Issues of migrants’ social adaptation based on deep biographical interviews are discussed. The study was conducted in 2018 in the Republic of Karelia among immigrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia: Avars, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Dargins, Ingush, Chechens, Tajiks, Uzbeks. All respondents belong to the category of forced migrants who came to the territory of Karelia mainly from the mid-1980s until 2013 as a result of local military conflicts. The study uses the method of biographical standards – repetitive biographical structures and discourses allowing key problems of adaptation to life in new conditions for migrants to be identified. The analysis of the data supports the definition of key content categories, detection of contradictions and doubts that allow to penetrate conflicts between individuals and society and to understand challenges of social adaptation in the new region. Biographical standards and typical content categories testify to the displacement of traumatic experience of local wars for migrants by the issues of successful inclusion in the host society, mimicry to it. Even memory of the Great Patriotic war and its consolidating potential in terms of interethnic relations serve these interests.