting substantial ethnographic data on migrants' everyday interactions with police officers and immigration officials.

# BEC OMING "LEGAL" IN A C ORRUPT AND WEAK RULE-OF-LAW ENVIRONMENT

As discussed in previous chapters, Russian immigration laws determining the conditions for the legal status of foreign citizens remain inconsistent, poorly enforced, and often contradictory (Kubal 2016a). This is unsurprising given that much of the academic literature describes the Russian legal environment as corrupt, arbitrary, and repressive (Sakwa 1995; Gel'man 2004; Solomon 2004; Ledeneva 2006). Thus, even those migrants who possess all of the required documents cannot be sure that they will not encounter problems when they come into contact with Russian police officers and immigration officials (Reeves 2015; Kubal 2016b). Given the weak rule of law, widespread corruption, and arbitrary law enforcement, being "legal" or "illegal" hinges on contextual factors and individual skills. These factors and skills include how, when, and where the interaction between migrants and Russian state officials takes place as well as migrants' knowledge of informal rules, street smarts, bribery skills, and ability to negotiate and find common ground (*obshiy yazik*) with state officials. These legal uncertainties imply the near impossibility of a migrant being fully documented, while the only path to asserting one's "legality" requires using various informal and illegal practices and procedures (Dave 2014a).

Much of the prevailing research tends to portray Central Asian migrants in Russia as passive, agencyless subjects. As such, they are constrained by the punitive legal environment, pointing out how being undocumented incapacitates migrants and invades their lifeworlds, leading to ever-present threats of exploitation, deportation, police corruption, racism, physical violence, and even death (Light 2010; Ruget and Usmanalieva 2010; Reeves 2015; Abashin 2016; Kubal 2016a; Round and Kuznetsova 2016; Agadjanian, Menjívar, and Zotova 2017; Nikiforova and Brednikova 2018; Schenk 2018). A similar perspective also commonly pervades the broader "migrant illegality" literature (based on research conducted in North America and Western Europe), where immigrants' legal status represents a key factor determining various paths, as well as the quality and timescale of migrant integration (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002; Coutin 2003b; Calavita 2005; Menjívar 2006, Gleeson 2010). In other words documented and undocumented migrants have such varying experiences that they constitute two different social classes.

The treatment of migrants as passive, agencyless subjects, however, may preclude us from looking at their actual coping strategies and navigational skills. Take the example of Malaysia, as Garcés-Mascareñas (2010) shows, where undocumented migrants, unlike documented migrants, enjoy more opportunities to change jobs, can negotiate their salary and working conditions, can avoid extra fees to enter or remain in the country, and can extend their stay in the country regardless of their economic situation or health status. Garcés-Mascareñas (2010) suggests that illegality can be viewed as a form of everyday, hidden resistance to state migration control policies. In Russia, by comparison, migrants also face similar constraints where they must deal with the arbitrary and repressive legal environment that does not allow migrants to legalize their work and residence status. Even those migrants with perfectly "clean" documents cannot be certain that they are "legal" when stopped by police officers. In the Russian context, however, "illegality" does not automatically incapacitate migrants, confining them to the space of vulnerability and legal nonexistence. Rather, it becomes a way of life, something of a norm for millions of migrants in Russia. Consequently, when the state forbids things or makes it nearly impossible to follow official procedures, it creates the need for informal and illegal means of getting things done (Morris and Polese 2015b). This means that migrants are forced into informal relations with the state in their everyday life (Kuznetsova and Round 2018). As we have seen, these constraints force many migrants to operate in the shadow economy (Heusala and Aitamurto 2016), where they can survive with false immigration documents and follow informal adaptation paths. This is confirmed by the Russian government's 2015 statistics showing that nearly 3 million foreigners in Russia violated the legal terms of their stays (Pochuev 2015). In fact, some experts estimate that there are around 5 million undocumented migrants in Russia (Chikadze and Brednikova 2012).

Given the magnitude of the shadow economy, the migrant labor market in Russia and the multiple informal and illegal practices revolving around it should not be viewed as abnormal behaviors but rather as institutionalized practices, a parallel legal order emerging out of the corruption and weak rule of law that characterizes much of the Russian bureaucracy. Thus, a distinctive feature of the Russian migration regime is the large shadow economy based on its own economy, legal order, and welfare infrastructure (Urinboyev and Polese 2016).

The above considerations have informed my approach in this chapter, which aims to examine not the limitations of the legal system but rather the unintended consequences that empower the agency of migrants to navigate the system. More specifically, in this chapter I aim to show that in hybrid regime contexts such as Russia, migrants are resilient and active agents and creatively use the opportunities provided by the weak rule of law and the corrupt political system to navigate the structural constraints and negotiate and assert their legal status. These processes can be explained by the vested interests of relevant Russian state actors (e.g., the police and immigration officials), where each of these actors view the (informal) migrant labor market as a source of *kormushka* (a feeding trough) and attempt to "take their own piece" of it. These patterns become particularly discernible when we attend to migrant workers' everyday experiences, tactics, and coping strategies when they attempt to negotiate the "rules of the game" with Russian migration officials and police officers. Although these processes and strategies may come across as manifestation of corruption and a weak rule of law, they actually constitute a real mode of migration governance and, thus, reveal the broader sociolegal context in which migrants' legal adaptations occur. In this chapter, then, I suggest that the study of migrants' legal adaptation should move beyond the structuralist (Western-centric) perspectives that emphasize the importance of one's legal status and the enduring power of the legal environment. That is, in order to better understand migrants' relationships to the host state's law and institutions in hybrid regime contexts, we should introduce a new analytical lens encompassing not only the legal centralistic approaches but also a legally pluralistic perspective accounting for informal norms and practices.

To illustrate these processes, the next sections focus on migrants' everyday encounters with the two aforementioned Russian state actors. As I mentioned earlier, I collected the empirical data presented in this chapter while conducting my ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow between January of 2014 and August of 2018. In the sections that follow, I first present the informal interviews and observations, which focus on migrants' everyday encounters with police officers and immigration officials, two key social arenas through which migrants experience the legal environment in Russia. Throughout what follows, I use pseudonyms for all of the names that appear here. I also present some relevant empirical examples from indepth (semistructured) interviews with 100 Central Asian migrants (Kyrgyz, Tajik, and Uzbek) I conducted between July and August of 2015. The interview questionnaire consisted of 91 open-ended questions and covered 15 different topics. For this specific chapter, however, I chose to present the results specifically focusing on police-migrant interactions. Thus, the chapter focuses on a small portion of the empirical data I collected within the larger project. A more comprehensive description of the interview details appears in chapter 1.

# MIGRANT S' EVERYDAY ENCOUNTERS WITH POLICE OFFICERS

In today's Moscow any visitor will quickly notice the large number of police officers visible on all major streets and in all public places. A more attentive observer will notice police officers frequently stopping and checking the identity documents of non-Russian-looking passersby. This is particularly visible on the Moscow metro, where police officers typically stand at the top of the escalator and enthusiastically carry out document checks. Many of these stopped passersby are citizens of Central Asian republics (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan) who left their home country given the lack of viable income-earning opportunities.

It is through these street-level massive document checks that the (informal) implementation of Russian immigration policies and laws takes place. In Russia, where the rule of law remains weak and corruption prevails, it is actually police officers who claim the prerogative of defining who is *zakonno* (legally) residing and working within the territory of the Russian Federation, even though they are not legally entrusted with enforcing immigration laws (Reeves 2013; Dave 2014; Kubal 2016b).1 For many police officers, who receive a meager salary from the state, migrants represent the most lucrative source of *kormushka* (feeding trough), compensating for their low salaries.2 As Round and Kuznetsova (2016) observed, when stopped by the police, migrants must show their work patent and labor contract. Police officers understand that the majority of migrants remain undocumented, and even legally employed migrants often experience problems with their residence registration documents since they do not actually live at the address where they are registered. Yet, even if migrants present all of the required documents, police may simply claim that those documents are fakes in order to extort money.

Although these massive document checks by the police clearly contradict Russian legislation, the authorities tacitly endorse them. In *Policing Migration in Soviet and Post-Soviet Moscow*, Light (2010) explains Russian police's extortionist behavior, referring specifically to the Moscow city government's attempts to keep Central Asian migrants in a constant state of fear and insecurity, thereby discouraging them from settling down permanently in Moscow. This resulted from the Moscow city government viewing migrants as a burden to its budget since migrants use public services without paying for them. Under Russian legislation, however, only the federal government has the authority to regulate immigration. Thus, the Moscow city government and the country's regions do not have the legal right to restrict the entry of foreign nationals. Unable to limit migratory flows, as Light (2010) maintains, the Moscow city government deployed three methods to deter migrants: (a) random checks of migrants' identity documents in public places, (b) raids on workplaces (e.g., construction sites) targeting undocumented migrants, and (c) deploying police officers at points of entry and transit areas, such as railway stations and the city's metro system. All three of these methods are implemented by police officers, whose main task is to keep migrants in a constant state of fear and vulnerability so that they do not feel welcome and only seek temporary stays. In return, the Moscow city government tacitly tolerates abusive and corrupt behavior among its police officers.

The system of police performance assessment and reporting serves as another factor driving massive document checks. According to the system of assessment from the Russian Ministry of the Interior, each police officer must disclose a certain number of criminal cases and report them to higher authorities so as to collect the required points and demonstrate that s/he is indeed "working" (Dubova and Kosal's 2013). This assessment method, commonly known as a *palochnaya sistema* or *plan* (quota system), was developed during Soviet times and continues to enjoy wide practice in the post-Soviet era as a key method of performance assessment of police officers on a monthly basis. This requirement forces them to invent various schemes and tactics. For instance, each month police officers must disclose a certain number of robbery and prostitution cases. Instead of doing real work, they stop two Uzbek female migrants in the street, bring them to the police station, and ask them to sign a sheet of paper indicating that they were involved in prostitution. Quite often, migrants do not read the paper but sign it so that they are quickly released. After getting their signature, the police let them go. In turn, police officers report to their superiors that they caught two sex workers and fined them. This is how they fulfill the "prostitution quota." The same logic applies to document checks and bribes. On a daily basis police officers stop and check the identity documents of a certain number of migrants in order to generate revenues for their superiors and themselves. But getting caught by police officers is particularly risky during the last part of month, since police officers must catch undocumented migrants and transfer their cases to court. Therefore, migrants commonly use the expression *planga tushib qolish* (fall within the quota/plan) to apply to migrants whose cases are transferred to court for possible deportation. Aware of these possible risks, many migrants avoid public places at the end of each month.

Given these realities, migrants understand the near impossibility of being "completely legal." As one migrant rights' activist ironically described it, "the primary aim of Russian migration laws is to fight against legal migrants, not illegal migrants."3 As a result, migrants have developed various informal strategies and tactics to navigate the system, a parallel world based on its own rules. Rather than trying to be "legal," an unrealistic and unattainable status in contemporary Moscow, many migrants simply buy fake work permits and residence registration documents produced at underground printing houses at Moscow's Kazansky railway station. Echoing these views, Salim explains why many migrants are reluctant to legalize their work and residence status in Russia:

It is almost impossible to go legal [*qonuniy*]. Even if you try to follow all of the laws and have proper documents, *melisa* [police officers] can always find a way to "milk you" [extort money]. Therefore, instead of paying the patent [work permit] fee each month, it is easier and cheaper to buy fake documents at *Kazansky vokzal* [railway station]. The rate of the bribe is almost the same, regardless of whether your documents are clean or fake. (Salim, 35, male, Uzbek janitor in Moscow)

In reality, Salim's observations are not unfounded. Many migrants I interviewed stated that if a migrant is caught by the police without any documents, s/he must pay a bribe of 5,000 rubles (US\$80) to be released. But, if a migrant shows at least fake documents to the police officer, the rate of the bribe decreases and s/ he can get away with paying approximately 2,000 to 3,000 rubles (US\$30–\$45). Indeed, when stopping migrants on the street, police officers cannot verify whether migrants have authentic documents. This is because immigration law lies clearly under the prerogative of the General Administration for Migration Issues of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (GUVM). Thus, district-level police officers do not have direct access to the GUVM database and must submit an inquiry to GUVM if they want to determine the authenticity of immigration documents (Kubal 2016b). Many police officers are overburdened with various tasks and uninterested in transferring each migrant's case to the courts. Instead, they endeavor to release migrants as soon as possible after they pay a bribe. This represents an optimal outcome for both parties: the police officer generates additional income, and the migrant continues to work in Russia using fake immigration documents.

To further investigate this, during the last period of my fieldwork in August 2018, I conducted daily observations in Moscow's metro stations, streets, and public areas such as parks, shopping malls, and supermarkets in order to gain insight into how migrants organize their daily lives and routines. Interestingly, wherever I went, whether in metro stations, bus stations, or parks, I observed many instances of police officers checking the documents and bags of several migrants. Through careful observation, it is possible to witness those migrants pulling money from their pockets to bribe the police. I also conducted observations at the Kazansky railway station, a primary migration hub in Moscow where migrants acquire fake and clean fake immigration documents. When leaving the Komsomolskaya metro station, I came across Bakhtiyor, an Uzbek middleman selling *registratsiya* (a residence registration document). Some passerby migrants approached him, asking about the price of the registration and whether it works when shown to the police. Accordingly, he provided a price list and told them about three different types of registrations. Bakhtiyor explained that they can buy a "handwritten registration" for 300 rubles (US\$5), a "printed registration" for 500 rubles (US\$8), or a "clean fake registration" for 1,500 rubles (US\$25). When the migrants asked him which worked best, Bakhtiyor responded that the "clean fake registration" was the best since it can be found in the official database. Furthermore, Bakhtiyor described the other two types—handwritten and printed registrations—as fakes not existing in the official database, which may cause problems if the migrants were caught by immigration officials during raids. He made clear, however, that the printed registration would be sufficient to convince police officers on the street, who often lack the time and energy to check the authenticity of documents. It is noteworthy here that Bakhtiyor honestly informed his potential clients in advance of the pros and cons regarding when and where his products work. This example illustrates that what identifies a document as fake or real is not simply its quality as authentic; contextual and situational factors also matter.

In addition to contextual and situational factors, migrant's individual navigational skills are also important. The case of Hoshim (33, male) and his brother Nodirbek (25, male) provides a relevant example. On April 14, 2015, Hoshim and Nodirbek visited Moscow's Red Square for sightseeing. Hoshim was planning to return to Uzbekistan the next day, so he wanted to do some sightseeing before leaving Moscow. In fact, Hoshim had a fake work permit and residence registration, but his brother Nodirbek had an authentic patent and "clean fake" residence registration that would appear in the database if checked. If these two brothers were stopped and checked, one may quickly assume that Hoshim would experience trouble with the police since his documents were fake, while Nodirbek would be allowed to go free. As anticipated, when exiting the Okhotny Ryad metro station, the police stopped both Hoshim and Nodirbek for a document check, and the two brothers were taken to a small room inside the metro station where the police usually check migrants' documents. Ironically, Nodirbek ended up paying a bribe to the police officer, whereas Hoshim was allowed to go without losing any money. While taking the bribe, the police officer praised Hoshim for going "legal" and warned Nodirbek that he would not forgive him the next time if he was caught with fake documents. The police officer also added that Nodirbek should follow his brother's example and go "legal" in Moscow. When I asked Hoshim to comment on this situation, he replied that his brother was a young, inexperienced migrant and did not know how to behave when stopped by the police. Unlike his brother, Hoshim was street smart and knew how to appear "legal" when talking with the police. Hoshim explained that one's legal status does not entirely depend on the existence of authentic documents. Instead, and more importantly, one must master the street rules and learn how to perform "legality." This anecdotal evidence illustrates the importance of informal rules and street life in migrant legal adaptation processes and reveals the peculiarities of Russia's immigration legal regime, wherein migrant's legal status remains fluid and depends on contextual factors and individual artistic skills.

The case of these two brothers is far from unique. I observed many similar incidents during my fieldwork, where street smartness, knowledge of the informal rules, and bribe-negotiation skills played a decisive role in migrant-police interactions. Aziz's experience with a police officer illustrates this:

Two weeks ago, my friend Olim and I were returning to our accommodation from work. Suddenly, a police officer popped up in our way and asked both of us to show our documents. My friend Olim had documents (although fake), but I forgot my documents in the apartment. After checking us, the police officer said that Olim can go, but he asked me to follow him to the police station. Olim did not want to leave me alone and tried to negotiate with the police officer. But I immediately stopped Olim and asked him to leave me alone with the police. Because Olim came to Moscow recently, he did not know that police officers were psychologists and their expectation of the bribe rate largely depends on the migrant's behavior. By trying to help me, Olim was actually increasing my value, which in turn results in a higher bribe expectation. In an everyday situation, for example, where the normal bribe rate is 500 to 1,000 rubles (US\$8–\$15), I might have ended up paying 2,000 rubles (US\$30) if Olim continued to negotiate further with the policeman. If your friend walks away and leaves you alone, the police understand that there is no one who will get you out of trouble, so he will release you for 500 rubles. Because I had many similar experiences, I was not afraid of the police, and this time I decided not to pay even a single ruble to him. The police officer locked me up in a temporary cell and offered to release me if I gave him 1,000 rubles. I knew that he would not keep me long, and I told him that he can keep me in the cell forever, if he wanted. As anticipated, the police officer kept me in the cell for three hours and, finally, after seeing that I was determined not to give him any money, he became frustrated and threw me out of the police station, swearing loudly "*poshel na khuy churka*" [fuck off, dumb ass]. Due to my patience, I was able to save 1,000 rubles. The only bad thing was that I was hungry and could not eat until I was released. (Aziz, 32, male, Uzbek construction worker in Moscow)

Sardor's story is even more intriguing, illustrating migrants' resiliency and resourcefulness. On January 20, 2016, Sardor finished work quite late and missed the last train to his accommodation, situated in a Moscow province district. He only had 200 rubles in his pocket, and it was freezing outside, with an air temperature of around −18°C. Thus, he needed to find alternative accommodations urgently. Suddenly, he saw two police officers on a night patrol at the station. Because Sardor needed a place to stay, he started screaming and pretended to be drunk, hoping that the police officers would notice him and then take him to a police station where he could spend the night. As expected, the two police officers quickly approached Sardor, and one of them kicked him in the ass, a method typically applied to show that Central Asian migrants are nobodies in Russia. Sardor needed a place to stay, so he did not react to the police officer's action and obediently followed their orders. When they reached the station, Sardor was placed in a cell where migrants are temporarily kept. But Sardor was aware that the police would not keep him long, so he needed to do something in order to extend his stay in the cell until the morning. Luckily, Sardor had a Huawei tablet with him, which had lots of pornographic movies on it. He quickly began playing one of the finest movies, hoping that the police officers would be interested. This strategy

Figure 8. Russian police officers work hard and hunt for money (i.e., migrants) during cold winter days. Moscow, January 2015. Photo by author.

worked well and grabbed the police officers' attention, since they were bored with their daily routines and eager to do something fun to kill time. Sardor also had cigarettes with him, and he gave the entire pack to them. Given these strategies, Sardor managed to please the police officers and quickly befriended them. As a result, Sardor was allowed to sleep in the cell until morning.

These examples suggest that Uzbek migrants are not merely passive pawns constrained by a repressive and corrupt legal environment but are resourceful, displaying the capacity to adapt to the situation in their host country. Street smartness, knowledge of the informal rules, and mastering bribery skills remain crucial to migrants' survival. Migrants understand that police officers are more interested in generating additional income from migrants than transferring their cases to court for deportation, as exemplified in the following:

Police officers also have a conscience. For example, you agree to a 500-ruble bribe, but you only have a 1,000-ruble banknote. You give them 1,000 rubles and they return 500 rubles to you. As Russians say, "*dogovor dorozhe deneg*" [an agreement is more valuable than money]. You can negotiate the bribe rate with the police, just like you negotiate the price of potatoes in a bazaar. You state your offer, he asks you to add a little, and you agree. Police officers are also people, and they have children. They have no interest in transferring our cases to the courts or to the immigration office. If they send our cases to court, they will not make any money. Secondly, it will be extra work for them, like going to the court and so on. It is easier for them to take our money and release us. They transfer our cases to court only when they have a special order or "plan" from their boss, which directs them to find a certain number of migrants for deportation on that day. (Soli, 41, male, Uzbek taxi driver in Moscow)

During my fieldwork I also conducted in-depth (semistructured) interviews with 100 Central Asian migrants in Moscow (July–August 2015), asking about their daily experiences with Russian police officers (among 14 other topics). Briefly, the basic characteristics of my informants were as follows: 92 percent were male, given the reality of the gendered constitution of Central Asian migrants (approximately 80 percent of all Central Asian migrants are male). In addition, the majority of the interviewees were young, ranging in age from 21 to 45 years old (92 percent), married (62 percent), and had completed upper secondary school or a vocational education (84 percent). In terms of employment they worked in construction (55 percent), at a supermarket (10 percent), as a cleaner and in housing maintenance (8 percent), in a warehouse (5 percent), as a domestic worker (4 percent), as a taxi driver (4 percent), in a bakery (3 percent), and in other sectors (11 percent). Only one-third of the informants (31 percent) could easily communicate in the Russian language.

In the next section I present some relevant empirical examples focused on migrant-police interactions. These include (a) relationships between migrant workers and the police, (b) corruption and bribes, and (c) migrants' navigational strategies and informal practices. Police corruption remains widespread: 85 percent of the migrants I interviewed indicated that they had paid a bribe to Russian police officers. The process of negotiating a bribe also seems well-established. Both police officers and migrants actively engage in negotiating the rules of the game. Usually (in 55 percent of my cases), police officers initiate bribery and openly state the amount they want. Then, migrants negotiate and try to lower the amount of the bribe. In almost as many instances, though (45 percent), the police officer does not directly ask for a bribe but drops a hint, saying something like, "What do you think? What shall I do with you?" Then, the migrant is expected to take the initiative and state the amount he or she can pay. But police officers usually increase the amount and demand more money. My interviews showed that police corruption has become a norm within the migrant labor market to the extent that 96 percent of the migrants I interviewed provided the same amount for the average bribe (500 to 1,000 rubles).

Of the migrants I interviewed, 76 percent stated that Russian police officers now commonly ask for a bribe in migrants' native languages. One of the Uzbek interviewees explained: "Look, we need money and we came to Russia and we are all trying to learn Russian. The same logic applies to police officers. Migrants are feeding their kids. So, police officers are also trying to learn Uzbek. We all need to learn the languages that feed us."

The majority of my interviewees (89 percent) believed that police officers' primary motivation for stopping migrants on the street was not aimed at maintaining law and order but to find problems in migrants' documents and subsequently pressure them to pay a bribe. And because it is almost impossible for a migrant to be "fully legal" in the Russian context, more than three-quarters (78 percent) said that possessing real, authentic documents is not associated with a significantly lower likelihood of paying a bribe to a police officer. Despite widespread police corruption, however, only 4 percent of the migrants I interviewed referred to corrupt policemen as their primary problem. More crippling were the high work-permit (patent) fees (43 percent) and homesickness (25 percent).

## MIGRANT S' EVERYDAY ENCOUNTERS WITH IMMIGRATION OFFICIALS

In this section I focus on the everyday interactions between Russian immigration officials and migrant workers. When examining these daily interactions, I present empirical examples encompassing two different periods: (1) empirical data covering developments between January of 2014 and April of 2016, when the Federal Migration Service (FMS) was responsible for migration management in Russia and (2) empirical data focusing on the post-FMS or GUVM period (April of 2016 through August of 2018), when FMS was dissolved by Presidential Decree on April 5, 2016, after which its functions were transferred to the General Administration for Migration Issues (GUVM) of the Russian Ministry of the Interior. The presentation of empirical data reflects this chronological order.

In 2014, during my first year of fieldwork, I conducted observations at several FMS offices in the north of Moscow. On January 24 I visited a local FMS office in Moscow's Bibirevo district. When I approached the FMS office, I found hundreds of Central Asian migrants standing in line to submit their documents for work permits. Despite the freezing temperature, around −25°C, all migrants were forced to wait outside, queuing in an area consisting of an iron-bar fenced-in space.  This scene left me with the impression that Russian authorities treat migrants as subpar humans. Since there were hundreds of migrants queuing, I did not wait long and asked the person in charge of the queue to add my name to his registration book. He registered my name and told me to return in three days.

As planned, I returned to the Bibirevo FMS office on January 27 early in the morning. After waiting approximately 45 minutes, I was finally allowed to enter the FMS building, where migrants were submitting their documents and biometric data. Inside the office, and together with migrants, I again waited in a queue among those waiting to speak to an FMS official. When standing in the queue, I saw three migrants approach the FMS official managing the queue and ask him if he could expedite the processing of their work permit application if they "thanked him" properly. The FMS official smiled and positively welcomed this gesture but

Figure 9. Reception facility at an FMS Office in Moscow's Bibirevo district. January 2014. Photo by author.

pointed to one Uzbek man standing near the reception area, assuring them that he could fix everything. The three migrants then approached the Uzbek intermediary, asking him if he could help them with their documents. The Uzbek intermediary explained, "If you give me 35,000 rubles (US\$560), I will create a clean work permit for you. I always work *halol* (honestly), and people who get their documents through me experience no legal problems. As I said, I always work *halol*." Afterward, he gave the migrants his phone number and instructed them to call him after 6 p.m. Interestingly, this Uzbek man was not an official employee of FMS but rather a *posrednik* (intermediary) whose main function was to act as a bridge between migrants and FMS officials by facilitating the informal transactions between the two parties. From my observations I concluded that the FMS employee never directly accepted the bribe; instead, they use the *posrednik*'s services to keep themselves free of reproach from corruption charges. That is, the FMS employees used well-organized, institutionalized, and well-established informal practices to accept bribes. Migrants were familiar with this practice and, therefore, primarily used this informal system to obtain work permits.

On April 7, 2014, I visited another FMS office in the north of Moscow. It was a typical workday at FMS, with about 500 to 600 migrants waiting in line. Dozens of buses were situated near the FMS building, bringing many migrants from the Moscow region. I spotted migrants from almost all of the post-Soviet republics, including Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Kyrgyz, Moldovans, Tajik, Ukrainians, and Uzbeks. There were only a few female migrants; approximately 80 percent of all visitors were men. There were no public toilets on the FMS premises. Owing to the large number of migrants, some were pushing the line forward, and the FMS officers screamed and cursed at the migrants to maintain order. The FMS employees did not show any respect toward the migrants and openly used the racial slur *churka* (dumb ass) toward those migrants who attempted to jump the queue. Since I was viewed as a part of the crowd, I also experienced the "privileges" of being a migrant worker.

Figure 10. Russian Federal Migration Service Office in the north of Moscow. Migrants line up to apply for work permits. Photo by author.

In fact, FMS was blamed for the chaos, since there was no area for those migrants who had to wait, even in freezing temperatures. But FMS created those queues intentionally, because the queues served as a *kormushka* (feeding trough).

A small "bistro" café situated at the FMS office's gate sold coffee, tea, and snacks to migrants, although the main function of this café was not to sell food and drinks; rather, it served as a place for migrants and middlemen to negotiate the price of two main services: (1) fast-track access to the FMS building for a fee and (2) facilitating a bribe for applying for and receiving a work permit. In truth, this café, owned by Armenian migrants, did not exist the previous year. Before opening the café, the Armenian migrants "settled" in the FMS office by selling coffee, tea, and hotdogs from a car's trunk to migrants submitting their documents for work permits during the cold winter months. In addition to selling drinks and fast food, they also offered the opportunity for migrants to warm themselves up in their car for 500 rubles (US\$8). In addition, they charged 1,000 rubles (US\$15) if a migrant wanted to enter the FMS building ahead of others. Previously, they worked as follows: a migrant arriving at FMS at midnight paid 1,000 rubles. As a rule, if the migrant wanted to enter first, s/he had to register her/his name first. Thus, migrants arrived at midnight, slept in the car until the next morning, and then registered their name first when the FMS employee opened registration. This business became quite profitable, and the Armenian migrants became rich, subsequently opening their bistro. Because of their daily presence in the FMS area, the Armenians established a close relationship with the FMS employees, allowing them to create an informal, fee-based fast-track system that they offered to migrants. The standard rate for fast-track access was 2,000 rubles (US\$30). If the line was too long, the price may increase to 3,000 rubles (US\$45). Migrants who did not pay for fast-track access were forced to wait at the FMS premises for many hours, in some cases, up to three days. The profit generated from this informal business was shared equally between the Armenians and the FMS employees. For example, each day they sold about 70 to 80 fast-track access "passes," collecting approximately 150,000 rubles (US\$2,400).

These observations indicate that the bureaucratic process of applying for a work permit was intentionally designed to be complicated, such that migrants would be compelled to approach informal actors (such as the Armenians mentioned above). The harder the process of obtaining a work permit was, the more willing migrants would be to informally pay intermediaries. As one immigration lawyer in Moscow explained, FMS employees are not well-paid; thus, they intentionally extend the document processing times in order to create queues. These queues then generate an additional source of income for them.4

Another area where immigration officials and migrants come into daily contact lies in the system of residence registration. In Russia all foreign citizens and stateless persons must register within seven working days after their arrival at the address where they reside. The FMS/GUVM, responsible for immigration control and management, also manages the registration service. But migrants cannot independently register their address. If migrants attempt to register, they must appear with their landlord. But few landlords in Moscow agree to register Central Asian migrants at their address, given fears originating from Soviet times that a person registered at their apartment might obtain co-ownership rights following residence for a certain period of time. Landlords, thus, are also reluctant to legally rent apartments to migrants, since they think that the apartment will turn into a "rubber apartment," a location where a tenant might bring another 20 migrants to the apartment, an illegal practice. Migrants cannot afford to rent apartments alone, given their low salaries. Typically, 15 to 20 migrants share an apartment and the cost of the monthly rent. These constraints create an informal market for residence registrations, whereby intermediaries, typically well-connected with immigration officials, offer a fictitious registration service.

The residence registration rules were further tightened following adoption of a new Federal Law (N 163-FZ), "On Amendments to the Federal Law on the Migration Registration of Foreign Citizens and Stateless Persons in the Russian Federation." Until June of 2018, migrants could register at the legal address of the company employing them. Following legislative changes, however, migrants were no longer allowed to register at the juridical address, meaning that registration was possible only at an individual's actual residential address. Clearly, many migrants could not comply with these new rules, which created further demand for the services of informal document intermediaries. The Russian police were also granted an additional opportunity to extort money from migrants since they understand that no migrant actually lives at the address linked to their registration. In other words, the residence registration serves as another source of *kormushka* for many Russian state actors, as illustrated in the words of one immigration lawyer I interviewed during my fieldwork:

If there was a desire to have more legal migrants, they [the Russian authorities] could easily restore order by eliminating the residence registration requirement. Apparently, many forces do not have such a desire. One of our former deputies sent a proposal to FMS/GUVM suggesting the complete abolishment of the residence registration rules. He justified his proposal by referring to the large number of illegal migrants as well as to the extensive bureaucracy and extra paperwork immigration officials must deal with in their daily work. But, he received a negative response from a high-level immigration official. It is quite obvious that they do not want to abolish the registration system because they generate large revenues from it.5

Nasiba's case serves as a relevant example here. On August 5, 2014, I went to an air ticket office situated next to a metro station in northern Moscow. This ticket office was managed by Nasiba, a 40-year-old female migrant from Osh, southern Kyrgyzstan. Officially, she sold air tickets to migrants; in reality, however, her primary job was to act as an intermediary between migrants and immigration officials with regard to residence registration, work permits, and other immigration documents. Profits linked to selling tickets remained quite small, since Nasiba sold tickets quite cheaply without adding to the original ticket price. Instead, she generated most of her revenues from facilitating migrants' immigration documents. Nasiba was fluent in the Russian language and had a solid command of Russian immigration laws.

In addition to immigration documents, Nasiba also provided various types of services. For a fee of 1,000 rubles (US\$15), Nasiba checked whether migrants had any administrative offenses registered in different government databases, possibly leading to the issuance of an entry ban. Given that an individual could receive an entry ban even for minor administrative law violations, many migrants were eager to check whether any offenses might prevent them from reentering Russia. Nasiba also provided information regarding any pending fines applied to migrants, when and where they were issued, and, in cases of an entry ban, when, where, and why it was issued. These types of information were available only through the FMS and border service databases, since they shared a combined database. The database for traffic police was also linked to the FMS database, since traffic code violations were also linked to the entry-ban system.

All of these means of access were possible given Nasiba's connections within the FMS. Since many migrants were not in a position to independently secure immigration documents, the role of document intermediaries like Nasiba remained crucial in facilitating migrants' legal adaptations. Nasiba typically took photocopies of migrants' paperwork and sorted various other issues and procedures herself (e.g., completing and submitting applications). When the documents were ready, she sent the migrants to the FMS office and secured fast-track access for them so that they could leave their fingerprints and pick up their documents. When I asked Nasiba whether immigration documents produced at Moscow's Kazansky railways station were reliable, she said that she viewed most documents issued through sources there as fake. As she explained, at Kazansky station they provide nicely designed residence registrations and work permits, but each of these are typically fake and do not appear in the FMS database. Nasiba frequently boasted that the residence registrations and work permits "issued" by her office carried a 100 percent guarantee, thanks to her connections at FMS:

I had a colleague who worked with me here. Currently, she works part-time at FMS. She cooperates with us in exchange for kickbacks. Therefore, all of the registrations we issue are clean since we get them directly from FMS. If I created fake documents, I could not continue to work here, because migrants would come and shoot me. I am just a *posrednik;* migrants come and submit their passport copies and migration cards. I scan those documents and send them to our contact at FMS. After that, they complete the registration form, stamp it, and send the completed document.

One could argue that the setting up of Multifunction Migration centers in Moscow, Moscow region, and other major cities has made it easier for migrants to acquire legal documents. One of the first and largest multifunctional migration centers was opened in 2015 at Sakharovo, a small village located in the Troitsk administrative district, which lies 64 km from Moscow city. Unlike in the past, when migrants obtained their work permit documents through intermediaries and waited in long queues, as of 2015 migrants could obtain the required documents and apply for a work permit (patent) independently, without making an informal payment to an intermediary for services and fast-track access. The only disadvantage to this system was that the multifunctional migration center lies quite far from Moscow, meaning migrants must travel long distances and lose one full day of work.

Indeed, when we read the "law in books," the procedures for obtaining immigration documents might seem somewhat simplified. But, in reality, it has become even more difficult to legalize one's migration status. This is due to high legalization fees and bureaucratic uncertainties and inefficiencies that push many migrants into illegality. Another reason is that immigration officials have limited ability to generate informal benefits that were closely connected with the system of queues and work permits. Following the opening of multifunctional migration centers, immigration officials lost a rather substantial portion of their revenues. The only source of *kormushka* they now have at their disposal lies in the residence registration business. An immigration official who previously earned an additional 50,000 to 100,000 rubles (US\$800–\$1,600) monthly today must rely on her/his salary, hardly enough to meet her/his living expenses. Since nearly all processes and services are highly digitalized at the multifunctional centers, no intermediaries are needed, and it is impossible for immigration officials to take bribes.

Given these changes, immigration officials now appear to sabotage the changes, making it hard for migrants to obtain work permits and related documents. Many of the migrants I interviewed stated that immigration officials are excessively strict and refuse to accept migrants' applications for various illogical reasons not stipulated in official procedures. They require migrants to present various documents not mentioned in the list of mandatory documents, such as translating passports into Russian. But, when migrants present these additional documents, immigration officials continue to find issues with them. For example, one Uzbek migrant presented a translated version of his birth certificate, in which the original stated that the certificate was issued by the Uzbekistan SSR; accordingly, the translator also used Uzbekistan SSR. But the immigration official did not accept the translated document, arguing that "SSR" must be spelled out. One case involved the refusal of a migrant's application from further processing given the absence of a comma in the application. An immigration lawyer I interviewed provided this explanation of the flip side of these processes:

Immigration officials are simply sabotaging the process. They intentionally make migrants' lives difficult, hoping that they make noise and complain that the multifunctional migration center cannot serve migrants. They want migration services to be returned to individual districts, so that they can again calmly take money. Most likely, such logic explains their actions. Therefore, where corruption existed before, implementing changes would be difficult.6

•••

As the empirical material presented in this chapter demonstrates, both police officers and immigration officials are more interested in having more undocumented migrants than managing labor migration in a more rational and formalized way. This stems from the vested interested of Russian police officers and immigration officials, who regard migrants as a source of *kormushka*, whereby these actors attempt to "take their own piece" from it. The empirical material also shows that migrants remain active agents in these processes since they develop various strategies and tactics to negotiate the "rules of the game" with Russian migration officials and police officers.

The empirical data presented here should not be understood as an attempt to portray corruption, extortions by police, and other informal practices as arbitrary and unregulated. Although these processes and strategies may come across as a manifestation of corruption and a weak rule of law, they should also be viewed as an informal yet real mode of migration governance in Russia. Thus, these processes reveal the broader sociolegal context in which migrants' legal adaptations occur. From this perspective migrant legal adaptation processes in the context of a hybrid regime such as Russia should not be understood merely through the legal centralistic lens that emphasizes the importance of one's legal status and immigration laws. Instead, we must also focus on alternative avenues that account for the role of informal rules and practices in migrant legal adaptation processes. Thus, I conclude that the study of migrants' legal adaptation should move beyond legal centralistic perspectives that emphasize the merciless application of immigration laws (e.g., "legal violence," "legal nonexistence," and "deportability"). To better understand migrants' relationships to the host state's laws and institutions in hybrid regime contexts, a new analytical lens encompassing not only the legal centralistic approaches but also the legally pluralistic perspective accounting for informal norms and practices should be adopted.

# The Life Histories of Three Uzbek Migrant Workers in Russia

This chapter presents the life histories of three male Uzbek migrants in Moscow, which I label the "three heroes of the book." These men experienced many challenges during their initial migrant periods and then successfully adapted into the labor market and host society given their knowledge of the informal rules of survival and street life and their ability to adapt to changing circumstances. These three life histories resulted from my extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2014 and 2018 in Moscow and the Fergana Valley (Uzbekistan). Throughout that period I maintained regular contact with these three heroes and closely observed the developments in their life through intensive fieldwork site visits and smartphone-based communication. This difficult endeavor was possible given that the three heroes and I all hail from the same region in Uzbekistan, which enabled me to build a trustworthy relationship with my heroes and gain access to their daily lives and mundane activities in Moscow. Observing their lives afforded me the opportunity to collect their narratives related to informal adaptation and the street world and to observe situations where they maneuvered around immigration and labor laws and solved problems through informal rules and channels. I present these life histories in a separate chapter primarily to explore—ethnographically and biographically—the interconnections between various structural and individual factors described in the previous chapters. This presentation allows me construct how migrants maneuver through the Russian legal system and among the police, immigration officials, and border guards, and how they produce various forms of informal governance and legal order to organize their daily lives. Throughout what follows, I use pseudonyms for all three of these heroes and all of the other individuals that appear in the life histories.

The first case focuses on Zaur, an undocumented migrant who works in a supermarket and receives a proper salary (comparable to a Russian citizen's salary) thanks to his fake Russian passport. The second case revolves around the adventures of Nodir, an undocumented labor migrant linked to street institutions and who works as a guard and caretaker at a *dacha* (summer cottage) in Rublevka, Moscow, a property owned by a high-level official in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). The third case focuses on Baha, a loader at a warehouse, who experienced various hardships given his attempt to comply with Russian immigration laws. He later succeeded by using informal means of legal adaptation. The sections that follow provide the "thick descriptions" presented through these three life histories.

# Z AUR: BECOMING "RUSSKIY" (RUSSIAN) THROUGH INFORMAL PRACTICES

Zaur (35, male), a migrant worker in Moscow, comes from the Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan. He arrived in Moscow in 2003 shortly after finishing secondary school in rural Fergana. Before traveling to Moscow, he worked as a broker in his home village, a seasonal summer job where he bought fruits and vegetables in large quantities from individual farmers (*dehqonlar*) and distributed them to village-based informal entrepreneurs (*rossiychilar*) at a wholesale price. Typically, *rossiychilar* export these products to different bazaars in large Russian cities. All of these transactions take place without prefinancing and rely on trust and an oral contract, whereby the *rossiychilar* are expected to sell all of the products in Russia and then pay the brokers for the products they provided. In turn, the brokers are expected to distribute the promised money to individual farmers. Zaur's brokerage business created more trouble than profit, however, since informal entrepreneurs who bought his products went bankrupt and failed to pay Zaur's expenses. As a result Zaur also found himself indebted to several individual farmers who typically relied on the summer harvests to make ends meet. These events and the resulting daily pressure placed on him by various farmers eventually forced Zaur to leave his home village and search for job opportunities in Russia.

Zaur arrived in Moscow in the autumn of 2003, when labor migration remained a new phenomenon in Russia. But Zaur quickly adapted to the new environment, given that his classmate Mirzo was already working in Moscow and helped him find a job at a furniture factory. His salary was 21,000 rubles (~US\$700 based on 2003 exchange rates), and he worked at the furniture factory until 2007 without a work permit or employment contract. Given his stable monthly salary, which was considered high compared to typical wages in Uzbekistan, Zaur paid off his debts to farmers in one-year's time, allowing him to use his remittances to buy a fancy car for his parents and renovate their house in his home village. This granted Zaur and his family a higher social status and reputation in the village, which probably would not have happened so quickly if Zaur had remained in the village.

But Zaur lost his job in 2007 because of the tightening of immigration laws in Russia, which forced many employers to hire migrants with proper work permits and residence registration documents. Given his undocumented status, Zaur was forced to work in the construction sector for one year, a sector in which he could work without documents. Because construction work is considered "black work" (*qora ish*) among migrants, Zaur did not remain in this sector long. Fortunately, he had many connections from the street world through which he could "legalize" his status and, subsequently, returned to his former job at the furniture factory. In December of 2007, for a fee of 8,000 rubles (~US\$250 based on 2007 exchange rates), he bought a fake Russian passport and became a "Russian citizen" with a different name and place of birth, which situated him as an Uzbek born in southern Kyrgyzstan. This removed his connection to Uzbekistan completely from his new fake Russian passport. Since his Russian passport was nicely designed and identical to an authentic passport, Zaur managed to convince his Russian boss at the furniture factory that he had indeed received Russian citizenship by bribing a high-level official at the Federal Migration Service. Thanks to this new legal status, he easily returned to his old job at the furniture factory, but he was now hired as a Russian citizen and received a monthly salary of 45,000 rubles (~US\$1,500 based on 2007 exchange rates), an income level comparable to an average Muscovite's salary. Like typical Russians, he worked there only five days a week and took two days off during the weekends, although he continued to receive a salary twice as high as his covillagers, a position granting him the nickname *Russkiy* (Russian) among his village network in Moscow.

Zaur's success did not last a year. In August of 2008, on his way to his workplace, he was stopped by a police officer who asked for his identity documents. Without even thinking of the possible consequences, Zaur confidently showed him his Russian passport, proudly stating that he held Russian citizenship. But his confident voice did not convince the police officer who previously dealt with many similar cases and decided to check the authenticity of his passport at the police department. After carefully checking his passport against a database, the police officer identified his passport as a fake and informed Zaur that he had prepared an arrest report and was transferring his case to a public prosecutor, recommending that a criminal case be opened. It was highly likely that Zaur would be charged with document forgery, a criminal act according to Article 327 of the Russian Criminal Code. Not wanting to end up in prison, Zaur quickly found a Russian defense lawyer through his street connections in Moscow. His defense lawyer was street-smart and well-versed in bribery. Rather than trying to defend him in court, he asked Zaur to give him 30,000 rubles (~US\$1,000), which would be given to the public prosecutor who agreed to change Zaur's case from a criminal charge to an administrative offense, resulting in a fine and deportation to Uzbekistan. The public prosecutor kept his word, and Zaur received a fine along with an administrative expulsion and deportation order. After spending three months in the temporary detention center at Dmitrievskoe Shosse in Moscow, Zaur was deported to Uzbekistan in November of 2008, with an entry ban for the next five years (until 2013).

After returning to his village, Zaur married in 2009 and started a new life. But because he had worked in Moscow for many years and was accustomed to receiving a good salary, he could not readapt to the low pay and working conditions in rural Fergana. His salary was insufficient to secure even his family's basic needs. Working as a broker was not an option given his past experience with the *rossiychilar*. In his words he had already become "Russified" (*o'rishlashib ketdim*) and longed for his migrant life in Moscow. His desire to return to Moscow prompted him to develop new strategies. In March of 2011, after long negotiations and efforts, he managed to find common ground (*til topishdi*) with an Uzbek police officer in his home district willing to assist Zaur in changing his name and obtaining a new passport for a gratuity payment of US\$500. As a result, Zaur was now "clean," and he returned to Moscow in April 2011 as a migrant who had previously never been to Russia.

This time, given his previous bad experience with a forged passport, Zaur was determined to become "legal" (*qonuniy bo'lib yurish*) and follow all Russian laws. Zaur knew that his name was clean and that none of his previous offenses existed in the Russian state database because of his new name. But, going "legal" in Zaur's view meant renewing his migration card and exit-entry stamp every 90 days at the Russian-Ukrainian border. This process allowed many Central Asian migrants to remain legally within the territory of the Russian Federation, but this legal stay was limited to visitors and did not allow migrants to work in Russia.

Because Zaur was away from Moscow for nearly three years, things were different in the migrant labor market. After arriving in Moscow in April of 2011, he tried to return to his old job at the furniture factory, but he found no vacant positions there. Additionally, they knew Zaur's history with the fake Russian passport, which probably was the main reason they chose not to rehire him. Since he could not secure a stable job, Zaur had to work in many places until May of 2014, when he was again deported to Uzbekistan. Between April of 2011 and May of 2014, he worked as an electrician, a loader in a bazaar, a *dacha* caretaker, and a construction worker, earning on average of 18,000 to 20,000 rubles (~US\$500– \$650 based on 2011–14 exchange rates) per month. Zaur worked in all of these different jobs without a work permit since they were all based on a handshake agreement. In order to remain "legal," Zaur traveled by shared taxi to the Pogar border point (Russian-Ukrainian border) in the Bryansk province every 90 days. There he could renew his migration card and get a new exit-entry stamp in his passport, allowing him to stay another 90 days in Russia.

In May of 2014, FMS, with assistance from OMON (the Russian paramilitary police), conducted a raid at the construction site in the Moscow province where many Uzbek migrants worked. With other migrants Zaur was also apprehended during this raid. Since all of the migrants worked there without any formal contracts or work permits, their cases were transferred to the courts for trial and possible deportation. Before the court proceedings, Zaur and all of the other migrants were brought to the police department, where migrants were kept in a cell prior to trial. Knowing that all Russian police officers take bribes, Zaur offered 15,000 rubles (~US\$450) to one police officer there. But the officer refused the bribe with regret, stating that FMS was involved in this case, and, therefore, the officer was not in a position to take bribes.

As expected, the next day, Zaur, like other migrants, was fined 10,000 rubles (~US\$300) and received an administrative expulsion and deportation order with a five-year entry ban. He was then transferred to a temporary detention center (*Spetsial'noe uchrezhdenie vremennego soderzhaniya inostrannikh grazhdan*) in Moscow city, where he was kept for 18 days, until his deportation to Uzbekistan. Those 18 days that Zaur spent in the detention center turned out to be useful to him. Although the food and living conditions at the detention center were completely unacceptable, Zaur met a migrant worker from southern Kyrgyzstan who was street-smart and knew how to navigate around Russian laws. He told Zaur that he had a chance to return to Russia immediately if he managed to renew his passport within a month after his arrival in Uzbekistan. When Zaur asked him to explain more, he said that there was no shared database in Russia and each state institution—for instance, FMS, the police, and border control—has a separate database, and these different databases are only synchronized once a month. Even if a migrant is deported, this information exists only in the FMS database, and the border control service's database will only be updated one month later. Thus, migrants could easily enter Russia if they replace their old passport (with the deportation stamp) with a new one within 30 days. Not many migrants knew about this practice.

After being deported and arriving in rural Fergana in early June of 2014, Zaur moved quickly and secured a new passport in 12 days thanks to his connections at the district passport department. Immediately upon receiving his new passport, Zaur decided to travel to Russia by shared taxi rather than airplane, assuming that it would be safer to enter Russia through the Russian-Kazakh border, where, he believed, there was less control and more disorder. His tactic proved successful and he managed to get an entry stamp at the border, allowing him to continue his journey to Moscow, where he had good connections and knew how things worked.

Learning from his past mistakes, Zaur completely changed his strategy. He understood that he was already "illegal" in the FMS database, meaning that obtaining a real work permit and residence registration was an obvious impossibility. When Zaur worked in the wholesale bazaar, he was able to develop a friendly relationship with Mukhtar, an Azerbaijani immigrant in Moscow with Russian citizenship, who sold fruits and vegetables at a wholesale price. Coincidentally, Zaur's and Mukhtar's facial appearances were identical to the extent that a typical Russian would hardly distinguish between them. Given that Mukhtar was a Russia citizen and the similarity in their facial appearances, Zaur asked Mukhtar if he could use his Russian passport to get a job as a clerk at a supermarket, a position most Uzbek migrants in Moscow consider rather decent. This strategy rested on Zaur's understanding that for many Russians both Uzbek and Azerbaijani are *cherniy* (black) and, therefore, Russians can barely distinguish one *cherniy* from another.

In return, Zaur offered Mukhtar a 5,000-ruble *dolya* (share) per month. Because Mukhtar worked informally in the bazaar, he did not accumulate any points for his pension. Given this fact, Zaur made clear to Mukhtar that he would be registered as formally employed in the state records and receive social security and pension contributions. Based on these benefits, Mukhtar gladly accepted Zaur's business proposal and even designed a more innovative strategy. Mukhtar said that Zaur could use his original passport when applying for a job at a supermarket and opening a bank account given that the original documents are required in such situations. If these two key steps are successfully passed, then, Mukhtar suggested that Zaur would carry with him two documents to keep him out of trouble when stopped by the police or other law-enforcement authorities: (1) a notarized copy of Mukhtar's passport, and (2) the original of his *voenniy bilet* (military ID), a document testifying that Mukhtar completed his military service in the Russian army. Both Zaur and Mukhtar agreed to these arrangements.

Events unfolded exactly as Zaur and Mukhtar anticipated. Zaur approached the manager of the supermarket with Mukhtar's passport. After a follow-up conversation, Zaur's job application was accepted, and he was subsequently employed as a Russian citizen with a 45,000-ruble per month salary (~US\$1,200 based on June 2014 exchange rates) and two days off each week. He also managed to open a bank account at Sberbank and received a Mastercard for payments. Zaur was known as a Russian citizen in his workplace and received his salary in a bank account, a rarity among many migrants in Russia. Zaur also began enjoying free mobility in the city since the police check was no longer a problem for him. Each time he was stopped by the police, Zaur showed the notarized copy of his passport, together with the military ID, explaining that the original passport was currently at the public notary because of a sales contract issue.

In August of 2018, the last time I met Zaur in Moscow, he was still working at the same supermarket. Zaur was not alone this time. His wife was also in Moscow, working at the same supermarket with Zaur. Since Zaur had a good relationship with the supermarket manager, his wife could work at the supermarket informally, without any contract or documents. Given his *Russkiy* status, Zaur also managed to rent a three-bedroom apartment from the housing agency for 38,000 rubles per month (~US\$600 based on August 2018 exchange rate), which he used to generate revenues by subletting two bedrooms and the living room to 12 migrants. This business covered his apartment rental fees, as well as generating an additional 12,000-ruble (~US\$200) profit for Zaur. To keep the apartment free from police checks, Zaur paid a monthly bribe of 5,000 rubles (~US\$80) to the police officer in charge of the area near the apartment.

All in all, Zaur managed to change his social status from *cherniy* (black) to *Russkiy* (Russian) given his street smartness and his ability to develop various informal strategies to navigate the repressive legal system. Zaur used to listen to a song, "Moskva slezam ne verit" (Moscow sheds no tears), and believed that one must be creative and not afraid to take risks if s/he wanted to succeed in Moscow.

As shown above, given his street smartness and navigational skills, Zaur managed to adapt to the restrictive immigration legal regime in Russia. Because of normalized discrimination in the Russian labor market, where local workers with Russian citizenship received twice the pay migrant workers received, it was obvious that Zaur would not receive a decent salary even if he worked legally and possessed all of the required immigration documents. In addition to receiving a decent salary, Zaur also gained labor rights enabling him to complain about working conditions and claim overtime payment if he worked long hours. Hence, rather than trying to follow formal (legal) channels of legalization, which is almost unattainable given Russian realities, Zaur pursued alternative, informal paths of legal adaptation. These alternative paths provided him with greater economic security and relatively unimpeded mobility in a city notorious for police harassment and corruption.

#### NODIR: STREET-LEVEL ADAPTATION

Nodir (31, male) is a migrant from the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan. He is a talkative, street-smart, physically fit individual. He has a rich experience in wrestling and street brawls, experiences confirmed by the many scars on his body. This history is also visible in his postschool career, during which he was involved in an unconventional income-earning activity. Shortly after finishing secondary school in 2004, Nodir started working as an *ellik to'rtchi* (fifty-four), a new term originating in the Fergana Valley, referring to individuals who illegally transport (or smuggle) cheap Chinese goods from Kyrgyzstan into Uzbekistan, items prohibited under Decree No. 154 of the Cabinet of Ministers of Uzbekistan1 . While cheap Chinese products remain in strong demand, Uzbekistan continues to prohibit the importation of Chinese goods. This injunction stems from the vested interests of high-level state officials and business structures who established a monopoly over the provision of certain products by limiting the inflow of cheap Chinese products into Uzbekistan. Since these interests are formalized through a legislative act, Uzbek border guards and customs officials heavily control the inflow of these products.

As a smuggler, Nodir was to secretly transport Chinese goods and items (e.g., clothes, electronics, etc.) into the territory of Uzbekistan by means of cars provided by local entrepreneurs.  Frequently, he was spotted by Uzbek border guards who tried to chase him, but he always managed to escape them. Owing to his exceptional mountain-driving skills, many villagers used Nodir's nickname "Michael Schumacher," an internationally famous German race-car driver, when referring to him. But Nodir had to stop his smuggling activity in November of 2009 when the Uzbek government intensified its control over the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border, where border guards were instructed to shoot anyone crossing the border illegally. Not wanting to risk his life, he looked for alternative means to earn money, which led him to choose Russia as a new place to seek adventures. His decision to work in Russia was largely driven by the widespread trend in his village: all young men were migrating to Russia in search of better-paying jobs.

Nodir arrived in Moscow in mid-January of 2010. Like many Uzbek migrants, he worked without a work permit and regularly renewed his exit-entry stamp in his passport at the Russian-Ukrainian border every 90 days, allowing him to extend his legal stay in Russia. With the assistance of his village networks, he quickly found a job in the construction sector in the Moscow province. His tasks included various finishing and design works, such as window fitting, painting, flooring, and wallpaper installation. His monthly income was around 15,000 to 20,000 rubles (~US\$450–\$600 based on 2010 exchange rates). In this position he met many migrants from different villages of the Fergana Valley and established connections with the street world. These connections served as the basis for his new job as an extortion racketeer at Moscow's Kazansky railway station (hereafter, *Kazansky vokzal*).

*Kazansky vokzal*, situated at Komsomolskaya square, is one of nine railway stations in Moscow, which serves the Trans-Aral railway line (among others) departing to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Therefore, when visiting this railway station, one may spot many migrants arriving from and departing to Central Asia. Given the high concentration of migrant workers at *Kazansky vokzal*, many cafés serve Central Asian food, and many underground printing houses produce fake immigration documents.

Since Nodir had already been involved in street-based informal economic activities in Uzbekistan, it was quite obvious that his premigratory experiences influenced his labor market behavior in Moscow. In April of 2011 Nodir, together with three migrants from the Fergana Valley, started a new "job" as an extortion racketeer at *Kazansky vokzal*. The main form of their racketeering activities involved forcibly extorting money from Kyrgyz, Tajik, and Uzbek migrants (departing to Central Asia) through threats and violence. If migrants had no money, Nodir and his team either took their mobile phones or took other valuable items from their bags. In turn, Nodir sold these phones and items at a market in Moscow's Savyolovskaya metro station, where visitors were predominantly Central Asian migrants. On average, each member of the racketeering team earned a monthly income of about 50,000 to 60,000 rubles (~US\$1,500–\$1,800 based on 2011–13 exchange rates).

Undoubtedly, Nodir and his team's racketeering activities represented criminal acts according to Russian legislation, which could lead to a seven-year prison sentence. They knew that they needed informal approval—that is, "roofing" (*kryshevanie*) from police officers at *Kazansky vokzal*—to continue their extortionist activities there. But Nodir was street-smart and managed to strike a deal with the Russian police officers. According to their informal agreement, Nodir was expected to give a weekly *dolya* (share or fee) of 10,000 rubles (~US\$300), as well as secure their daily "recreational" needs such as cigarettes and vodka. In return, the police officers ignored their extortionist activities and did not react when migrants approached them for help. This informal agreement allowed Nodir and his team to freely and openly conduct their extortionist activities within the territory of the railway station.