“Cage” Familiar, Unfamiliar, and Foreign, or Why Emigrants Go for Freedom

In the field of political studies, a toolkit has been developed for analyzing the functioning of the state, its specific organs and systems of interaction with other, equal entities. However, all of this only works when the state itself is genuine. What if the “mortal god” that has been familiar since the time of Thomas Hobbes is only imitated, forming an external, protective contour of something else, hidden inside? Meanwhile, today such cases are not at all uncommon. The article puts forward a hypothesis according to which, such a tool as the analysis of migration flows helps to see or at least more or less reasonably model the course of political processes within imitation structures. According to the authors, such flows can serve as an indicator of the implicit (not yet in the public sphere) political processes both at the point of origin as well as at the destination point. The authors test their hypothesis using a case study based on a series of interviews with migrants from the Central Asia, primarily from Tajikistan, who moved to the Russian Far East under state resettlement programs in the recent years. As a rule, these migrants previously lived in the capital or other large cities; they possess fairly high skills and have a good command of the Russian language. A large number of migrants name the desire for freedom as a motivation for moving. The authors use a substantive analysis of what kind of freedom is being discussed to penetrate the deep layers of the polity of exodus. The conceptual basis of the analysis is the idea of polity as a system of restrictions (“cage”) that provides opportunities for joint activity. The article highlights familiar restrictions perceived as an objective state of affairs, and unfamiliar restrictions (changes), which become powerful factors of expulsion. In this context, “freedom” turns out to be “foreign” restrictions aimed at actions that are conceivable and widespread in the “foreign” society and therefore not important for people from another polity.