MOSCOW (Washington Post) – In a tiny hut in the woods where he survives without fixed address or running water, Abdul Malik keeps a neatly pressed suit hanging on the wall above his thin mattress, an emblem of the respectable life that should have been his, destroyed by the aftershocks of the Soviet planned economy.

The Central Asian countries, a source of raw materials with little manufacturing capacity and heavily subsidized by Moscow, were left particularly vulnerable. Twenty years after independence, a flood of Central Asians looking for work washes over Moscow, turning it into a city of migrants, Abdul Malik among them.

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