The EU’s neighbourhood policy towards the South Caucasus: expanding the European security community

Abstract

focuses on the old propaganda slogan, the “Friendship of Nations” – now cynically devoid of any meaning. The chapter revives it by infusing it with real-life experiences, memories and understandings of Soviet migrants and Soviet citizens. Wistfulness does not give way to a blind nostalgia, as Sahadeo’s interviewees keep the narrative in place by astute comments comparing the friendship to that “of Robinson [Crusoe] and Friday” (p. 59). Chapter 3 focuses on place making practices, ambivalent welcome, and settling in. It tells the story of new beginnings, gender relations, cultural adaptions in spaces that officially lacked any form of social or ethnic segregation, but deep down were perfectly segregated (p. 91). Chapter 4 reveals how a Western concept of “race” will not do to explain the intersectionality of subordination experienced by “southern” migrants, and how ethnicity, nationality, social class, gender and social position help to revaluate and open up the discourse of Russian “racism”. Chapter 5 demonstrates the different forms, modalities and experiences of belonging in Soviet Moscow and St Petersburg and becoming svoi via personal networks or work collectives. Chapter 6 reviews the organizing analytical themes of the book – the journey, early adaptation, social mobility, links with home – through the lens of personal stories of four different traders, while Chapter 7 gives a migrant perspective to the turbulent years of perestroika, rising ethnic and linguistic tensions fuelled by extremist politics, volatile economics and bewildering legislation, as the Soviet period drew to a close. In sum, Sahadeo’s excellent book writes the much-needed pre-history, indeed prequel, to contemporary labour migration into Russia’s European cities, and firmly situates late Soviet migration as an intrinsic element of global change and development.