Voices from the Soviet Edge

Jeff Sahadeo

Description

Jeff Sahadeo reveals the complex and fascinating stories of migrant populations in Leningrad and Moscow. Voices from the Soviet Edge focuses on the hundreds of thousands of Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and others who arrived toward the end of the Soviet era, seeking opportunity at the privileged heart of the USSR. Through the extensive oral histories Sahadeo has collected, he shows how the energy of these migrants, denigrated as "Blacks" by some Russians, transformed their families' lives and created inter-republican networks, altering society and community in both the center and the periphery of life in the "two capitals."Voices from the Soviet Edge connects Leningrad and Moscow to transnational trends of core-periphery movement and marks them as global cities. In examining Soviet concepts such as "friendship of peoples" alongside ethnic and national differences, Sahadeo shows how those ideas became racialized but could also be deployed to advance migrant aspirations. He exposes the Brezhnev era as a time of dynamism and opportunity, and Leningrad and Moscow not as isolated outposts of privilege but at the heart of any number of systems that linked the disparate regions of the USSR into a whole. In the 1980s, as the Soviet Union crumbled, migration increased. These later migrants were the forbears of contemporary Muslims from former Soviet spaces who now confront significant discrimination in European Russia. As Sahadeo demonstrates, the two cities benefited from 1980s' migration but also became communities where racism and exclusion coexisted with citizenship and Soviet identity.

Sujets

• Former Soviet Union
• Histoire
• Post-Soviet states
• Russia
• History of Asia
• History of Europe
• Migration
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501738210
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

VOICES FROM THE SOVIET EDGE

VOICES FROM THE SOVIET EDGE Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow

JEff SaHaDEO

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Copyright © 2019 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 2019 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Names: Sahadeo, Jeff, 1967–author. Title: Voices from the Soviet edge : southern migrants in Leningrad  and Moscow / Jeff Sahadeo. Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2019. |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018045871 (print) | LCCN 2018047146 (ebook) |  ISBN 9781501738210 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501738227 (epub/mobi) |  ISBN 9781501738203 | ISBN 9781501738203 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Migration, Internal—Soviet Union—History. |  Migration, Internal—Caucasus, South—History—20th century. |  Migration, Internal—Asia, Central—History—20th century. | Saint Petersburg  (Russia)—Ethnic relations. | Moscow (Russia)—Ethnic relations. Classification: LCC HB2067 (ebook) | LCC HB2067 .S34 2019 (print) |  DDC 304.80947/0904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045871

Image Permissions

Images from the RIA Novosti archives project and the personal photography collection of Professor Thomas T. Hammond on Wikimedia Commons are free to share and adapt under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CCBYSA 3.0) license and the Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International (CCBYSA 4.0) license respectively.

Terms of the CCBYSA 3.0 license can be consulted at creativecommons.org /licenses/bysa/3.0/legalcode.

Terms of the CCBYSA 4.0 license can be consulted at creativecommons.org /licenses/bysa/4.0/legalcode.

The RIA Novosti archives project on Wikimedia Commons can be accessed through commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:RIA_Novosti.

The photography collection of Thomas T. Hammond on Wikimedia Commons can be accessed through commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hammond _Slides_Moscow.

Cover photograph: People in line to visit Lenin’s Mausoleum, Red Square, Moscow, 1954. © Henri CartierBresson/Magnum Photos.

To Petra, Caroline, Andrew, Brahm, and Judie

My address is not my house or my street. My address is the Soviet Union. —David Tukhmanov, Soviet composer, 1973

Contents

Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Note on Terminology

Introduction: Journeys to the Core(s)

1.  Global, Soviet Cities 2.  Friendship, Freedom, Mobility, and the Elder Brother 3.  Making a Place in the Two Capitals 4.  Race and Racism 5. Becoming Svoi: Belonging in the Two Capitals 6.  Life on the Margins 7.  Perestroika

Conclusion: Red or Black?

Appendix: Oral Histories Notes Bibliography Index

îx xîî xîîî

1

11

35

64

93

116

147

169

198

205 215 253 269

Acknowedgments

Many years went into the making of this book, and I have many people to thank. An incomplete list begins with the seventyfive citizens of the Soviet Union who gave their time and thoughts for the oral histories that lie at the heart of the proj ect. Equally important were colleagues and graduate students who assisted in the interview process. Together, we tracked down Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Buryats, Georgians, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, North Caucasus peoples, Tajiks, and Uzbeks. Inter views took place over crackly phone lines, but mostly in person, in Ottawa, New York, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Baku, Lenkoran, Almaty, Tashkent, Bishkek, small Kyrgyz villages, Tbilisi, and Kutaisi. Those who located or interviewed these subjects from 2005 to 2011 include Lisa Greenspoon, Allison Keating, Altynay Teshebaeva, Shakhnoza Matnazarova, Rauf Garagazov, Tair Faradov, Mehrigiul Ablezova, Gulmira Churokova, Akamral Arzybaeva, Ryan Buchanan, and Ia Eradze. Bruce Grant and Madeleine Reeves served as excellent cultural media tors as I undertook my fieldwork in rural Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. I count myself extremely fortunate to have gained access to vivid personal memories and glimpses of both the ordinary and the extraordinary in later Soviet society and culture. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided the principal funding for this project. Internal grants from Carleton University assisted in realizing initial fieldwork and completing finishing touches. The In stitute of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and its superb administrators, Ginette Lafleur and Krysia Kotarba, provided solid technical help. I received support also as part of South Ural State University’s Laboratory of Migration Studies, with special thanks to Yulia Khmelevskaya and Olga Nikonova. The Azerbaijani embassy to Canada, the Uzbek embassy to Canada and the United States, and the University of Central Asia also assisted with logistics during research trips. The search for published documents on late Soviet migration also took me near and far. At Carleton University, Aleksandra Blake and our excellent library staff tracked down sources worldwide. Yulduz Kutlieva spent many hours comb ing through Soviet newspapers at our university library, and Patryk Reid mined the collections of Indiana University. Helen Sullivan, Jan Adamczyk, and Kit Condill at the Slavic Reference Service of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign worked with me from beginning to end. I also consulted Terri Miller

î

x