Authors

Discussion

My paper will apply new approaches from border studies to the exclusion zones around numerous Soviet cities, the largest and most strictly enforced around Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv and Kharkiv, but with smaller counterparts across Soviet space. These metropolitan zones, which began to take shape soon after the revolution and were still being enforced for some citizens until the early 1990s, were intended to protect cities and their surrounding areas from populations perceived as threatening, including returning political and criminal prisoners, social ‘marginals’, certain religious believers, and political dissidents. These zones and their invisible borders are therefore a quintessential example of sub-state boundaries that were ‘invisible to many, but extremely pertinent to a few’ (Rumford): a category that has attracted increasing interest in border studies of the last ten to fifteen years.

For the Soviet authorities, and for those navigating these exclusion zones, these invisible boundaries, which were often disputed between citizens and authorities on the ground, generated forms of ‘border work’ (Reeves), and a ‘sense of a border’ (Green) quite distinct from those of external state borders. This paper will first theorize these boundaries in light of new border studies scholarship, and then engage in close analysis of some of the migration practices, experiences and affects associated with them, based on 101^st kilometre memoirs drawn from the extensive Sakharov Centre and Memorial databases.