Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with migrants and their families in northern Tajikistan and Russia, this thesis seeks to interrogate economistic assumptions about the logics of Tajikistani migration to Russia. In doing so, it addresses the complexity of the relationship between migration, the pursuit of the good life, and people's projects of self-fashioning, taking the discussion surrounding migration into the realm of personhood, self and subjectivity, and imaginaries of the good life. In particular, it looks at different ways in which people navigate what it means to be a good person (odami khub) and to have a good life (zindagii khub) in the context of constantly shifting realities of migration rules, precarious labour conditions, legal and social constructions of (il)legality, and citizenship regimes. The chapters explore the domains in which tensions of pervasiveness of migration play out - experiences of place, ideas about modernity and tradition, ritual performances, familyhood and care, citizenship strategies and documents. I argue that mass migration from Tajikistan is as much a project of navigation of moral personhood as it is a quest for economic resources, enabling people to enact their ideas about the good life and becoming a certain type of subjects. Far from being an 'automatic' response to general economic and political breakdown, migration decisions are inserted in local gender and generational hierarchies and embedded in the experiences of living and imagining one's present and future in a place, constituted by the multi-layered histories of mobilities, where present forms of sociality are informed by spatial and social transformations brought about by the Soviet modernisation project. As people struggle to make sense of their 'modern' past and 'less-modern' present, and trying to bridge the disjuncture between the pressing need to bear the burden of meeting one's life projects under the scrutinising gaze of the community, and the loss of capacity to do so staying in place, they engage in particular projects of self-cultivation. Through their language choices, cultivating certain bodily presence in the community, throwing elaborate performances of the traditional in the face of legal regulation of ritual expenses, mobilising resources transnationally to negotiate moral obligation of care, and acquiring Russian citizenship to alleviate uncertainties of migrant lives, they are trying to become modern subjects, caring family members, and good members of community.