The economic crisis has led to the halting of construction work on sites across Moscow and the rest of Russia, forcing the unemployment of tens of thousands of migrants from the poorest countries of the former Soviet Union.
Rustam Nargyzyev left his native Tajikistan for Russia, dreaming of making easy money to sustain his family back home in a modern day gold rush of frenetic construction in 21st-century Moscow.
Although his jobs over the last two years have always been on the black market, he never had to deal with contractors who did not pay him for his work.
But Rustam has been out of work since the economic crisis unleashed a whirlwind of havoc amongst the half-built shiny business centres and glitzy housing developments sprouting up throughout the city.
The now-unemployed construction foreman has had to repeatedly beg his former employer to pay him the wages he is owed for his last four months of work.
Since October, he and 27 members of a crew hired to plaster the walls of a large parking deck have not received a single rouble. The gates of the construction site have been padlocked.
The contractor "owes 1 million roubles (22,000 euros) to the 27 men who have worked here for two months. We haven't received a kopek and we were simply driven out of here," said Rustam.
He now dreams of only one thing - "returning home".
For its part, the contractor has told the workers it cannot pay, since the developer of the project has gone bankrupt.
Rustam, who is now staying with friends, travelled day after day to the construction site to convince the contractor, MIK-2007, to pay the wages of his men. Without work, his debts have mounted to around 1,000 euros.
"I'm not treating you like an asshole! I told you that you will be paid when the client pays us!" said Ivan Vassilyevich, the deputy director of MIK-2007, speaking to his former employee as they stood at the snow-covered site.
And Rustam and his plastering crew are not the only ones suffering.
According to a report by Mayor Yury Luzhkov's office issued last December, the city in 2008 had 2 million foreign workers, 90 percent of whom were illegal.
Since autumn, when the financial crisis began to hit Russia, organisations monitoring immigrant workers have noted a skyrocketing number of delayed or cancelled payments, a situation against which migrant workers are powerless.
"In December 2007 there were seven complaints against debtors. In December 2008 ... there were 48 cases. This is very strong growth," said Gauhar Dzhurayeva, the president of the Law and Migration Association.
Meanwhile, the Association of Tajik Migrant Workers reported receiving over 6,000 calls for assistance this past December, while it recorded only about 1,800 such calls over the same period in 2007.
"There are five children in our family. I am the oldest," said Argen Abditalipov, an 18-year-old Kyrgyz man who has not been paid since December, but who nonetheless does not want to leave.
"There, in Kyrgyzstan, there is no work and when there is, the salary is very low."
And Russian authorities do not seem to be willing to help the very people who have manned the building boom and put their skyscrapers into the sky let alone fight the abuse they face.
"Objectively, we expect an increase in crimes that could be committed by migrant workers," Deputy Interior Minister Mikhail Sukhodolsky said. "When a person is without means of sustenance... some choose the path of crime", he said, calling on the police "to be more vigilant."
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