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FORCED MIGRANTS AND LOCAL PEOPLE: STEREOTYPES OF MUTUAL PERCEPTION AT WAR

Marina Potemkina, T. Pashkovskaia

Abstract

The modern world has been a witness of the surge in migration processes leading to the various problems. Therefore "migration tension" and its causes became the key issue in the contemporary Russian and European historiography. The article deals with stereotypes of mutual perception that existed between native inhabitants and evacuated people during the Soviet-German conflict of 1941-1945. Stereotypes in this sense are fixed images of local people used as clichГ©s and complicating people's adaptation in the regions of arrival. The research is conducted based on primary sources and the theory of stereotyping. It is interdisciplinary in character. The methodology includes historical, sociological and psychological methods. We concluded that the stereotypes were shaped under the influence of many objective and subjective factors. In due course, the social experience of migrants inevitably integrated into the local way of life and a new culture and gradually led to overcoming the stereotypes. Among the factors that influenced the process of eliminating stereotypes were the single economic market and common political space in the USSR, the patriotic and liberating character of the war perceived as a shared grief and national tragedy, the historical experience of multicultural coexistence and the internationalist nature of politics in the Soviet Union. The results of the research are valuable for different migration studies dealing with modern problems of forced migrants' adaptation in a new culture.

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