How Muslim Migrants Are Reshaping Russia's Dying Countryside

[TomSea]

How Muslim Migrants Are Reshaping Russia's Dying Countryside

ROZHDESTVENO, Russia -- Nazim Soliev is confident that he's good for Russia.

Or more specifically, the 35-year-old native of Tajikistan, the most impoverished of Central Asia's five former Soviet republics, says his presence here, 200 kilometers northwest of Moscow, is good for his adopted homeland.

"'Better you than the Chinese,' that's what my ex-boss told me," the small-framed Soliev says between double shifts as a stoker at the village school, earning him around $250 a month, nearly twice the average Tajik wage.

The "you" is a reference to Soliev, who speaks fluent Russian and also routinely quotes ancient Persian thinker Omar Khayyam's poems in Farsi, a linguistic sibling of his mother tongue, and 46 other families whose resettlement from Tajikistan over the past decade almost doubled Rozhdestveno's aging population of about 200.

Read more at: https://www.rferl.org/a/how-muslim-migrants-are-reshaping-russia-s-dying-countryside-one-village-at-a-time/29237540.html