ABSTRACT

By definition a refugee is an individual who seeks refuge from persecution from outside their own country.1 It is the physical crossing of international borders which differentiates refugees from other kinds of ‘displaced persons’ since the latter might adequately describe anyone who has been forced to leave his or her home through actual or potential threat of violence or persecution (Schwartz 1993:240; Susokolov 1994:187). Thus, when the press first began to talk of ‘refugees’ in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s the term was doubly problematic. Ideologically the concept of a ‘Soviet refugee’ in a country which had prided itself on the establishment of an historically new community of peoples appeared nonsensical and, since the first refugees appeared before the collapse of the Soviet Union and moved only within the Soviet single space and before the USSR had adopted any law on refugees, or indeed on immigration (ibid.), they did not strictly conform to the international definition of refugees either.2 As a result, when towards the end of the 1980s significant numbers of displaced persons appeared on Soviet territory, ad hoc executive government resolutions rather than comprehensive legislation defined the rights of refugees and other ‘involuntary’ migrants while, in practice, the actual granting of status was left to those on the front line-the police.