Rights and Roubles: Exploring Migration from the Soviet Successor States to Russia
Ashton Verdery and G. Robin Gauthier
3/20/2008
Introduction
Recently, political scientists have attempted to “bring the state back in” to
migration theory (Hollifield 2008), and sociologists have lamented the “short shrift” of
the “nation-state as an agent influencing the volume and composition of international
migration” (Massey 1999: 303). Thus far, scholarly responses to these calls have focused
on immigration and immigrant groups, but this is only one half of the migration process.
Little work has incorporated the role of the state in analyses of emigration (exceptions
include Sayad 2004; Schmitter Heisler 1985; Brand 2002; Østergaard-Nielsen 2003; and
Green and Weil 2007). Scholars exploring the emigrant state have focused on state
responses to the emigration of citizens (Fitzgerald 2008), or attempts to prevent
emigration (Zolberg 2007). That states may desire, or be ambivalent about, the removal
of large subsets of their citizenry seems forgotten in many analyses. Given the wealth of
literature on ethnic cleansing, refugees and coerced migration (e.g, Zolberg, Suhrke and
Aguayo 1989), this is a surprising omission.
Furthermore, in the literature on ethnic relations, few have analyzed emigration as
a response to political pressure. Scholars have documented ethnic patterns of migration
(Kobrin and Speare 1983), yet, outside of the refugee literature, interest in migration and
ethnicity has not moved beyond migration as a cause of ethnic identities (e.g., Horowitz
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