Foreigner, Control and Symbolic Exchange: How Provincial Bureaucracy Created Migrational Discourse in Post-Soviet Russia (Case of Irkutsk)

The article contemplates the process of developing a language by Irkutsk officials to describe migration in the early 1990s. Drawing on the archive they collected, which includes internal documents of the city administration, migration service and police, the authors trace how local self-government bodies and lower structures of federal departments perceived migrants and relations with them. They focus on the social characteristics of migrants that were ascribed to them, the spaces in which they were represented, as well as the actions, of which they became objects and subjects. The authors identify two discourses that described interaction with “strangers”. Both discourses characterized a newcomer as an “ethnically” labeled outsider with some inherent ability to influence the host community negatively. The difference between them was in the notion of how to discontinue this influence. The first discourse, more frequently used by the local governments (the authors call it “administrative”) presumed an exchange: the authorities allowed and supported the manifestation of cultural differences in exchange for the loyalty of “outsiders”. The second discourse (designated as the “forceful” one) involved strict control and constraints as the main way of interaction. In conclusion, the authors put forward the hypothesis, according to which both discourses, to one extent or another, go back to the Soviet narratives that shaped, on the one hand, national policy, and, on the other hand, the policy of control over internal and cross-border migration. According to their opinion, the archive documents reflect the process of merging these narratives into the discursive foundation of the modern Russian migration policy that is built on a sense of an obscure existential threat that can be stopped either by symbolic exchange or by forceful suppression.