"2 Transnationalism and capitalism: Migrants from the former Soviet Union and their experiences in Germany and Israel (S. 140-141)

This chapter explores the participants’ perceptions and cultural constructions of capitalism or the capitalistic West after their emigration to Germany and to Israel. Not only is their migration accompanied by significant transformations in all spheres of the migrants’ everyday life, it offered them a unique opportunity to reflect on knowledge as well as behavioral schemes and values normally taken for granted and to act on the basis of these reflections. The special circumstances of the population investigated are that this is a case of emigration across the previously tightly closed borders of the Iron Curtain from what Markowitz (1991, 638) referred to as a “total system” to capitalist societies characterized by abundance and consumption- oriented cultures.

As former citizens of a closed society, the SU, participants lacked experience in the actual realities of living everyday amidst Western abundance, in a consumer culture, and with mass consumption. According to Miller this “is now the dominant context through which people in modern societies relate to the material world” (Appadurai 1996; Miller 1987, 4). Thus, emigration to a Western society led this group to encounter an absolutely new phenomenon and required that they develop strategies to cope with it on a permanent basis. Moreover, throughout their life in the SU, they were exposed to the powerful Soviet political machine’s propagandizing about life in the West.

Thus, migrants were socialized to view the Western society through negative deconstructions in which the West was the symbol, par excellence, of evil social regimes and the wrong way of life. The “decaying capitalist West,” as it was called in the Soviet media, was permanently juxtaposed to such frequent appellations as the “positive,” “right,” “humane,” “just,” “equal,” “spiritual Soviet socialist system.”

For example, a poster purchased by a participant in a Russian bookstore in Israel is a reprint of a 1948 poster that displays two pictures (picture 2:1). On the left side is a black-white picture of a violinist, in a capitalist country, destined to play on the streets while being completely ignored by passers-by who are portrayed as men in coats and bowlers (recalling an old image of capitalists). The violinist looks very depressed. Depicted above this scene are many lights and advertisements, such as White Horse Whisky. The caption at the bottom of the capitalist side of the poster states “The fate of talent…”

The fate of the violinist in socialist countries is presented on the poster’s right hand side in red letters. There the violinist is depicted appearing on stage in a big concert hall together with a huge organ, an orchestra, composed of hundreds of male and female musicians. The national emblem of the SU is depicted on this socialist side of the poster in approximately the same place as the advertisement for whisky is displayed on the capitalist side. The title for socialist depiction is positive—“The route of the talented!”