Forced Migration, Special Settlements, And Ethnic Identities: Soviet Germans and Crimeans After World war II‪.‬

In Vynuzhdennaia migratsiia: sotsial'nye posledstviia mezhnatsional'nyh konfliktov, philosopher Valerii Lukov and sociologist Sadig Nagdaliev propose, analyze, and apply a theory of the social effects of forced migration on national minority groups. This social science theory offers explanations for short-, mid-, and long-term effects of forced migration on displaced peoples. Immediate or short term results and changes include the loss of family members and familiar surroundings; the destruction and often collapse of social status and everyday ways of life; loss of representatives of the native culture through death and separation; deformation and transformation of national spiritual and material values; destruction of social institutions like schools; the collapse of self-government or the elite power base; and finally the complete destruction of the rest of life. (1) Among midterm effects the authors include the "brain drain" which comes about mostly because of the inability of intellectual elites to pass on their knowledge due to geographical distance and lack of educational institutions; changes in the structure of labor resources, or change in the professional qualifications of migrants as a means of survival; change, dislocation, or disappearance of political, economic, and cultural elites; demographic changes; and finally the inevitable adaptation to a new way of life. (2) Lukov and Nagdaliev argue that from a microsocial perspective, or from the perspective of forced migrants, all the immediate and mid-term hardships result in two long-term effects on the migrants and their mentality. First is a "transformation of mentality," or transformation of ethnic self-consciousness, and the second is the creation and preservation of an "image of the enemy" which had caused their travails. (3)