When the USSR disbanded, citizens from across the Union discovered their citizenship had been revoked. In a short period of time, people soon discovered that being “Soviet” no longer held substance under the new democracy.
While people in the West celebrated the triumph of Capitalism over Communism, people whose lives had been shaped by the freedom of movement around the Soviet Union, were shocked that in many of the new republics, they were no longer welcome.
Racism, xenophobia and nationalism. The combination of these along with the mass poverty which fell across Eastern Europe in the 1990’s, caused years of stagnation. The reintroduction of borders under the former worker’s states, caused a ripple affect, where skilled labour and intellect quickly faded back to their countries of origin.
The ripple affect then expanded into those countries, where former Soviet citizens originated from. As corruption, nepotism and in some cases superficial regime changes, caused further economic stagnation and those same workers then chose to move West.
In the post Cold War era, the West benefited from changes in Eastern Europe, as economic crisis allowed Western Europe to welcome these “immigrants”. Their skills and qualifications were varied, their abilities to speak a multiple of languages were often utilised in politics, education and business.
In the late 1990’s and into the Millennium, as Eastern Europe began to emerge out of the economic wilderness and German re-unification brought stability to the West of Europe. Mutual trading agreements in energy, produce and manufacturing, opened the doors for greater migration across the European continent.
Out of the poverty brought by the end of Communism, a new world opened up without the constraints of borders and intelligence services monitoring peoples movements. A world where money could be made and invested. What these workers embraced, was “free world” economics, which the British themselves claimed triumphant, at the fall of the Soviet Union.