Marked on the voice: the visibility experiences of Russian heritage migrants following the war against Ukraine

5.1 Participants

The participants were five L1-speakers of Russian. Fluent in Swedish, they all spoke with an accent which could identify them as having Russian heritage.^[1] Participants were recruited from social networks accessed by the first author. Information about the participants (identified by pseudonyms) is presented in Table 1.

5.2 Interviews

Interviews were carried out during the summer of 2022. Each participant was interviewed on three occasions. First, a semi-structured interview was conducted. Thereafter, two follow-up interviews took place. Here, participants were invited to comment or elaborate on things said in the preceding interview. The interviews were conducted in Russian by the first author, a native speaker of Russian. Interviews focused on experiences of being a Russian-speaker living in Sweden and were structured around three questions: ‘How do you experience being Russian-speaking and living in Sweden?’, ‘What are your experiences of speaking Swedish with an accent that could identify you as Russian?’, and ‘Has the war in Ukraine changed these experiences?’ The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

5.3 Research ethics

The research was conducted according to ethical principles set out by the Swedish Research Council (2017). Participants were informed orally and in writing about the study’s purpose, that participation was voluntary, and that they could discontinue participation at any time. Information about confidentiality, how the data would be managed, and how findings would be reported was also provided. The first author maintained contact with the participants throughout the research period, making clear her availability to discuss participants’ experiences and to provide support if desired.

5.4 Method of analysis

In line with Alcoff’s (2006) contention that the investigation of visible identities requires the use of hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches, and her argument that visible identities constitute “hermeneutic horizons” comprised of experiences, beliefs, and values (287), a double hermeneutic approach was employed. This approach is characteristic of interpretive phenomenological analysis (Smith and Nizza 2021; Smith et al. 2009) and interpretive sequential analysis (Straub 2006). In these approaches, a participant attempts to make sense of an experience, while the researcher attempts to make sense of the participant’s sense-making attempts (Smith and Osborn 2008). Consequently, the researcher needs to adopt both an empathic standpoint (understanding an event or experience as the participant sees it), and a critical standpoint (understanding it from a critical or theory-driven perspective) (Smith et al. 2009). This involves moving back and forth between the experiential space of the participant (the ‘experiential horizon’) and the analytical space of the researcher (a ‘counter horizon’) (Samata 2014; Straub 2006).

5.5 Analytical procedures

The analytical procedure involved three steps (Smith and Nizza 2021). In an initial step, data was analysed case by case by the first author. Reading and working through each transcript line by line, initial experiential statements and exploratory notes were made, respectively, in the right-side and left-side margins of a printed transcript. In a second step, and after re-reading the transcripts and revisiting the statements and notes, a table of personal experiential statements was compiled, and a cross-case analysis was carried out. Here, the aim was to identify initial themes. Emerging themes were then discussed by both authors. Drawing on these themes, in a third step coding was carried out across the five cases. This involved re-reading transcripts, revisiting experiential statements, and revising initial themes. At this point, sections of the transcripts illustrative of the themes were translated into English. Both authors then carried out a critical evaluation of the themes. Thereafter, the first author met again with the participants and shared the initial analyses. Here too empathic and critical standpoints were adopted (Smith and Osborn 2008). Specifically, we wanted to consider (i) how our empathic perspective (how we had understood a participant’s experience) aligned with the participant’s own understanding of an experience, and (ii) how our critical perspective (how we had interpreted the data) might resonate with the participant’s own conceptions.

Finally, and as an additional validation strategy, participants were given a copy of the completed manuscript (minus the current section). Although not going as far as to provide participants with opportunities to “theorize their own experience” (Harvey 2015: 34), the aim was to provide them with an opportunity to again consider the degree to which the generated themes resonated with their own experiences. In particular, participants remarked on the relevance of the interpretive framework (passing and visible identities), and the similarity of experiences across the sample:

I was especially interested in the theoretical framework and the chosen analytical method, as I too have worked with psycholinguistics and its semantic aspects. The concept and the importance of the context are for me undeniable.

(Ljuba)

All the participants have similar feelings. No one wants to reveal their origins, as this could cause tension in communication or generate questions that one would like to avoid. Everyone wants to choose when and with whom they want to be open, and when they just want to remain anonymous. I believe that this feeling has been greatly intensified in connection with recent world events, although it was present even before.

(Anna)

6.1 Perceptions of visibility and invisibility

For the study participants, visibility experiences were closely linked to perceptions of national identity and positioning as Russian women. For Elena, her Russian heritage connected to a professional identity (as a teacher of Russian and a school principal) and provided a perspective from which she viewed the world: “For us it is more than just a nationality. A Russian is a person who speaks the Russian language, who thinks the Russian way, and whose culture is Russian. This is not an ethnicity”. Closey associated with her profession, Elena’s Russian heritage was not something she always sought to conceal:

I never thought I was not Russian. I have always been Russian […] But in the concept of Russian, we include more than just Russian as an ethnicity. For us it is more than just a nationality. A Russian is a person who speaks the Russian language, who thinks the Russian way, and whose culture is Russian. This is not an ethnicity. In the West, Russians are those who came from the Soviet Union too. […] We do not become Swedes. We can live here for 100 years, and we will remain Russians. Nowadays no one asks where you came from. But I don’t hide anywhere that I’m Russian. My first education is from Russia. […] And as Muslims appear in their headscarves, I can also carry a raised visor with the fact that I am Russian.

For Elena, Russianness was an identity that she experienced as visibly marked. In the same way that she believed that people from Islamic cultures could be visibly identifiable through distinctive apparel, Elena experienced that her identity as Russian can also be visible to others. However, unlike people from Muslim countries, she experienced that a Russian identity could be either displayed – as a ‘raised visor’ – or concealed. As Hult (2014: 66) has explained, people with flexible language resources are able to “present an image of the self that conceals an identity that may not be socially advantageous in the context of interaction”.

By using the metaphor of an adjustable visor, Elena described her experience of agency, and of being able to control when a Russian identity was made visible, and the extent to which it might be observable to others. In Piller’s (2002) terms, Elena’s experiences can be understood as performances where passing is situationally accomplished. As Piller (2002: 194) makes clear, in everyday encounters with unknown others, “successful L2 users do not necessarily aim to pass for native speakers. Rather, they just don’t want to be perceived as members of a particular national group right away”.

For other participants, the experience of being visible as a Russian-speaker could be less comfortable. For Ljuba and Inna, the sense of discomfort that could attach to a Russian identity could be assuaged by the forging of associations with a global ‘foreignness’. By positioning themselves as global citizens, they were able to create an identity as a person with a non-Swedish background and with an inclusive and cosmopolitan outlook:

Yes, I was born in that country. So what exactly does this mean? […] Well, maybe now because there is such a thing as a Citizen of the world. I came here. You can understand me, I can communicate with you. But I don’t belong to this culture. I am not from here. I wasn’t born here. The fact is that I came from Russia. But I could have come from Japan, Korea, or Finland.

(Ljuba)

I consider myself as a world citizen. For me, it does not matter at all where I come from.

(Inna)

For Ljuba, the comfort she experienced in identifying as a cosmopolitan was closely tied to an ambivalence connected with a Russian heritage. On the one hand, she experienced warmth, contentment and sometimes pride when reflecting on the Russian landscape and Russian culture. However, she also described how these sentiments could be troubling. As she explained, these feelings could sometimes be difficult to accommodate and could generate a sense of guilt. In public spaces, and in interactions with unknown others, Ljuba described how she preferred to keep her heritage concealed:

I never wanted the people around me, on the bus or at the theatre, to know that I was Russian. There’s not much to be proud of, unfortunately. My husband, Sven, sometimes says that his wife is Russian when we travel. But I don’t want to. They can speak different languages with me, but this connotation, belonging to… With all my respect for Russian culture and its beautiful fields and so on. But there is something else. Sure. To hold on to one’s Russian national identity. But I think it’s kind of a sad statement, of a sad fact. Because I see people who were born in Italy and America, and how important it is for them to be connected to each other and to their countries. I love Russian culture, but to be identified with this country is a very difficult and complex question.

In a similar way, Inna was resistant to identifications as Russian. However, if Lubja was sometimes ambivalent, Inna experienced a greater desire to distance herself from the past, and from its associations:

If I wanted to be Russian, I would have stayed in Russia. When I came to Sweden, I knew that there is a different attitude to us, less respectful. There were various situations, jokes, and comments like “the Russians are coming”, “Russian spy”, and so on. Well, I knew in advance that Russians are treated worse, and that Russia is not seen as a friendly country. […] And now I just say, “I was born in Russia. My native language is Russian”. And that’s it.

For all the participants, the sense of becoming visible – being identified as Russian – occurred through language. As Krivonos (2020: 402) has argued, “accent and audibility are particularly remarkable aspects of racialization of a heterogeneous group that [can] not be classified through appearance or phenotype”. Like participants in other studies carried out in Nordic contexts (Guðjónsdóttir 2014; Koobak and Thapar-Björkert 2012; Leinonen 2012; Leinonen and Toivanen 2014), the perception of losing anonymity and becoming visible as a member of a minority group occurred in spoken interactions. For many years, Inna had worked in a bank. She recalled the experience of how, when an interaction commenced, people would immediately notice her accent. As she explained, she could observe the unmasking process as it unfolded, where a person’s initial response on hearing her accent would be followed by movement of their eyes to her name-badge (where a national flag indicated that languages that the wearer spoke):

My appearance does not give away my national identity, no. When I worked at the bank, people understood that I was not Swedish. And often, I think, they asked themselves “Where is she from?” And on my jacket, I had a badge with my name. And with different flags, which languages I spoke. But it was not very noticeable. But when I began to speak, the look from their eyes passed to the badge. People tried to find out where I was from. I mean, it was obvious.

Even if in the professional contexts that Elena and Inna described, where the experience of becoming visible was unavoidable and was something they had become used to, an interlocutor’s reticence or wary response could nevertheless be upsetting. Even Elena – who as we have seen was generally comfortable in being identified as Russian – described how she could perceive a change in an interlocutor’s response when unmasking occurred, and how this altered the way in which she was perceived:

They don’t see that we are foreigners. No. But when they hear that we are not Swedes it feels like a pushback. A distance. Well, I feel it because communication is not so rosy. There becomes a distance. I don’t know. You are treated like, “Yes please, no thanks”. Well, it is not a natural communication.

Although undesirable, and sometimes uncomfortable, the perception of becoming visible during oral interactions was accepted as a consequence of the women’s situations as transnational migrants. As some of the women explained, they could develop an immunity to wary responses when unmasking occurred. However, with escalating anti-Russian sentiment, and reports of Russian aggression conspicuous in national media and social media threads, the participants experienced an increasing desire to conceal their backgrounds, and to avoid situations in which they could be revealed as a person with Russian heritage.

6.2 Heightened awareness of visibility

Following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, participants described how they had experienced increasing discomfort in being identified as Russian. Even for Oksana, the youngest among the women, and who had arrived in Sweden in 2019 long after the beginnings of Putin’s policy of foreign aggression, the change that had taken place in the immediately preceding months was apparent:

When I came to Sweden four years ago, one of my colleagues, who is also an artist, a Russian-speaker from Ukraine, told me “try not to speak Russian on the busses and so on. Russians are not so popular here”. I had never thought so. And me and my husband had always been speaking Russian in public places, at least until recently.

A self-confident young woman with an openness to new experiences, Oksana described how she had been sceptical when receiving her colleague’s cautionary advice: “I had never thought so”, she said. However, as she made clear, events in the Spring had caused a shift from an experience of being generally carefree about speaking Russian, to one of vigilance and being on her guard.

In the period before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, most of the study participants described the experience of having their heritage revealed as uncomfortable, even if it did not generate deeply upsetting experiences. However, after the invasion, this changed. The sense of becoming unwelcomely visible triggered more deeply troubling experiences and feelings of ill-being. Each of the participants was able to describe situations when a perception of becoming visible, or the fear of becoming visible, caused them to experience emotions such as pain, anger, sadness, and resentment.

As we have seen, Elena was the participant who had least concerns about visibility. Open about her heritage, she could experience pride in being Russian and was generally accepting of other people’s positionings. However, following the war, Elena described how she could feel a change in people’s responses in everyday contexts. She experienced that people could be avoidant, how she herself had become vigilant, and how she was reluctant to put herself into situations where her heritage might come into focus:

E: I’m out walking with my dog, and everyone knows where I’m from, and what I work with. Everyone knows I don’t want to discuss the issue of Putin and Russia. […] Many Swedes believe that I should hate Putin and so on. But when this situation happened in Ukraine, on seeing me, this dog owner crosses to the other side of the street. She is trying not to cross paths with me.

I: And why does she do that?

E: For the fact that I am Russian. I’ve never discussed anything with her. It’s just that after February 24, she switches sides.

I: She doesn’t want to discuss it?

E: No. She just changed her attitude toward me. One neighbour wrote some nasty things about me on Facebook, and I deleted them and banned him. So, when I meet him, I don’t talk to him either. Another one, also a dog walker, he wanted to ask me something about Putin. I told him that I would answer his questions after the war.

Similar stories of negative responses in connection with situations when heritage became visible were told by other participants. Anna and Oksana both described the pain which they had experienced when heritage had become revealed, and when they had encountered the prejudice of others. In a situation that occurred in the confined public space of an aircraft cabin, Anna described how she and her teenage daughter had chosen to remain silent, rather than risk the emotional costs that an unmasking could bring:

On the plane in front of us sat a couple, a Swedish man and a Russian-speaking woman. In their company was also an older woman who only spoke Russian, not Swedish. The women were talking Russian all the trip, and I could hear that both were native speakers of Russian. We did not say much during the flight. And when it was time to go, I said to my daughter, in Russian, “Let’s go, Emma”. The younger Russian-speaking woman turned to her Swedish husband and said loudly in Swedish: “There is an enemy sitting behind us”. I was really upset and angry! What does she know about us? My daughter has a Swedish father and I have been living in Sweden for so many years. How could she say that we are enemies? And they themselves speak Russian too! I did not want to argue, I just said to my daughter, very loudly in Swedish, come on Emma, take your bags, were have landed.

Oksana described several situations where she and her husband had experienced the hostility of others:

O: I and my husband were at the gym and spoke in Russian. A man came to us and asked, in broken Russian, where we were from. We are both from Russia, I answered. And where are you from? He just waved his hand, showing that he was not interested to talk to us.

I: Where was he from, you think?

O: Well, he was definitely not Russian speaking, he looked very Swedish to me. I felt that he wanted to show in some way that there is no point in talking to us. We are all choked by this war. And I felt very upset that people do not understand that we are also suffering. My husband was on the demonstrations against the war. What do they know about us? I was very sad and cried. So now we try not to speak loudly in public spaces, we speak English to each other.

Several of the women described how upsetting experiences arose not only in situations when their own heritage had become visible, but also in situations where a family member had been victimized:

We live in a neighbourhood with very few people with migrant backgrounds. It is mostly Swedes here. For me, it has always been very important that my children would learn Russian, and here I have always tried my best, as I have a big family in Russia. When it all happened [the beginning of the war] my daughter who is born in Sweden and has a Swedish father went home from her mother tongue instruction together with some other pupils. “What language do you speak?”, asked a boy passing by. “Russian”. “Then why are you murdering people?” the boy shouted. Emma [daughter] told me about this situation when she came home. I was very upset.

(Anna)

Describing a similar event, Inna told how a grandchild living in Norway had been affected by negative responses to his nationality that had been triggered by the war. While she was optimistic that the situation would change with the passing of time, and was aware that many people see beyond simplistic notions of collective blame, she realised how anti-Russian sentiment could force Russian speakers to conceal their identities by remaining silent:

I don’t think people who know you have changed their attitude in any way. […] We can’t be collectively responsible for everything. We didn’t do it. One person did it. I am sure a lot of people there [in Russia] disagree. Now it is at a peak. But people also begin to talk less. Are people afraid of being Russian? The first days, my grandson who lives in Norway said, “I don’t want to be Russian. And when I grow up, I will be in the military and defend Norway”.

While these experiences traverse a spectrum of social situations, common to all is the sense of vulnerability to microaggressions – brief but commonplace verbal or behavioural indignities that convey hostility or prejudice (Spanierman 2020; Sue et al. 2007). In a sociohistorical context where, through the actions of the country’s leaders, Russia and Russians had become demonized, for any person with Russian heritage a public encounter could involve the risk of microaggressions. In these circumstances, participants experienced a strong desire for invisibility. In the final section, focus is directed to agency, and the ways in which participants felt able to control their visibility.

6.3 Agentic capacity in controlling visibility

Visible identities are the products of complex interactions between individuals, societies, and historical events. However, while a person “may have been born into a culture and language not of one’s choosing”, these categories are not entirely detachable from human agency (Alcoff 2006: 236). Moreover, individual agency is not to be seen as an exclusively intrinsic capacity, but as made possible through social interactions. Thus, in a more expansive view, a visible identity can be understood as “the product of a complex mediation involving individual agency in which its meaning is produced rather than merely perceived or experienced” (Alcoff 2006: 42 emphasis added). Highlighting the performativity of passing, Piller (2002) similarly emphasizes agency and awareness, pointing out that highly proficient L2 users “can measure their personal attainment in terms of their success in passing and the length of the passing act” (192).

In our data, the sense in which a visible identity is “produced” comes to light in the ways in which the women experienced having control over visibility and invisibility. As we have previously seen, one of the women (Elena) described her Russianness as a “visor”, an identity that could become visible in controlled circumstances. In a similar way, and like the young Russian-speaking migrants in Krivonos’s (2020) study who found they could reduce visibility experiences through changing a surname, Anna experienced visibility as something that could be strategically managed:

I have a Swedish last name and my children have cosmopolitan names which work all over the world. But I don’t want my Russian background to be deleted. I would not like to be a “Maria Svensson” actually. I have such access to information, culture, and people through the Russian language and culture. It’s just that I don’t want my migrant visibility to be obvious all the time. I want to choose when I want to show it and not be repeatedly asked about my background.

In circumstances where the perception of being visible to others was difficult to avoid, we have seen how participants could experience vulnerability. To safeguard against discomfort caused by becoming visible, and to prevent the risk of microaggressions, participants described various ways in which unmasking could be avoided. Like the participants in Krivonos’s (2020) study, for our participants, perceptions of visibility are immanently connected with pronunciation and intonation (see also Piller 2002). They would often reflect on how accented speech could be neutralized. As Inna put it:

When such events are happening now, I want to get rid of the accent, so that this Russianness of yours would go somewhere, so as not to give yourself away.

Ljuba expressed a similar sense of wanting to divest herself from a tell-tale accent, recognizing, however, that this could be hard:

Of course, if I could get rid of the accent, I would gladly do it.

Indeed, for some of the women, working on pronunciation had been a major focus, and a means of avoiding situations where they might be immediately identified as Russian:

I tried very hard to learn Swedish and worked a lot on pronunciation in Swedish. The goal was not only to learn to interact in Swedish, but also to speak without an accent. At least not a Slavic accent. Let me have a Norwegian, an English, a French accent. But not a Slavic accent. Because there is a different attitude towards the Slavs. Less respectful. I knew somewhere that the attitude towards you would be different. I knew in advance that Russians are treated worse, and that Russia is not seen as a friendly country. If I came from an English-speaking background, I wouldn’t care. So I tried to polish my pronunciation as best as possible, so that this “Russianness” would not be there.

(Inna)

Beyond these more fundamental desires, participants described how the risk of a discomforting experience connected to unmasking could sometimes be assuaged through proactive choices. As we have already seen, one commonly described way of maintaining invisibility was to communicate in English, a strategy which has been reported in other studies (Guðjónsdóttir 2014; Leinonen 2012). However, while this might be effective, it could also be upsetting, in that it functioned as a reminder of ‘deficiencies’ when speaking Swedish:

L: Now sometimes, after I have been living in Sweden for so many years, Sven, my husband, tells me, “Ljuba, speak English!” I’m looking at him. “What? Should I speak English? Why? I can speak Swedish actually”!

I: And when and why does he tell you this?

L: Sometimes, he feels that the attitude to me is different because of the accent.

As Ljuba’s reflection reveals, the experience of selecting English is shrouded in ambivalence. While on the one hand, she could feel protected, on the other the use of English involved a painful recognition that she could not communicate in Swedish without revealing her Russian heritage. The emotional ambivalence of wanting to protect herself from a negative response – but at the same time feeling sadness in not feeling able to accomplish a non-complicated transaction in Swedish – is an experience that other women shared:

For example, when a problem should be solved. Well, I solve all problems by myself. But the fact is that when you are a Swede you will get a positive answer. So then I can ask a colleague. For example, you are looking for a room for your company. In this case, it is better that the Swede calls. Because the Swede will most likely be told “yes” and because you are a foreigner. Yes, there are situations when I ask Swedish teachers who work at our school to call, when I know that there will be a negative reaction to foreigners. So that’s unfortunately true. You’ll be politely turned down. When it comes to me personally, I have a lot of acquaintances. And when they know me, it’s a completely different situation. I don’t often call strangers. I mostly have contact with people who know me and know that I’m a good person.

(Elena)

By avoiding communication in situations where associations with heritage could be experienced as the trigger for a negative response, Elena chose to remain invisible by proxy, seeking the support of a colleague who did not speak with a foreign accent.

Through the exercise of agency, the women were able to control visibility. In Elena’s words, identity management involved the lowering and raising of a visor. Similar to Voytiv’s (2021) findings in her study of the ethnic identifications of Russian speakers living in Sweden during the earlier stages of Russia’s aggression, for our participants the control of visibility was carefully managed through the strategic performance of passing, where remaining unmarked was “easiest achieved by not saying anything at all” (Piller 2002: 192; Wagner 2015). Reflecting the individual’s agency (Alcoff 2006), visibility management involved what Voytiv (2021: 212) has described as “an active decision-making process that involves rational evaluation of the costs/benefits if the conversation should take place”.