Ethnocultural Heritage of Central Asian Labor Migration to the Southern Urals, 1942–1944

During the Great Patriotic War, a significant contingent of laborers from the Central Asian Military District was mobilized to work at industrial enterprises in the Southern Urals. Unlike mobilized ethnic Germans, who remained in the region permanently and formed visible localities (the so-called “German quarter” in Chelyabinsk’s Metallurgical District, Lutheran and Catholic churches, and a memorial cemetery), Central Asian laborers began returning home as early as 1944. This article aims to systematize the memory of Central Asian laborers in Chelyabinsk and Kopeysk (1942–1944) by analyzing photographs from the newspaper “Kopeysk Worker” (1943–1944) and 22 in-depth interviews with long-term residents, supplemented by five expert interviews with historians of the Soviet economy. The theoretical framework draws on the concept of translocality, which allows us to see wartime mobility not as an isolated episode but as a process that maintained multiple connections between the Southern Urals and Central Asia even after the laborers returned home. The findings reveal a sharp divergence between oral memory and official discourse. Interviewees – both direct witnesses (born 1930–1931) and their descendants (born 1942–1963) – recall the Central Asian laborers through markers of difference: clothing (“Uzbek robes, belts, skullcaps”), language barriers (“muteness”), fear of mine work (“there is a shaitan underground”), bodily practices (exhaustion, scurvy), and informal exchanges (dried fruits for bread). In contrast, “Kopeysk Worker” constructed an idealized image: the teahouse (chaykhana) as a space of care, Stakhanovite heroes with names and faces, and the rhetoric of “fraternal unity” that masked real isolation. This divergence explains why no material traces of Central Asian laborers survived: they were treated as a temporary resource, and after their departure no stable diaspora or spatial markers emerged. The only remaining testimonies are the photographs in old newspaper issues and the fragmentary stories of the oldest generation. Thus, the photographs and oral accounts examined here constitute precisely such heritage – a scattered, non-material form that nonetheless carries social memory and makes visible a migration episode that would otherwise have been forgotten.