Abstract
While new migrant groups from the former Soviet Union have started to emerge in the UK, gradually taking shape over the course of the 2000s, researchers have been responding with numerous studies that have introduced these migrants to social scientific scholarship. When looking at a population with fuzzy outlines, different histories, citizenships, languages, political affiliations, legal aspects of their mobility and different migration patterns, the term ‘post-Soviet’ is used heuristically, rather than in order to define migrants as a group with clear boundaries. In this chapter, I review the existing scholarship on the topic, seeking to highlight its relevance and the main challenges faced by such research, tentatively structure this body of literature and disentangle its key themes, and suggest some directions for further exploration. I argue that further studies need to draw upon a more differentiated approach towards the diverse migrant populations, instead of using the umbrella terms (such as ‘Russian-speakers’) interchangeably with the more specific ones. Research needs to be embedded in politically relevant contexts (such as Brexit), and would benefit from avoiding the focus on relatively easily accessible groups (such as middle-class Russians), looking instead at groups whose migration circumstances are more connected with risk and vulnerability.
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Notes
- 1.
Tuvikene (2016: 143) argues for rethinking and reconceptualisation of the term ‘post-socialism’ in urban theorising, stressing that ‘[i]nstead of assigning a simplistic definition to the adjective “post-socialist”–understanding a post-socialist city as simply a city in the post-1989/1991 CEE region––this term should be applied more carefully and productively’. This way, he asserts, ‘cities usually seen as post-socialist would be liberated from their territorial trap but, at the same time, within the reworked notion of post-socialism, their “post-socialist” particularities could still be drawn out analytically’ (Tuvikene 2016: 144).
- 2.
Eight Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia), that are also referred to as A8 countries, and two Mediterranean countries (Malta and Cyprus) joined the EU in 2004; followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 (A2 countries), and Croatia in 2013.
- 3.
- 4.
The article is blissfully stereotypical in its portrayal of Russian migrants in London, which includes the use of the old cliché ‘Moscow-on-Thames’ and references to a ‘self-made’ migrant woman who has ‘great skin’ and originates from Yakutsk—with the obligatory mention of winters in home country region being as cold as −50 °C. Media portrayals of migrants are outside the scope of this chapter, but make a great material for research in the field of popular geopolitics.
- 5.
Some authors have focused on Russian-speakers/Russians from the former Soviet states in Britain and other West European countries: Germany (Darieva 2004), the Netherlands (Kopnina 2005), France (Bronnikova 2014). The geographies of UK-based research on post-Soviet migrants are quite diverse, and while gravitating more towards urban areas, cover different regions. London is a common location, due to its multicultural population and large numbers of migrants (Malyutina 2015; King et al. 2017; Parutis 2011a, b; Saar 2017). However, there are also studies focusing on other locations in England (Byford 2012; Kliuchnikova 2015; Savikovskaia 2017), Scotland (Judina 2014; McKenna 2018; Shubin and Dickey 2013), and elsewhere in the UK (Lemos 2014; Liubiniene 2008, McDermott 2012). While most of the studies of CEE migrants including those from the FSU are focused on urban locations, some scholars have addressed rural areas (Flynn and Kay 2017).
- 6.
The idea that the ‘post-Soviet’-ness of migrants is generational and may be coming to an end has been mentioned, for example, by Isaakyan (2010) who brings migrant occupation into her understanding of the ‘Soviet platoon friendship’ as a basis of the Soviet academic diaspora of those who left Russia around the breakup of the USSR. She observes that their case can be approached as the ‘short, happy life of the Soviet academic diaspora’, in a sense that this particular migrant generation that position themselves as different from both later academic migrants and colleagues in home and host countries is ‘facing extinction’ (Isaakyan 2010: 286).
- 7.
As Savikovskaia (2017: 16) observes in her recent PhD thesis while reviewing the state of the art in current research on Russian and Russian-speaking migrants in the UK, scholars ‘made no differentiation between Russian-speakers coming from different CIS states, usually putting them under one umbrella term of Russians or Russian-speakers. No or little differentiation has either been made on the grounds of their nationality or visa status, even legality and illegality of residence in the UK, as the fact of Russian-speaking self-identification was usually enough to include them in the study group’.
- 8.
Language, Soviet past, or citizenship of A8 countries have been a common, but not the only, criteria for selecting a group to study. For example, Markova and Black (2007), choosing the term ‘East European’ migrants, focused on Albanian, Bulgarian, Montenegrin, Russian, Serbian, and Ukrainian migrants in a study on community cohesion, including into their sample research subjects who were at that time representatives of the former socialist countries in CEE, ‘new’ migrants for the UK, and non-EU citizens.
- 9.
According to the figures provided by King et al. (2017), the Russian-origin population constitutes 26% of the total in Latvia, 25% in Estonia, and 6% in Lithuania. It is hardly possible to say what the proportion is among the UK-based migrants. The majority of the researchers, while mentioning the languages used in communication with research subjects (that often include Russian), do not give the exact numbers of Russian-speakers in their samples. However, for example, Saar (2017: 64) deliberately included only Estonian-speakers in her study, noting that that including Russian-speakers would have meant introducing another category to the research, thus increasing its complexity, and that Russian-speakers ‘may have had a different experience of Estonia’s neoliberalization’.
- 10.
See also the ESRC-funded post-Brexit referendum project that included a survey of over 1100 young East Europeans living in the UK, focus groups and family case studies: Here to Stay? Identity, citizenship and belonging among settled Eastern European migrant children and young people in the UK: http://www.migrantyouth.org/publications/
- 11.
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine are the six East European partner states of the EU.
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Malyutina, D. (2020). Whither Studies of ‘Post-Soviet’ Migrants in the UK? Key Themes in Current Academic Research. In: Denisenko, M., Strozza, S., Light, M. (eds) Migration from the Newly Independent States. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36075-7_24
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