This book is the product of two interdisciplinary workshops held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in March 2004 and January 2005. The workshops focused on causes and consequences of migration in Eurasia, both past and present. The volume contains an introduction and conclusion by coeditors Cynthia Buckley and Blair Ruble, respectively, as well as 10 chapters by individual authors; the chapters are grouped in three “parts,” each with its own brief introduction.

The volume editors and individual authors place the discussion of migration in the USSR and post-Soviet territory into the broader contemporary literature on international migration (world systems approach, classical and neoclassical economic perspectives, human capital approaches, and network analyses). The contributors focus on four questions: the interplay between macrolevel forces and individual decisions; the conflicting interests within the state that must balance economic needs and those of cultural maintenance; the decision-making process among those who do not move; and the emotional salience of memories of home.

Part I, “Trends in Post-Soviet Migration,” begins with two chapters (by Timothy Heleniak and Andrei Korobkov, respectively), both of which treat broad issues of post-Soviet migration. Taken together, these chapters provide a wealth of data on the overall dynamics of migration, much of it in charts and tables. Heleniak warns about the limitations of data, which, among other things, have many holes, are subject to government attempts to obfuscate or distort, and are often not comparable across the independent countries of the former USSR. These caveats serve as useful reminders throughout the volume. Despite the data problems, Heleniak provides convincing evidence that, as elsewhere in the world, many of the reasons for migration within the post-Soviet space are related to economic disparities, and that “there is not a separate ‘post-Soviet migration theory’” (p. 63). He also notes that in the Russian Federation (RF), as in other countries with large aging and declining populations, the required levels of replacement migration are “far above levels that are politically and socially plausible” (p. 63). Korobkov stresses the fact that negative attitudes in Russia toward the Gastarbeiter who come from the South are unwarranted—temporary labor migration has important direct and indirect benefits for Russia. In Korobkov's words, migration has “played the important role of social stabilizer” that has allowed many post-Soviet societies to avoid mass hunger (pp. 84–85), something that in turn has a positive impact on Russia. Korobkov dismisses emigration as a major reason for a Russian brain drain; he sees its roots primarily in “‘internal migration’ of Russian academics into jobs not related to their professional skills” (p. 88).

The title of Andrew Robarts's contribution promises a “theoretical and practical look at the Russian Federation's Migration Regime” (p. 99). Pointing out that policy toward migrants is a reflection of attitudes in society, Robarts turns his attention to Muslim migration in the RF. This treatment leads to a conclusion that many readers may find insufficiently nuanced. According to Robarts, given the rise of Russian nationalist sentiment in the RF, the “consequences of a migration regime that is receptive to Muslim migration would be profound and potentially destabilizing” (p. 110). He claims this would result in change in Russia's overall ethnic and religious composition, which “would be perceived as a threat to the core Orthodox and Slavic components of Russian national identity” (p. 110). Seema Iyer's chapter on the “frost belt” rounds off the volume's first part. In this well-documented and tightly organized chapter, Iyer explores why the frost belt has not lost population in the way predicted at the time of the Soviet collapse. Through careful analysis of propiska (residency registration), she explains the dynamics of migration affecting the frost belt among various cohorts—divided according to place of origin, destination, education, economic well-being, gender, and family status.

Part II analyzes historical legacies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Eric Lohr's “Population Policy and Emigration Policy in Imperial Russia” taps rich archival material to illustrate the limits of the tsarist government's ability to control emigration and the tensions between the policy directions promoted, respectively, by Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID). Lohr cites MVD estimates that in the late nineteenth century, “as many as 90 percent of all emigrants” from Russia left illegally (p. 171). Bruce Adams's archivally-based “Reemigration from Western China to the USSR, 1954–1962” provides a vivid picture of conditions endured by those resettling from China to the USSR both as they prepared to move and after arrival in the USSR. Adams's fascinating account of the work of the Soviet consulate in Kul'dzha and its dealings with Moscow illustrate the complexities of policy evolution and implementation, with particular emphasis on the impact of deteriorating Sino-Soviet relations on the Kazakhs Xinjiang. J. Otto Pohl's chapter, which relies on published Russian and Western sources, takes up the “loss, retention, and reacquisition of social capital” by “special settlers” (spetsposelentsy). Comparing the Germans to the other groups he examines, Pohl sees the primary reason for the weak movement among Volga Germans to restore the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) in the lack of a sense of a “territorialized Soviet German nation” (p. 216). Pohl argues that economic factors were very important in Soviet leaders' reluctance to allow deported groups to return to their homelands: Northern Kazakhstan “had grown dependent on Russian-Germans,” the Crimean Tatars filled important “construction, mining, and factory jobs … shunned by Uzbeks,” and Meskhetian Turks, who worked in agriculture, had “earned a reputation for being hard workers” (p. 213).

Idil Izmirli's contribution, on the return of the Crimean Tatars, is the first chapter in Part III, “Transnationalism.” Izmirli's chapter contains interesting observations from fieldwork in Crimea, though in places the prose is misleading, such as a statement that in Crimea, Russian and Ukrainian languages “are being used interchangeably in the public spheres” (p. 240). The chapter also contains a number of misspellings, mistransliterations, and mistranslations. Alexander Diener's contribution analyzes Kazakhstan's oralman policy to gather the Kazakh diaspora in independent Kazakhstan. While acknowledging that Kazakhstan's leadership has a clear policy intended to increase the share of the titular ethnic group in the country's population, Diener challenges the interpretation of the oralman policy as merely a “full-scale state-directed resettlement” related to a “hardening of space.” He points out that in order to understand the implementation of this policy, it is necessary to consider “the logical spatial distribution of the returning diaspora along socioeconomic lines, and the exercise of free will within a condition of imperfect information on the part of the returning migrants” (pp. 275–76).

In the last chapter of Part III, Ruth Mandel considers the Volga Germans' and Jews' migration to Germany and their integration there. Mandel highlights the stark difference between policy toward these groups, which Germany has “recruited, targeted, and privileged,” and other foreigners, particularly Turkish Gastarbeiter. Because of a pervasive German ideology that “Germany is not an immigration country” (p. 307), Jews have been “gerrymandered into an obscure category of ‘quota/contingent refugees,’ Kontingentfluchtlinge,” whereas Germans, in accordance with German constitutional law, have been categorized as German nationals returning from an extended exile of two centuries (pp. 306–7). Mandel describes the frequent movement between Germany and countries of the former Soviet Union by Volga Germans and Jews who have settled in Germany; in so doing, these groups “inherently challenge conventional notions of citizenship” (p. 309).

One of the volume's most valuable contributions is its demonstration that governments, even “totalitarian” regimes run by centralized organizations like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, are limited in their ability to control the movement of the population in their states. As the chapters demonstrate, the reasons include the lack of coordination among different actors or institutions within the government, their working at cross purposes, authorities' incomplete or inaccurate information about the population and its movement, and even such simple logistical issues as a lack of personnel to process documents or buses to carry the would-be migrants. The volume also illustrates how very powerful regimes—whether tsarist or Soviet, not to mention post-Soviet—are susceptible to pressures from below, and that sometimes this leads to fundamental changes in policy.

The volume is also particularly useful in illustrating the contextual nature of the concept “homeland”; from the perspective of citizens, we see in such diverse cases as Kazakhstan and Crimea that an unseen homeland may nevertheless serve as a powerful magnet. We also see that regimes at times adopt policies that allow, encourage, or oblige those it regards as alien to leave, even if such populations have lived on a territory for centuries.

The introduction to the book, the introductions to individual parts, and the conclusion by Ruble do a good job of bringing coherence to a set of essays on very disparate topics, assuring that the individual authors relate their topics to broader questions in the scholarly literature on identity, homeland, and migration.