ABSTRACT
Post-Soviet migrations to Western countries have already lasted for thirty years. Since the loosening of the former Soviet Union’s and then Russia’s emigration regime more than ten million people have left the Russian Federation. At the beginning of the 2010s Russian speakers in Finland were affected by many conflicting national and transnational discourses, policies, expectations, and demands, which gave rise to a feeling of being “between the devil and the deep blue sea”. It is a commonplace to state that immigrants to Finland from the countries of the former Soviet Union during the post-Soviet period form a heterogenous group. Russian speakers’ heterogeneity is conditioned by evolving Finnish immigration policies. In the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s two immigration channels were open to people from the former Soviet Union: the “return” migration of persons of Finnish descent; and marriage migration.
