Yevhenii Monastyrskyi

How can a state people fleeing also be a refuge? Between 1918 and 1991, tens of thousands of political migrants came to the Soviet Union seeking safety and purpose. This dissertation traces history of the Soviet migration regime, system that granted asylum seekers rights and privileges while also surveilling and limiting them. Drawing on multilingual state archives and personal papers across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Central Asia, this research follows the entanglement between policy and lived experience. By looking at the Soviet Union as a host-society rather than a closed, self-contained world, the dissertation offers a new account of migration and belonging in the twentieth century.