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An anthropologist finds that Russians in two European cities live in separate, often competing subgroups.
by Boris Kagarlitsky
Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization Studies and a columnist for The Moscow Times.
East to West Migration: Russian Migrants in Western Europe, by Helen Kopnina. Ashgate, 2005. 243 pages.
Migration is one of the most popular and also most sinister talking points in today’s Russia. Every day the largely nationalistic press complains that migrants from the republics of the former USSR are “congesting” Moscow and other big cities, that they take jobs from Russian citizens, and that they lead to greater crime. In this connection, it should be noted that not long ago Russia not only welcomed migrants but also sent its citizens to other countries. In Western Europe there are hundreds of thousands of Russian migrants. Many of them work and reside there illegally.
In East to West Migration: Russian Migrants in Western Europe, anthropologist Helen Kopnina writes about such people. Although the title suggests more, the book's scope is limited to presenting research conducted among the “Russian community” in two European capitals, London and Amsterdam. Kopnina teaches at Haarlem College and the Amsterdam Fashion Institute. Coming from a family of Russian immigrants who rode the previous emigration "wave,” before the collapse of Soviet power, Kopnina is an almost ideal intermediary between the two groups. She is a Russian йmigrй who is assimilated into the cultural system of the West, although her Russian origin was not always an asset in researching this book. Some of her subjects were sympathetic, but assumed she knew the "obvious" things that a person who grew up in Western Europe could not have known, while others viewed her with suspicion and envy as one who left with an earlier wave.
MELTING-POT MIGRANTS
From the first pages of the book the reader learns that the Russian community in London and Amsterdam is neither truly Russian nor truly a community. Just about everyone from the former USSR at least those who speak Russian is considered "Russian" in the West. Their ethnic origin is irrelevant as in the well-worn joke about the man who left Russia a Jew only to become a Russian in Israel. The migrant's point of departure is also irrelevant; many "Russians" had moved westward from Ukraine, Belarus, or Kazakhstan. As the governments of the former sister republics sling mutual recriminations and tell their citizens that their newly independent countries and societies are distinct, the йmigrйs, finding themselves in the West, consider themselves representatives of one and the same culture and one and the same society. Belarusians and Ukrainians in Western Europe, excluding members of nationalist organizations, automatically become Russians.
The immigrants whose lives Kopnina examined have nothing much to do with politics, however. They left for England or Holland looking for work. Some of them hoped to start a professional career, others wanted to see the world and acquire new experiences unavailable in Soviet or post-Soviet society. Some readers might be surprised to discover that the concept of "community" is not appropriate to describe "the Russians." They are divided into numerous, scarcely communicating groups. Their members belong to different social strata and have different political views. More than that, they have no common cultural life and no centers where they might meet and feel themselves as together. “During my field work, I discovered that the concept of ‘subcommunities’ describes Russian migrants’ circumstances more accurately than that of ‘community,’ ” Kopnina writes.
In the course of her research, Kopnina discovered several subcommunities, including artistic and professional ones, both "closed" and "open" (to locals and each other). These subcommunities are hardly in contact with one another, or are often in conflict. Among the Russian emigrants in London one can meet the oligarch Boris Berezovsky as well as half-starving dishwashers. These migrants can hardly manage to feel kinship. A common culture and language are of no help in this regard.
The emigration of the past 15 years differs greatly in many respects from earlier episodes. Even though most of those who left the USSR were seeking economic rather than political asylum, they shared a common dislike of the system and the country they had left behind. They benefited from state social support that was much more generous in the 1970s and 1980s than now, and their numbers were few.
This book, however, is about a new wave of emigrants who fled not Soviet power so much as a new reality, one shaped by the collapse of the Soviet system. Therefore, their attitude to the Soviet past is often less negative. They are economic refugees, too, but where in previous waves people fled an economy ruined by central planning, now they flee a radically free-market one. The long-term pattern of Russian emigration has been peculiarly shaped by recurrent waves, each differing ideologically, culturally, and socially. The social situation of the new wave is in some respects the opposite of those faced by Soviet-era emigrants, for whom emigration was largely illegal. In recompense, the West did not exactly welcome such emigrants, but did not mind them. Now the situation is different: to leave is not a problem, but arriving can be troublesome.
UNFETTERED COMPETITION
Migrants face an unfriendly or even hostile environment. Many are afforded no or restricted legal status. Survival is largely a solo act, for these migrants demonstrate a surprising solidarity deficit. In this respect, the new Russian emigration in the West reflects the same tendencies in play in post-Soviet society. It is startling that contemporary Russian society has been quickly marked by an almost complete absence of altruism, solidarity, and community. No longer under the dominion of the Communist Party, society has turned to primitive individualism.
This paradox can be simple explained. The Soviet system solved all collective problems in a centralized manner, through the state bureaucracy. The system did not permit self-organization among the citizenry and often suppressed it as a politically dangerous tendency. Personal matters, on the other hand, were a citizen’s own business. People did not need to hold hands to be together, and when they got together they had to jostle for more comfortable positions. As the poet said, "I’m trying to feel someone’s hand but come across an elbow."
These social skills are extremely useful for emigrants. Abroad, they are inclined to solve their problems on their own. But Kopnina writes that when they acquire valuable information and contacts that helps them settle into their new lives, they are careful not to share these with their compatriots, whom they view as competitors.
Kopnina’s book is instructive in that it illustrates how emigrants from the former Soviet Union retain the familiar qualities of the society that raised them, although they may make no effort to cooperate or even meet others in the same boat. Of course, Russians do not heavily populate the author's two focus cities as they do, say, Berlin or Paris. In this sense, London and Amsterdam can be considered cleaner fields for research in that people from the former USSR became numerous in these cities only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, unlike in the German and French capitals, home to many Russians since the revolution of 1917. The experiences of these old emigrants, along with those of the "second wave" that left after World War II, have little in common with those of the "new wave."
The ongoing emigration to Europe also differs from the "third wave" of the Soviet period, which helped establish tight-knit Russian communities in Israel and in New York. Kopnina notes the absence of such communities in London and Amsterdam (in marked contrast, Chinese and Indian neighborhoods flourish).
Further studies of the phenomenon of Russian emigration are needed in order to understand it in a contemporary and in a historical perspective. As a start, readers unfamiliar with everyday life in post-Soviet Russia can turn to Kopnina’s book for unexpected revelations.
Translated by Luidmila Znatkevich.
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