Transgressing the Boundaries: The Migration of Uighurs into Soviet Central Asia After World War II

After World War II, suffering from a severe workforce shortage and unprecedented economic devastation, the Soviet Union encouraged the immigration of Chinese citizens from Xinjiang into Soviet Central Asia. Despite the arbitrary behavior of local authorities, the immigrants were successfully integrated into Soviet society. But after 1963, many of the Chinese “defectors” began to be considered a threat to national security, and the KGB (Committee of State Security) arrested a good number of them. I argue that the Sino-Soviet split affected the mentality and immigration policies of the Soviet Union, much like current relations between China and the Central Asian states shape the attitude of the latter toward new arrivals from China. This article is based on research in the Kyrgyz and Kazakh archives.