A View from the Italian Side: Transit Migrants from the Soviet Union in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract During the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of migrants from the Soviet Union transited through Italian territory. Awaiting Western immigrant visas, people spent weeks or months in the maritime periphery of Rome. Based on Italian archival evidence, the article discusses how this migration was perceived in Italy. The article interprets the ex-Soviet transit as an integral part of the broader migrations that crossed Europe during the second half of the twentieth century. Within the Italian context, I inscribe the transit in the tectonic shift from emigration to immigration that Italy underwent from the 1970s onward. Scholars have commented on how slowly Italian government policies and legislation came to appreciate the country’s changing migration landscape. This article goes further by connecting high-level politics to the situation on the ground—in the localities where people from the Soviet Union stayed—and shows how ordinary Italians confronted the new migratory reality face to face. Although the former Soviet citizens were transit migrants rather than immigrants proper, the challenges they faced had much in common with those encountered by many immigrants from other countries. In that sense, the reception of the ex-Soviets not only revealed the extent to which Italian society was (un)prepared for these new population dynamics but also offered an instructive preview of the larger, more bitterly contested migrations that awaited Italy and the rest of the Western world.