Nearly a Million Tajiks Have Taken Russian Citizenship Affecting Both Countries

The Jamestown Foundation  |  Paul Goble

More than 800,000 Tajik citizens have acquired Russian citizenship over the past decade, leveraging a unique bilateral agreement to secure dual nationality. This massive demographic shift has severely constrained Moscow's capacity to regulate Central Asian migration while triggering intense domestic backlash over the perceived dilution of Russian national identity.

The legal foundation for this influx rests on the 1995 Dual Citizenship Agreement, a unique post-Soviet accord originally intended as a blueprint for regional integration. While Russian businesses remain heavily dependent on this migrant labor force, political figures like Sergey Mironov warn that the trend threatens domestic cohesion. Simultaneously, Dushanbe relies on remittances, which constitute approximately 50 percent of Tajikistan's gross domestic product, to maintain economic viability. Despite rising xenophobia and domestic pressure to abrogate the treaty, the Kremlin is highly likely to preserve the arrangement to prevent alienating Central Asian partners and to maintain its geopolitical influence across the former Soviet space.

Comment

Moscow's retention of the 1995 Dual Citizenship Agreement exposes a fundamental tension between domestic security anxieties and the Kremlin's broader geopolitical ambitions in Central Asia. While domestic political factions push to restrict Tajik migration to preserve ethnic cohesion, any unilateral abrogation of this treaty by Russia would instantly degrade its diplomatic leverage over Dushanbe. This policy dilemma forces Russian decision-makers to accept localised social friction in exchange for maintaining the critical labour flows required to sustain their sanctioned industrial economy. Ultimately, the preservation of these open-border mechanisms reveals that regional hegemony and economic survival consistently override internal nationalist demands within the Russian state apparatus.

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