A Review of Jeff Sahadeo, Voices from the Soviet Edge: Southern Migrants in Leningrad and Moscow. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2019, 273 рр.

Abstract

The new book by the Canadian scholar Jeff Sahadeo is a historical anthropology of the migration from the southern regions of the USSR to Moscow and Leningrad during late socialism. Based on a large collection of oral history interviews with former migrants as well as on archival and newspaper sources, this book compares the historical experience of migration in the USSR with similar processes in North America and Western Europe. The migrant stories presented in the book reveal the complexity of the late-Soviet historical experience that can hardly be reduced to the concept of “stagnation”.