As part of his “Introduction” to The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, author Hein de Haas underscores a key point of tension regarding migration in the modern era: while the movement of peoples is nothing new, the challenges they present to nationalist ideas underlying many contemporary nation-states are. From the removed position of the student’s desk, this appears inane: if people have been moving forever, why do nationalist ideologies think they stand any chance of stopping this?
In the case of both the Soviet Union and Turkey, it appears as though, for a time, there was not a move to deny the shaping powers of migration. Instead, the definitions of a “Soviet citizen” and a “Turk” seem to have been wide containers used to encapsulate many different kinds of people, both blurring and defining differences between them where necessary… So long as those involved satisfactorily suppressed or cast off their old identities (both in name and in practice) in favor of accepting the supremacy of this new one.
The “newness” of a state, or at least a state ideology, at first allows for many types of people. Justin McCarthy, quoted in Bedlek’s Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey, characterizes the fledgling Turkish Republic as “… a nation of immigrants whose citizens came from Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere” (Bedlek, 22). A brief look into McCarthy’s academic works is revelatory of his pro-Turkish stances; regardless, it is hard to imagine this Turkish Republic wherein all these different groups came together as one. Especially if Armenians are one of these groups.
Still, there is some type of “blank slate” element that comes with the rapid promotion of a new identity. This may be tied to the need to get more groups involved at first in order to legitimize the new, self-defining operation. Plus, there may be the very practical consideration of it being easier to include everyone into a new group with no historical anchors than it would be to co-opt many different groups into one, already extant and historically situated title.
The Soviet Citizen
The Soviet Union placed, to no one’s astonishment, the Russians as the proverbial “elder brother”. Jeff Sahadeo, in his 2019 work Voices from the Soviet Edge : Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow describes how this is viewed by other, non-Russian sectors within the former Soviet Union. Many interviewees acknowledged the privileged position of the Russians, but still recalled fondly the solidarity so many different groups were able to establish when under the collective umbrella of “Soviet”. Sahadeo observes in these responses what may be remnants of a performative show of appreciation. Clearly someone far more knowledgeable than myself in both Soviet spaces and human psychology is needed to dig deeper into these responses.
Nonetheless, the Soviet Union made concerted efforts to display its vast cultural holdings and position itself as a diverse metropole, sponsoring programming that, while stilted and essentialist from today’s vantage point, showed how many could become one under the ever-powerful “friendship of peoples”. Sahadeo is always careful to make note of exactly whence these diverse voices come: from “officially recognized” minorities.
From the eyes of some of the actual migrants within the Soviet Union — which does not fully include the indigenous populations who suddenly fell under Soviet jurisdiction — the picture is less rosy. The Chechens, the Ingush, and the Uighurs from China, though all nominally Soviet, and not all external migrants, were not made to part of this cohesive, far-spread mass. While Sovietness may have been both available to many in the form of passports and promoted to a degree on a state level, Soviet identity shattered when the government collapsed.
The Turk
The situation in Turkey is slightly different, and I am still working through the various pictures I have had presented to me regarding Turkish identity. The McCarthy quote from above is an extreme, painting the Turkish Republic as a diverse group of immigrants living as one. Keyder’s analysis (in Hirschon, 2008) paints a different picture, entirely. Keyder instead characterizes Turkish nationalism as emphasizing unity and collectiveness, but considers it a strain of nationalism all the same that “precluded the possibility of a citizenship constituted on a foundation of principles that would apply regardless of differences in religion, language, or race” (Hirschon, 47). In reconciling Keyder’s view with the reality of the 1923 population exchange, the fact that these (likely) Greek speakers imported from Greece itself were placed into Turkey with minimal disruption to larger Turkish social systems shows that the 1923 forced migrants themselves had a very minor impact on Turkish society. The same is not true for the forced migrants in Greece. Nonetheless, Keyder’s emphasis on collectiveness from a base position of homogeneity very adequately accounts for the removal or outright genocides of “undesireables”.
Still, I am left to question: was “race” (and, to a lesser extent, language) truly a barrier to Turk-hood?
A Story Closer to Home
Notions of an open-ended, widely cast identity that anyone has the possibility of attaining are very familiar to me. This is, indeed, what nearly two decades in the American public education system has led me to believe on some level — surely, anyone can become an American, with enough grit and perseverance! The United States, in its founding and even to this very day, is characterized by its oddly polarized attitudes toward migration. Though reliant upon migration to support a population in its founding days, policies specifically engineered to exclude certain groups have always been in place. Thus, I am very skeptical of the promotion of catch-all, “come one, come all!” approaches to the development of any solidarity group.
Though these approaches were perhaps necessary rallying cries in the early days of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Turkey, and the United States of America, the creation of a new identity to encompass the populace of an emerging nation-state is inherently “othering”.
References
Bedlek, Emine. Imagined Communities in Greece and Turkey. Trauma and the Population Exchanges under Atatürk. London: IB Tauris 2016.
Keyder, Çaǧlar. “The Consequences for the Exchanges of Populations for Turkey”. Crossing the Aegean: an appraisal of the 1923 Compulsory Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey. New York: Berghahn 2008.
de Haas, Hein; Stephen Castles; Mark J. Miller. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: The Guilford Press 2020.
Sahadeo, Jeff. Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2019.
Your comments highlight the fact that modern states shape identities in myriad ways, through efforts to attract or incorporate and to exclude people or to forcibly redesign them. Migration may challenge nationalist concepts, or may be driven and determined by nationalist concepts.
You bring up an interesting point that I’ve thought about as we read about the Soviet Union – that many Central Asians adopted a sort of dual nationality, considering themselves both as members of their Central Asian nation as well as Soviet. Your closing statement, that the creation of a new national identity is inherently alienating, is very thought provoking, and you support the idea well.
I’m interested in your point about Soviet identity “shattering” with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Our readings emphasized that many people identified themselves as Soviet, in addition to or instead of identifying with the nationality of their individual countries. It must have been difficult for these people to reshape their identities almost overnight. I’m wondering if this sense of Soviet identify really did go away or if it remained for some time.