Journal of Social History

Siegelbaum,, Lewis

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz090pmid: N/A

Beginning in 2007, Jeff Sahadeo published a series of articles on Central Asians and people from the Caucasus who had migrated to Moscow and Leningrad in the 1960s-80s. Appearing in journals ranging from Slavic Review to Central Asian Survey and The Journal of Modern History, and based on interviews he and a team of researchers had conducted, they documented the hardships and accomplishments of these migrants and in other respects broke new ground about everyday life in the late Soviet period. Most explosively, they revealed a Soviet past to the racism to which people of color have been subjected so notoriously in post-Soviet Russia. Interviewees’ reactions to what they had experienced—from flat denial to a sense of aggrieved national identity—added an important dimension to their stories. Voices from the Soviet Edge is a fuller, deeper, and more reflective analysis, one that is beautifully constructed and informed by vast reading in the literatures on global cities, south-north labor migration, the construction of race and post-colonialism, and the history and sociology of the Soviet Union in its last decades. After two chapters that situate Moscow and Leningrad within Soviet and global socio-economic trends of the post-war (and post-colonial) decades, the book follows migrants from their homes to one or the other of the “two capital cities” as they pursued educational and career opportunities or engaged in the expanding arena of commercial operations. These three chapters underscore the key role that such institutions as dormitories, work collectives, and festivals of national arts played in integrating migrants into the “friendship of peoples” and other Soviet core values. Sahadeo is keen to argue that, despite often daunting obstacles, these migrants exercised what he calls (borrowing from Alexei Yurchak) “agentive power” that enabled them to claim the capitals as “their own.” His placement of the chapter on “Race and Racism” between those on place-making (Chapter 3) and “Becoming Svoi: Belonging” (Chapter 5) perfectly conveys this dialectic. Thus, even as Shuhrat Kazbekov, a figure skater who became a professional stuntman, asserted that “Here in Leningrad, I feel like svoi, but if I returned to Uzbekistan, I would feel a stranger,” Sahadeo notes that Kazbekov attributed the admiration he earned among his fellow workers for “his energy and dignity … to the importance Uzbeks placed on watching out for families” (134). No book is perfect or will satisfy every taste. I found it puzzling why the title refers only to “southern migrants” when the book usually identifies them as “southern and eastern.” Was it because the author wanted to fit migrants from both the Caucasus and Central Asia (not to mention the Russian Far East, whom he does mention) into the global south-north migration pattern? Why then speak of “citizens on northern or western paths” (64) and “arrivals from southern and eastern regions”? (115). Perhaps the title gives a nod to the popular ethnic Russian term “iuzhnyi” applied to all migrants perceived as black, but if so, why privilege that discourse? Sahadeo is also occasionally is a little too fond of citing other scholars’ turns of phrase—as in “soils of significance,” “mythico-history” and “mobile and processual” sense of identity, all within two successive sentences (149)—and of himself employing the locution of “-scapes,” as in “street,” “city,” and “ethno.” But what is indisputable is that the book serves as a vindication of—and, hopefully, stimulus to—history from below, a once vibrant scholarly approach now fallen on hard times. Listening carefully to what these migrants had to say, Sahadeo detected a value rarely associated with Soviet life: freedom. He attributes its appearance in their discourse to “the combination of easy travel (albeit within state borders), personal safety, and the belief in a meritocracy” (203, also 167). Some among the 70 interviewees explicitly contrasted these qualities with the “almost anarchic” conditions of post-Soviet life; others did so implicitly. For many, the years of perestroika—the subject of the final chapter—put them in a series of “gray zones” requiring them to develop new adaptive strategies. Voices from the Soviet Edge exhibits another quality endemic to the best oral histories—empathy for its subjects. This is evident throughout the book, but nowhere more so than in the Appendix devoted to the methodology of oral history. Here, Sahadeo writes of his own “surprise—sometimes openly, during an interview—when two or more subjects, of similar ethnic and social background, faced parallel situations and reacted, or at least recalled their reactions, in dramatically different ways. What makes one brush off an incident of discrimination as a mere distraction to dreams of success,” he asks, “and another dwell on a quite comparable one to the point of … remain[ing] haunted by it now?” (209). That he doesn’t provide a definitive answer is not a shortcoming but rather a strength of the book; it demonstrates an awareness of the contingencies of personality that only someone sensitive to his subjects’ individuality would notice and take seriously. At the same time, he can offer acute observations about what his subjects shared such as that their nostalgia for the USSR was for their own youth, when they “found ways, through or around the system, to make their own lives” (212). © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)