Terrorists attacked Moscow. Now Russia’s migrants are feeling the backlash.

Life in Russia has never been easy, says Gazali Kukanshoyev. But life in his native Tajikistan is much more difficult.

That’s why he came to Russia as a student 30 years ago, and after working in various jobs, he eventually acquired citizenship. Now Mr. Kukanshoyev runs his own business and volunteers to help less fortunate migrant workers adjust to Russia’s labyrinthine bureaucratic rules, capricious police, and unsympathetic social environment.

Since he arrived decades ago, the government has made it progressively easier for migrants to come and work, and even earn citizenship. Though rules have remained murky, corruption rife, and migrants vulnerable to unscrupulous employers and authorities, the situation has seemed stable and, for most, generally bearable.

That changed with the mass-casualty terrorist attack at a concert in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall March 22.

The attack has jolted Russian society out of a two-decade-long bubble of complacency, pressured authorities to deliver on promised public security, and created a nightmare for Russia’s estimated 2 million migrant workers. That’s especially true for the more than half-million Tajik workers – a nationality shared by most of the suspects arrested so far.

“After this event we see more police raids on places of work, hostels, and residences” targeting migrant workers from Central Asia, Mr. Kukanshoyev says. “If someone’s documents are not completely in order, they will be immediately deported.”

“I notice the unfriendly stares”

Travel by land and air between Russia and the former Soviet states is generally easy and visa-free. When in Russia, workers need to obtain a specific type of work permit that is only good for one industry in a particular region. That has given rise to a good deal of corrupt document-fixing, which leaves workers vulnerable to police pressure.

Accommodation requires a difficult-to-obtain registration in Russian cities, and that has given rise to illegal hostels where migrants live in a kind of legal limbo, even if their work documents are good.

Last month’s attack revealed that this system, which provides cheap labor for vital economic sectors such as construction and the service industry, is also a human pipeline that terrorist networks can infiltrate with relative ease.

Russian security experts have long worried that if the United States left Afghanistan and the Taliban took over, the Islamist insurgencies that seemed banished for two decades would come roaring back. Tajiks and Uzbeks are substantial ethnic minorities in Afghanistan. Borders in the region are porous, and Central Asian regimes, though autocracies, are extremely weak.

According to media reports, thousands of migrant workers in several Russian cities were arrested and deported in the first week following March 22. Tajikistan’s ministry of labor reported that the influx of citizens returning to the country from Russia was much bigger than the outflow, saying, “Our citizens [in Russia] are fearful. There is panic. Many want to leave.”

The Russian authorities’ immediate reaction, besides cracking down on undocumented workers, has been to create a new “migration agency” to better regulate the flow of people and streamline the rules.

Ilkhomiddin, a Tajik factory worker in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg who doesn’t want to give his family name, says that after many years of working legally in Russia and overcoming many difficulties, he’s worried that the social backlash to the attack might make life for his family intolerable.

“After that terrorist attack, people have started to accuse Tajiks,” he says in a phone interview. “I tell them, ‘Don’t blame a whole nation of 10 million people for the acts of a few.’ But it happens. I have a Tajik friend who was evicted from his apartment because his landlord decided he might be a terrorist. When I go out shopping with my kids, I notice the unfriendly stares of some people. What can we do?”

The danger of Russia’s “rah-rah patriots”

The police raids on residences and workplaces are the worst in a long time, but they have been a cyclical feature of life for migrant communities, and tend to die down after a demonstration has been made.

A bigger fear – one shared by migrant groups and the Kremlin alike – is that the shock of Islamist terrorism may arouse the specter of Russian ethnic nationalism and destroy the relative comity that has prevailed in Russian society until now.

Though ethnic Slavs make up about three-quarters of Russia’s population, there are substantial numbers of other groups concentrated in 20 ethnic republics, and about 20% of the country’s indigenous population is culturally Muslim. There have been a few, relatively minor racially tinged incidents in the past, but Russian cities have remained overwhelmingly stable, safe, and peaceful.

Mr. Kukanshoyev is afraid that those days are over. “There are a number of new groupings, such as Russkaya Obchshina, who have appeared recently,” he says. “They get together, beat migrants, and place videos of those beatings on YouTube. The migrant community is powerless against such attacks.”

The incidents to which he refers are still few, but the fast-growing groups of vigilante-like Russian “self-protection” organizations are very real.

Russkaya Obchshina (Russian Community), which claims to have 90,000 members, declines to talk directly with foreign journalists. But in a manifesto posted on YouTube, the group’s coordinator, Andrei Tkachuk, says, “We want Russian people to create their own communities in every city and every town. We are just Russians who are uniting to help each other. Now Russians find themselves alone with their problems. ... We are protecting the interests of every Russian where our state cannot cope.”

Much of what Mr. Tkachuk describes, such as counseling troubled schoolchildren or delivering supplies to Russian troops at the front, sounds like standard patriotic voluntarism to which the Kremlin would not object. But some of the activities advertised on the group’s social media channels, such as organizing to protect Russian businesses that are “under threat” and military-style weapons training, will likely set off alarm bells.

While such groups raise the specter of interethnic conflict in Russia, they also threaten to create new independent power structures that run parallel to the existing ones – which would undermine the Kremlin’s authority and influence. The Kremlin will likely respond to this challenge by attempting to co-opt these groups, and channel their patriotic zeal into politically acceptable activities.

At a recent meeting with security officials, President Vladimir Putin warned against what he called “rah-rah patriots.”

“It is unacceptable to use the recent tragedy to incite ethnic discord, xenophobia, Islamophobia and the like,” he said. “Actually, the main goal of the terrorists and their masterminds was to sow discord and panic, conflict, and hatred in our country, to split Russia from within. It is their main objective. We must not allow them to achieve it under any circumstances.”

Experts say resurgent Russian ethnic nationalism is a tiger the Kremlin will probably manage to ride, at least for the foreseeable future. But the lives of migrant workers will likely grow more difficult.

“Every day there are new measures to limit and control migrants,” says Alexander Verkhovsky, head of the Moscow Sova Center, which monitors extremist trends. “What we don’t see is any measures to control the nationalists.”