In the burgeoning literature on contemporary migration to Russia, we have lacked the thorough historical grounding that Jeff Sahadeo's Voices from the Soviet Edge provides. Looking back into late Soviet-era migration through oral histories, Sahadeo elucidates the deeply emotive perspectives of Soviet citizens hailing from Central Asia, the Caucasus, and eastern Russia as they chronical their journeys to the cosmopolitan megapolises of European Russia. Hope, hard work, everyday life, nostalgia, memory, race, and core-periphery relations emerge as major themes. These concepts are not equally developed, but the book provides a thought-provoking basis for considering and reconsidering ideological constructs like the friendship of the peoples, and the emotional attachment people had to these ideas.
Sahadeo's book offers two great contributions, and likely more as the rich and theoretically probing text will resonate with scholars from numerous disciplinary backgrounds. First, it offers historical context for contemporary migration patterns in Eurasia. Second, it takes readers on a very personal journey into everyday Soviet life, social relations, and engagements with the state.
The similarities between Soviet and contemporary migration are at times so palpable that it is easy to forget this is an account of historical migration. This observation cannot be reduced to the idea that elements of the propiska system remain and governments persist in their authoritarian orientations, rendering people vulnerable to poor living conditions, discrimination, and various types of insecurity, though these factors are indeed relevant sometimes for some migrants. Rather, a palpable sense that people have an ambivalent relationship to the law persists across both periods, where individuals engage in a continual process of deciding which aspects of the law are relevant and how best to relate to the state. Sahadeo shows that Soviet migrants’ responses to the law depended a great deal on their personal networks, experiences, and personality. Contemporary migration is no different. A striking difference between Soviet-era and contemporary migration is the keen knowledge migrants in Sahadeo's account possessed of their rights, and how that knowledge of rights empowered them in their interactions with a “lightly repressive” state that exists in the background, rather than as a central figure in their lives. Central to these migrants’ experience was a sense of agency, hope, and belief that hard work would enable them to accomplish any goal. These aspects of the migrant experience are notably absent in contemporary accounts that cast migrants as vulnerable to a domineering state that eliminates both rights and agency, though exceptional accounts show how migrants live “from the nerves” (Madeleine Reeves, 2015) or “muddle through” (Rano Turaeva, 2013).
In recasting the Soviet everyday, Sahadeo provides a contrast to the many accounts of dismal grayness and stagnation in the Brezhnev period. He shows the colorful centrality of southern-grown fruits and flowers, which could stand as a metaphor for the dynamism and diversity that Soviet minorities brought to the cities. Personal and micro-level accounts of dynamic market-based processes in the formal and informal spheres bring new vitality to the accounts of Philip Grossman (1977), Cynthia Buckley (1995), and Alena Ledeneva (1998). Diversity not only characterizes the felt realization of the friendship of the peoples, but also the range of experiences among the migrants’ interviewed, and the ability of negative emotions about discrimination and human meanness to coexist with positive recollections of the same experiences. Are these memories simply nostalgia? This is a theme Sahadeo revisits again and again, both in the text, in the wonderfully reflexive methodological appendix, and in a Sean's Russia Blog podcast interview. Migrants naturally remember their experiences alongside reflections of how the social fabric of the Soviet Union fell apart, which in some cases brought personal tragedy. However, their memories are not revisionist inventions of a history they wish had happened. Instead, reflections are based on real experiences and if nostalgia imbues those memories with a sense of wonder, promise, and potential, it should not be seen as inauthentic.
Sahadeo offers only a few brief reflections on interviewees’ thoughts and experiences of migration in the contemporary period. These moments suggest that migrants are critical both of their younger compatriots’ behavior and acculturation, and of the contemporary racism migrants face in Russia (though they themselves never use the concept of race). Sahadeo leaves off in a way that invites further theorization and comparison about the mechanisms that create disjunctures over time and the scholarly defaults in current approaches that may warrant reconsideration. Voices from the Soviet Edge, and its rich bibliography, should therefore be required reading for students and experts of contemporary Eurasian migration.
