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The events of February 2022 became the starting point of a new wave of Russian emigration. On the one hand, this phenomenon can be considered within a series of previous migration waves, on the other hand, the modern context leaves its imprint on the current migration process, making it very special from the economic and sociocultural perspectives. The article presents an attempt to analyze this specificity with an emphasis on the characteristics of the economic behavior of emigrants. Empirically, the study is based on a series of in-depth interviews with people who left Russia after February 2022. On the basis of these interviews, the authors built idealized cognitive models of possible options for the economic behavior of migrants. The authors considered a total of four models: relocation, which involves searching for a job in the host country; relocation, which involves remote work for a Russian company; relocation, which involves creating or moving one’s own business; relocation to a branch of a Russian company. Since the economic strategies of migrants are influenced by signals broadcast by the Russian government structures, the article analyzed the statements of representatives of these structures using the method of network cognitive mapping, which made it possible to reveal two types of official discourse in relation to those who left Russia, which differed in the extent of their criticism towards them. In general, the study showed that migrants of the latest wave are internally heterogeneous and fall into several groups that differ markedly in their motivation and patterns of economic behavior. At the same time, a significant part of them continues to cooperate with Russia in one way or another and, in principle, is ready to return to Russia. For them, migration is driven largely by security and/or economic reasons. Only a minority of emigrants left the country due to their disagreement with the current political course and consider the possibility of coming back only if the political course changes radically.
Puren et al. (Tue,) studied this question.