Authors

Oksana Ermolaeva¹;  ¹ Complutense University, Spain

Discussion

This paper discusses how the differentiation of people on the move or in transit and their categorization impacted the ethnic minorities’ lives twice in the XX century Russian history: in revolutionary and post-Soviet times, and how the local communities involved in regular local (b) order crossing reacted to these challenges. Uptaking an example of Russian Northwestern borders with Finland, Latvia, and Estonia, the paper shows how the introduction of new, politicized identity markers by the newly created Bolshevik regime played out in the area starting from 1918 up to the end of the 1920s, and then, using the comparative temporalities approach (Kuhrer-Wielach, Lemmen 2016, 574).), it shifts to the transborder regulations and their receptions in the early 1990s. This archive-based research demonstrates, that while the project of infiltration of the borderland populations with the new ‘politicized’ forms of belonging was accomplished much later, and was accompanied with replacement of the ethnic minorities of most of the Soviet borderlands, a political marker of belonging was actively at use from the onset of the Soviet political project not only by the state servants but by the local communities. Later, in the 1990s, the post-Soviet Russia yet again had to reinvent new categories to classify the individuals, accused in smuggling, illegal border crossings, and espionage according to their nationality; and the latter refined their survival strategies. During these periods, Russian ethnic minorities residing at the Russian side of the border (Karelians, Finns, Latvians, and Estonians) repetitively renegotiated the relationship between their territorial belonging and the practices of border crossings by interiorizing and negotianing an increasingly universalist approach to the (b) order making.

The paper claims that at every radical turning point of Russia’s political regime and every (geo)political cataclysm, we can speak of a certain cyclicity of the Russian border regime development, which is a very important aspect of this study. Further on, its accentuates how, as a result of the unintended consequences of geopolitical exigencies, unexpected cross border political and cultural influence emerged in Russian borderland regions throughout the country’s history.