ABSTRACT
This book does not provide a history of migration studies in the former Soviet Union1 or an exhaustive account of current migrational movements in the former Soviet space.2 It focuses on a particular social phenomenon: the movement of the Russian-speaking populations3 in the former republics of the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation during and following the collapse of the USSR. It charts the experience of those displaced by this political upheaval and asks how that experience informs an understanding of the relationship between migration, displacement and identity in post-Soviet Russia. By way of introduction, this chapter outlines the empirical and theoretical obstacles which must be negotiated in order to address this question. It argues that traditional divisions between macro-and micro-level studies and existing categories of migration studies, based on a differentiation between economic (voluntary) and political (involuntary) migrants, may have to be unfixed in order to conceptualize successfully current migrational flows in the former Soviet space.
