Abstrakt
Russian Federation is a third top emigration country; experts believe that 100,000 to 150,000 people now move away annually and approximately 1.25 million Russians have left the country in the last 10 years. One of the main destination of Russian migration is Europe, which is considered to be stable, safe and highly developed.
The imagination of Europe in Russia started to be formed from the time of Peter the Great, who ""broke the window to Europe"" and Europe became a model of the human development, the embodied idea of progress, the cradle of science and culture. This paper overviews the Russian migrants migration strategies and investigates the role of the myth about Europe for their intentions to migrate.
The author performed the research on a base on theoretical concept of the theory of cumulative causation and tried to answers to the following questions: In what kind of cultural, social, historical and economic contexts decisions to come to Europe are taken? How do perceptions of Europe change over time? The study is based on the field research conducted by author and in-depth interviews made with the Russian migrants in the Czech Republic and available official data related to this topic.