| Summary/Abstract |
Based on an analysis of the bureaucratic interactions between deported Chechen and Ingush ‘special settlers’ (spetspereselentsy) and local state institutions in late-Stalinist Kazakhstan (1944–1953), this article argues that the deportees’ acts of assimilation can be seen as representative of the contradictory dual relationship of victimization and dependence faced by the majority of Soviet citizens in one form or another during late Stalinism. Rather than an entirely peripheral and unusual case, moreover, this narrative of Chechen and Ingush assimilation in Kazakhstan may have important implications for the study of state–citizen relations throughout Central Asia and the whole of the USSR.
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