Abstract
This article explores how senses of belonging, place, and mobility are linked to each other in the context of rapid socio-political change and human mobility. Using the sociological concept of place-belongingness, the article examines narratives of belonging among young people from Crimea who moved to Moscow to pursue higher education in the two years following Russia’s 2014 annexation of the peninsula. Drawing on 38 biographical interviews conducted in Moscow with young people from Crimea, the article demonstrates how ‘movements of borders across people’ (to build on Rogers Brubaker’s expression) result in a non-binary construction of belonging across places, based on the access an individual has to constellations of resources different places offer. The analysis shows that narratives of belonging among young people from Crimea revolve around resource categories that include economic resources, emotional resources, resources that reconcile multiple identities, and ontological security resources. This study moves beyond analysis of identities as linked to nation-building in the post-Soviet space, focusing on categories of ‘place’ emerging from the perspectives of study participants.
Introduction
In 2014, Crimea, a region of Ukraine, was annexed by Russia. To use the words of Rogers Brubaker, this event constituted a ‘movement of borders across people’ (Brubaker, 2000). Most UN member-states, including Ukraine, have not recognized Crimea to be a part of Russia. Today, Crimea is de facto administered by the Russian state, most Crimean residents have received Russian passports, pensioners receive Russian pensions, and schools and universities have been re-registered under the Russian system. Russia’s administrative integration of the peninsula shapes the everyday lives, mobility opportunities, and perceptions of belonging among those who have ties to Crimea.
This study contributes to our understanding of the effects of these events by exploring how a mobile group of Crimean students express attachment to places and construct narratives of belonging in the first two years following Russia’s annexation of the peninsula. Research on mobility and belonging among people from Crimea is significant in light of a new political context unfolding in Europe since 2014: conflict and territorial contestation between Russia and Ukraine has produced turmoil and renegotiation of belonging among millions of people affected by the war in the east of Ukraine and by Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula.
Within studies of identities in the post-Soviet space, there is a tendency to focus on identities in a context of nation-building, with reference to narratives constructed by political elites and to communities residing within the borders of states that formed after 1991. Material conditions that lay the foundations for identity formation in combination with bottom-up ‘folk’ categories used by people residing in those regions have been underexplored in empirical studies on attachment and identity. In order to go beyond the lens of nation-building and taken-for-granted categories (such as those found in census data), we use the sociological concept of ‘place-belongingness’ suggested by Marco Antonsich (2010), coupled with attention to resources available in different places, and base our study on open-ended interview questions within a biographical sociology framework. This allows us to focus on categories that emerge from the language used by study participants, and keep in mind the material and symbolic foundations of attachment in our analysis.
In this article we explore the construction of belonging and place-attachment among mobile youth in the context of social and political change by analyzing narratives of Crimean students studying in Moscow after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. The first section of the article introduces the sociological concept of ‘belonging’ and explores studies that have conceptualized belonging and relationship to place, also drawing on literature from human geography. In the second section of the article, we draw on our empirical data to analyze how mobile students understand place and narrate their sense of belonging. We argue that mobile students see their ties to different places through the resources these places offer, and construct their sense of belonging through access they have to these resources. We then offer a typology of resources our study participants draw from to articulate belonging, and show which places are associated with emotional, ontological, reconciliatory, and social and economic resources.
Belonging and place-belongingness
Belonging is described by Vanessa May as ‘a sense of ease with oneself and one’s surroundings’ (May, 2011: 368) that ‘guides how we act in the social world and helps inform with whom we form relationships, in which places we feel comfortable, and which types of activities we engage in’ (May, 2016: 636). May expands on works by Linn Miller, who describes belonging as a social ‘sense of ease or accord with who we are in ourselves’ and ‘a relation that makes us feel good about our being and our being-in-the-world; a relation that is fitting, right or correct’ (Miller, 2003: 218). May’s and Miller’s approaches to belonging build on Bourdieu’s ‘sense of place’ (Bourdieu, 1977), which supposes ‘harmonious relation between habitus and field’ and refers to the sense of ‘ease’ that relates habitus and field. ‘Belonging’ is shaped in part by a feeling of ease, yet centers on the relational and emotional (May, 2011: 369). Unlike Bourdieu’s ‘sense of place’, which is ‘a practical knowledge that does not know itself, a “learned ignorance” ’ (Bourdieu, 2006: 185), the idea of belonging leaves more room for negotiation, evolution, and agency on the part of the individual. In this article, we go beyond the dichotomies of ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ characteristic of approaches to belonging that focus on group membership, building rather on aspects of works by Bennett, Miller, and May that emphasize relations to place and materiality (Bennett, 2014; May, 2011; Miller, 2003).
Studies in human geography and environmental psychology allow us to move beyond inclusion/exclusion dichotomies to understand how people form attachments through resources. Studies distinguish between ‘functional/instrumental’ (physical) and ‘emotional’ (social) place attachment, or, in other words, place identity and place dependence (Lewicka, 2011; Lin and Lockwood, 2014). Place identity captures ‘the symbolic importance of a place as a repository for emotions and relationships that give meanings and purpose to life’ (Williams and Vaske, 2003: 831), echoing elements of place-belongingness mentioned above. ‘Place dependence’, coined by Stokols and Shumaker (1981), reflects ‘the importance of a place at providing features and conditions that support specific goals and desired activities’ (Williams and Vaske, 2003: 831) that stems from ‘a subjective quality’ one associates with a place (Stokols and Shumaker, 1981). According to Stokols and Shumaker (1981: 477), place dependence ‘describes a person’s perceived strength of association between herself and specific places’, which may derive from the quality of current place, or from the relative quality of comparable, imaginable alternatives. This body of literature focuses on the material, and argues that resources available within a place can affect whether a place facilitates achievement of goals; these studies also mention physical characteristics of places as contributing factors to place dependence (Gunderson and Watson, 2007; Scannell and Gifford, 2010; Stokols and Shumaker, 1981). For example, Lin and Lockwood (2014: 80) found that functional attachments were constructed by means of ‘sensory responses to, and associated dependence on, the study areas’ biophysical features (such as coastal landforms) and their associated atmospheres (such as wildness and remoteness)’. Moreover, their study shows how participants express their attachments ‘specifically in relation to the activity or purpose for which they engaged with the place’, referring to lifestyle benefits of living and working in close proximity to the place (Lin and Lockwood, 2014: 80). These approaches allow us to view belonging through the intentionality of an individual who accesses material resources a place offers, yet they fail to explain how place-identity and place-dependence are constructed socially and relationally against the backdrop of political developments and loyalties.
Sociological studies of migration have also touched upon the importance of the material through nature, leisure, and other elements of place that have been overlooked in mainstream literature on migrant integration. In a study that stresses belongings as multiple and overlapping, Alexandra Gryzmala-Kazlowska proposes the concept of ‘anchoring’, which links identity, integration, and security for people on the move (2015, 2018; Gryzmala-Kazlowska and Brzozowska, 2016). Gryzmala-Kazlowska compares anchors with resources, arguing that resources are ‘assets helping to overcome or deal with problems related to adaptation’, while anchors include a broader array of ‘material, cognitive and behavioural’ footholds that comprise social capital (Gryzmala-Kazlowska, 2018: 634). ‘Anchoring’ is defined as ‘the process of establishing footholds and points of reference which allow individuals to acquire relative stability and security (understood as a feeling of being safe and not exposed to chaos and danger) and function effectively in a new environment’ (Gryzmala-Kazlowska, 2018: 632, italics added). For mobile people, anchors may serve as ‘parallel’ or ‘dual footholds’ (homes, family and social ties, etc.), or as ‘complementary’ connections both in host country and country of origin. The concept of anchoring is useful because it allows us to move beyond inclusion and exclusion, to recognize the possibility of multiple belongings, and to locate agency of using resources of places with the mobile individual. This study builds on these three characteristics of the ‘anchoring’ concept.
Identity in Crimea, youth in Ukraine
This study focuses on ideas of belonging among mobile young people who have grown up in Crimea and left the region to pursue university studies in Moscow after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Crimea is a border region located in between different imagined communities of several nation-states, and borders have shifted across Crimea throughout history, making it a fascinating region for examining bottom-up constructions of belonging. From the late fifteenth century the region was a territory of Crimean Khanate under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, before it was taken over by the Russian Empire in 1783. In 1921, it became an Autonomous Crimean Socialist Soviet Republic within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) under the USSR. In 1945, it was transformed into the Crimean ‘oblast’ (region) under the RSFSR, then was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954. When Ukraine gained independence with the breakup of the USSR in 1991, Crimea became an ‘autonomous republic’ within Ukraine that same year (Plokhy, 2000; Sasse, 2007), which was recognized by Russia. More recently, following an occupation by Russian troops and a referendum (which has not been recognized by most of the international community or Ukraine), Crimea was de facto administratively integrated into Russia in 2014. These historical legacies have been woven into competing imaginings of the region by different groups of Crimeans, as well as by Ukrainian and Russian political elites, as they define and redefine the region’s borders and collective identities (Bocale, 2015; Sasse, 2007).
Crimea has a multiethnic, diverse population, which, according to the 2001 Ukrainian census, includes self-identifying Russians (58.5%), Ukrainians (24.4%), Crimean Tatars (12.1%), and Belorussians, Tatars, Armenians, Jews, Poles, Moldovans, Azeris (among others). 1 The peninsula also has a history of population change, which particularly shaped the experiences of the Crimean Tatars. During the Second World War, Stalin suspected the Crimean Tatars of collaboration with Nazi forces and deported the entire population of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia. The Crimean Tatars who live in Crimea today are families of deportees and surviving deportees who returned to the peninsula after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
According to both Ukrainian and Russian census data, the majority of those who reside in Crimea are Russian speakers. 2 In his work from 2000, Brubaker described the ethnic Russians of Crimea as ‘accidental diasporas’, which are the product of ‘movement of borders across peoples’, a reference in this case to the collapse of the USSR (Brubaker, 2000). However, Eleanor Knott’s research suggests that strong political identification with Russia was a ‘minority sentiment’ among post-Soviet generation Crimeans in the pre-2014 period (Knott, 2015). Knott argues that although people who identify as ‘Russian’ constitute the majority of Crimea’s population, they are not a homogeneous group (Knott, 2015). Based on her interviews with Crimeans during the pre-2014 period, Knott proposes a categorization of identification among Crimeans that includes ‘discriminated Russians’, ‘ethnic Russians’, ‘political Ukrainians’, ‘Crimeans’, and ‘ethnic Ukrainians’ (Knott, 2015). Knott stresses in her study that Crimean regional identification allowed her respondents to navigate hybridity and complexity (Knott, 2015: 843), and that ‘Crimeans showed the greatest sense of belonging to Crimea because of their interethnic situation’ (Knott, 2015: 844), referring to both Russian and Ukrainian ties, as well as to the multiple ethnic groups that make up Crimea’s population.
Similarly, 3 in his pre-2014 research on identities of Crimeans, Charron (2016) has shown that Crimeans exhibit a strong sense of belonging to the region: ‘Crimeans’ senses of territorial belonging were not primarily oriented towards either Ukraine or Russia, but rooted instead in regional identities informed by competing national narratives about Crimea’ (Charron, 2016: 245). Some scholars also imply that the Ukrainian national identity project may diverge from the way some parts of the population see themselves, which results in local renegotiation of Ukrainian identity as constructed by the state in order for these people to better fit in, creating strong regional self-identification within Ukraine (Selivestrova, 2017: 62; see also Polese and Wylegala, 2008; Richardson, 2008; Rodgers, 2006; Tereshchenko, 2013).
Other studies also show that local contexts significantly inform how Ukrainian youth relate to Ukraine, stressing that the region or center can be the more inclusive identification option depending on the group in question. Tereshchenko, in her 2013 study in Galicia (in the west of Ukraine) and in Donbas (in the east of Ukraine), finds that ‘the identifications of minority ethnic youth in the region were not always typical of the majority, especially if the dominant meaning of place excluded them’ (Tereshchenko, 2013: 140). Her study shows that that Russian-speaking minority in Galicia places greater emphasis on their national Ukrainian identity (‘as a more inclusive option’), in contrast to strong regional belonging among the majority of ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Polish youth (Tereshchenko, 2013: 140). Tereshchenko also shows that young people from different regions experience ‘Ukrainian identity’ differently: Galician youth stress their Ukrainianness through ethnicity and language, and engage in othering those from the Donetsk region; young people in Donbas, by contrast, draw on emotional and civic forms of belonging rather than on language, defining their Ukrainianness through ‘respecting the country’, ‘doing something for the country’, or ‘having rights and duties’ (Tereshchenko, 2013: 137).
Another body of literature on Ukrainian identity focuses on identification with Ukraine versus Russia. A study of Russian speakers in the Ukrainian cities Lviv and Odessa demonstrates that while a Russian speaker might be either accepted (in the case of Odessa) or rejected (in the case of Lviv) by others as Ukrainian, she still might see herself as Ukrainian and feel attached to Ukraine (Polese and Wylegala, 2008). Thus, in Lviv young people of Russian descent, although seen by others as ‘pure’ Russians, perceived themselves as Ukrainians and saw Ukraine ‘rather as a civic community of compatriots’ (Polese and Wylegala, 2008: 798), while in Odessa most people are regarded as Russians yet identify as Ukrainian (Polese and Wylegala, 2008).
The authors mentioned above speak of belonging in terms of ‘region–center’ or ‘Ukraine–Russia’ dichotomies, while studies conducted in the post-2014 period have focused largely on peaceful regions and on the drift towards identification with Ukraine (Kulyk, 2018). Another body of literature specifically on Crimean youth in the post-2014 period, mostly conducted by sociologists in Russia, focuses on quantitative surveys among pro-Russian politically active youth (Rostovskaya and Toshchenko, 2016). Our study adds to this diverse body of knowledge, yet attempts to transcend the methodological nationalism 4 inherent in the assumption that young people from Crimea view themselves as attached to Ukraine or Russia, by analyzing how places rather than states emerge in narrative interviews. We focus also on the material aspects of belonging, allowing for study participants to reflect on issues of economic capital and the natural environment. Though it is difficult to move beyond methodological nationalism in a situation of conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and in a context where national laws shape mobility opportunities, attempting to do so allows us to see constructions of belonging that may not line up neatly along nation-state borders or ethnic and linguistic groupings. The concepts of belonging and place-belongingness are helpful in the analysis of youth narratives during conflict because they allow us to speak of localities rather than of political or ethnic self-identification.
Methods and data
In 2014, the Russian government announced that Crimean high school graduates would be able to apply to Russian universities and to take up study for free without having to take the Russian standardized state exam usually required for enrollment at university in Russia (Panov, 2015; SPS Konsultant Plus, 2014). In 2014, 6000 spots for Crimeans were allocated in 295 universities across Russia. Only 1400 of these free places were taken up by high school graduates from the peninsula in 2014 (Savelyeva, 2014), and most Crimean graduates enrolled at Crimean universities (even though diplomas issued by Crimean higher education institutions are not recognized by other states, and are valid only in Russia). Quotas for Crimeans were abolished after 2016. 5 The findings presented in this article are based on 38 narrative interviews conducted in 2016 with young people from Crimea who came to Moscow for their BA studies in 2015–2016 as part of the quota system.
To examine links between self and society ‘from the point of view of the person’, revealing ‘how people engage with social structures in their everyday lives’ (May, 2011: 368), we used the biographical method (Rosenthal, 2004; Wengraf, 2004). This approach allows us to consider the life story of an individual within broader social contexts and transformation processes (Rosenthal and Köttig, 2009). Each biographical interview was divided into two parts. In the first part, the interviewer asked one narrative question, formulated in our study as: ‘Tell me the story of your life, including the most important turning points that have taken place for you or for your family.’ In the second part of the interview, the interviewee posed additional questions arising from the study participant’s story, using the study participant’s own words to stimulate more detailed narratives on the topics they themselves raised (typically 5–10 questions were posed in the second part of the interview, focusing in particular on how events of 2014 affected the family, where the students have family and friendship ties, how the decision to relocate came about, and experiences of relocation and adaptation).
Study participants were in their first or second year of BA studies, between 17 and 23 years old, and included 25 female and 13 male students. We did not ask for ‘ethnic’ self-identification, but rather asked about language, and all participants stated that Russian was the language they spoke at home. The sample included:
Students from across different fields of study (technical and natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities, medicine);
Students from 13 universities in Moscow, including five of Moscow’s top-ranking universities, and a small sample of two universities outside Moscow;
Students from a range of cities of origin. Participants came from Crimea’s major cities, i.e., Simferopol (the capital of Crimea), Sevastopol (administratively this is a separate ‘region’ from Crimea, located on the Crimean peninsula and integrated into the Russian Federation in 2014), Kerch, Yevpatoriya, Yalta, Feodosiya, four small towns with a population under 30,000 (which we anonymized), and one village (also anonymized).
The participants were recruited via social networks using cold calling (using the databases available on university websites) and snowballing. Repeated contact via social networks enabled us to build rapport with research participants, which is important as the interviews were primarily collected via Skype (Lo Iacono et al., 2016). While some interviews were conducted face-to-face (5 in person and 33 online), both offline and online interviews were of comparable quality. The participants were interviewed individually in Russian, by Russian speakers based in Moscow. Interviews were recorded with participants’ permission, then transcribed and anonymized (all names used in this article are pseudonyms; the hometowns of study participants have been indicated as ‘small town’ or ‘village’ if their population falls under 30,000, while larger cities have been named here without anonymization). Recordings averaged approximately 30 minutes, and transcripts included notes on pre- and post-interview written and oral interactions, upon consent.
We analyzed transcripts using inductive ‘in vivo’ coding, also known as verbatim coding (Charmaz, 2006; Saldana, 2009: 74), or coding interview transcripts using the study participants’ own words. This allowed us to keep codes and analysis ‘rooted in participants’ own language’ (Saldana, 2009: 6) and is a method used widely in studies of youth to understand the everyday language and folk categories they use (Saldana, 2009: 74). We then organized repeating in vivo codes into themes we developed inductively; these themes were phrases that described the language used in the transcripts at a higher level of abstraction (Saldana, 2009: 139). For example, in vivo codes included ‘I don’t differentiate’ and ‘single entity’, ‘equally’, ‘something in between’; these were grouped into the theme ‘reconciliation of multiple attachments’. Other themes included ‘emotionally loaded attachment’, ‘ontological security’, ‘social resources and networks’, ‘economic considerations, gains, losses’, which lay the foundation for categories of resources we present below.
Findings: Narratives among young people from Crimea
Narratives of place
Study participants experience belonging to different places, some of them to more than one place at the same time. The representations of place and belonging to a place are noticeable to varying degrees in participants’ narratives. We have grouped most of the participants into five inductively derived categories, based on the main places they identified with (those they spoke of at length in greatest detail). Some participants identify with more than one place, and many compare different places, which we discuss in the analysis below. The main places mentioned are:
Crimea
The post-Soviet space
Sevastopol/Russia
Moscow/Russia
Ukraine and unmarked belongings
Students speak about these places in terms of what resources they offer, which can be grouped into the following four categories:
Emotional resources (associated with Crimea)
Ontological security resources (associated with Sevastopol/Russia)
Reconciliatory resources (associated with both Crimea and the post-Soviet space)
Social and economic resources (associated with Moscow/Russia)
Below we analyze the study participants’ narratives.
Crimea
Study participants who spoke of a sense of belonging to Crimea (approximately one-third of those interviewed) associate the region first and foremost with emotional resources and the fulfillment of emotional needs (affective belonging). This place association is also linked with a reconciliatory construct that allows students to think of themselves as not exclusively Russian, Ukrainian, or pertaining to any specific cultural or ethnic group, but through a regional category that can reconcile different identities, echoing the findings of Wilson (2002) and Charron (2016).
Alongside participants’ construction of belonging to Crimea as to a ‘native’ place, many participants also referred to nature and weather in the region as resources that enrich Crimeans’ lives, alluding to the lifestyle this can afford, (see Lin and Lockwood 2014 for a study that expands upon the topic of lifestyle resources): And I still think that out of all the places I had the chance to visit, Crimea was the best, in terms of weather and nature, and place … it’s impossible not to miss Crimea. (Vladislav, 19, Simferopol)
Such participants tend to call themselves ‘Crimeans’ first and foremost, instead of opting for an ethnic or a nation-state-based identification, speaking of belonging to Crimeans as a group. Crimea was also depicted in the narratives as a separate and exclusive place, and simultaneously as a place that includes a number of varied categories (similar to Wilson, 2002): I know that my father’s parents are from Ukraine. But my mother’s entire family spent their lives in Crimea. We’re native Crimeans, you could say. I [consider] myself to be Crimean … because I cannot say that I am Ukrainian, since I speak Russian all my life after all, but I cannot say that I am Russian or that I am not Russian. (Olga, 18, Simferopol)
In this way, study participants used place-belongingness to Crimea as a way to reconcile multiple belongings, to overcome the dichotomy of ‘Russian vs Ukrainian’, and to subvert national belonging constructs imposed by states through passports (and, in the case of the parents’ generation, through ‘listing’ of nationality in Soviet passports). The participants challenge ideas of nationality and citizenship and refuse to take sides in a territorial conflict by clinging to the region as their main place of identification.
My mom’s side – she was listed as Russian too, but there’s a lot of different blood mixed up there, so if someone asks me then I answer that I am Crimean because there’s probably no such nationality that can describe me. (Anita, 19, village)
In this way, young people identify with Crimea as the ‘more inclusive option’, mirroring strategies employed by youth in other parts of Ukraine (Tereshchenko, 2013).
The post-Soviet space
Five of the study participants stress their attachment to the post-Soviet space as a whole. These students use the post-Soviet space as a construct that reconciles their ties to different places; for example, some of these participants explained their belonging both to Ukraine and Russia as to an ‘inseparable’ unity: Let’s put it this way: I don’t differentiate between these states [Russia and Ukraine] in terms of lifestyles, languages – for me they are a single entity. Even though my mother and father are from different states, I am something in between, I’m equally Russian and Ukrainian. (Petr, 19, Yevpatoriya)
However, most of the other research participants we grouped in this category narrate their belonging to Russia more explicitly than to Ukraine, while stressing that the two are still ‘inseparable’ in terms of culture, traditions and practices, and lifestyle: ‘Crimea joined Russia, I think maybe 90% of Crimeans were in favour of it. And I am among them. Although I love Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. The countries are brother and sister’ (Larisa, 19, Simferopol). Here, the narrative of an imagined ‘Slavic’ category is played up: ‘I really don’t think there’s much sense in dividing [people] into Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians. Generally speaking, I look Slavic and have Slavic roots’ (Alexei, 18, Sevastopol).
Identification with both Russia and Ukraine also stems from the study participants’ experience of being related to both of them in terms of competence in both Russian and Ukrainian languages, connections with relatives, following traditions of both countries (for example, New Year’s Eve celebrations ‘spent with’ two presidents, both of whom give an annual televised New Year’s Eve address). As in the case of place-belongingness to Crimea, the ‘post-Soviet space’ construct allows participants to overcome the divisions between Russia and Ukraine, to opt for ‘flexible citizenship’, and to avoid taking sides in a conflict between two nation-states. By discounting the nation-state as the primary source of place-belongingness, the participants can feel a connection to the multiple parts that make up the larger category of the post-Soviet space and to view them as interconnected, overlapping entities. The use of such a category can be interpreted as an attempt to formulate a flexibility of citizenship, and to opportunistically and ideationally ‘navigate transnational geographies for securing lifestyles and maximizing potential opportunities in a dynamic interconnected world’ (Cottrell Studemeyer, 2015: 565). While the idea of flexible citizenship has mostly been applied in the context of globalization and transnational ties, in the case of Crimea we see the category of ‘post-Soviet’ applied in a case of hardening, securitizing borders as a way for Crimean young people to overcome the securitization and division between two nation-states in their narration of belonging.
Sevastopol/Russia
The grouping of two place categories in the heading ‘Sevastopol/Russia’ emerges from our data, reflecting how study participants spoke of Sevastopol: those who expressed place-belongingness to Sevastopol all stressed that Sevastopol was a historically ‘Russian’ city. Emphasis on the city’s historical link to Russia was a common sentiment not only among the study participants who were from Sevastopol (three of them were native to the city or had prior links to it), but also among students from other parts of Crimea. In fact, Sevastopol was a separate administrative entity from the rest of Crimea before 2014, and remains so today. This category of belonging can be characterized by a strong association between Sevastopol and Russia, and by the fact that Sevastopol and Russia are presented in narratives by students as offering ontological security resources.
By ‘ontological security’ we mean a coherent sense of self through space and time, that emerges from routinized trust relations in society (Kinnvall, 2004; Mitzen, 2006). This concept is helpful here because it captures some study participants’ tendencies to portray their own belonging to Russia as something deep and embedded, continuous throughout the ages. Anthony Giddens borrows the concept of ontological security from RD Laing, and argues that our coherent sense of self (‘self-identity’) depends on our ability to trust the narratives and routines in which we are embedded in our everyday lives, which keeps us from being obsessed with the fragile nature of our modes of being. These narratives can be cultural, legal, existential, political, and ontologically secure individuals take them for granted, which allows them to have a sense of agency, gives them the ability to engage socially with other social actors, make choices, and have sufficient confidence in the spaces and narratives they occupy (Giddens, 1991: 53). Giddens calls these narratives ‘ontological reference points’ for making sense of everyday life (Giddens, 1991: 48).
Study participants who grew up in Sevastopol emphasize their perceptions of a continuous, enduring belonging of this city and its residents to Russia. Participants claim this was evident even before Crimea became a part of Russia, and some even call it ‘the most Russian city’ out of all cities in Russia (Alexei, 18, Sevastopol). In the quote below, Alexei presents a narrative in which he normalizes the change in political borders that took place in 2014 and downplays the drastic nature of these changes, claiming an enduring belonging to Russia before 2014: Because we even have this mentality, that Sevastopol was always mostly a Russian city, and that’s why when the coup happened in Ukraine and there was a power change, as a result the civilian population was indignant and everyone went out to the streets … And so the fact of joining Russia wasn’t actually shocking for us – I mean when the military came. (Alexei, 18, Sevastopol)
Anna echoes this, using the word ‘always’ four times in the excerpt below, and calling Russia a ‘normal’ country, thus stressing continuity and comfort in connection with Russia, without taking the Sevastopol–Russia connection for granted by stressing that with Russia ‘you feel safe’ (i.e. she implies there can be a potentially unsafe alternative): Sevastopol was always considered a Russian city, we always celebrated the New Year with Russians, we always considered ourselves to be part of Russia, this situation then became official. Of course it’s like you feel safe, you feel you live in a normal country – but I don’t know if [people’s] views actually changed, I always associated myself with Russia more than with Ukraine, so nothing really changed. (Anna, 18, Simferopol)
Anna talks about a sense of safety and security associated with Russia and the feeling that Crimea’s de facto integration into Russia was in line with what was a feeling of belonging to Russia before 2014 (Polese and Wylegala, 2008).
In addition, many study participants depict Sevastopol as a city dominated by the Russian Black Sea Fleet: ‘We always had only Russian flags on display, and this is connected more with the Black Sea Fleet. In other words, the majority of people considered themselves to be more Russian’ (Maya, 18, Sevastopol).
Moscow/Russia
In the narratives of study participants who fall under this category, Moscow is closely associated with the greater entity of Russia, rather than being seen as a distinct place in and of itself. The construction of belonging to Russia, as described in the interviews, is based on the idea that Russia is the homeland, and this perception is associated with the resource of ontological security. Study participants use words that refer to history and the past, as well as words like ‘protection’ and ‘concern with the fate of the people’ in reference to what is gained from being part of the Russian state: In that political situation, the choice was obvious – we need the state that can give us protection, and many Crimeans who are a generation older than I, who still remember that Crimea was initially Russia, they are very happy that everything has returned to what it was like before. And the young generation today, everyone adequately understands the situation both in Ukraine and in Russia, and [everyone] understands which state is seriously concerned with the fate of the people. (Svetlana, 18, small town)
In the accounts of study participants grouped in the ‘Moscow/Russia’ category, the vote to join Russia in 2014 is considered to have been a strategic or rational decision. It is common for participants to regard de facto integration into the Russian Federation as a guarantee of security and safety, both ontological and physical, which is understood as an absence of violence or war, and as the promise of protection from a stronger state: ‘I mean in any case, in Russia you feel some kind of protection, dependability, calmness. Well, everything is relative, of course, but you feel that. Under Ukraine we didn’t feel that at all, we didn’t have it’ (Alexander, 18, small town). Joining Russia is also associated in these narratives with better opportunities both for the region and individuals. The region is getting ‘more attention’ and investment, while it was ‘stagnating when in Ukraine’.
Place-belongingness to Russia can also be interpreted as situational nationalism, i.e., as ‘national identities that shift in response to overarching, compelling geopolitical battles that appeal to the loyalties of individuals in fluid identity settings’, which Erin Jenne and Florian Bieber found to be characteristic of border regions on the Balkans over the past six decades (Jenne and Bieber, 2014: 439). Jenne and Bieber argue that identification varies as a result of ‘changes in state–periphery relations and attendant shifts in the salient political cleavages at the local, national and international levels’ (2014: 439). The authors show that following the Second World War, ‘Montenegrins identified as Montenegrin in addition to Yugoslav and sometimes also Serb. However, as the Montenegrin–Serbian cleavage became more salient in the 1990s, individuals increasingly viewed these as competing, mutually exclusive identities’ (2014: 439). It is possible that as a territorial conflict emerged between Russia and Ukraine in 2014, this category of study participants felt they needed to choose an identity, and played up Russian place-belongingness (the playing down of Ukrainian place-belongingness is discussed in the section below).
Study participants also consider the move to Moscow as a means of achieving access to quality education and to career opportunities. Moscow also provides a platform for ‘intellectual development’.
If you want to stay in Moscow, ‘put down roots’ here and survive, you need to be on the move constantly and find yourself, you must find a hobby that would give you pleasure. (Elena, 19, Simferopol)
Moscow is represented as a place where you make money, or a place full of ‘capital’ individuals can accumulate. This construction starkly contrasts associations with belonging to Crimea, as Crimea is a place of emotional, even nostalgic attachment, while Moscow is a place that offers economic and development opportunities in students’ narratives. Study participants stressed a certain lack of resources in Crimea in contrast to Moscow: ‘No, I will not go back to Crimea. Only for the reason that there’s no work there for a journalist’ (Svetlana, 18, small town). Maya agrees: ‘I don’t plan to go back to Crimea because the political science profession is not really the best thing for Crimea. One should look for work in Moscow.’
Larisa (19, Simferopol) also compares Crimea to Moscow: for her, in Moscow ‘everything is so large-scale. It’s the capital, it’s loud, this much is obvious. For my soul to rest and take a break – Crimea is ideal for this.’ In this way, many students identify both with Moscow in terms of the life chances it offers, and with Crimea in terms of the ‘rest’ it offers ‘for the soul’. For many study participants, part of Crimea’s ‘restfulness’ stems from its coastline, mountainous areas and beautiful scenery, which allow for a different lifestyle than is offered by Moscow (Lin and Lockwood, 2014). This division between the kinds of resources one can obtain from various places reveals patterns of multiple, complementary belongings among study participants, who can draw from Moscow’s economic capital and find anchoring in the beauty of Crimea (Gryzmala-Kazlowska, 2015).
Ukraine and unmarked belongings
We did not find that students who study in Russia expressed explicit belonging to Ukraine as a place. Only one participant claimed that she is ‘75% Ukrainian’ and accentuated her Zaporizhian Cossacks ancestry in particular: ‘All my relatives are from Zaporizhia … my mom is a pure blooded Ukrainian from Zaporizhia, my dad is half. One grandfather is from Tula, but my grandmother is from Zaporizhia. Since then we’re from Zaporizhia, Zaporizhian Cossacks’ (Alena, 18, Feodosia). She was the only study participant who described herself predominantly in terms of what she called ‘blood’ ties (one other study participant, quoted previously, mentioned ‘mixed blood’ in passing).
Perhaps belonging to Ukraine can be tackled through the notion of ‘unmarked belongings’, which can allow us to discuss not only those belongings that were addressed in narratives of the study participants (‘marked’ belongings), but also those that were not narrated (‘unmarked’). In this regard, it is worth mentioning that our research participants rarely refer to their past in Ukraine, except their experience in school. Typically, past experience in Ukraine was not addressed during the first stage of the interview, and came up only during the follow-up questions: Well, I don’t know what memories [of Ukraine] should have stuck, because we lived just as normal, we took everything for granted. (Ksenia, 18, small town)
Unmarked belongingness stems from four possible factors. First, the students we interviewed were already living in Russia at the time of the interview, and had chosen to apply for a place at a Russian university through a Russian government program. This means that the families of these students and the students in our sample may have already oriented themselves towards Russia, either before, during, or after 2014. It is also possible that the students took their life within a Ukrainian state for granted, without reflecting on their relationship with a broader Ukrainian national identity project (Polese and Wylegala, 2008; Rodgers, 2006; Tereshchenko, 2013).
Second, since the students spoke of Russia in terms of the resources it offers, the absence of Ukraine in their narratives shows that they either associate Russia with more viable or accessible resources, or have simply chosen to orient themselves towards the resources Russia offers as opposed to those offered by Ukraine. Third, the setting of the interview in Russia with Moscow-based researchers could have pushed study participants to focus on their ties with Russia; possibly, researchers based in Ukraine or in both Russia and Ukraine could have sparked a different set of narratives.
Lastly, it is also possible that neglecting Ukraine in the narratives (even though formally the study participants had resided in Ukraine for most of their lives, were educated in the Ukrainian school system, and most likely held or continue to hold Ukrainian citizenship) may derive from the complex and ambiguous situation Ukraine and Russia are involved in. Participants may try to ‘normalize’ or avoid issues connected with Ukraine, especially if their families find the issues traumatic (Brubaker, 2000), or to reconcile by speaking of ties to the ‘post-Soviet space’ or Crimea and dissociating from the political implications of referring to Ukraine (Rosenthal, 1993).
Unmarked belongingness should be interrogated by using broader samples, varying research settings, and creative interview approaches. Further studies could tackle the question of factors that determine whether a young person develops ideas of belonging to a Ukrainian imagined community, or conditions that can shape how and when young people transition between varying constructs of belonging (thus building on work done by Tereshchenko).
Narratives of mobility and change
Russia’s annexation of Crimea affected the mobility of the region’s residents. All of our participants came to Russia and entered university because of a special program for Crimean high school graduates initiated in 2014. Spatial mobility is one strategy for achieving belonging: it shapes meanings attached to places and people’s experiences of localities (Arp Fallov et al., 2013). The move to study at Russian universities is a ‘sharp turn’ in our study participants’ lives, which most of them regard as something that allows them to access resources Moscow offers, mostly in the form of employment opportunities and economic capital.
Importantly, with few exceptions, our study participants claim they did not consider studying in Moscow before 2014, explaining that it is difficult to study in a different country as an international student due to higher fees and fewer opportunities to study for free. For some participants, it was important to study exclusively at the universities of a capital city, be it Kyiv or Moscow, as in Larisa’s case: ‘I was looking at three universities in Kyiv. Three in Kyiv, and one definitely in Kharkiv. I even went to Kyiv in January 2014 to find out more. But then it turned out differently, and it was scary, and then our supervisor convinced me [not to go to Kyiv]. I wasn’t even going to apply anywhere. Then I found out that Crimean high school graduates, university applicants, have a special program in Russian universities, in Moscow for sure.’ In this regard, their orientation towards Moscow can be considered as an orientation towards any capital city of a state that Crimea is a part of.
Most study participants had planned to enter university not in Crimea, but elsewhere in Ukraine. In their view, Crimea’s integration into Russia made it impossible to study in Ukraine because they regard the socio-political situation in this state as unsafe or hindering mobility. As expressed in Daria’s (18, Yalta) account: ‘As we [Crimea] became Russia, Ukraine [as place for studying] was out of the question, as no sane parents would let their kid go [to a place] under such circumstances.’
The students not only view themselves as mobile and ready to move for the sake of obtaining education and a job, but some of them also view Crimea as a mobile region. Narratives often mention movement of borders. Research participants describe the events of March 2014 using words like ‘country change’ (‘we were in Ukraine’ – ‘we are in Russia’), ‘joining’/‘inclusion’, ‘detachment’, ‘transition’, ‘annexation’, ‘joining-annexation’. These phrases capture changes in the region’s position and reflect its ‘displacement’: I thought it was funny that it was the first time I went abroad, while being already abroad, so to say … I hadn’t been abroad before, and since I was in Ukraine, I studied in Odessa, and it turned out that formally the first time I ended up abroad was when I was coming back home, when Crimea was already in Russia … I was somehow abroad and somehow home. (Ekaterina, 20, Simferopol)
Some students reflect on the new border with Ukraine in relation to movement opportunities. Some consider it difficult to travel to Ukraine and to the EU (these were the places mentioned in interviews) because of the legal status of Crimea, which makes it difficult for students to obtain a visa to travel abroad, since they are registered in a region that is not recognized by most states to be a part of Russia. They have trouble applying for visas both through consulates in Ukraine with Ukrainian passports, and in Russia with Russian passports. In this way, the region’s own ‘mobility’ between two states created hindrances for the students to access certain resources.
Conclusions and implications
This study contributes to literature on belonging by transcending questions of identity formation, and by examining how ‘folk’ constructions of belonging are articulated by individuals in light of the access they have to resources across the borders and scales of cities, regions, and nation-states. This approach is particularly helpful in studies of belonging among groups from borderlands or sites of territorial conflict, where individuals are forced to re-evaluate their life strategies against the backdrop of shifting political cleavages and transformations in state–periphery relations. In addition, a bottom-up take on place-belongingness that accounts for material resources has the potential to expand our understanding of how people form attachments and employ strategies of mobility in former Soviet countries, which are often analyzed in mainstream literature in terms of identity discourses and nation-building.
We have shown how Crimean students who relocated to Russia after Russia’s annexation of Crimea relate to places on different scales (the macro-region of the post-Soviet space, the nation-state scale of Russia, the regional scale of Crimea, the city-level in the case of Sevastopol or Moscow), but always with reference to the constellations of resources they can access through ties to these places. The study thus moves beyond the lens of identity, uncovering the heterogeneity of bottom-up perceptions of place and attachment among the young people interviewed. Moreover, the study attempted to find ways to methodologically move beyond the Russia–Ukraine dichotomy in order to empirically identify folk categories used by Crimean youth, which, in turn, enabled us to interrogate how young people use the categories ‘Russia’ and ‘Ukraine’ without imposing them on study participants. Allowing study participants to avoid statist categories is an important methodological tool to consider during conflict and in a context of a rise in nationalistic sentiment both in Ukraine and in Russia, because it can help us uncover alternative categories used by study participants in their everyday lives. Here, the place-belongingness (Antonsich, 2010; Bennett, 2014; May, 2011; Miller, 2003) approach proved useful, as well as considerations of place-dependence and instrumental belonging (Lewicka, 2011; Lin and Lockwood, 2014; Stokols and Shumaker, 1981), which allowed us to interrogate material and symbolic capital study participants have acquired or seek to acquire, thus transcending statist constructs and identity categories. Adopting these approaches made it possible to demonstrate the multiple and ‘complementary’ (Gryzmala-Kazlowska, 2018) character of people’s ties to different places, and to examine how people navigate between ‘more inclusive options’ of attachment (Tereschenko, 2013).
The findings have two major methodological implications for studies of belonging: first, we reaffirm the importance of bottom-up perspectives and the usefulness of qualitative, open-ended biographical methods for uncovering how individuals formulate belonging. Second, while many sociological studies that inform the theoretical development of ‘belonging’ focus on empirical work conducted in Western liberal democracies (including among migrant populations), turning towards post-Soviet contexts allows us to examine situations when borders ‘move across people’, upsetting and shifting taken-for-granted categories. These shifts present us with two unique windows into how people construct belonging: first, symbolic and economic capital fluctuates, often forcing people to adapt and recalculate their life strategies. Second, silences and possible self-censorship follow. Taken together, these conditions allow us to examine individual and group efforts to retain, regain, or obtain resources in tumultuous times.
Limitations of this study include a Russia-based research team (which may have led study participants to downplay the importance of Ukraine), and a lack of comparison to students who study in Ukraine or Crimea (attempts to reach out to Ukraine-based students from Crimea were made, but building rapport proved difficult). The study also focused on bottom-up categories of belonging, therefore we did not pose overt questions about ethnicity. In further studies, possible pre-screening with a survey that would include a question about ethnicity could allow researchers to diversify the sample and to include an exploration of belonging among Crimean Tatars. More broadly, methods that interrogate belonging without explicit ties to state categories in the research question or interview questions are under-utilized in studies of post-Soviet experiences. The present study shows the fruitfulness of such an approach.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all the study participants for the time and thought they gave to this study, and to Ksenia Efimova and Irina Gavrilenkova for their help with data collection. Thank you also to the peer reviewers for their insightful comments.
Funding
The research leading to these results received funding from the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow.
