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

Russia is not a part of the world scholars often associate with migration, perhaps because of its history of state-imposed restrictions on mobility (in the form of serfdom, collective farms, and an internal passport system that exists to this day). Yet migration has long been an integral part of Russians’ lives, as Lewis Siegelbaum and Leslie Page Moch show in their compelling book, Broad is My Native Land. With this work, Moch and Siegelbaum have attempted to “bring Russia in” to the field of migration studies while drawing Russianists’ attention to the importance of human mobility in Russia’s social, economic, and political landscape. Although the book covers some familiar ground and is somewhat limited in its timeframe, it is a well-researched and beautifully written study that brings the lives of migrants to the fore of an engaging historical narrative.

Broad Is My Native Land examines migration (or rather, migrations) across Russia and the former Soviet Union during the country’s “long” twentieth century, a period stretching roughly from the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 to the early 2000s. The authors discuss several different types of migration, with chapters addressing resettlement (colonization of Russia’s hinterland), migration to the city, deportation and evacuation, career and military migrations, and seasonal migration, as well as a fascinating coda on Russia’s itinerant peoples, including mobile pastoralists and Roma. The book’s organization means there is some repetition; the movements associated with collectivization and dekulakization under Stalin, for instance, appear several times. However, it allows the authors to catalog the immense diversity of migrants’ experiences and to show that different types of migration coexisted and overlapped. The book’s center of gravity rests on the Stalin era, when the scale of migrations of all sorts (voluntary, coerced, and some combination thereof) reached massive proportions but also addresses the pre-revolutionary period, the post-war Soviet Union, and both Yeltsin and Putin eras. By examining migration under three distinct regimes—tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet—the authors attempt to highlight peculiarities of the Russian experience that have transcended political systems.

Among those peculiarities, the authors point out, is Russia’s sheer physical expanse, which in many ways defined its migratory “regimes,” state plans for and management of migration. In such a vast country, with natural resources far from population centers, both tsarist and Soviet states viewed migration as a necessary component of imperial governance and economic development. Russia’s vast hinterland also gave officials ample space into which they could exile, evacuate, and deport their subjects. Yet distance also attenuated these states’ ability to govern migratory processes. As a result, Moch and Siegelbaum argue, migrants employed their own “repertoires”—culturally-specific strategies, practices, and personal networks—to move, survive, and establish new lives. While acknowledging that Russians seldom moved in circumstances of their own choosing, Siegelbaum and Moch take great pains to show that migrants—from Arctic reindeer herders to Gulag guards—made decisions that shaped their fates at least as much as the “regimes” imposed from above. Even in cases of extreme state coercion, they contend, repertoires were essential to migrants’ mobility.

The authors also stress that migratory regimes and repertoires were not always in opposition but rather existed in constant and often complimentary interaction. Peasants who resettled to Siberia, for instance, took advantage of the tsarist state’s limited reach to circumvent rules and restrictions. At the same time, resettlement depended on settlers’ self-reliance and initiative to fill the gaps left by inadequate planning and infrastructure. The authors show that a similar dynamic was at work in the case of urbanization, seasonal migration, evacuation, and in many other contexts, paying particular attention to the role of the family in migrants’ repertoires.

Broad Is My Native Land represents an...