Beyond Russia, Becoming Local: Trajectories of Adaption to the Fall of the Soviet Union among Ethnic Russians in the Former Soviet Republics

Abstract

When the Soviet Union began to unravel in the late 1980s, many observers expected that the 25 million ethnic Russians who lived in the non-Russian republics represented an important group of people who could be mobilized by ‘empire-savers’ to stem this process. Russians who would end up as minorities in new nationalizing states, had little if anything to gain from state disintegration. They were also highly resourceful in terms of education and occupational positions. The sinister role which ethnic Serbs played in Slobodan Milosevic's schemes to salvage the Yugoslav state boded ill, as did the bloody war waged by France in Algeria in protection of the pied-noirs in the 1950s. As it turned out, the Russians in the non-Russian republics for the most part remained remarkably passive, and this contributed in no small degree to the tranquil transition to a new political map in Eurasia. This article is an attempt to explain this counterintuitive outcome. I revisit a typology of identity trajectories for the Russian diaspora which I developed in the mid-1990s and conclude that its basic insights remain valid. At that time I had argued that Russians outside the RSFSR had already for some time been going through a process of dissociation from the Russian core group. They were adopting some cultural traits from the local population without undergoing any kind of assimilation. While there were important regional varieties as well as generational differences within each Russophone community, as a general rule it could be said that they had developed an identity of their own, or more precisely: one local identity for each republic. In this way Russian ethnic solidarity was weakened and the mobilizational potential of the diaspora issue for political purposes was diminished. Empirical research carried out by myself and others over the last 15 years, including large-scale opinion polls, seem to confirm these assumptions. After the break-up of the unitary state the distance between the identity trajectories of the various Russian-speaking post-Soviet communities have gradually grown wider, for a number of reasons. Those Russians who were least willing or able to adapt to the new political circumstances have in many cases returned to Russia, making it even more important for those who remain to learn the local language and find their cultural-political niche in their country of residence as a national minority.