On the subject of immigration to Russia -- the menial labor work force in Moscow is mostly composed of non-Russians. Moscow is an immigration magnet, especially for illegal immigration. They do hard work for very little money. Every other construction worker is Ukrainian, and the rest are Moldovan. The small sellers in the street markets, selling food, cheap shoes and shirts from China and so forth, are predominantly Caucasians from Armenia, Georgia, etc., and also Uzbeks, Turkmen and Afghans. There are also a lot of Chinese and North Koreans in the Far East who do dirt-cheap labor. Living standards in Russia are much higher than in China, not to mention North Korea. For some reason, there also seem to be a lot of Turkish construction workers in Moscow.
There is also a large migrant workforce in Russia. People come from Armenia and whatnot to do grunt labor for six months or so and then go back (or stay illegally). Some 30% of Armenia's money comes from people's relatives in Russia sending them cash.
Moscow practically has the living standards of a big Western capital city (much higher living standards than practically Third World Washington with its immense poor population, in fact). Moscow is dripping with cash. Incomes in Moscow are something like 5 times the Russian national average, which in its turn is about 10 times the level in the rest of the CIS.
BTW, one thing I like about Russia is that there are no slums. The poor are not ghettoized in Russia -- they live in the same privatized apartment blocks as everybody else (excepting the nouveaux riches, of course). I was trying to describe a slum to a Muscovite friend of mine, and he had problems understanding the concept. "You mean like a Khrushchev building?" He's never seen a slum.
What still wierds me out are Afro-Russians, mostly children of Russians and Africans who moved here during the USSR. There's a popular talk-show host by the name of Yelena Khanga, whose mother is Russian and whose father is an African-American who was trying to build Communism in Tanzania and then moved to the Soviet Union. There are black people in Russia named Ivan.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal