Special Issue Article Genealogies across the cold war divide: The case of the Pontic Greeks from the former Soviet Union and their ‘affinal repatriation’ Ethnography 2020, Vol. 21(3) 355–372 ! The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1466138120939589 journals.sagepub.com/home/eth Eftihia Voutira School of Economic and Regional Studies, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece Abstract This paper focuses on two historical moments in time and geographical locations, significantly situated at the beginning and the end of the Cold War of the Pontic Greeks’ recent past. The significance of these moments relates to the two encounters between the two formerly isolated groups of Pontic Greeks, separated by the Cold War divide: one in the East (FSU) and the other in the West (Greek nation state). It addresses the continuous reconceptualisation of state-family relations, including the Soviet policies of the state as family. The main hypothesis is that in the case of the Pontic Greeks ‘repatriation’, normally seen as ‘return to a place’, should be construed as ‘affinal repatriation’, meaning ‘return to each other’. The paper considers alliance theory (affinity by marriage), thus expanding the traditional concept of kinship (as consanguinity) while maintaining the idiom of belonging, including ideological foes as defined by the Cold War Divide. Keywords Greek Communist Party rules, endogamy, Tashkent, affinal Repatriation, genealogies, Soviet parent state, philelene Corresponding author: Eftihia Voutira, School of Economic and Regional Studies, University of Macedonia, Egnatia 156, Thessaloniki 54636, Greece. Email: voutira@uom.edu.gr 356 Ethnography 21(3) The case of the Pontic Greeks: Conceptualising ‘homecoming’ as sociability Seen over time, Pontic Greeks are a permanently mobile people, due to choice or coercion. They can trace their origins back to the 7th century BC, speak Greek in different periods, call themselves Rhomaioi (medieval noun for ‘Greek’) and continue to distinguish themselves from their surrounding cultures – including in Greece – by calling each other ‘My root’ (riza’m) as a term of endearment. They have been referred to as Greeks or Hellenes by the different cultures they have lived among, as well as by scholars who have studied them. Following the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey (1923), the Pontic Greek populations of the Black Sea regions confronted a dilemma as regards the direction of their flight: to the East, to what was originally the Russian Empire and became the Soviet Union, or to the West, to the Greek nation state (Hirschon, 2004).1 The two groups were brought together at the beginning of the Cold War in 1949 under conditions of exile, when members of the Greek Democratic Army fled under Stalin’s orders to Tashkent (1949) after their defeat by the Nationalist forces in the Greek Civil War (1946-49).2 There, they found the deportees (exiles) from the Black Sea regions of the Former U.S.S.R. The second encounter of the two groups came at the end of the Cold War in 1991, which marked the official launch of the Greek state’s Repatriation Programme of ‘their kith and kin’ from the FSU to Greece. The late Byzantinist Anthony Bryer, one of the first to firmly place them on the interdisciplinary academic map, claims that “the Pontic Greeks are among the world’s survivors”. Interest in their identity was launched through the publication of the special issue on the Odyssey of the Pontic Greeks, published by Oxford University’s flagship publication, the Journal of Refugee Studies. Since then, a series of anthropological PhDs have employed the Pontic Greeks as a case study, drawing from a fascinating narrative that has been reinterpreted in different contexts in light of their long duree. This paper draws from extensive fieldwork in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and Greece3 in order to explore one aspect of kinship and its relation to Forced Migration, a flourishing academic field that has integrated post-Colonial, postSoviet, and post-Cold War studies. It addresses the complex topic of ‘repatriation’, a concept which may claim to be an almost ‘empty signifier’ given the many contexts in which it has been used both at the level of state policy and as personal project for members of the diaspora who have the right to return to a putative historical homeland. From the standpoint of the receiving state (Greece), in the last 20 years following the end of the Cold War the newcomers have been construed largely as members of the ‘nation’ and thus as privileged in relation to other migrant populations. In this sense, they may be identified as ‘privileged return migrants’ (Voutira, 2004). Voutira 357 The concept of repatriation has traditionally been used to mean ‘return to the antecedent place of residence and/or origin’ (‘homeland’). The main hypothesis of this paper is that ‘repatriation’ in the case of the Pontic Greeks should be construed in terms of ‘affinal repatriation’, meaning ‘return to each other’, rather than ‘return to a place.’ The Pontic Greek example is presented here as a case that challenges the more conventional conceptualisations of kinship as it relates to the experience of forced migration, which defined each and every generation of its members for at least a century. This long-term longitudinal perspective allows for certain critical issues to be raised concerning the group’s notions of membership and belonging, particularly since it relates to their inclusion into the family of the nation-state (Greece). A key theme in this analysis concerns the manner in which self/other perceptions are structured and articulated in the context of membership and belonging. I construct this narrative by conceptualizing Pontic Greek culture as infinitely dividing segmentary groups divided across internationally-established state boundaries in the 20th century. The principle of segmentation relates to forced migration, a phenomenon which in the case of the Pontic Greek people has the status of a regularity that needs to be explained. The use of ‘segmentation’ outside ‘stateless’ societies is not new in anthropological research. Michael Thompson has pointed out the way competing narratives operate as cultural segments to account for the possibility of conflict within a group. Using Dresch’s (1986) analysis concerning ‘honour’ as the unifying theme mapping the different forms of segmentary differentiation within Yemeni society, Herzfeld has pushed this argument one step further by suggesting that segmentation is a feature of the ‘logic of concealment and display’ (Herzfeld, 1992: 66). A different use of segmentation is introduced in Papataxiarchis (2006: 410–15), who uses it to usher in the concept of ‘auto-colonialism’, a concept he constructs with reference to western views of Greece as “a hegemonic construction given the perception the civilized West had on the inhabitants of Greece as the ‘natural heirs’ (fisikoi klironomoi) of their ancestral heirs.4 He suggests that segmentation is a tool to understand both ‘hospitality’ and patterns of integration within a hierarchical statestructure. His argument is that segmentation is ‘a transformer’ (metasximatistis), which can, among other things, accommodate the value laden notion of ‘assimilation’ (ensomatosi). Seen from the perspective of contemporary Greek state policy, the notion of integrating or asmilating new members is an important act of affective kinship that I explore below in considering different examples of encounters between the Pontic Greek newcomers and their kin state (Greece). The conceptual model of ‘cultural segmentation’ will be used to understand the relationship of identity and displacement by focusing on how the Pontic Greeks developed their sense of group identity despite being uprooted every generation. Drawing upon accounts of segmentation that divorce it from lineage theory (Herzfeld, 1992; Holy and Stuchlik, 1983), segmentation is used as a heuristic device deployed to reconstruct their continually-interrupted cultural narrative across the Cold War divide. 358 Ethnography 21(3) The relevance of kinship and ethnography of the Soviet Greek case It can be said that one aim of ethnography is to provide a holistic account of a priority acknowledged by that community which cuts across societal levels. The ambiguity of ‘repatriation’ as it refers to the Pontic Greeks’ ‘return’ to Greece or antecedent places of residence within the Former Soviet Union (FSU), plus their rich interconnections with Greek history and modern Greek culture, support this priority. A main hypothesis is that the ‘Pontic’ Greeks are a group of people who trace their origins to the Pontos of the 7th century BC and define themselves in terms of their ‘affinal ties’ (the term ‘affinal’ is used here to include cases of consanguinity and belonging to a collectivity based on a common affinity). This identity is far stronger and deeper than just being ‘Greeks from the Pontos’. Within the totalitarian society model, kinship and tracing genealogical lines was a high-risk activity within the Soviet context. As Pahl and Thompson (1994) observe, oral history based on family lore, on interpersonal familial relations did not allow for any genealogical test because the necessary condition for the formation and perception of family history is the knowledge of the networks of familial relations. In most families there is at least one person who functions as the gatekeeper of the family tradition, who constructs and transmits family lore, what happened to whom, who married whom, who separated from whom, and who died, including the when, where, and cause of death. For many people, family memory is what creates genealogy and places it at the center of an ‘alternative’ history to the extent that it differs from the official textbook version. On the level of lived history, the difference between the soviet and the western model of family lore is critical. Soviet society was predicated on the common precept that to remember is dangerous; the less people knew about someone’s family history, the better. This is because every piece of information could always be used negatively in the future. Friendship, familiarity and intimacy between people and families were experienced against the backdrop of this fear of personal recollection and self-reflection (Verdery, 1995). Family members often played the role of policeman. The result was an all-encompassing secrecy, equivalent to the kind observed in the context of “speaking magic” (Geschiere, 2013). Irina Serbakova’s (1992: 103–116) research among survivors of Gulags shows that many kept their experiences in exile secret not only from their children, but also from their spouses (see also Alexopoulos, 2008). In the case of the Soviet Union, family memory was considered ‘dangerous’, especially if it did not coincide with the official norms of public memory, i.e. what was ‘allowed’ and ‘not allowed’ to be remembered both in private and in public. The danger when family members leaked information was something that everyone was socialized to observe. Every village had a statue of little ‘Comrade Pavlik’’ (Pavel Morozov), a mythical child who was a member of the komsomol (communist youth party), and whose claim to fame was that he denounced his father to the KGB for his subversive activities (Kelly, 2005).5 Voutira 359 It would be fair to say that who lives with whom – and by implication, who works, cooks, eats, and exchanges labour with whom – remained at least partly patterned by the habits of patrilocal residence, at least in the 1960s, among the exiled Pontic Greek communities in Central Asia. The establishment of Soviet life ostensibly changed all this, but the structure of expectations followed the old pattern that required obedience to the norm of patrilocality as practiced in Greece (Loizos and Papataxiarchis, 1991). Seen from the perspective of kinship and repatriation, not simply as a family project but as a political order by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the question of who married who became critical. The order of the CPSU was that no Greek Communist (political refugees) was allowed to marry locally while in Tashkent. This order was in conflict with the soviet principle of intermarriage among the different ethnic groups as part of the ideology of the creation of the ‘Soviet Nation’ (Szynkiewicz, 1990). Ironically, a large number of Greek political refugees were of Pontic Greek origin. The tragic irony was that they discovered that there were other Pontic Greeks in Central Asia when they started looking for wives, obeying party orders to marry within, i.e. other Greeks. And yet our case study is different. The Greek Communist Party (KKE) under the protection of the Soviet Communist Party and in light of the dictates of democratic centralism had full control of the fates of individual party members. Given that the arrival of the members of the Democratic Army had to follow the last order of the leadership committee of the Democratic Army, the precept to be applied at all levels of social life was obedience to the order ‘en guard’! (to oplo para poda). Getting and being married is one of the most important priorities of adult life. Giddens (1992), and others have argued that marriage, according to norms in advanced capitalist society, should be the result of love rather than by arrangement. Here I would introduce the notion of party loyalty as a critical variable in understanding some of the more complex issues relating to marriage choices and the types of arguments used by Greeks in Central Asia to legitimiz support, or explain their choice of spouse during the ‘exile years’ (yperoria). The context within which marriage choices were to take place is a primary factor in determining the type of rationale and particular cultural idiom used as a response. The focus is on the degree to which the ethnic minority norms are in agreement or in tension with the norms of the host society, as well as the strategies people use to accommodate one or both. In the Soviet context intermarriage between different ethnic groups was seen to be as much part of the ideology of sliianiye, the coming together of the different nations, as was the promotion and continuous reference to the ’soviet people’. As Maria, one of my key informants in Tashkent told me, the “promotion of intermarriage among different ethnic groups and particularly with Russians was seen as part of the state ideology”: “Every marriage between members of different nationalities was seen as a step towards the realization of the Soviet people, and a victory of communism!” 360 Ethnography 21(3) Case study 1: Finding the Greek communists in exile: ‘Political refugees’ from the Greek civil war Tashkent constitutes a focal point of the Soviet Greek deportation experience, bringing together segmented groups: Pontic Greeks who had left for Greece in the 1920s and had become ‘Greeks’ and those who had stayed behind in the Soviet Union (Voutira, 2006b, cf. Karpozilos, 2014; Lampropoulos, 2014; Yatroudakis, 2000).6 ‘Tashkent, gorodkhlebnyi’ (Tashkent, bread city!) was the popular Soviet name for the capital of Uzbekistan, a city whose identity has been tied with socialist development on a grand scale (Zei, 1992). For modern Greeks, Tashkent is often referred to as ‘Little Moscow’ and has special significance because it was where the Greek Democratic Army leadership was sent in August 1949 after the defeat of the communists in Greece. In 1991, there were cafes and tourist pavilions in the park, where three blocks of KGB buildings still dominated the central city opposite the Central Party offices and Lenin’s statue, emblems of Soviet power structures. Around noon, huge kettles of boiling pilaf produced an enticing aroma mingled with that of corn cobs being grilled on street corners. Traditionally dressed women, youth in jeans, and old men wearing tiboukeitas (Muslim caps) would buy their lunch and eat standing up or sitting on stools along the strip of paved road in the middle of the park. At the same time, in Moscow, one could hardly find a loaf of bread at the local bakery, let alone buy anything in the street other than shriveled tomatoes or sprouted potatoes sold outside the grocery markets. For the Soviets, a critical issue concerning the city of Tashkent relates to the composition of its Greek and Pontic Greek populations.7 For a long time, the two groups remained isolated from each other. Within Tashkent, the dominant Greek identity was that of political refugees (politemigranty), a total of 11,110 persons including 6,022 men and 1,142 women, though their civic status remained that of stateless people (litso bez grazhdanstva) for at least ten years (Lambatos, 2001). The term ‘evacuation’ (ekkenosi) as referring to what happened to the Greeks from Greece came from one of the informants who explained this deportation to Central Asia under Party orders as a challenge that had to be achieved under conditions of wartime flight. This rescue mission was coordinated through Albania, where boats were waiting to load women and men to be taken through the Black Sea and then from Batumi by train to Tashkent. Housing was the first challenge, as described in the memoirs of a number of these communist Greeks; they lived as ‘mobilized soldiers’ in long wooden army barracks built for German and Japanese prisoners of war. This situation lasted until 1956. As one of the members of the Democratic Army reflects in his memoirs, it was only after that date that they began building their ‘own homes’: Our people who were arriving in Tashkent were put in camps set up next to big industrial plants or construction complexes. These original barrack compounds, our mahalades, Voutira 361 were later called politeies (gorodok – small town). Men lived in male wards and women in female wards. The majority of the women who were there with their husbands could not live as couples . . . Everyone was given work immediately. They would all line up in the morning and march to work and they would all line up in the evening to march in to sleep. We followed the same military discipline that we had in the mountains. . . It was forbidden for anyone to leave their barracks. It was also forbidden to form relations with Soviet citizens, and particularly for the men to have relations with Soviet women (Dritsios, 1983: 15ff). In accordance with party orders, the ‘polit emigranti’ were not allowed to marry ‘Russians, Uzbeks, Kazakhs or others. They were required to find a way to marry ‘within’. This regulation was related to the communist leadership’s long-term plan to facilitate the select Tashkent group’s return to Greece whenever the fight to establish communism was resumed. This precept also guided the educational system of the Greek Civil War evacuees (Pondila, 2004; Voutira and Brouskou, 2000). Marrying a Russian meant putting down roots and this was not an option allowed by the Party, although it was tolerated more often than not. For “the young Greek lads” (ta palikaria) of the Democratic Army who had not married while in Greece, the question of finding a wife became a key preoccupation. Vangelis’s story is typical. Pontic Greek by origin, his father fled to Greece as a refugee in 1918 and settled with his family in the Katerini region. Vangelis was recruited into the communist resistance forces in 1944 at the age of sixteen. He was “of marrying age” (tes pandrias) when he arrived in Tashkent in 1949. He retrained as a mechanic, under Party rule, but as he insisted: My problem was not finding work, it was finding a wife. The Party order was not to marry anyone non-Greek . . . In 1954, I heard that in the region there were members of our family, from both sides. They were in Kentau . . . I took the map and tried to find the town. I saw the train tracks and knew there was a station approximately 20 kilometres distant from the town. I had to travel along a dusty road to reach the village. It seemed like being in the desert. I asked around and most people spoke Romeika (Greek). I found the family . . . Then I decided to marry Aliki (who was tes pandrias [i.e. of marriageable age]), even though they were ‘Greek royalists’. We got married in Tashkent. (Vangelis T., b. 1928 in Katerini, arrived in Tashkent in 1949, interview in Thessaloniki in 1996). For members of the Democratic Army such as Vangelis, seeing/meeting a ‘Greek royalist’ was like confronting the enemy. The Royalists were the enemy of the Democratic Army in the Greek Civil War. Why would someone who had been deported within the Soviet Union identify with the Royalists in Greece? The answer relates to the preconceptions and perceptions of each about the other. Deported Greeks had a passport with the indication, ‘Kingdom of Greece’, sufficient in the Cold War climate to identify them with the opposition. In Greece, marriage between the opposing sides would have been impossible, but 362 Ethnography 21(3) in exile the sub-national Pontic Greek affinal relation imposed its own rules of endogamy, which in exile was the priority (Voutira et al., 2004). The tensions between the Greek communists and the exiled Greeks from the Caucasus were acutely articulated by one of my interlocutors: We the communists came here at daylight. They took them [exiled Pontic Greeks] late at night. The reference here summarizes forced migration practices under the Soviet regime. As I havedocumented elsewhere (Voutira, 2011: chapter 4), the practice of Stalinist deportations involved taking people away late at night, whereas the Cold War assumption was that in a democracy arrests occurred in daylight. As Marina said, “when the soldiers came to our house at three o’clock in the morning our lives were turned upside down. . .What to take, what to leave, whom to inform, how to think about the future and the past. We followed the order, we got on the trains and since then each day has been a different struggle for survival” (see also Agtzidis, 1991). Aliki first thought about going to Greece when she was eighteen years old and her mother began mentioning marriage. Who would she marry? A Greek, of course. Why? This was the first time the rationale was explained to her, because she could then go to Greece someday. We were not raised to think of Greece as a haven. Our parents did. I remember them talking about it as a dream. But then after we were deported there was very little that we could do. We were all trying to survive from one day to the next. No time to think or contemplate a better or different life. Then, when the marriage age came and we were thinking about who will marry whom, the issue of Greece was always coming up. My brother was in love with a Russian girl; she was beautiful and kind but my mother did not want her because she was Russian. So she quickly arranged a marriage for him with a Pontic Greek to make sure that he didn’t ‘get a Russian’. There were many people like my mother, they were all afraid of having a Russian in the family. . . If you marry you can’t leave, my mother said that if you marry it is like sowing roots. How can you uproot yourself again then? (Aliki T., b. 1935, exiled from Batumi to Kentau, Kazakhstan in 1949, interviewed in Thessaloniki in 1996). Another case of a ‘polttemigranty’ marrying within the ethnic group against the interests of the party, but also farther away in the Caucasus, is Lefteris. His story is different in that he managed to get permission from the Party to visit his relatives in Tsalka in the Caucasus (I met him in Greece, in Prohoma, where he had returned in 1987). In 1965 my aunt wrote to invite me to Tsalka where they lived in the village of Santa. I had grown up with the image of that place because my father always tol me stories about Santa, where his brother and sister had stayed after he went to Greece in 1928. The Voutira 363 Party gave me permission to go. I went there and found my aunt Areti living in the family home. Imagine, I got to sleep in my father’s house, in fact in his room! He had died in the war so I could not tell him that I was able to realize his dream, live in his house and sleep in his room! I wrote my relatives and told them I was sleeping in my father’s room in Russia . . . There I met Anna, who was my second cousin and we lived there [in Santa, Georgia] for another 15 years before returning to Greece. (Lefteris P., b. in Prohoma in 1924, fled with the Democratic Army to Tashkent in 1949, repatriated to Greece in 1987, interviewed in Prohoma in 1996). The story of his marriage is more than simply finding a wife. It involved retracing a whole part of his genealogy. Ironically, Lefteris did not merely find his wife by retracing his genealogy; he was compelled to get married in church in order to repatriate to Greece with his wife, given that at the time (1979) political marriage was not recognized in Greece. “We had to get married in church. Can you imagine me, a communist, trying to find a priest, in order to legitimize my marriage?” Case study 2: Life imitates literature: Disillusionment upon arrival to the homeland (Greece) In the early 1990s, most Soviet Greeks wishing to relocate to Greece had to ‘prove’ their Greekness through corroborating evidence, e.g. Greek education in the 1930s, Greek agnatic descent and/or exiled status as ‘enemies of the state’ (Agtzidis, 1991). By comparison to other migrants and refugees arriving in Greece during this period, Pontic Greeks enjoyed a preferential status. This is related to the political point of national membership, which construes members of the nation as those who can prove their consanguinity as defined by the state. However, in daily life, Pontic Greeks regularly experienced their status as inferior vis-à-vis the local established populations, and often complained about being ‘outsiders’. Unlike the majority, Alexandros, a Pontic Greek from Tbilisi, was invited to settle in Thrace, Greece, as part of the emerging settlement policy introduced by the PASOK government with a view to changing the demographic balance between Muslims and Christians in Thrace (Notaras, 2000; Voutira, 2006a). Alexandros arrived in Greece with high expectations, given that he abandoned his antecedent life under the perception that he was ‘wanted by the homeland’. However, he found that there were no provisions, no efficient and effective rehabilitation in the new homeland, despite the official repatriation programmes advertised by the Greek government (Voutira, 2003). This ‘failure’ was the result of failed mutual expectations, since the Greek government perceived the newcomers as agricultural settlers who would populate rural Thrace, while the newcomers viewed their resettlement as an opportunity to change their antecedent lifestyle, move upward, and compete in an urban environment. The re-qualification process caused them continuous trepidation, as they had to prove themselves according to native (i.e. Greek state) criteria, including professional qualifications. This situation entailed continuous competition with the local 364 Ethnography 21(3) population, something that continues to breed resentment when the us/them polarity is experienced under conditions of scarcity of resources (Pratsinakis, 2017). Alexandros narrated his disillusionment and disappointment upon arrival using Tolstoy’s novel The Cossacks as a metaphor. Its hero, Olenin, ‘follows the wrong path looking for the wrong girl’, Alexandros said. Such literary usage did not surprise me; both in the Soviet and post-Soviet context people used references to Russian classical literature to communicate various messages. In Alexandros’ allusion to Tolstoy’s novel – where the hero, a young Russian aristocrat, falls in love with the romantic notion of winning a Cossack girl’s heart and in the process becomes a Cossack – the point was that there was an essential type of betrayal. “Imagine, you travel that far to get the best possible life only to find out that the girl you want, Maryanka, does not care for you”. In fact, he said, The situation is even worse, since she actually ends up abhorring you. This is how we are, too. Loving and waiting for the homeland all these years. We come here [Greece] and what do we find? People do not want us. The homeland (patrida) has fooled us. I remember back in 1982 when the first letters started arriving from the Greek Embassy asking us to go to Greece where we were needed. The embassy letter said that we would receive a government grant, a house, and education to start up. The second letter came two years later, the content was the same. I tried to get a visa, but the Soviet authorities refused. I was allowed to come to Greece in 1995. I went to see my cousins and uncles, who had lived in Greece since the early 1930s (they all lived in Athens). By the time I arrived, the state gave us nothing and not only that, they wouldn’t even let me enter the country. It was all lies. No one and nothing was waiting for us here.8 Alexandros articulated his resentment in terms of his expectations from the motherland, who acted as a capricious mother watching her children fighting as siblings do, vying for her affections.9 Yet his narrative also contains an important bit of information. The mass ‘repatriation trend’ from the FSU to Greece did not begin with the end of the Cold War as is normally assumed. His narrative, corroborated by archival research (Notaras, 2000), suggests that return had begun much earlier, in the early 1980s. Ethnographically, the relevant point is that people’s expectations, at least in the Caucasus, began to rise in the 1980s partly due to the Greek state intervention. The so-called ‘mass arrivals’ of 1989 were the result of a long process of rising expectations and information dissemination through the kinship networks among Greeks in the FSU. The mass arrival of Soviet Greeks in Greece originally followed, as I have argued elsewhere, the ‘successful’ rural refugee resettlement model of 1922 (Voutira, 2004). The challenge of deciphering mutual expectations in the electoral ‘present’ has been a key political issue that defines Greek national politics in the early 21st century. The lack of an official immigration policy for the inclusion of non-co-ethnic newcomers meant that from the standpoint of the Greek state, repatriation was an immigration policy in disguise. As in other cases (Germany, Israel, Voutira 365 Finland), the ‘kin-state’ created a special category for these privileged return migrants who ‘came in from the cold’. Twenty years down the line, the original plan in Thrace was deemed a ‘failure’. The state agency responsible for the resettlement of the homogeneis (co-ethnics) has been dismantled. As documented in (Pratsinakis, 2008, 2017), the processes of negotiating the ‘established’ and ‘outsider’ identities in Greece vis-à-vis the coethnic newcomers is a circuitous and long-term process. An important landmark date is the introduction of law 2910/2000 on the repatriation of ethnic Greeks. The new provisions, especially paragraphs 1 and 3 of article 76 of law 2910, introduce the criterion of an interview as a prerequisite for determining the status of the homogeneis. Thus, while Greek descent continued to be a critical factor in the definition of membership to the Greek state, a novel criterion was introduced, namely Greek national consciousness (ethniki synydeisi). This concept became decisive in determining the degree of an individual’s Greekness (Tsitselikis, 2005; Triandafyllidou and Veikou, 2002: 198). According to Christopoulos’ historical/legal account of the evolution of the concept of Greek nationality/citizenship (ithageneia), the current notion of Greek citizenship has been ‘modernized’ in that it allows for a variant of jus soli to be included in the antecedently exclusionary practice of Greek citizenship (Christopoulos, 2012). In fact, as of 2010 people are not only born Greeks, they can also become Greeks. Public perception about the processes by which foreigners (allodapoi) may acquire citizenship is that ‘they very quickly become Greeks’. Nevertheless, they must prove that they deserve it. The burden of proof, therefore, has been shifted to the interview process. Many of my interlocutors perceived this process as both a challenge and an initiation rite. Pontic Greeks experienced this ritual of membership into the state with considerable apprehension. As a matter of course, they treat it as a major examination, studying and cramming before the exams and becoming anxious about the questions they will be asked (Kaurinkoski, 2018; Voutira, 2006a). Case Study 3: Greek by choice rather than descent Alexandros A. (another Alexandros) is a ‘Greek’ from Mariupol who did not begin as an intellectual or a documented Greek, but rather, learned to be one and eventually mobilized this Greek identity for his own and his son’s future. I met him in August 1991 in Moscow, at the Greek embassy where he was the representative of the Mariupol Greek Association. We had met repeatedly over the years, but it was only in 1993 in Greece, that he trusted her sufficiently to disclose how he ‘became a Greek’. Alexandros A. was born in the village of Sartana, one of the Greek-speaking villages of the Donbas region in the Ukraine in 1943.10 Nothing in his life suggested to him that he was Greek except his first name, which he thought sounded Greek enough. His journey of discovery began in the early 1980s when he was 366 Ethnography 21(3) invited to meet friends in Estonia, where he began to see that Greeks were a ‘minority group’ in the Soviet Union (Szynkiewicz, 1990). In the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, there is no reference to Greeks in the USSR. There is reference to Ancient Greeks but none to Greeks in the Soviet context. He developed an idea, supported by his Estonian colleagues, that one could write a history of one of the ‘small nations’ (a technical term referring, in the Brezhnev years, to having a particular homeland) that would be equivalent to that of the ‘big nations’. He was interested in music, so during the Soviet celebrations for May Day he gave the first ever recital in Tallinn of Greek folk music from the Donetsk villages. His plan was, if he could draw an audience in Estonia for Greek folk music, how much more interest would there be in Ukraine. In 1982 he went to Donetsk to promote what he called ‘Greek art’, his definition of Greek art being knowledge of the folk tunes he had collected in 22 villages around Mariupol. He came to Greece in 1992 with the primary goal of enrolling at the University of Athens as a research associate at the Department of Greek Language and Culture. He also became actively involved in promoting Greek language and culture through his role as the founder of the Ukrainian Greek Cultural Association, and subsequently its vice president until 1991. For his work on the preservation of traditional folk culture, he was awarded the first Ionov prize. Since 1996, Alexandros has lived in Athens, moving back and forth to Mariupol where his family lives and continuing to collect traditional music that still exists in the villages. He studied ethnomusicology and continues to produce books and records of the Mariupol folk traditions (ta Marioupolitika) under the threat of war time extinctionin post-2018 Ukraine. Alexandros’ story is interesting, because for him ‘repatriation’, however fictive in terms of his descent, became a real option, not because he was Greek, or was pursuing his Greekness or had a burning desire to go to an imagined homeland. Alexandros’ interest in settling in Greece was based on his wish to preserve or codify a culture that was disappearing, in the process of which he became a philhellene. This aim coincided precisely with the Greek state’s nationalist policies and a concern to promote an image of a historical diaspora in the FSU. Thus he was considered a ‘Greek’. In many ways Alexandros constitutes the ideal repatriate of the 19th-century Greek state whereby Greekness was a category that included those who wanted to be Greek (philhellenes) (Kyriakidoy-Nestoros, 1975). This, of course, was before the rigid and exclusionary borders established by 20th-century nation states. Alexandros is not a Pontic Greek by descent, but his work engages him with the material culture and Pontic Greek folklore which was what the traditional Ethnography Institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were producing under state socialism. His work now in Athens is at the Folklore Archive of the Academy of Athens where he specializes in ethnomusicology. He has become more ‘Greek than the Greeks’ as he characteristically says with a noticeable Russian accent. Voutira 367 Concluding remarks In preceding sections of this paper I have tried to identify key moments of encounter and interaction between different groups of Pontic Greeks across the Cold War divide. The specific cases selected for discussion have sought to illustrate how kinship matters. Seen over time and in what was considered to be a mutually exclusive universe between East and West, the Pontic Greek experience across the Cold War divide illustrates the relevance of kinship in extreme forced migration situations. At the end of the Cold War, the concept of ‘repatriation’ became a European agenda. As such, it was introduced in the 1990s to accommodate former Soviet citizens into their ‘kin states’. The case of Vangelis and Aliki, who met in exile while belonging to the two opposing camps of communist/anti-communist, suggests an interesting resolution to the ostensible Cold War divide. On the one hand, the rule of endogamy, which was part of the Pontic Greek norm, ironically coincided both with the principle of maintenance of intra-ethnic continuity (marry within) and with the Communist Party rule of marrying members of the Greek community to facilitate the eventual return to establish a communist state in the homeland. On the other hand, the very activity of searching for Greek wives in exile gave rise to an interest in personal life history, which was not a practice normally cultivated under Soviet rule. The case of Alexandros, a Pontic Greek who was recruited because of his clear administrative record, involves a deep sense of betrayal in relation to rising expectations before and after his arrival in the historical homeland. His case is one where an individual fulfilled the bureaucratic criteria of being Greek and, hence, being summoned to resettle as a member of the Greek state. His disillusionment upon arrival is the result of contradictory expectations between the newcomers and their hosts. Finally, the third case raises a set of issues that go to the heart of the ambiguity of membership in the Greek nation as a category of self-ascription. It suggests that one can become Greek out of commitment to the activities performed by Greeks. This notion of performativity, used by gender theorists like Judith Butler, has reaffirmed the idea of agency and its relevance in appreciating the role of the individual as a conscious actor, acting within the framework of deep-seated commitment to performing Greekness as an act of personal commitment. Alexandros’ case illustrates how a professional concern with the performative arts may coincide with singing, preserving, and performing Greek folk songs. Seen over time, these cases illuminate the way in which kinship is made and remade to accommodate the contingencies of everyday life. In the cases I identified above we saw that, like other transnational forced migrants, Pontic Greeks managed to ‘return to each other’ and thus engage in what I have called affinal repatriation. I have also suggested that Pontic Greeks turn to their own in establishing new ‘affinal’ arrangements based on a revalorization of kinship in seeking to understand the new ways of revaluing kinship, understood emically as part ‘of our own’ (‘t’imeteron’). 368 Ethnography 21(3) Drawing from the three case studies I have presented, one can see the range of the different constructions of the ‘self’ an individual and collective identity perceived in the context of the dialectic between self and other in the definition of membership. The different case studies suggest the varieties of ways the homeland is part of the collective imaginary whether as part of a long-term plan to return, as in the case of the Communist Greeks, or in a more affective emotionally charged conception of the state as ‘family’ and nation. To paraphrase Malkki (1994), the very capacity to perceive the nation as a community also implies the capacity to perceive the nation as a family. From the standpoint of the state (Greece) as promoted by the different state actors, Greek immigration as repatriation and its settlement policy, particularly in border regions such as Thrace, presupposes the primacy of the sedentary model of cultural adaptation. However, our examples point to an alternative livelihood strategy (Voutira, 2004). They are closer to a transhumant model of adaptation which includes continuous movement between two homelands. As regards the elderly, the strategy devised had been (in pre-crisis Greece at least) to receive their pension in Greece and consume it in the old Soviet homeland. This is an interesting type of nomadic adaptation that presupposes the privileges of a sedentary settlement programme. Evidently, the quantification of the sedentary settlement programme is easier, and possibly can become a criterion for individual selection. The second transhumant type of adaptation is more difficult to codify and therefore, less attractive as a model in the formation of an official state resettlement programme. The post-2010 ongoing financial crisis in Greece has minimized and in many ways redefined the antecedent privileges of the Soviet Greek returnees, and this in turn has given rise to novel types of anxieties experienced by the less fortunate among them. In Greece people often say that their homeland (patrida) does not know how to take care of its children. The expression used is “san ton Krono pou troei ta paidia toy” (she [fem. gender] acts like Cronus who eats his own children). This utterance is the Greek variant of the well-known reference to the French Revolution, which consumed its children during the period of Terror. Greek people draw from their own cultural heritage and refer to Zeus’s father Cronus, who devoured his own children in order to guard against his own regicide. This is a feeling which is now shared by many FSU Pontic Greek repatriates, who were socialized in a more dominant and protective ‘parent state’ during the Soviet era. One may wonder how (or even, whether) future generations of FSU Greeks, who have already integrated into their new homeland, will remember the ‘deep past’ of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Acknowledgements I am grateful to the editors of the Special Issue for their detailed comments, as well as they anonymous reviewers for their criticisms and comments in earlier drafts of this paper. I also would like to thank Dr. Deborah Brown Kazazis and my assistant Charis Bachtsevani for their continuous input in the revision process. 369 Voutira Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. ORCID iD Eftihia Voutira https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7111-9370 Notes 1. The ‘exodus’ of the Pontic Greek population from the Black Sea regions had actually begun much earlier than their official expulsion, since Christian populations followed the Russian armies at the end of each Russo-Turkish war (1856, 1878, 1919) (Bryer, 1991; Xanthopoulou-Kyriakou, 1991). 2. The Greek Civil War (1944-1949) is considered by most accounts to have been the first ‘hot’ episode of the Cold War, since the British interfered in supporting the government forces against the communist (Democratic Army) forces. In October 1949, the Communist party leader Zachariadis acknowledged the defeat of the Democratic Army forces and the fighters of the Democratic Army were sent to the communist countries. The select group of Democratic Army fighters was evacuated to Tashkent to establish a Communist government in exile under Stalin’s orders (Danforth and van Boeschoten, 2012). 3. This research was initially conducted as part of the author’s PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge, but it evolved into a ‘life project’ upon which the author has been engaged for the last 25 years. Over this period, field sites included locations in the Former Soviet Union (Central Asia, Caucasus and Crimea) and Greece (Thrace, Thessaloniki, Athens). The follow-up research in Thrace / Greece focused on documenting Greek repatriation policies and migration management patterns. The focus of research in Greece was on assessing the impact of repatriation policies on people’s lives and changing priorities. The author’s antecedent presence in their pre-migration environment became the missing link in understanding their new lives in Greece. 4. Papataxiarchis explores in detail the concept of segmentation as a way of analysing the boundaries between the traditional concept of philoxenia (hospitality) and its restrictions on integrating non-Greek ‘others’, both newcomers and marginalized minorities (e.g., Pomaks, ethnic Turks in Thrace, Albanian immigrants). 5. Part of the rehabilitation of social memory among the different ‘oppressed’ ethnic groups involves a re-assessment of the longer-term implications of such social memory. See for example, Kirss, K~ oresaar and Lauristin (2004), published under the evocative title ‘She Who Remembers Survives’, which illustrates the relevance of social memory as transmitted by women. 370 Ethnography 21(3) 6. After the Treaty of Lausanne and the forcible exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey on the basis of religion (Hirschon, 2004; Loizos, 1999), Pontic Greeks divided between those who fled the Pontos area (eastern Anatolia) and those who stayed behind in what became the USSR. Those who remained ‘behind’ in the USSR developed according to the principles of state socialism (Karpozilos, 1999, 1991). 7. Both groups arrived at the same time, the Pontic Greeks in June 1949 from the Black Sea region of the FSU, and the Greeks from the Greek state in August 1949. Each was seen as having mutually exclusive ideologies, and their identity was defined by their place of ‘origin’ and what this denoted. From the standpoint of the Soviet Communist Party, the Greeks from the state of Greece were the elite leadership of the Democratic Army evacuated from Greece after the defeat of the communist forces in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). The Black Sea Pontic Greeks were the ‘enemies of the people’, ‘collaborators’ with the enemy, and the ‘punished peoples’ (Nekrich, 1978). 8. In fact one can argue that Alexandros’ view of Greece is the polar opposite of the ‘parent state’ (Verdery, 1995). He perceives Greece as a ‘lover state’. 9. 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Journal of Refugee Studies 4(4): 357–363. Yatroudakis S (2000) Tarjedg: 30 Xq oia Pqorutci a. Ah ga: Dioceg1. Zei A (1992) Achilles’ Fianc ee. Athens: Kedros. Author Biography Eftihia Voutira is a Professor of Anthropology of Forced Migration, University of Macedonia. She has studied Philosophy at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University where she received a doctorate, and then she did postgraduate studies in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, where she received a second doctorate. She has taught at the University of Oxford in the Refugee Studies Programme (1992-1998) and at the Forced Migration and Refugees Studies Centre, American University in Cairo (2001-2008). Since 1998, she has been Professor in the Anthropology of Force Migration at the department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies at University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece. As anthropologist, she has done extensive fieldwork in the former Soviet Union, in South and Central Africa, and in the Middle East. She has published extensively on issues of refugee protection and humanitarian assistance. She is the author of several monographs.