(Eastern Post – London, October 2025)

When Russia’s leading banker and long-time ally of Vladimir Putin, German Gref, declares that “millions of skilled migrants” are needed to sustain national growth, he is not speaking for the Russian people. He is speaking for the class he serves — the financiers, the oligarchs, and the Westernised technocrats who have long treated Russia as a corporate entity, not as a homeland.
The country, he claims, must import foreign labour to achieve 3.2% annual growth — the sacred figure of capital’s reproduction rate. Yet behind the economic jargon lies a political truth: the financial elite cannot maintain their profits without replenishing the cheap workforce they themselves have exhausted.
Russia’s citizens know this well. They have watched as their wages stagnated while the state subsidised banks, armies, and monopolies. They have seen factories close, small towns emptied, and local labour replaced by imported workers tied to contractors and intermediaries. Now, when the system begins to choke on its own contradictions, Gref’s answer is not industrial renewal or redistribution — it is migration.
The conflict is open. The people demand stability, housing, and fair pay; the oligarchs demand mobility, liquidity, and labour substitution. The banker’s speech is an economic declaration of war against the working class under the mask of “demographic necessity.”
Gref’s proposal to “attract skilled professionals from abroad” hides the same logic that underpinned the privatisation of the 1990s — the replacement of national responsibility with global convenience. When he says, “We must grow faster,” what he truly means is, the profit margins of capital must not fall.
The people, however, are not deceived. The demand for national labour sovereignty — the right of Russian citizens to work, earn, and live without being displaced by imported labour — is rising from every region. And it is precisely this demand that the financial establishment now brands as “populism.”
If Russia continues down this path, it will not achieve growth but dependency — on foreign labour, on speculative capital, and on the same bankers who engineered its economic subordination to Western systems of credit.

This is not about economics. It is about ownership.
Who owns Russia — its people or its financiers?

The working class does not need “millions of migrants.” It needs the return of stolen capital, the control of its own industry, and a government that defends its labour, not its lenders.
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