Migratory flows from Central Asia to Russia have been taking place for more than twenty years, ever since the breakdown of the Soviet Union (1991), with a remarkable acceleration in the early 2000s, and Russia has become a place where migrants have now gained experience in terms of civic or even political organisations.
Among the primary incentives to organise solidarity, one can identify the management of the body of a deceased migrant abroad. As with many other Muslim countries, post-Soviet Central Asian states do not have commercial funeral homes: death is a matter of collective management by the local community of relatives and neighbours. Only specific services such as reciting prayers, ritual body washing or grave digging may be compensated financially or by in-kind gifts, but the nature of the exchange is never thought to be a service provider-customer one. In Russia, on the other hand, the funeral sector is notoriously contaminated by corruption and fraud (Mokhov, 2021), and even a lack of competence in some regions with regard to Muslim rituals. Although Muslim funeral homes do exist, for example, in Moscow or Saint Petersburg, most Muslim migrants do not address them; among their major reasons are the financial costs and their different relation to Islam (Oparin, 2020).
As in other diasporic contexts, the issue of dead care is particularly acute given the high number of Tajik and Kyrgyz migrants working in Russia and sending money home to support their families…