SUMMARY:

The introduction to the forum “Urban Milieus, People’s Friendship and the Late Soviet Transnational Experience” seeks to reconceptualize late Soviet cities as places of transnational interactions. After World War II, the overlapping social forces of consumerism, migrations, mass-mediatization, and urbanization problematized the stability of nominally fixed, territorially bound national identifications. The Soviet state failed to provide such multiethnic urban milieus with a positive vision of diversity. Even the celebration of “people’s friendship” did little to change this. Instead of recognizing the multiplicity and complexity of diverse milieus, the concept only helped to perpetuate a clichéd vision of archetypical nations as discrete and separable entities. Instead of accepting the deterritorialization of ethnicity and the resulting cosmopolitanism of urban milieus, the Soviet state remained stuck in the territorializing logic of nationalist discourse.