Le territoire englouti de Mologa

The fate of the people of Mologa, a provincial village in central Russia, was forever marked by two consequences stemming directly from a single major event when the Rybinsk dam went into service in 1941. Not only did the waters of the lake it created cover their homes, but ene entire population was displaced as well. From then on, the inhabitants' new-found mobility was assimilated to the attachment to their territory, which on a symbolic level constituted their collective identity. In this sense, their forced displacement was incorporated into a culture of mobility: based on the spatial overlaying of individual and collective identities, it expressed its true dynamic nature in the principle of a potential return. The case of the community of Mologa is in many ways emblematic of the Soviet redistribution of populations; the bond between identities (personal, familial, or collective) and a territory seems to have been constructed in such a way that the displacement, rather than putting this bond into jeopardy, established or activated it. It did this by stimulating a living relationship within the spatial dimension. This dialectical movement between distance and return contributed to the formation and the preservation of a communal identity taking the form of mobility.