by Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne
Our author is a social anthropologist. This blog post reflects on personal experiences during her fieldwork, exploring the complexities of post-Soviet identities and their political implications among people from the former USSR in Bavaria.
“I’m out with older ladies again. The meeting is over and we take the underground together. There are five of us in total.1
The women tell me that they usually feel a bit reserved when an external person attends their events. That’s not the case with me. They don’t feel like I am a ‘stranger.’
The women ask me about my family. Whether my children are staying at home with my husband while I do research in Bavaria. Whether he is getting on well. Whether he is German.
I answer in the affirmative, and a woman [a Jewish woman from Russia] asks: ‘Is he ours or [one of] theirs? [Он наш, или ихний?].”
(From my field diary [name of the city], 14 January 2025).
This dialogue from my fieldwork diary raises many questions. What does my interlocutor mean by that? Is she asking whether my husband is “on our” side [i.e. theirs, and then whose?] and in what manner? Or does she simply ask if my husband is from the former Soviet Union?
This blog post will deal with these and further relevant questions of identity and belonging among people from the former USSR in Germany.
The conversation from “field” and its significance for me as a social anthropologist from Post-Soviet Space
This conversation with interlocutors on one winter afternoon is nothing special in the context of ethnographic research. On the contrary, it describes the very ordinary process of how an ethnographer turns from a “stranger” into a kind of “own”, into a “friend” (cf. Powdermaker).2
I have experienced such “passage” several times in my research career.
The focus was always on different belongings (ethnic, national, gender, etc.), social status, personal characteristics or habitus, to name but a few. It began with my one-year field research as a research assistant in the mountains and valleys of Georgia, continued with a year of my doctoral research in the border region between Georgia, Azerbaijan and the Russian Federation (from the Azerbaijani side) and is currently continuing in Germany from 2021.
About the author
Nino Aivazishvili-Gehne holds a PhD in social anthropology and is a researcher at the Leibnitz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS). Currently, she is working on the research project “On the fulfilment and failure of the hope of living as a German among Germans. Germans from the former Soviet Union in Bavaria” at the “Centre for Culture and Remembrance. Expellees and Resettlers in Bavaria”, based at the IOS and the University of Regensburg and funded by the Free State of Bavaria.
As an unmarried young woman in the mountains of Georgia, I was under observation. I aroused curiosity and was questioned: what I was up to, why I wasn’t married, whether I wanted to get married, whether I had nothing better to do (i.e. get married). In Germany, I was already researching as a married woman and the mother of two children (Aivazishvili-Gehne 2024: 37).
During my fieldworks the interlocutors sometimes gave me subject-specific names such as “a learning girl”; “our student from Vienna”3 and sometimes nicknames that hinted at a transformation of my positionality in the field. “Little Nino” (p’at’ara Nino meaning young in Georgian); “solnyshko” (солнышко in Russian, sunshine in sense of my darling) or “chjornenʼkaja” (чёрненькая in sense of “One with dark hair and brown eyes.”)
To summarize briefly, I was perceived as a woman, mother, migrant and at the same time, my interlocutors would give me nicknames as a sign of personal closeness.
However, the statement made by the old lady from Bavaria on this particular occasion, was something special. It affected me indirectly, but nevertheless put me in a certain position on the scale of a “stranger” and “one’s own” in a specific post-Soviet migratory context.
“Ours” versus “Theirs” in post- Soviet migratory contexts in Germany
Similar questions about whether someone belongs to a community and how they do so are in the foreground when it comes to the classification of ethnic Germans from the former USSR. Foremost, the question of whether they are “real” Germans as Russian speakers. Several authors have already written about this in detail, and to list and discuss them all would go beyond the scope of my blog entry (see Panagiotidis 2021). However, I would like to clarify the terms such as “Ours” (наш) and “theirs” (ихний) in the context of my ethnographic case study.
Pairs of terms “Ours” (наш) or “theirs” (ихний) form a dichotomy that can be addressed on different levels of a person’s identity among people from the former USSR. For example, if the woman asking the question were a “late repatriate,” the question would actually be about finding out what it means to be a “German among Germans.” And the person would want to know whether my husband is a “Russian German” or a German with no migration experience from the former USSR. In this constellation, I would be a “non-member” of the “we group” (Elwert 1989), simply a Georgian woman married to a type of German. However, this person was not a “Russian German,” but a Jew from the former USSR. This detail leads us to a more complex dimension of belonging: being post-Soviet and thus “own” at some point. This can mean different things, but also several things at the same time: coming from the same country; having the same mother tongue; having had similar generational experiences in the respective (post)socialist country, etc.
In the conversation mentioned at the beginning, I was included in the “we” category because I was born in the former USSR, grew up in post-socialist Georgia, and speak Russian. That could also explain the interlocutor’s comment: They “don’t feel like I am a ‘stranger.’”
And although I am pretty sure that the question about my husband was not meant that way, the categorization of being “ours” / “post-Soviet”, currently leads to a highly sensitive politicized identity: belonging to “Russkij mir.” (Russian World). This term has been redefined in and for the post-Soviet space, is very ambiguous and used for dangerous political purposes, for example by Putin’s regime.
According to Oleksandr Zabirko (2023), “Russkij mir” is a geopolitical concept, which unites different currents of anti-Western, anti-liberal and neo-imperial Russian thought. It includes Russian language culture and historical consciousness, strongly anti-liberal and anti-European Russian Orthodoxy and emotionally charged symbols (ibid.). In its most recent manifestation, the idea of “Russkij mir” provides an important basis of legitimization for Russia’s war against Ukraine (ibid.).
Almost two months after the women asked me about my husband’s belonging, I was sitting with Taisiya (Russian German woman from Russia) over coffee in her office in another city in Bavaria. From her, I learned what concrete forms this “world” can take in ordinary contexts, and why the division into “ours” and “theirs” is affective.
“This ‘our’ (наш /наша) is really by no means harmlessly connoted. That, precisely that, forms an emotionally charged attachment to the amorphous great homeland, with which one feels connected via everyday things. ‘Our women’, ‘our food’, ‘our music’, ‘our language’.4 Putin has created this ‘monster identity: belonging to everyday things.’ And that is what people feel connected to. It’s a birch tree, a song, a dish, a smell or a memory. It’s this emotional aspect that makes people differentiate themselves from others or feel attacked by others. One is rationally aware, it’s not about someone taking away your birch tree, but it [the amorphous belonging to the everyday] is affectively transferred to a large geographical area, ‘Russkij mir.’’’
(From my field diary [name of the city], 6 March 2025).
As I mentioned earlier, my interlocutor’s enquiry did not have this connotation. My ethnographic example can be better explained with the help of Dace Dzenovska’s paper: “Bordering encounters, sociality and distribution of the ability to live a ‘normal life’” (2014). The author describes and analyses encounters at the EU border in Latvia when the border police stopped illegal migration from non-EU areas. Dzenovska concludes that the border police treat people who want to migrate from the post-Soviet space differently from those from Africa. People with post-socialist experience are more familiar, in some ways “closer.” The border police “know” about post-socialist life conditions and recognize that the people at the checkpoint are “normal people like themselves” who are simply looking for a “normal life” (cf. ibid.: 278).
The old lady from the former USSR tries to categorize my husband and me according to this standard of what is “ours” and what is “theirs.”
Some final thoughts
In this blog post, I have used my identities as a kind of ‘projection surface’ for discussion. In doing so, I have shown how diversely the positionality of a social anthropologist can be seen and interpreted. A particular focus, however, was on old and renewed geographical and highly politicized identities formed in relation to post-Soviet and non-post-Soviet space.
To conclude, sometimes it makes us smile, sometimes it makes us ponder, and there are situations in which we have to contextualize our interpretations very carefully without overlooking important details.
References
Aivazishvili-Gehne, Nino: Auf der Suche nach dem guten Leben. Postsowjetische Gemeinschaften in Osnabrück. Bielefeld: transcript, 2024.
Dzenovska, Dace: »Bordering encounters, sociality and distribution of the ability to live a ›normal life‹«, in: Social Anthropology 22/3 (2014), S. 271–287.
Elwert, Georg: Nationalismus und Ethnizität. Über die Bildung von Wir-Gruppen. In: Kölner Zeit schrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 41/3 (1989) S. 440–464.
Panagiotidis, Jannis: Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland. Eine Einführung mit einem Vorwort von Sergey Lagodinsky, Weinheim: Beltz Juventa, 2021.
Powdermaker, Hortense: Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Zabirko, Oleksandr: »›Russkij Mir‹«. Vom kulturellen Konzept zur geopolitischen Ersatzideologie. https://www.bpb.de/themen/europa/russland/522375/russkij-mir/, (2023) last accessed on 21.03.2025.
- These observations with old ladies are part of my current research project: “On the fulfilment and failure of the hope of living as a German among Germans. Germans from the former Soviet Union in Bavaria” and is based on field research conducted in Bavaria since March 2024. The research is being carried out at the “Centre for Culture and Remembrance. Expellees and Resettlers in Bavaria” and financed by the Free State of Bavaria with a special grant [Project TG 78 “Culture and Remembrance. Expellees and Resettlers in Bavaria”] [↩]
- You can find out more about the events with old ladies from the former USSR in this blog post “Babushka’s” Get-Togethers – On Silence and Other Strategies for Being and Remaining a Community in Times of War [↩]
- Because I carried out my project at the University of Vienna (at the Research center for the history of transformations RECET). [↩]
- On March 21, 2025, in a completely different interview situation, I heard the following from another interviewee in another city in Bavaria: “My daughter is so horrified by Putin’s politics that she has even stopped eating pelmeni. She says she even hates pelmeni because it reminds her of Putin.” (Here, too, we see how food is associated with this politicized version of “our” identity. (From my field diary [name of the city], 20 March 2025). [↩]
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Redaktion ostBLOG (28. März 2025). “Ours” or One of “Theirs”: Contextualizing Belonging(s) among “Russian Germans” and Jews from the Former USSR in Bavaria. ostBLOG. Abgerufen am 29. April 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13laz