Russia's migrant workers live under the radar

Washington

ON A brutally cold day in February, hundreds of labourers from Uzbekistan mill around in the snow and mud of a construction site 10 miles outside Moscow. Surrounding them are a series of unfinished 18-storey apartment blocks meant to serve as homes for Russian military officers.

Work has stopped because the men haven't been paid in weeks. With nowhere to go, they stand around smoking and chatting at the vast project locals call "Samolyot" - Russian for "the plane", after a nearby monument to World War II pilots. At night, they hole up in a nearby shantytown of corrugated steel cabins. There's no shower, sink, or toilet - instead there's a row of blue portable toilets, each half-filled with stalagmites of frozen excrement.