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Abstract

Since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, tens of thousands of Russian citizens have relocated to Kyrgyzstan. Having long served as one of the primary sources of migrant labor for the Russian economy in the past, Kyrgyzstan has unexpectedly emerged as an affordable and accessible destination for a young generation of Russians fleeing political repression, military conscription and the effects of economic sanctions back home. Unlike many other communities of exile, Russian new arrivals in Kyrgyzstan occupy a relatively privileged position in post-Soviet Central Asia. My research examines how self-exiled Russians are adjusting to life in a country marked successively by Russian colonial expansion, Soviet rule and a continued post-Soviet geopolitical and economic dependency on Russia.

This research looks at the lived experiences of this new Russian diaspora in terms of its social, cultural and economic adaptation. In particular, my research asks in what ways relocation to Kyrgyzstan is making exiled Russians rethink their own positionality within ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic hierarchies shaped by the dual legacies of Soviet and Russian power. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, this study captures the diversity, in terms of class, education, employment and ethnic background, within the Russian community of relokanty, a new umbrella term for those who have fled Russia since the start of the war. Broadly speaking, the project examines the response of Russian migrants to a new life in Kyrgyzstan, more than thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the center of the study is the contradiction between the precarity of forced migration and the historically contingent privileged status of Russians in the region.