THE POWER OF THE UNBURIED:

QUASI-INDIGENOUSNESS, LIMITED CITIZENSHIP AND COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY OF RUSSIANS IN MONGOLIA AND CHINA

Abstract

Using the experience of repatriates from Inner Asia as an example, this article examines the specifics of Soviet practices of suspicion, fixing the border population in a situation of inevitable political and racial impurity. Despite the gradual withdrawal of the state from the mass persecution of people in border areas after 1953, the emotional experience of living near the border is relevant, not only in new post-Soviet contexts but also as a way to understand the past. This experience will be considered in two aspects: (1) the citizenship regime for repatriates as it, to a greater or lesser extent, related to the community and (2) the specifics of the community’s responsibility for armed resistance to Soviet power. The narrative shift in the study of Stalinism and Soviet citizenship has provided a broad theoretical view of the value system and epistemology of the Soviet subject. It should be noted that this theoretical generalisation can be filled with empirical content thanks to anthropological studies of the border communities from the eastern part of the USSR (Transbaikalia). To write this article, material was used from field research conducted in Mongolia, Inner Mongolia and the Chita region in the autumn of 2012, 2016 and 2021.