The Russia We Take with Us

A far less Gothic fate awaits the border-crossing Russian national who is posited not merely as a body, but as a self. Emigrés, migrants, contract workers, and students enrolled in foreign educational institutions are not exterior to biopolitics (arguably, no one is), but they do fit in ontological categories that allow for at least the possibility of subjectivity, agency, and interiority. Indeed, the very notion of "brain drain" (an international phenomenon that became a relevant threat to Russia once borders were opened) is based on a bodily metaphor that nonetheless stresses interior, intangible properties such as education and intellect. Moreover, numerous Soviet and pre-Soviet waves of emigration have established models for the lives and social organizations of Russian speakers abroad. But even the periodization of emigration from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union betrays particularly limited assumptions of the nature of "Russianness":  the massive outpouring of Ashkenazi Jews in the last decades before World War I doesn't even count.[1]These emigrants were Jews who were presumed to have a weak affiliation with Russian culture (and, in many cases, a limited command of the Russian language); their departure was just another phase in the nearly 2000 years of Jewish diaspora.  By contrast, the largely Jewish third wave of emigration under Brezhnev does "count," because the people leaving were, despite their minority status, perceived as thoroughly acculturated within the country at large. 

Soviet-era emigrations constituted diasporas, but, for the most part, they were short-lived, yielding to the powerful pressures of assimilation by the various host countries.  This is because the movements across the border were unidirectional and unrepeatable; with notable exceptions, those who left Russia or the Soviet Union were never coming back: what could be a clearer sign of removal from the state body than being stripped of citizenship? Biopolitically, the populations of these diasporas constituted a nearly non-renewable resource:  Russian-speakers abroad could not be expected to "breed true," nor could they count on reinforcements from the mother country. These waves of emigration were not what is today considered transnational: for the home country, they were a loss of human capital, while for the emigrants themselves, these emigrations represented near-complete isolation from their former national homes.

Soviet and pre-Soviet emigration was never about simply moving from one place to another.  As far back as the mid-nineteenth century, we find Dostoevsky continually configuring emigration to American as a trip to the underworld (for Svidrigailov, the choice between moving to America and suicide is almost a toss-up). The Soviet years made the connection between emigration and death much more explicit, through continual reinforcement of the is trope: the White émigrés in Bulgakov's play Flight ("Бег")  are dead in all but name, while the heroine of Olesha's A List of Benefits ("Список благодеяний") can only redeem the crime of merely considering emigration by dying in a communist demonstration on the streets of Paris.  Even in the first years of perestroika, emigration was presented as a kind of civil death.  In 1983, the American documentary series Frontline aired an episode about the lives of émigrés called "The Russians Are Here;" when it was aired on Soviet state television in 1986, it was simply called "Бывшие" ('Former").  Nor should one forget the paradigmatic film drama of the Gorbachev era, "Интердевочка" (Intergirl), which manages to make the post-emigration death toll a transnational phenomenon:  when Tanya, a former hard-currency hooker has moved to Sweden with a client-turned-husband, her mother discovers Tanya's former profession and kills herself, and a distraught Tanya dies while driving her fancy foreign car. 

There’s no place like home

The dismantling of the Soviet Union introduced multiple complications to the idea of diaspora for this part of the world, complications that resonate with broader trends in diaspora studies.  The Soviet Union itself intersected with two prominent diasporic communities: the aforementioned Jews, for whom the Soviet Union was a prominent, but not exclusive, diasporic site, and the Armenians, whose homeland was part of the USSR (and whose nationals were not considered members of a diaspora when they lived in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, but were arguably diasporic in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region in the Republic of Azerbaijan). Ethnic Russians living in the other fourteen constituent republics were technically outside of Russia, but did not typically consider themselves as being part of a Russian diaspora; their language was the Soviet lingua franca, and Soviet culture was their native culture virtually by default. After 1991, such Russians found themselves ethnic, and in many cases, linguistic minorities in foreign countries without ever crossing a single border.  The Russian term for these countries, "ближнее зарубежие" (the "near abroad") is wistfully proprietary, acknowledging (just barely) the existence of new foreign vistas.  Suddenly, the Russian diaspora had multiple, heterogeneous sites, which in turn contained multiple, heterogenous "Russian" diasporas. A culturally Russian Jew living in Tashkent had visible pathways for emigrating to Israel or the United States, but not to Russia, whereas an ethnic Russian (i.e., of Orthodox descent) might have a mechanism for getting to the Russian Federation, but a harder time ending up in the U.S. or Israel (unless, as is often case, by accompanying a Jewish spouse). At the same time, the disappearance of Soviet-era travel restrictions and the rise of Internet technologies resulted in a complete renegotiation of the terms of diasporic life.  Return trips were possible and relatively common, while real-time communication has become reliable, widespread, and cheap. 

Just as the Russian diasporas were taking on forms that were unprecedented in previous waves of emigration, the scholarly interest in globalization and contextually renegotiated national identities was prompting a reexamination of the diasporic idea.  In his seminal 1990 article "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," Arjun Appadurai proposed a new framework for cross-cultural interactions in a postmodern world, isolating "five dimensions of global cultural flow…: (a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes, c) technoscapes (d) financescapes; and (e) ideoscapes." These "perspectival landscapes…are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part by their own sense of what these landscapes offer." Global cultural negotiations and renegotiations are never simple a straightforward case of influence, assimilation, or rejection; nor can any one of Appadurai's five dimensions be used as the key for explaining the other four.  Diaspora as such was not Appadurai's primary concern here, but his work (along with that of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall,  Steven Vertovec, just to name a few) has led to what Thomas Faist identifies as the "awkward dance partners" of diaspora and transnationalism. [2]

Russian diasporas after 1991 seem tailor-made for a more nuanced, polyvalent approach to transcultural processes.  The two post-Soviet decades that have come and gone provide a wonderfully messy and productive clash between postmodernism's flexibility regarding identity, ideology, and culture on the one hand, and the new circulations of Russian and former Russian citizens who are the product of a rigid, quasi-modernist, quasi-medieval classificatory system of ethnicity that is entirely opaque to the rest of the world. While nationalists within the Russian Federation are doubling down on blood-and-soil definitions of Russianness, Russian-identified diasporic subjects are confronted by essentialism in their new host countries, while taking the opportunity to attempt a redefinition of Russian identity that puts the diaspora at the center rather than the periphery.

Next: The Russia That We Invent

Notes

[1] [Insert footnote on emigration scholarship]

[2] [Insert footnote on the huge body of work regarding diaspora and transnationalism.]