Striving for Futures Past. Citizenship, Memory, and Central Asia-Russia Migration
Striving for Futures Past. Citizenship, Memory, and Central Asia-Russia Migration

Summary/Abstract: In previous decades, migration from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia has made Russia one of the top migrant-receiving countries in the world. As these mobilities exist within the boundaries of what was once one state, Central Asian migrant communities thus exist as ’diasporas‘ within the territory of a country in which they once held citizenship. For Central Asians, this marked a shift from fellow passport-holders to racially marked ’guest workers‘ in Russia, vulnerable to discrimination and exploitation. This article focuses on how the dislocations of migration – particularly the precarity produced by both experiences of racialisation in Russia and the instability of the contemporary remittance-dependent economy in Tajikistan – shape the meanings and sentiments ascribed to the Soviet past. I draw from 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between Russia and Tajikistan, one of the major sources of migrant labour to Russia and one of the most remittance-dependent economies in the world. I ethnographically explore nostalgia for a common framework of Soviet citizenship, or the nostalgic perception of a trajectory of progress towards interethnic harmony. Bridging anthropological literature on nostalgia and citizenship with recent theorisations of the role of affect in politics, I illustrate the lingering potentialities of bygone frameworks of citizenship with regard to notions of belonging. By focusing on the role of nostalgia, I argue for an ethnographically-grounded understanding of citizenship that attends to the embodied afterlives of political shifts and subsequent reconfigurations of belonging.

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