Decolonizing US (Post-)Soviet Fiction After Russia's Invasions of Ukraine

Abstract This article examines Sana Krasikov's One More Year (2008) and Irina Reyn's Mother Country (2018) as diasporic critiques of Soviet and Russian (neo)imperialism that bridge East European studies and US migration literature. While both authors’ biographies link them to Jewish migration histories, their fiction resists the assimilationist logics of earlier Jewish American narratives, centering instead on mostly non-Jewish migrants from Georgia and Ukraine whose trajectories are shaped by neoliberal restructuring and Russian military interventions experiencing legal precarity, economic marginalization, and fractured diasporic relations in the United States. The analysis situates their writing within a broader history of US immigrant narratives attentive to global hierarchies and the blurring of economic and forced migration. As Krasikov and Reyn challenge reductive labels and foreground the entangled histories of Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish identities, their work expands the geographies and vocabularies of decolonial critique.