World War II and its aftermath enabled hundreds of thousands of people to leave the USSR and settle permanently abroad. In previous instances of outmigration, the Soviet state had allowed or even encouraged unwanted people to leave the country. In World War II, however, officials became desperate to repatriate people whose subjecthood they increasingly defined in ethnonational terms. Over time, the scope of their efforts transformed to include diasporas whose members had sometimes never lived in the Soviet motherland.
This talk examines the campaign initiated by the Committee for State Security (KGB, the secret police) in 1955 through the "Return to the Motherland" front organization. The KGB built on post-World War II repatriation efforts and aspired to the mass return of the wartime diaspora, which would demonstrate the superiority of socialism to capitalism. The epicenter of the campaign was Ukraine, where most of the nearly ten thousand migrants were ethnic Ukrainians from the diaspora in Latin America. Many became disenchanted when promises of family reunification, national belonging, and material prosperity went unfulfilled. The predictable conflicts that arose over these disappointments reveal unexpected dynamics in the post-Stalinist Soviet national imagination and the agency of migrants in the Cold War.
This event will be hosted in person and virtually on Zoom. Non-NYU affiliates must RSVP for in-person campus access.
Seth Bernstein is Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida. He previously taught at Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He is the author of Raised under Stalin: Young Communists and the Defense of Socialism (Cornell, 2017) and Return to the Motherland: Displaced Soviets in World War II and the Cold War (Cornell, 2023).
