Soviet “Blacks” and Place Making in Leningrad and Moscow

Abstract

Movement from the USSR's margins to Leningrad and Moscow, among groups ranging from traders to professionals, intensified in the late Soviet period. Using oral histories, Jeff Sahadeo analyzes the migration and place-making experiences of migrants from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Asian RSFSR, all of whom were often referred to then as well as now by the Soviet host population as “Blacks.” Sahadeo argues that the “two capitals,” despite being closed cities, became critical to advancement strategies for citizens unionwide, inextricably binding Soviet periphery and center. Sahadeo explores how race emerged as an important factor in place making but argues that this can only be understood through its interplay with class, gender, professional status, and other categories of identity. Soviet “Blacks” externalized experiences of difference as they sought incorporation into host societies while maintaining links between their adopted and native homes. Place-making strategies led them to see Leningrad and Moscow, not as Russian-dominated cities, but as modern spaces of Soviet progress.

Clean fake: Authenticating documents and persons in migrant Moscow

“…Rahat‐aka's remarks provide a powerful commentary on the post‐Soviet governance of migration: the sense that rule in Russia thrives on the production of ambiguous semilegal statuses and the way that bribes lubricate everyday relations in this space of administrative ambiguity. There is something distinctively post‐Soviet about this story, shaped by a particular history of attempts to regulate movement within the Russian metropolis (Matthews ), by particular legacies of racialization dating back to the late Soviet period (Sahadeo ), and by the persistence of a chaotic mode of governance that made the privatization of law and order a notorious feature of 1990s Russia (Ries ). It is a mode of governance mediated by the fact that violations of the border regime are policed by a class of state personnel, including policemen, border guards, and migration service officers, whose salaries are so low as to render the soliciting of bribes virtually inevitable (Light ; Rahmonova‐Schwarz ).…”

“…On the broader use of chernyi to designate certain non‐Russians, see Lemon , . Jeff Sahadeo (:338) explores the habitual use of languages of race in late Soviet Russia, noting that the origin of the term chernyi to designate people from the Soviet south, as opposed to those from South Asia or Africa, remains unclear.…”

Whither West Asia? Exploring North–South perspectives on Eurasia

“…They aim to do so by means of in-depth explorations into the nature of connections between Eurasia and what we term in this Special Issue as “West Asia.” In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest across multiple fields of area studies in the connections and interactions between parts of the former Soviet Union that were previously held to belong to either Central Asia or Eastern Europe. Anthropologists and historians, for example, have explored such connections through investigations into the experiences of labor migrants from Central Asia in Russia (e.g., Reeves, 2013, 2016; Sahadeo, 2012). Parallel to the study of such connections, scholars have also increasingly explored the nature of circulations between Central Asia and East Asia, especially in terms of the movement of merchandise and merchants (e.g., Karrar, 2016; Marsden, 2015; Steenberg, 2016).…”

Why Tajiks Are (Not) Like Arabs: Central Asian Migration into Russia Against the Background of Maghreb Migration into France

“…Since racism in the Soviet Union was taboo, it could only exist in hidden forms (Sahadeo 2007; Sahadeo 2012; Zakharov 2015). In post-Soviet Russia, it has become evident.…”