ABSTRACT
It turned out that the crisis was shorter-lived than anticipated. Instead of 1–1.5 million who were expected to arrive within three to five years (a 22–33 percent addition to the pre-crisis population), some 500,000 arrived in three years (a 12 percent increment). A million immigrants did arrive – but within 10 years, rather than three. As conditions in the former Soviet Union began to stabilize in 1992, the immigration rate in 1993–2000 tapered down to a much lower annual rate – about 60,000–80,000 a year. While this was still six or seven times the pre-crisis rates, it was nowhere near the numbers at the height of the crisis.
