Speaker: Lewis Siegelbaum, Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor, Michigan State University
On 9 March at 18.00 in the Conference Hall.
Professor Siegelbaum (Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor, Michigan State University), author of Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile, will speak on the subject of his most recent book, Broad is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century, which was coauthored with Leslie Page Moch. The lecture will be delivered in English.
Migrations across ethno-linguistic spaces, spaces defined in Soviet political discourse as national, seem tooccupy an indeterminate area between internal and international. How to conceptualize these migrations that included both voluntary and coerced forms - from temporary work (otkhodnichestvo) in major cities and construction sites, to mass deportation based on national identity? I argue that transnational migration is an appropriate way to conceive of such mobility and that transnationalism should be understood as the familial, cultural, and emotional linkages between homeland and life at destination. One is a precondition for the other. In the Soviet communal apartment, transnational migrants moved between rooms, but only those who maintained links to their old room could be said to have engaged in or practiced transnationalism.
The key to recognizing the extent of transnational migrations within the Soviet Union and the possibility of transnationalism in one country is to take seriously the Soviet definition of “nationality.” The advantages of seeing migration in this light are several. First, it helps to historically contextualize the phenomena of inter-ethnic marriage and the post-Soviet “unmixing” of peoples, that is, migration to “one’s own” nation-state; second, it helps to clarify the similarities and differences among federative state socialist polities; and third, it gives us a new metric with which to assess what was generically Soviet and what was ethnically – or nationally – distinct.
Contact: (812) 386-76-34