The collapse of the Soviet Union, ending with the establishment of fifteen newly independent republics, led to the emergence of several unresolved questions of population, belonging, and identity. While political borders were redefined through legal instruments and international recognition, demographic realities remained deeply entangled. Large ethnic groups, especially Russians, remained scattered across the newly independent republics and began to reassert linguistic and cultural primacy. In this context, both in Central Asia and the Caucasus, states lacking fully consolidated institutions were compelled to govern populations whose political and ethnic belonging and civic status were often ambiguous.

Due to the extreme instability of ruling nation-building practices, demographic governance has assumed a significant strategic character. In post-Soviet space, population policies, including citizenship laws, language requirements, and repatriation programs, are not meaningful per se but have served functions far beyond administrative necessity. They have been employed to consolidate sovereignty, delineate national identity, and extend extraterritorial influence. By shaping and instrumentalizing the demographic composition of the polity, once viewed as a static, taken-for-granted background condition, it has become an object of active political intervention.

This transformation is not incidental; rather, it reflects a broader structural reality: in states where sovereignty remains contested and where institutional legitimacy is still under construction, demographic and ethnic composition functions not merely as statistical data but as a site of political agency. The long-term consequences of the post-Soviet collapse, usually considered as territorial and economic, are also deeply demographic, and the policies emerging from this condition reveal a persistent logic of insecurity and power seeking, shaped by numbers, classifications, and the control of movement and identity.

Demographics as geopolitical reach: citizenship and control beyond borders

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 produced a logical reconfiguration of borders and, at the same time, a profound disruption in the long-established architecture of citizenship. The former Soviet population, once governed and unified under the same legal identity, was forcibly and abruptly redistributed across fifteen newly sovereign states. In many cases, these populations found themselves in states with embryonic legal systems, fluid definitions of citizenship, and contested narratives of national belonging. For the newly born Russian Federation, this post-imperial demographic dispersion constituted a strategic resource of soft power to be mobilized. In the absence of formal territorial control, which has been at the center of the Russian-imagined world order for centuries, the extension of citizenship to co-ethnic or politically sympathetic populations became a mechanism for sustaining influence.

This strategy, commonly known as “passportization,” has been central to Moscow’s foreign policy toolkit. It emerged prominently in the early 2000s in the separatist Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where Russia, after having recognized the two territories as independent and sovereign, unilaterally began distributing passports without the consent of the Georgian state. The practice expanded in scope and strategic function over the following

decades, notably in Crimea and the Donbas, where mass naturalization and influence of residents arguably facilitated Russia’s territorial annexation and military interventions. The political utility of passportization lies in its ability to reassert Russian authority through juridical and demographic means. By producing a population of Russian citizens abroad, the state creates a legal justification for extraterritorial protection, all the while fostering dependency through political affiliation, mobility rights, and social benefits. Practically, it creates conditions under which the intervention, in the Kremlin's narrative, can be framed as the defense of compatriots abroad and not as a deliberate aggression, as happened in Georgia and Ukraine.

This demographic strategy, crucially, takes advantage of the legacy of population movements during the Soviet era, when, in order to tie peripheral republics to Moscow, Russians speaking communities and political officials were purposely dispersed throughout the Union. In the post-Soviet context these scattered populations have been reimagined as an artificial extension of Russian statehood, allowing for a legally ambiguous and post-territorial projection of power.

The instrumentalization of citizenship in this manner reflects a broader recalibration of power in the post-Soviet region. Economic reliance and military alliances are still important forms of geopolitical control but are increasingly supplemented by demographic tactics that function outside of official conflict. Russia has managed to maintain imperial forms of reach in a post-imperial world by distributing legal status in a way that blurs the lines between domestic and foreign, citizen and subject, and territory and influence.

Demography and state consolidation: sovereignty from within

While the Russian Federation has deployed demographic tools to extend its influence extraterritorially, other post-Soviet nations have focused their demographic strategies inward, viewing population control as a key tool for consolidating sovereignty. In addition to creating workable institutions, these states have faced the concurrent challenge of defining the national body politic, including its composition, foundation, and level of inclusivity. In the context of contested identities, incomplete state formation, and residual imperial entanglements, demography has been mobilized to fortify internal cohesion and delineate the boundaries of the political community.

In this context, Kazakhstan serves as an example of how postcolonial redefinition has been facilitated by demographic statecraft. Russian speakers dominated many northern regions at the time of independence, while ethnic Kazakhs made up only a small majority of the population. The state’s response was measured but strategic: through the “Oralman Repatriation Program,” Astana actively encouraged the return of ethnic Kazakhs from abroad while simultaneously promoting the Kazakh language in education, media, and administration. These measures, which have become one of the major milestones of Kazakh independence, have collectively changed the republic’s linguistic and ethnic balance, making the percentage of ethnic Russians move from 38% to 16% and the Kazakhs’ one from 40% to 70%. Due to the gradual erosion of their status and the uncertainty surrounding their long-term integration, Russian-speaking populations left in large numbers during the 1990s and again after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

While Kazakhstan pursued a strategy of demographic inclusion aimed at reconstituting the titular nation, the Baltic republics adopted a more restrictive, legalist framework to restore national sovereignty. Both Latvia and Estonia inherited significant Russian-speaking minorities, largely the result of Soviet-era in-migration policies aimed at diluting titular ethnic majorities. In 1989, ethnic Russians constituted 34% of Latvia’s population and 30% of Estonia’s, concentrated especially in urban centers and border regions.

Since independence, both states implemented restrictive citizenship laws that did not confer nationality on all Soviet-era residents. Instead, citizenship was primarily granted to those who could demonstrate descent from pre-1940 citizens, effectively excluding large numbers of Russian-speaking residents from automatic inclusion in the new polity. Those excluded were designated as “non-citizens,” a legal category that conferred permanent residency but withheld key political rights, including voting in national elections and holding certain public offices.

Language requirements for naturalization, often demanding proficiency in Latvian or Estonian, have been justified by national authorities as essential to cultural integrity and social cohesion. Although contentious, the establishment of a "non-citizen" status was a calculated move to reaffirm the titular nation's supremacy and lower the perceived danger of Russian political meddling. This legal framework, despite being frequently presented as exclusive, represented an existential necessity: to restore national sovereignty in the wake of a former hegemon.

The politics of belonging: inclusion, exclusion, and the stratification of citizenship

In post-Soviet states, belonging is neither a purely legal category nor an inherited status. State institutions, ideological narratives, and strategic calculation all influence this dynamic and contentious process. Formal citizenship offers a foundational definition of political membership, but it frequently falls short of explaining the actual distribution of rights, representation, and recognition. Across the region, belonging is hierarchized—structured not only by ethnicity or language but by perceived loyalty, historical embeddedness, and instrumental value to the state.

This stratification is visible in the coexistence of multiple legal statuses—citizen, non-citizen, permanent resident, and repatriate—each carrying differentiated rights and symbolic weight. States decide not only who can fall into these categories but also how quickly, under what circumstances, and with what level of dignity. In Kazakhstan, for instance, the “Oralman repatriation program” has offered preferential routes to citizenship for ethnic Kazakhs returning from abroad, often with state-sponsored benefits in housing, education, and employment. On the other hand, despite being officially recognized as citizens, Russian-speaking communities, particularly in the northern oblasts, have received less clear signals from the government about their long-term status and cultural integration. The message, though rarely stated explicitly, is clear: some forms of belonging are more integral than others.

Stratification is not limited to national minorities; it extends to the broader regional labor economy, where millions are included economically but excluded politically. The Russian economy depends heavily on the millions of workers from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, especially in the low-wage and unorganized sectors. However, their social and legal status is still unstable. Although many receive temporary residency or work permits, these statuses are strictly regulated, subject to revocation, and infrequently come with long-term integration or political participation pathways. Because of their economic value, migrants are tolerated—even encouraged—despite being the targets of surveillance, police harassment, and legal uncertainty. In this situation, belonging turns into a transactional category: migrants are accepted because they satisfy labor demands rather than civic standards.

The politics of belonging, then, is not reducible to citizenship law or ethnic identity alone. It is shaped by the selective logic of utility, where inclusion is offered based on what populations can provide, and exclusion is justified on the grounds of cultural incompatibility, political risk, or economic dispensability. In many post-Soviet states, this logic allows governments to maintain both demographic control and political flexibility, adapting the definition of “who counts” according to shifting national interests. The ability to modulate inclusion in this way has become a subtle but powerful instrument of post-Soviet governance.

The demographic logic of power

In the post-Soviet space, demographic policy has emerged not as a residual function of governance but as a primary instrument of strategic behavior. Its strength resides in its subtle, frequently imperceptible ability to influence political realities, whether through redefining the parameters of inclusion, allocating legal status unevenly, or influencing population trends to change the distribution of power. In situations where traditional methods of influence, institutional integration, and military projection have failed or grown too expensive, demographic tools have provided a more adaptable way to exert control.

Yet the longer-term consequences of such strategies are structurally destabilizing. Demographic engineering embeds exclusion and hierarchy into the foundations of statehood, often at the expense of civic cohesion. When access to rights, resources, or recognition is contingent upon ethnic, linguistic, or functional criteria, pluralism becomes fragile, and dissent is more easily framed as disloyalty. Furthermore, the politicization of population groups institutionalizes zero-sum approaches to sovereignty and territorial control and discourages compromise.

At the regional level, this dynamic exacerbates fragmentation. Shared frameworks for cooperation deteriorate as states define belonging according to different principles—ethnonational in some contexts, civic or strategic in others. The region becomes more susceptible to geopolitical competition, especially from outside actors capable of taking advantage of demographic tensions for strategic advantage, as trust declines and integration deteriorates.

Demography thus emerges not only as a reflection of political order but as a mechanism through which that order is restructured. Post-Soviet states face more than just population control; they have to confront the longer-term implications of turning people into instruments of sovereignty. In doing so, they shape not only the internal logic of their polities but also the geopolitical future of the region.