Anthropological accounts of migrant exclusion and racialization have primarily been theorized in the context of Global North migrant-receiving countries that heavily police and restrict their borders. Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Russia and Tajikistan, this dissertation explores how the decades-long patterns of labor migration between Central Asia and Russia have shaped the politics of ethno-national difference across the region. Through multi-sited research conducted with Tajik interlocutors, I probe the symbiotic effects of these migration patterns on the production of ethno-racial categories and broader understandings of citizenship across in the region. I argue that the relatively new presence of racialized “others” has not only shaped the politics of difference in Russia, but also that experiences of racialization among minorities, in this case Tajik migrants, shape the articulation of belonging in their home societies. By integrating postsocialist and postcolonial frameworks, I explore how the genuinely emancipatory, future-oriented ideologies that undergirded Soviet notions of citizenship take on new meanings amidst contemporary iterations of long-standing imperial dynamics in the region. In each dissertation chapter, I employ the conceptual framework of “remains” to track the changing and contradictory fates of Soviet legacies—both tangible objects and intangible sentiments, ideologies, and legal frameworks—pertaining to the production of boundaries between belonger and outsider. In so doing, I ethnographically illustrate how the afterlives of Soviet citizenship both subvert and perpetuate hierarchies of difference. This research contributes to the burgeoning interdisciplinary discussions on race in Russia and the Soviet Union and offers ethnographically-grounded perspectives on the topics of coloniality that have long interested historians of the USSR.