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Paper abstract:

The Russian Federation hosts the fourth-largest population of foreign-born migrants in the world, mobilities that have significantly changed the ethno-racial makeup of 21st-century Russian cities. However, unlike migrant residential patterns typical to North American and Western European cities, it is the absence of segregation or “ethnic” neighborhoods that characterizes Central Asian migrants' presence in Russia’s cities (Demintseva 2017). Social scientists have tended to focus on segregation as a primary analytic or taken-for-granted starting point for understanding social stratification and processes of migrant racialization in metropolitan areas. In contract, this research asks: How does a lack of spatial segregation affect the navigation and contestation of social difference? Do the enduring remains of Soviet housing systems mitigate differential treatment of migrants on the part of the contemporary Russian state and local citizens, or rather, do these high levels of cohabitation exacerbate existing tensions and fuel ethno-nationalist attunements? This paper specifically examines the impacts of housing discrimination on strivings for citizenship and belonging among Tajik migrants in Russia's two largest cities. I draw from 12 months of ethnographic research in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In addition, I draw from 6 months of ethnographic research among return migrants in Tajikistan, as well as interviews and encounters with landlords and digital ethnography conducted on Russian housing websites and residential listings. Tajik centrality in this research allows me to ethnographically probe Moscow and Saint Petersburg as spaces for those visibly non-Russian whose lives are most impacted by the overlapping constraints of racism, xenophobia, and economic precarity in the country. I argue that within the post-Soviet Russian city, it is precisely the lack of racial segregation and high degrees of conviviality that have led to the proliferation of housing discrimination, such as the stipulation that properties be leased to "Slavs Only" (tol'ko slavianie) or only Russian citizens. Thus, I seek to contribute to how ethnographers of urban areas can theorize racialized registers of citizenship in a context devoid of segregation. Ultimately, I aim to examine more closely how some of the most explicitly and successfully articulated Soviet projects—built environments—possess the ability to shape repertoires of citizenship and race within the hierarchies of belonging in the Russian post-imperial landscape.