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Abstract

While the Russian migration literature captures well social and economic realities of Central Asian labour migrants, it takes only an infrequent notice of other less visible groups of immigrants. One of such groups, African immigrants, is estimated to consist of about 40,000 individuals, mainly from North and Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper looks at the African immigrants in Russia. After identifying the African immigrants, the article focuses on refugees and economic migrants in more detail. Who are the African immigrants in Russia? How do they see Russia and Finland as the countries of immigration? The study is based on scholarly literature of African immigration to Russia and asylum interview documents of the African asylum seekers in Finland. The most prominent group of Africans in Russia are immigrants distributing advertisements at metro stations in large cities such as Moscow. However, these immigrants struggling with their poor status are only part of the Africans in Russia. The highly educated African diaspora and businessmen trained in the Soviet Union, as well as the staff of the delegations, live well- off lives in Russia and there is little interaction between the above-mentioned “new” immigrant groups. In this article, we focus especially on the “new” immigrants who arrived in Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union and their stories of everyday insecurity. International crime and human trafficking enable asylum seekers to move around in Europe today. At the same time, it puts several groups of people, such as women, children and the low-skilled, particularly vulnerable to various forms of exploitation during the journey.

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This article by Maxim Matusevich proposes to develop the model of modernity presented by Paul Gilroy in his seminal essay The Black Atlantic, to better understand the modernizing impact of African students in the Soviet Union on their host society. While it is true that the Soviet Union, just as its Russian predecessor, possessed no African colonies and, in fact, remained unrelenting in its critique of European colonialism and North American racism, it experienced its own modernizing encounter with the Black At­lantic. In the aftermath of the 1957 Youth Festival in Moscow, first dozens, and eventually thousands of African students made their appearance in the USSR. They arrived in Moscow, Leningrad, Baku, Kiev, Minsk, and other Soviet cities attracted by generous educational scholarships but also inspired by their own postcolonial dreams of reforming and rebuilding their newly independent nations. For the Soviets, steeped in anticolonial rhetoric and guided by Cold War exigencies, these young Africans seemed to be "natural allies" who could help to enhance Moscow's credentials in the Third World and cultivate its future elites. However, the reality of the encounter between these postcolonial nomads and a largely isolationist society produced some unintended consequences. From the point of view of Soviet authorities, the community of African students in the Soviet Union continued to be a source of ambivalence and even, on occasion, political and cultural subversion. Cosmopolitan and globally minded African students repeatedly challenged the norms of Soviet political and cultural discourse and, in doing so, proved to be the true harbingers of modernity and globalization for the hosts. In the course of the encounter with Soviet society, they inadvertently expanded the reach of the Black Atlantic, bringing its tidal waves well beyond the Iron Curtain. Резюме: Статья представляет собой оригинальную попытку применить модель модерности, предложенную Полем Гилроем в его знаменитом эссе "Черная Атлантика", для понимания модернизационного воздействия африканских студентов в СССР. Автор рассматривает период после московского фестиваля молодежи и студентов 1957 г., когда в СССР стали прибывать десятки, а позднее и тысячи африканских студентов. Их привлекали не только щедрые стипендии; они вдохновлялись постколониальной мечтой реформирования своих ставших независимыми наций. Советы рассматривали их как естественных союзников и агентов укрепления позиций Москвы в третьем мире. Однако в реальности контакты между этими постколониальными номадами и изоляционистским советским обществом привели к ряду неожиданных последствий, анализ которых и составляет главный предмет рассмотрения в статье. Космополитичные и глобально мыслящие африканские студенты бросали вызов советскому политическому порядку и культурному дискурсу и, как показывает автор, оказывались провозвестниками иного типа модерности и глобализации в принимающем обществе. Взаимодействуя с советским обществом, они непреднамеренно расширяли и пределы Черной Атлантики за рамки железного занавеса.
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