Beyond Nations and Nationalities: Discussing the Variety of Migrants’ Identifications in Russian Social Media

Abstract

This article examines how transnational labor migrants to Russia from the five former Soviet Union countries – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – identify themselves in social media. The authors combine Rogers Brubaker's theory of identifications with Randall Collins' interaction ritual theory to study migrants' online interactions in the largest Russian social media (VK.com). They observed online interactions in 23 groups. The article illuminates how normative and policy contexts affect the Russian Federation's migration processes through a detailed discussion of migrants' everyday online interactions. Results reveal common and country-specific identifications of migrants in their online interactions. Migrants from Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan employ identifications connected to diasporic connections. Migrants from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan in their identifications refer to low-skilled labor migration to Russia as a fact, a subject for assessment, and as a unifying category. For these countries, the present and the future of the nation is discussed in the framework of evaluation of mass immigration to Russia.