Abstract
Reviewed by: Rebecca Manley, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada
Roman Lazebnik, a Soviet citizen, migrated multiple times over the course of his life: as a child, his family resettled in Southern Ukraine as agricultural colonists; during the upheaval of collectivization, his father became a seasonal migrant, travelling to work in construction and returning only for spring sowing; when war broke out, Lazebnik was mobilized and travelled across the western expanses of the country as a Red Army soldier, a German prisoner, a partisan, and finally as a member of a territorial defence squadron; at war’s end, fearful of punishment on account of his time in German captivity and encouraged by a fellow soldier from Uzbekistan, Lazebnik resettled in Tashkent. Lazebnik’s is one of many individual stories that animate Broad is My Native Land, Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch’s wide-ranging study of migration in twentieth-century Russia. The book seeks to bring Russia’s twentieth century into the broader global history of migration, and to bring migration into focus for specialists of Russia. While historians of Russia have produced a host of excellent studies on particular forms of migration (most notably deportation) and on specific migratory experiences, no scholar has yet sought to produce a synthetic or interpretative account of migration as a whole, still less one that spans the entire breadth of the twentieth century and three distinct political regimes.
In Broad is My Native Land, Siegelbaum and Moch have written a valuable survey of Russia’s modern migration history. In addition, they have elaborated a distinctive approach to migration. Eschewing an exclusive focus on the state as the prime agent of migration, the authors seek to probe the interplay between what they term the ‘regimes of migration’ elaborated by the state and the ‘repertoires of migration’ developed and practised by the population. Herein lies the book’s most important contribution. In contrast to many studies that view migrants as passive subjects of state policies, Siegelbaum and Moch contend that migrants themselves shaped the migration experience. Their study of migrants’ ‘repertoires’ explores how migrants adapted to distinct migration regimes, ranging from resettlement to deportation. They devote particular attention to the role of familial and interpersonal networks in shaping where migrants went, how they got there, and how they organized themselves upon arrival.
Structuring a book with such broad temporal and geographic scope is inevitably a challenge, and Siegelbaum and Moch opted to organize this work thematically. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a different type of migration, treated in chronological fashion from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. The authors begin with resettlers, like Lazebnik’s family, and proceed to address, in separate chapters, seasonal migrants, migrants to the city, career migrants, military migrants, refugees and evacuees, deportees and, finally, itinerants. The book’s structure is well suited to scholars interested in particular forms of migration, but is less helpful for historians of Russia seeking to understand the migratory experiences generated by phenomena such as collectivization or World War II, both of which are treated in disaggregated fashion across several distinct chapters. The division by type notwithstanding, the authors take pains to underscore the moments of slippage between one form of migration and another, such as when seasonal migration becomes permanent rural to urban migration, or when evacuation becomes deportation.
Given the book’s ambitious scope, it is of necessity largely synthetic. Nonetheless, the authors supplement the extant secondary literature with research in a number of archival holdings, most notably the files of the Resettlement Administration. Most significant for their overall interpretation is their use of numerous first-hand accounts, including the rich repository of testimonies collected over the past few years on websites such as I Remember, where they found Lazebnik’s narrative, among many others. The authors’ commitment to excavating the individual stories of migrants, whether in archives or on the web, reflects their interest in the qualitative rather than the quantitative dimensions of migration. These stories not only add colour and texture to the book, but also underscore the way migrants’ own ‘repertoires’ shaped migration patterns and experiences.
Broad is My Native Land offers rich insights into migrants’ practices in twentieth-century Russia. Readers will also find a wealth of material on the late Imperial, Soviet and even post-Soviet states’ migration regimes. Perhaps because the book spans the whole twentieth century in each chapter, however, the authors are less successful in elaborating a sustained story or argument about the policies and practices of the state at any given juncture. This shortcoming aside, the book makes an important contribution to migration studies. It also underscores the central role of migration across the entire arc of Russia’s twentieth century.