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As the Forest is Chopped, the Chips Fly: The Fall of Soviet Internationalism and Late Perestroika's “Refugee” Problem, 1988–1990

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2023

Lyudmila B. Austin*
Affiliation:
Davis Center, Harvard University, [email protected]

Abstract

By 1989, at least one in five Soviet citizens lived outside of “their” titular territories or did not have one, yet their lived experiences—especially poignant when the USSR dissolved—are not well understood. Using archival evidence and oral interviews, this paper focuses on two events pivotal to these communities: fatal unrest over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh territory from 1988–1990, the first perestroika conflict that produced the phenomenon of Soviet “refugees” in the country; and the Fergana Valley Massacre of June 1989, the first mass casualty event in Central Asia that displaced tens of thousands more. It argues that these conflicts became major regional and Soviet-wide issues that exposed the growing impotency of the center and contributed widely to the impetus to flight. This paper underscores how Soviet internationalism created the foundation for intercommunal “groupness,” or the various cross-ethnic nexuses that became especially apparent vis-à-vis these episodes of titular violence.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1 Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (hereafter GARF), fond (f.) R9654, opis΄ (op.) 10, delo (d.) 369, list (ll.) 1–230 (correspondence, proposals, and complaints from the citizens’ reception to deputy chairmen and members of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR). To preserve anonymity of the authors, I do not include last names.

2 GARF, f. R9654, op. 10, d. 369, ll. 157–67.

3 Ibid.

4 The highest estimation I have seen is from the Chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities, who reported that 73.1 million people lived outside of “their” territories in the USSR in 1991 (about one quarter of the USSR’s population as compared to the 1989 census). This number evidently included those who did not have “home” territories. Sources often conflate these groups. GARF f. R9654, op. 6, d. 221, ll. 2-11 (Materials received by the Chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities, R.N. Nishanov, on issues of interethnic relations: conflicts, problems, refugees). See also Bohdan Nahaylo, “(After the Soviet Union)-Population Displacement in the Former Soviet Union,” Refugees, no. 98 (December 1994).

5 Scholars of early Soviet nationality policy have established how the USSR became a “maker” and not “breaker” of nations. These scholars, however, have discounted the lived realities of groups outside of or without “their own” national territories after the late 1930s when state policies shifted toward favoring titular nationalities and Russified centralization. Some key works include, Suny, Ronald Grigor, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slezkine, Yuri, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (New York, 2001)Google Scholar. On perestroika nationalist mobilization, see Mark Bessinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State (Cambridge, Eng., 2002). Bessinger’s “tidal wave” theory of national mobilization argues that in the glasnost era of “thickened history,” nationalist events and challenges to the state fed off one another. Similarly, and less recognized, however, were the mobilizations against nationalist movements that called on centralist intervention. Major historical works on the collapse have focused on the Soviet Union’s systemic failures as an explanation for why it failed to cope with the perestroika reforms. Vladislav Zubok also argues that Mikhail Gorbachev’s indecisive leadership played a critical role in the state’s breakdown, and that it was a factor in the state’s inability to address rising titular nationalism and violence. See Zubok, Vladislav M., Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven, 2021)Google Scholar, and Kotkin, Stephen, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970–2000 (New York, 2001)Google Scholar. On Gorbachev’s response to ethnic unrest, see also Kramer, Mark, “Official Responses to Ethnic Unrest in the USSR, 1985–1991,” Russian History 49, no. 2-4 (2022): 289335CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Few scholars have moved historical debates regarding perestroika’s impact on the USSR’s nationalities policy beyond state or intelligentsia accounts. One exception is Jeff Sahadeo’s oral history, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow (Ithaca, 2019). The final chapter of Sahadeo’s oral history discusses how perestroika exposed and exacerbated national tensions. He makes an important point by noting that center-periphery ties “nurtured by decades-long mobility and networks” deepened even as the union unraveled.

6 “Equal political, economic, state, cultural, and social rights” irrespective of one’s nationality were bedrocks of the Soviet constitutions that applied to all citizens at least in theory. Krista Goff, Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (Ithaca, 2021), 3.

7 Most works use “nontitular” to refer to Soviet ethnic groups living outside of “their” ethnic homeland and to those who did not have one. Historian Krista Goff, however, has adopted the term to specify groups in the Soviet hierarchy of nations who had no titular ethnic homeland and were more likely to be subject to titular assimilation after the late 1930s; see Goff, Nested Nationalism. To recognize this critical historical difference, I use “extraterritorial” to refer to groups living outside of legitimated “home” republics or territories and “nontitular” for those groups who did not have one.

8 Erik Scott was of the first to focus on the “evolution” of “internal diasporas” in the Soviet Union by centering on prominent Georgians in Moscow. See Erik Scott, Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire (New York, 2016). In a recent monograph, Krista Goff concentrates on the more vulnerable nontitular nations in the Caucasus left at the mercy of both titular nationalism and Russified centralization after the late 1930s to claim that it was the former, not the latter, that many nontitular peoples blamed more for everyday inequalities. See Goff, Nested Nationalism. See Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge, for another recent monograph. On some historical linkages between extraterritorial, nontitular, and local communities, see Rebecca Manley, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca, 2009); Michaela Pohl, “The ‘Planet of One Hundred Languages’: Ethnic Relations and Soviet Identity in the Virgin Lands,” in Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (London, 2007), 238–62.

9 See Rachel Applebaum, Empire of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslovakia (Ithaca, 2019).

10 See Erik Scott, Familiar Strangers; Stefan Guth, “USSR Incorporated Versus Affirmative Action Empire? Industrial Development and Interethnic Relations in Kazakhstan’s Mangyshlak Region (1960s–1980s),” Ab Imperio 4 (2018): 171–206; Artemy Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Ithaca, 2018); Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge.

11 On Soviet intermarriage, see Adrienne L. Edgar, “Marriage, Modernity and the ‘Friendship of Nations’: Interethnic Intimacy in Postwar Central Asia in Comparative Perspective,” Central Asian Survey 26, no. 4 (December 2007): 581–99; and Adrienne L. Edgar, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia (Ithaca, 2022).

12 Guth, “USSR Incorporated Versus Affirmative Action Empire?” See also Edgar, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples, 23–24, and the epilogue to Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005).

13 On the use of international vospitanie at local, republican, and national scales, see RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 407 (letters on nationalism in various republics of the USSR: 1966–1990). On the relaxation of republican controls in the post-Stalinist period, see Jeremy Smith, Red Nations: The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR (Cambridge, Eng., 2013). On Soviet demographic trends, see Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, “Demographic Sources of the Changing Ethnic Composition of the Soviet Union,” Population and Development Review 15, no. 4 (December 1989): 628–35.

14 Guth, “USSR Incorporated Versus Affirmative Action Empire?,” 186.

15 I. V. Barannikova and M.V. Cherkezovoi, eds., Vospitanie sovetskogo patriotizma i sotsialisticheskogo internatsionalizma v protsesse izucheniia russkogo iazyka i literatury (Leningrad, 1985); N.A. Baskakov, eds., Puti razvitiia natsional΄no russkogo dvuiаzychiia v nerusskikh shkolakh RSFSR (Moscow, 1979).

16 See RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 407; RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 408 (letters on the manifestations of nationalism in various republics of the USSR, volume 2 1980–1987); RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 405 (letters on the nationality policy of the CPSU, January 1966–April 1972); RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 422 (letters from citizens of Tajik nationalities on the aggravation of interethnic relations in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan).

17 See Krista A. Goff, “‘Why Not Love Our Language and Our Culture?’ National Rights and Citizenship in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union,” Nationalities Papers 43, no. 1 (January 2015): 27–44.

18 RGANI, f. 100. op. 5, d. 407, ll. 77–79.

19 Party organizations for the “patriotic and international education of workers” functioned throughout the country. See, for example, RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 439, ll. 1-19 (Letters from citizens of various nationalities demanding recognition of their nation, language, culture, 1966–1988). See also Vladimir Emel΄ianovich Naumenko, “Deiatel΄nost΄ Checheno-Ingushskoi oblastnoi partiinoi organizatsii po internatsional΄nomu vospitaniiu trudiashchikhsia (1959–1971 gg.)” (PhD diss., Dagestan Friendship of Peoples University, Makhachkala, 1984).

20 Artemy Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development, 11.

21 The Meskhetian expulsions targeted “Turks, Kurds, and Kemshins [Muslim Armenians].” Historically, the “Turk” label has been used to refer to various groups, including Azerbaijanis, Tatars, subjects of the Ottoman empire or Turkey, and Muslims. I use “Meskhetian Turks,” which underscores Georgian origins, because this is the ethnic label used most often in letters and party and government documents in this period, and by the Meskhetian Turk Organization “Vatan.” On the Meskhetian expulsions, see Claire P. Kaiser, “What Are They Doing, After All, We’re not Germans”: Expulsion, Belonging, and Postwar Experience in the Caucasus,” in Krista Goff and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, eds., Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderland (Ithaca, 2019), 80–94. On debates related to the ethnic category, see Stephen F. Jones, “Meskhetians: Muslim Georgians or Meskhetian Turks? A Community without a Homeland,” Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees 13, no. 2 (May 1993): 14–16.

22 On minorityhood as socially and historically constructed, see Janet Klein, “Making Minorities in the Eurasian Borders: A Comparative Perspective from the Russian and Eurasian Borderlands,” in Goff and Siegelbaum, eds., Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands, 17–18.

23 Pål Kolstø, “Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Job Competition: Non-Russian Collective Action in the USSR under Perestroika,” Nations and Nationalism 14, no. 1 (January 2008): 151–69.

24 Regional head of the Meskhetian Turk Organization “Vatan,” phone interview, North Ossetia, January 18, 2022.

25 GARF, f. R9654, op. 6, d. 221, ll. 9–10 (letters on the need to assist refugees and on the draft law “On forced migration in the USSR”). It would not be until February 1993 that the Russia Federation would finally legally differentiate between “forced migrants”—those who could claim Russian citizenship—and “refugees.” Until then, the terms were used interchangeably.

26 See Yaacov Ro’i, “Central Asian Riots and Disturbances, 1989–1990: Causes and Context,” Central Asian Survey 10, no. 3 (1991): 21–54; Pål Kolstø, “Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Job Competition,” 151–69; Matteo Fumagalli, “Framing Ethnic Minority Mobilization in Central Asia: The Cases of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan,” Europe-Asia Studies 59, no. 4 (2007): 567–90; Sato Keiji, “Mobilization of Non-Titular Ethnicities during the Last Years of the Soviet Union: Gagauzia, Transnistria, and the Lithuanian Poles,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 26 (2009): 141–57.

27 See Vladimir Shlapentokh, Munir Sendich, and Emil Payin, The New Russian Diaspora: Russian Minorities in the Former Soviet Republics (New York, 1994); Paul Kolstoe, Russians in the Former Soviet Republics (Bloomington, 1995); Hillary Pilkington, Migration, Displacement and Identity in Post-Soviet Russia (London, 1998); Igor Zevelev, Russia and Its New Diasporas (Washington, DC, 2001); Moya Flynn, Migrant Resettlement in the Russian Federation: Reconstructing Homes and Homelands (London, 2004); Ismailbekova, “Mobility as a Coping Strategy,” 49–68; Cynthia J. Buckley, Blair A. Ruble, and Erin T. Hofmann, eds., Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia (Baltimore, 2008); Alexia Bloch, “Citizenship, Belonging, and Moldovan Migrants in Post-Soviet Russia,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 79, no. 4 (August 2014): 445–72; and S.V. Ryazantsev, “Nashi” za granitsei: Russkie, rossiiane, russkogovoriashchie, sootechestvenniki: rasselenie, integratsiia i vozvratnaia migratsiia v Rossiiu (Moscow, 2014).

28 Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

29 Goff, Nested Nationalism.

30 Timothy Heleniak, “Migration Dilemmas Haunt Post-Soviet Russia,” Migration Policy Institute, October 1, 2002, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/migration-dilemmas-haunt-post-soviet-russia (accessed June 26, 2023).

31 Timothy Heleniak, “An Overview of Migration in the Post-Soviet Space,” in Cynthia J. Buckley, Blair A. Ruble, and Erin T. Hofmann, eds., Migration, Homeland, and Belonging in Eurasia (Baltimore, 2008), 46.

32 On pushback to the reforms, see Jeremy Smith, “The Battle for Language: Opposition to Khrushchev’s Education Reform in the Soviet Republics, 1958–59,” Slavic Review 76, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 983–1002.

33 Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton, 1994), 250–324.

34 Ibid.

35 Those who named Russian as their native or second language said that they could “freely command.” Zevelev, Russia and Its New Diasporas, 94–95.

36 See, for example, Olga Zeveleva, “Political Aspects of Repatriation: Germany, Russia, Kazakhstan. A Comparative Analysis,” Nationalities Papers 42, no. 5 (2014): 808–27.

37 See Goff, Nested Nationalism.

38 See RGANI, f. 100, op.5, d. 422, ll. 55–69; ll. 29–46. See also Goff, Nested Nationalism.

39 On Volga German, Kurd, and Lezgin petitions for autonomous territories in 1988 and 1989, see GARF, f. R9654, op. 10, d. 369, ll. 119–24; ll. 208–30, and RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 433, ll. 11–13 (letters from Lezgins addressed to party congresses and conferences, the Central Committee of the CPSU). See also Keiji, “Mobilization of Non-Titular Ethnicities,”141–57.

40 See Goff, Nested Nationalism, 166–78.

41 Mark Tolts, “Personal Life Reflected in Statistics: Interethnic Marriages,” The Current Digest of the Soviet Press 42, no. 4 (February 1990): 31.

42 Heleniak, “An Overview of Migration in the Post-Soviet Space.”

43 Anderson and Silver, “Demographic Sources,” 609–56.

44 Shlapentokh, The New Russian Diaspora, 14–15.

45 See Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development; Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge.

46 Pohl, “The ‘Planet of One Hundred Languages,’” 239.

47 Those who lacked Russian-language skills were sometimes disadvantaged even in “their” national territories. See Stefan Guth, “USSR Incorporated Versus Affirmative Action Empire?”

48 Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, “Transnationalism in One Country? Seeing and Not Seeing Cross-Border Migration within the Soviet Union.” Slavic Review 75, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 970–86.

49 Anna Whittington, “Citizens of the Soviet Union—It Sounds Dignified,” in Maarten Van Ginderachter and Jon Fox, eds., National Indifference and the History of Nationalism in Modern Europe (London, 2019).

50 See Bloch, “Citizenship, Belonging, and Moldovan Migrants,” 445–72.

51 Jeff Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge.

52 See Arsene Saparov, From Conflict to Autonomy in the Caucasus: The Soviet Union and the Making of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh (London, 2015).

53 Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (New York, 2013), 16. See RGANI, F. 100, op.5, d. 361–63 (letters and telegrams to the Central Committee of the CPSU and the XIX Party Conference with various proposals on perestroika and social issues in the country, and on Nagorno-Karabakh; vol. 1–3).

54 The brutalities committed toward Armenians and Azeris have been well-documented by journalists and eyewitness accounts. Here I emphasize how the conflict became a larger regional and countrywide issue. Total deaths remained difficult to verify. This number includes an unofficial body count from the Baku morgue, including 26 Armenians and 6 Azerbaijanis. See De Waal, Black Garden, 41; Samvel Shahmuratian, ed., The Sumgait Tragedy: Pogroms Against Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan, Volume I: Eyewitness Accounts, trans. Steven Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

55 Its founding conference was held on July 16, see Vera Tolz and Melanie Newton, eds., The USSR in 1989: A Record of Events (Boulder, 1990), 382.

56 De Waal, Black Garden, 91.

57 “O merakh po okazaniiu pomoshchi grazhdanam vynuzhdenno pokinuvshim Azerbaidzhanskuiu SSR i Armianskuiu SSR ot 7 aprelia 1990g. N 329,” Biblioteka normativno-pravovykh aktov Soiuza Sovetskiikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, http://www.libussr.ru/doc_ussr/usr_16395.htm, accessed June 26, 2023.

58 Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch, Broad is my Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century (Ithaca, 2014), 270.

59 De Waal, Black Garden, 91.

60 GARF, f. R9654, op. 10, d. 369.

61 Here I have provided pseudonyms. Interview, December 15, 2018, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Many Armenians from Azerbaijan eventually settled in Michigan. See the Armenian Research Center at the University of Michigan Dearborn for an oral interview collection with those who fled Baku. See Bruce Grant, “‘Cosmopolitan Baku,’” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 75, no. 2 (2010): 123–47.

62 Zubok, Collapse, 54–56.

63 Klein, “Making Minorities in the Eurasian Borders.”

64 RGANI, f. 100, op.5, d. 361, ll. 3–5.

65 Ibid., l. 74.

66 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 361, l. 73.

67 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 449, ll. 56–58 (letters from citizens about possible violent actions against persons of Jewish nationality, April 1988–January 1990).

68 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 449, ll. 56–58

69 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 449, ll. 30–38.

70 RGANI, f. 100, op.5, d. 409, l. 72 (letters from citizens on nationalism in various republics of the USSR Volume 3, 1988–1990).

71 RGANI, f.100, op. 5, d. 463, ll. 2–20 (letters from Armenian refugees from the Azerbaijan SSR requesting the lifting of the blockade from the NKAO, the end of a new wave of terror against the Armenian population living in Azerbaijan, November 13–December 26, 1989).

72 GARF, f. R9553, op.1, d. 5263, ll. 54–55 (materials related to Goskomtrud’s Department of Migration and Resettlement).

73 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 463, ll. 4–20.

74 See, for instance, RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 407; RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 406 (letters on non-compliance with the provisions of the national policy in the selection and placement of personnel, April 1966–August 1987). See also Goff, “Why Not Love Our Language and Our Culture?”

75 RGANI, f.100, op. 5, d. 463, ll. 2–20.

76 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 463, ll. 4–20.

77 GARF, f. R9553, op.1, d. 5263, ll.56.

78 GARF, f. R9654, op. 6, d. 329, l. 9–15 (material on interethnic relations: conflicts, problems, refugees).

79 GARF, f. R9553, op.1, d. 5263, 33–38.

80 GARF, f. R9553, op.1, d. 5263, 43–45.

81 GARF, f. R9553, op.1, d. 5263, l. 46.

82 GARF, f. R9553, op.1, d. 5263, ll. 79.

83 GARF, f. R9553, op. 1, d. 5263, ll.120–25.

84 Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 10.

85 Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, 258–60.

86 “Report by R. N. Nishanov, First Secretary of the Uzbekistan Communist Party Central Committee,” The Current Digest of the Soviet Press 24, no. 41 (July 1989): 7. Some contend that Birlik was unaffiliated with nationalist extremism and became a scapegoat following the events. Deputy Chairman of the Organization for Meskhetian Turks based in Moscow “Vatan,” interview, January 28, 2022; see also Ro’i, “Central Asian riots and disturbances,” 21–54. The national movement was subsequently suppressed. See Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State, 258-60.

87 GARF, f. R9553, op.1, d. 5263, ll. 336–40.

88 The number of causalities and injuries is from the USSR’s Prosecutor’s Office. RGANI f. 100, op. 5, d. 474, ll. 64 (letters from different nationalities about interethnic relations in Uzbekistan, from December 1987–November 1989), Tolz and Newton, eds., The USSR in 1989, 292–96; Madeleine Reeves, “Travels in the Margins of the State: Everyday Geography in the Ferghana Valley Borderlands,” in Jeff Sahadeo and Russell Zanca, eds., Everyday Life in Central Asia: Past and Present (Bloomington, 2007), 284.

89 Tolz and Newton, eds., The USSR in 1989, 292–96.

90 Irina Levin, “Caught in a Bad Romance: Displaced People and the Georgian State,” Citizenship Studies 22, no. 1 (2018): 19–36.

91 Sergei Riazantsev, Sovremennyi demograficheskii i migratsionnyi portret Severnogo Kavkaza (Stavropol, 2003), 129–42. See also A.G. Osipov, The Violation of the Rights of Forced Migrants and Ethnic Discrimination in Krasnodar Territory: The Situation of the Meskhetian Turks (Moscow, 1996).

92 Maks Lur΄e and Petr Studenikin, Zapakh gari i goria: Fergana, trevozhnyi iiun΄ 1989-go (Moscow, 1990), 30–31; Newton, ed., The USSR in 1989, 292–96. On (Baltic) interfronts, see Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization, 392. See also Keiji, “Mobilization of Non-Titular Ethnicities,” 141–57.

93 Lur΄e and Studenikin, Zapakh gari i goria, 30–31.

94 Some displaced Armenians referenced a (repeat) genocide, while the evacuations of Meskhetian Turks are broadly referred to as a “double deportation.” See GARF f. R9553, op. 1, d. 5263. Some Armenians (interviewed in 1995–96 who resided in St. Petersburg for at least ten years) reported that their ethnic identification heightened after the pogroms. See Ol΄ga Brednikova and Elena Chikadze, “Armiane Sankt-Peterburga: Kar΄ery etnichnosti,” Viktor Boronkov and Ingrid Osval΄d, eds. Konstrurovanie Etnichnosti: Ethnicheskie obshchiny Sankt-Peterburga (St. Petersburg, 1998), 227–59.

95 GARF, f. R9654, op. 10, d. 369, ll. 119–124.

96 Ibid.

97 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 474, ll. 35–38.

98 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 474, l. 38.

99 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 474, ll. 67–71.

100 RGANI, f. 100, op.5, d. 474. ll. 61–63.

101 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 474, l.57.

102 RGANI, f. 100, op.5, d. 422, ll. 77–80.

103 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d.422, ll. 71–72.

104 RGANI, f. 100, op.5, d. 409, ll. 94–98.

105 GARF, f. 10121, op. 1, d. 32, l. 24 (Council of Ministers of the RSFSR on the problems of migration. Vol. 3. July 3, 1991–December 29, 1991).

106 GARF, f. R9553, op. 1, d. 5263, ll. 211–13.

107 GARF, f. R9553, op. 1, d. 5263, ll. 198.

108 GARF, f. R9553, op. 1, d. 5263, ll. 90.

109 “Regulirovanie migratsionnykh protsessov na Severnom Kavkaze.” In V. A. Tishkov, ed., Vynuzhdennye Migranty i Gosudarstvo (Moscow, 1998), 137–38.

110 “O merakh po okazaniiu pomoshchi grazhdanam.”

111 GARF, f. R9553, op.1, d. 5263, ll. 336–40.

112 GARF, f. 10121, op. 1, d. 30, ll. 46–51.

113 Riazantsev, Sovremennyi demograficheskii i migratsionnyi portret, 130–31.

114 GARF, f. R-9553, op.1, d. 5263, ll. 219–221; 252–53.

115 GARF, f. R9553, op.1, d. 5263, ll, 219–21, 252–53; Riazantsev, Sovremennyi demograficheskii i migratsionnyi portret, 130–31.

116 GARF, f. R9553, op. 1, d 5263, ll. 147–51.

117 GARF, f. R9654, op. 10, d. 369, ll. 10–22

118 GARF, f. R9553, op. 1, d. 5263, ll. 175–76.

119 On racism and migration in the USSR, see Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge.

120 Riazantsev, Sovremennyi demograficheskii i migratsionnyi portret, 130–31.

121 GARF, f. R9553, op. 1, d. 5263, ll. 201–32.

122 Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, 12.

123 GARF, f. R9654, op. 6, d. 329, l. 16.

124 See Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford, 2013).

125 RGANI, f. 100, op. 5, d. 428, ll. 53–56.