I'm Russian ... sorry : an examination of the Russian migrant experience through three generations of one family and their contemporaries over three continents

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. This thesis contains 3rd party copyright material. The hardcopy may be available for consultation at the UTS Library.NO FULL TEXT AVAILABLE. This thesis contains 3rd party copyright material. ----- This thesis is a non-traditional PhD in a number of ways. It is interdisciplinary, drawing on historical and cultural theory. It employs a mix of genres to present a narrative about one stream of twentieth century migration: literary and auto/biographical, analytical and interpretive. It uses personal memoirs, interviews, and photographs - a large, but inevitably fragmented family archive due to the practicalities resulting from travels over space and time - in combination with traditional historical sources such as academic texts and official documents. Related lines of inquiry involve issues surrounding immigration and the uses of memory, oral history, and auto/biography as sources. It is centred on the experiences of my extended family, thus the personal intersects with the public in a story of historical entanglement in individual lives, and migration almost as a way of life. The range of sources and my relationship to the material suited a more literary mode of writing. Using this vehicle, I explored the impact of major events through unique family eyewitness accounts, some generated at the time, some later. It allowed for a range of individual expressions of the results of this impact over a period of nearly a hundred years and for an attempted dialogue between the present and the past. Along the way, there was also a dialogue with my own values, a questioning of how a legacy such as mine translated into current realities. The experiences of one family provided the opportunity to open a window on similar or parallel instances of the intertwining of history and private lives