INTRODUCTION

The possessions people are attached to help us to identify who they are. In migration, when people uproot their lives and adapt to another country, material objects from the place of their origin are likely to be especially meaningful and play an important role in the understanding of immigrant identity. This chapter examines the effect of a new culture on the life of immigrants by comparing possessions that people bring with them to Australia with possessions remaining in their households years later. Altogether, there have been several major waves of immigration from Russia and the Soviet Union to Australia: (1) from the late nineteenth century to World War I (pre-revolutionary labour and political immigration); (2) from the early 1920s to World War II (post-revolutionary immigration); (3) from the late 1940s to the early 1950s (post-war immigration); (4) from the mid-1950s to the second half of the 1980s (immigration from China and Europe) and (5) from the late 1980s to the present day (perestroika and post-perestroika immigration) (Gentshke et al. 2014; Kanevskaya 2008; Ryan 2005; Usuyama 2015). Some researchers, however, prefer different divisions of these flows. Thus, Ryazantsev (2013) singles out six immigration waves, whereas Ters (2015) claims there have been eight, and both of them give a finer division relying on differences between contingencies and motives. I focus on immigrants who moved to Australia from Russia and Ukraine or from the corresponding republics of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, as well as in the 2000s.

Possessions are viewed as providing valuable insights into how people present themselves and identify their membership in society. Various prior studies have examined possessions of immigrants and their role in securing identity, including the identity of Russian immigrants. For example, Pechurina (2011) focuses on the possessions of Russian immigrants in the UK that serve as a ‘symbolic representation’ of Russia and ‘Russianness’. Protassova and Reznik (2019) examine why Russian immigrants to Finland value some objects as special possessions and get rid of others. Some studies focus on the classification of migrants’ possessions. Suleimanova (2015), for example, distinguishes three main types: (1) one's own everyday household items (e.g. furniture, electrical appliances, dishes); (2) ‘symbolic items’ that satisfy spiritual needs (family photographs and other memorabilia) and (3) everyday household items provided by landlords (e.g. furniture and appliances).