Broad Is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia’s Twentieth Century by Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Leslie Page Moch (review)

Although human mobility has been among the themes of several major monographs in Russian history during the last decade (see, inter alia, the work of Brown, Gatrell, and Sunderland), the field has lacked a comprehensive study of migration in all of its forms.¹ In Broad Is My Native Land, Siegelbaum and Moch join forces to offer just such an account. The work is chronologically ambitious—spanning the entire twentieth century and covering three different political systems—and thematically comprehensive, with chapters devoted to resettlement, seasonal migration, urbanization, various forms of professional movement, refugees, deportees, and a broad category of “itinerants.” Although the authors acknowledge that such thematic separation obscures what was, at times, the mutual constitution of different forms of migration (8), such an approach allows them to trace continuity and change clearly among different political systems.

The book’s argument is structured around two key concepts invoked in the title: migration regimes—that is, state behavior, “policies, practices, and infrastructure designed to both foster and limit human movement” (3)—and repertoires—“migrants’ own practices, their relationships and networks of contact that permitted adaptation to particular migration regimes” (5). The history of migration in Russia, for the authors, is a story of mutually evolving and reinforcing repertoires and regimes, a dance between state interest in human movement and the individuals who actually did the moving. If this relationship was, at times, profoundly asymmetrical, nonetheless, “people were not putty in the hands of the state” (392). Thus, although resettlement, for example, was crucial to both tsarist and Soviet plans for economic modernization and resource extraction, in practice moving settlers depended on their own networks, economic practices, and the preferences that emerged from them (47). Specialists in higher education during the Soviet period, though required by law to work at an assigned site (sometimes isolated or otherwise undesirable) for five years, often used a process of informal negotiation to live where they wished (180–183). Even ethnic deportees and special settlers, subjected to some of the worst conditions that the Soviet system had to offer, counted among their repertoires escape and emotional adaptation, salvaging a narrative of pride from inhumane circumstances (296–297, 309). These examples by no means exhaust the richness of the volume, but demonstrate the robustness and versatility of the authors’ conceptual framework.

At the broadest level, this work is a new way of telling an old story, as the authors themselves imply in describing migration as a “barometer” of political, social, and economic conditions (5). The dichotomy of repertoires and regimes is basically consonant with a revisionist understanding of Russian and Soviet history, which acknowledges the significant ambition and coercive power of the state while also noting individuals’ ability to avoid, shape, or adapt to the state’s onerous demands. But the authors’ contribution remains significant. They walk a fine line, emphasizing for Russianists the importance of mobility throughout the twentieth century, while employing the familiar typologies of migration studies in an effort to bring Russian history into that field fully, not simply as a stereotypical locus of coerced movement (392–393). Most importantly, by bringing a plethora of life stories into what could easily have been a dry, state-centric narrative, they provide a deeply human history of migration—the lives that it made, the lives that it changed, and the lives that it destroyed.