Liminal Consciousness of New Russian Migrants

On 24th March, I participated in the 10th annual Dean Hopper Conference “Modes of Belonging: Kinships, Exile, and Translation” at Drew University, Madison (NJ), USA.

During my presentation “Relocation": Liminal Consciousness of New Russian Immigrants”, I talked about how the Russian war in Ukraine (2022-) has caused a new wave of Russian immigrants who call themselves "Relocants." These new Russian immigrants are trying through language, oral stories, and even "expert discourse" to abstract from the Migrant Identity due to the historically negatively colored political connotation of the word "Emigrant" in Russian society.

This new group of Russian migrants is actively constructing a new collective memory to comprehend the horror of the "Real" (Lacan, The Neurotic's Individual Myth, 1979) and mitigate the consequences of collective trauma for themselves by forming a new collective memory (Hirschberger, Collective trauma and the social construction of meaning, 2018). It indicates ambivalent intentions, including an individual and collective desire for self-depoliticization and the need to continue the political struggle outside Russia in at least a symbolic and semantic field.

However, the legislative and social requirements of the new countries where the "relocants" migrated may provoke further identification and symbolic-semantic conflicts and find their expression in "relocants"s new oral histories.

Based on analyzing texts of "relocants" in social networks and media, I showed the main topics of the Liminal Consciousness of new Russian Immigrants.

Key words: migrants, Russia, liminality, relocation, collective trauma