Forced Citizenship: Political Migration to the Soviet Union, Belonging and Passportization in 1930-50s

• In Event: Citizenship in the Shadow of Empire: Enforced and Contested

Abstract

Since 1935, political migrants who came to the Soviet Union for ideological reasons—and who remained for various other reasons—found themselves amidst the peculiar practice of "passportization". For many, accepting a passport posed a dilemma about their identity and belonging: did this act mean abandoning the hope of returning to their homeland? And how would it reshape their relationship with Soviet Union? In this paper, I am looking at the phenomenon of passportization of the political migrants, tracing its evolution during the Stalinist era and well into the late 1950s.

Author

• Yevhenii Monastyrskyi, Harvard U