Short answers, pulled from the story.
White émigrés were people who fled the former Russian Empire following the Russian Revolution and Civil War, primarily between 1917 and 1920. They included soldiers, Cossacks, intellectuals, dispossessed landowners, and Imperial government officials. Estimates of their numbers range between 900,000 and 2 million.
White émigrés settled across four continents. Major communities formed in France, Germany, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Many went east to Harbin and Shanghai in China, and approximately 150,000 reached the Ottoman Empire. Others settled in the Philippines, Japan, and after World War II in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Latin America.
White émigrés generally viewed the Soviet Union not as Russia's legitimate successor but as an occupying force. They considered the period from 1917 to 1991 an anti-Christian occupation. Most believed their mission was to preserve pre-revolutionary Russian culture until they could return, maintaining the pre-revolutionary tricolor as their flag.
In 1924, the Chinese government recognized the Soviet Union and rendered most White Russians stateless, stripping them of legal protections. A League of Nations survey in Shanghai in 1935 found that 22 percent of Russian women between 16 and 45 were engaging in prostitution to some extent. Those under Japanese control faced worse: General Kenji Doihara forced Russian émigré women into prostitution, and Japanese scientists conducted human experiments on White Russian men, women, and children at Unit 731 and Unit 100.
Harbin, founded by Russians in 1896, became one of the largest Russian-speaking cities in East Asia, known as the Moscow of the Orient. By 1920, approximately 127,000 people there had come from Russia. The community built two opera companies and numerous theaters staging the classics of the Russian stage, making Harbin a center for the preservation of pre-war Russian culture.
The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad was formed in 1924 as the spiritual and cultural center for White émigré communities outside the Soviet Union. It operated separately from the Russian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate for more than 80 years, until the Act of Canonical Communion on the 17th of May 2007 reestablished canonical ties between the two bodies.