Renegotiating the ‘communal apartment’: migration and identity in Soviet and contemporary Eurasian cinema

Abstract

The first decade of the twenty-first century in Russia saw a massive influx of former neighbours from what Yuri Slezkine has described as the ‘Soviet communal apartment’. This demographic shift, particularly the large-scale economic migration from Central Asia, has caused significant cultural and social tensions that have resulted in a reciprocal need to renegotiate the terms of this intercultural encounter in a new historical setting. Contemporary Russian and Central Asian cinema addressing the issue displays critical elements of Soviet nationality policy, including such ethnic identity-shaping notions as primordial ethnicity, backward nations, friendship of the peoples, and Russian cultural and linguistic dominance. These official policies found a potent visual embodiment in Soviet cinema that both reinforced and, during more liberal times, cautiously questioned the unequal relationship between Russians and their ‘younger brothers’ in the Soviet Union. After reviewing the larger tradition of depicting ethnic identity and migration in Soviet cinema, this article investigates to what extent contemporary Eurasian film-makers on both sides of the divide have internalized these formative principles and how they draw on common Soviet-era myths, shared experiences and ethnic stereotypes to make sense of the post-Soviet socio-cultural dislocation as one instantiation of global migration processes.