This dissertation examines how Soviet citizens who lived outside of their "home" territories or did not have them navigated the ethno-federal USSR after Soviet nationality policy shifted to prioritizing titular nations and, paradoxically, Russified centralization. It focuses on the USSR's "southern tier," which I define as the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Moldova, regions that generally underwent greater out-migration in the 1970s, were the sources of the most violent conflict and displacement with the USSR's dissolution, and lost the greatest proportion of their self-identified Russian populations from 1989-2005. Through an analysis of hundreds of archival letters, party and government documents, periodicals, newspapers, and over a dozen oral interviews, this dissertation contends that Soviet internationalism, or internally adapted socialist internationalism, was a pillar of Soviet nationality policy and that it was central to legitimizing and safeguarding communities who lived outside of or without "their own" territories in the late Soviet period. Through a case-study of the Russian North Caucasus borderland, the site of the most in-migration amid the USSR's demise as well as transregional displacement in Russia, this dissertation also shows how the legacy of Soviet nationality policy influenced enduring contestation over national space that contributed to the migrant crisis and the social response to it.
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