The accidental traders: marginalization and opportunity from the southern republics to late Soviet Moscow
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shrinking opportunities on the Soviet periphery pushed increasing numbers of Caucasus and Central Asian peoples to late twentieth-century Moscow. This article analyses the migration experiences of two Kyrgyz, one Uzbek and one Azeri who left their native villages, eventually engaging in private trade in Moscow's streets and markets. Using oral histories, the article reveals the importance and extent of trading networks across the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the opportunities as well as perils that faced those who participated in this grey-market activity. Traders confronted complicated dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and sometimes racism, from the host society. The migrant experience transformed ideas of identity and ethnicity, at home and away. As each realized economic goals, these traders also considered pursuit of social mobility, attracted by Moscow's dynamism. Strong family relationships and a tenuous sense of incorporation in the Soviet capital drove them home in the late 1980s.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".