Welcome, Not Welcome: The North Caucasian Diaspora's Attempted Return to Russia since the 1960s

In 1968, a Jordanian man, 'Abbas Mirza, visited Kabardino-Balkaria, a mountainous autonomous republic in Soviet Russia. He was of Kabardian (eastern Circassian) descent, and his ancestors had emigrated to the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century. He was one of the first overseas Circassians and, indeed, any foreigners who were allowed to enter the North Caucasus since the onset of Soviet rule. Soviet authorities invited his family to visit Kabardino-Balkaria to see for themselves the progress that had been achieved under communism. Mirza did not have the best time on his trip. At some point during the carefully curated Soviet tour, he started asking questions about "the Communists": "What kind of rights do they have in the Soviet state? Do party members and nonmembers have a similar lifestyle? Are there any Communists who believe in God? What happens to religious people in this country? Do children of party members and of nonmembers get along?"¹ Mirza did not receive satisfying answers to his questions. He was then relieved of his cash when someone stole the equivalent of 800 USD in Soviet, Turkish, Syrian, and Jordanian currency, which the man had brought with him. At the end of his less than stellar trip, 'Abbas Mirza told the Soviet organizers: "I regret deeply that I traveled [to the Caucasus]. … What will I tell people in Amman? I will, first of all, tell them that people there are kind, cheerful, hard-working, hospitable, and achieve the seemingly impossible, but they drink a lot, there are no mosques, and religion is relegated to society's margins. … After all the good and bad that we saw, I doubt that my children and I would ever want to come here again."²

Mirza's disappointing trip to the Caucasus rests on two historical developments. First, since the 1860s, North Caucasian Muslims—including Circassians, Chechens, Ingush, Ossetians, Balkars, Karachays, and others—lived not only in the Caucasus but throughout the Middle East. About a million North Caucasians had left tsarist Russia for the Ottoman Empire.³ A century later, several million of their descendants were citizens of Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel. Most of them learned Turkish or Arabic, while preserving their native languages in their villages. Second, in the late 1960s, the Soviet government started quietly reaching out to the North Caucasian diaspora with the hope of spreading Soviet influence to the Middle East. The North Caucasian diaspora had had little communication with the homeland since World War I. At the height of the Cold War, North Caucasians in the Middle East were allowed to reestablish ties with the Caucasus, under the watchful eye of the Soviet government.

This article examines a transnational relationship between the North Caucasian diaspora in the Middle East and its homeland within Russia since the 1960s. It focuses, first, on Soviet-sponsored tours to the Soviet Caucasus for North Caucasian activists from Jordan, Syria, and Turkey and, second, on the diaspora's efforts to repatriate to the Caucasus under Soviet and Russian rule. I argue that the Soviet government's outreach to the North Caucasian diaspora fell short of diasporic activists' expectations, disappointed with the realities of life under communism and the Soviet government's opposition to repatriation. Yet this limited engagement electrified an entire generation of North Caucasian activists in the Middle East and paved the way for more assertive transnational Circassian activism and calls for repatriation after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet government's engagement with overseas diasporas of some of its constituent Muslim nations offers a new angle on global Soviet history at the height of the Cold War. The Kremlin's relationship with emigrants from the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, especially their western regions, was fraught with tension. Soviet authorities regarded those who left the motherland and refused to repatriate as traitors, while many emigrants rejected the legitimacy of Soviet rule in their homelands. The Soviet government's relationship with an older, 19th-century diaspora of North Caucasians in the Middle East was...