Jeff Sahadeo

Druzhba Narodov or second-class citizenship? Soviet Asian migrants in a post-colonial world

Abstract Increasing numbers of citizens from the eastern and southern regions of the USSR sought and obtained residence in the ‘two capitals’ of Leningrad and Moscow following the Second World War. This article exposes the uniqueness of late Soviet periphery to core migration, all the while placing it within a global post-colonial framework. Soviet policies that promoted the ‘friendship of peoples’ spared migrants from the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Asian regions of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic the ethnic violence and ghettoization that accompanied parallel movements to Western industrial capitals. Most appreciated the opportunities that awaited them, even as social spending on the periphery forestalled substantial economic migration. This paper argues nonetheless that subtle tensions existed on official and unofficial levels. Oral histories as well as sociological surveys demonstrate that nationalist and racist ideas and encounters challenged the friendship of peoples. Migration emerges as a complex and personal process as Asian residents of Leningrad and Moscow weighed possibilities, benefits, and risks of integration or separation.

The accidental traders: marginalization and opportunity from the southern republics to late Soviet Moscow

Shrinking opportunities on the Soviet periphery pushed increasing numbers of Caucasus and Central Asian peoples to late twentieth-century Moscow. This article analyses the migration experiences of two Kyrgyz, one Uzbek and one Azeri who left their native villages, eventually engaging in private trade in Moscows streets and markets. Using oral histories, the article reveals the importance and extent of trading networks across the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the opportunities as well as perils that faced those who participated in this grey-market activity. Traders confronted complicated dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and sometimes racism, from the host society. The migrant experience transformed ideas of identity and ethnicity, at home and away. As each realized economic goals, these traders also considered pursuit of social mobility, attracted by Moscows dynamism. Strong family relationships and a tenuous sense of incorporation in the Soviet capital drove them home in the late 1980s.

Conquest, Colonialism, and Nomadism on the Eurasian Steppe

Michael Khodarkovsky, Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. 290 pp. ISBN 0-253-33989-8.

Black Snouts Go Home! Migration and Race in Late Soviet Leningrad and Moscow*

39.95 (hardcover). Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century. Richmond: Curzon, 2001. 244 pp. ISBN 0-7007-1405-7.

Empire of Memories: Conquest and Civilization in Imperial Russian Tashkent

80.00 (hardcover). Chinara Ryskulbekovna Israilova-Khar′ekhuzen, Traditsionnoe obshchestvo kyrgyzov v period russkoi kolonizatsii vo vtoroi polovine XIX–nachale XX v. i sistema ikh rodstva [Traditional Kirghiz society under Russian Colonization in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries and Their System of Relationships]. Bishkek: “Ilim,” 1999. 213 pp. ISBN 5-8355-1038-1.

We’re Exceptional Too! Power, Peripheries, and Imperial Connections Julian Go’s Patterns of Empire Viewed from Russia’s Borderlands

Over the last decades of the Soviet Union, darker-skinned or darker-haired Soviet southern or eastern migrants in Leningrad, Moscow, and other Slavic cities became the target of racial epithets. Newcomers heard calls of “blacks” (chernye), “black snouts” (chernomazye), or “black asses” (chernozlopy). “Black”-themed insults extended to relatively fair-skinned traders from the Caucasus, though they were not applied, as they were elsewhere in the industrialized world, to South Asians, African Americans, or Africans; the latter were characterized as “negry,” a moniker that became racialized but lacked the bite of the terms hurled at fellow Soviet citizens. Blackness became a discourse and a category with which to articulate the anxieties of European, or white, Russians toward growing migration from their former colonial peripheries. Epithets and discriminatory acts in Leningrad and Moscow underscored a dimension to everyday interactions that the regime sought to conceal. Hidden in contemporary literature, such phenomena have proven challenging to access for historians of the late Soviet Union. Even as the USSR promoted the “friendship of peoples” (druzhba narodov), denying prejudice within its borders while condemning it elsewhere in the world, southern and eastern newcomers faced unique challenges in Leningrad andMoscow. Race emerged alongside ethnicity and nationality as an important category of inclusion and exclusion as migration to the USSR’s “showcase cities” grew and evolved. Exclusivist discourses and actions in late Soviet Leningrad’s and Moscow’s streets and workplaces elevated the status of ethnic Russians, even as benefits were spread unevenly. The extent, and the limits, of racial and ethnic prejudice in the USSR’s “two capitals” of Leningrad andMoscow connect the region to the postcolonial world as well as offering insight into the distinctiveness of Soviet life. Increasing late twentieth-century migration to Western industrial capitals triggered significant,

Russian colonial society in Tashkent, 1865-1923

Abstract This article argues that Russian administrators and intellectuals in fin-de-siècle Tashkent employed a glorified past to guide the development of their colonial community. Memories that focused on M.G. Cherniaev, leader of the 1865 conquest, and K.P. fon-Kaufman, the region’s first governor-general, recalled the importance of the city to the empire. But they also underscored the complex dynamic between aspects of conquest and civilization that were at the heart of the imperial mission. As well, Russian and Central Asian elites used tributes, monuments, and memorials to Cherniaev and Kaufman to advance their own particular interests in local society. The figures of the two leaders served to focus political and cultural debates at a time when unrest on the Russian periphery and at the centre added to growing doubts as to the compatibility of conquering and civilizing missions across the imperial world.

Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present

Sahadeo’s article examines Julian Go’s Patterns of Empire from the viewpoint of a historian of Russia’s southern borderlands of the Caucasus and Central Asia. Go offers a pathway for scholars of other expansionist regimes, including the tsarist state and the Soviet Union, to break down exclusivist mythologies and think beyond the nation. In turn, Sahadeo’s article examines steps toward a transnational history of empire that builds on Go’s peripheral model.