Russian diaspora

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian diaspora begins, in one telling, with the Lipovans. These Old Believers walked southward out of Russia around 1700, after breaking from the official church in the preceding century. Their departure was quiet. What followed over the next three centuries was not. Between 20 and 30 million ethnic Russians now live outside the Russian Federation. The Russian-speaking diaspora, counting all native Russian speakers regardless of ethnicity, reached close to 30 million by a 2010 estimate from SIL Ethnologue. What drove so many people out of Russia across three hundred years, and where did they land?

• 2. Faith Before Country

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  The Doukhobors began emigrating to the Transcaucasus from 1841, pushed out by a state intolerant of religious difference. Decades later they pressed onward, reaching Canada from 1899. Another sect, the Molokans, scattered even more widely. Their settlements ranged from the United States to Georgia, Armenia, Kars, Azerbaijan, Australia, and Central Asia. Both groups were religious dissidents fleeing the centralizing authority of the Russian imperial state.

  Russia's Jewish population shaped a defining wave of emigration in the late 19th century. Facing religious persecution, roughly a third of that population left the region altogether. Of those who departed, approximately 80% resettled in America. Local populations were generally distrustful of their cultural differences. Many new arrivals chose to settle near existing Russian immigrant communities.

  Partial tribes of Spiritual Christian Pryguny, breakaway sectarians from the Russian Orthodox Church, began arriving in Los Angeles in 1904. They had fled Tsarist persecution. Diverted from their original plans, they purchased and colonized land in the Guadalupe Valley, northeast of Ensenada, founding villages where Russian culture survived for several decades. Those villages were eventually abandoned. Only the cemeteries remain, their headstones still marked in Cyrillic.

• 3. The White Wave

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  The Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and the Russian Revolution erupted in rapid succession between 1904 and 1923. A particular burden fell on young men. Avoiding forced military service was a major reason men specifically chose to emigrate from Russia during that period.

  The October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that ran until 1922 produced the most politically defined emigration Russia had yet seen. Those who fled became known collectively as the White emigres. The term 'first wave' applies not because emigration was new to Russia. It applies because this was the first departure driven entirely by opposition to Communist rule.

  In the 1920s, between 100,000 and 200,000 White emigres overwhelmed Harbin, transforming the northern Chinese city into a center of Russian life. Some of those Harbin Russians later dispersed to Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin. By the 1930s, Shanghai's Russian community had grown past 25,000 people. Thousands of former White Army soldiers also settled in Albania, arriving at the end of 1921 at the request of Prime Minister Ahmet Zogu. The Soviet Union would later pull its specialists out of Albania in 1961. The Russian-speaking community there today numbers only about 300 people.

• 4. The Second and Third Waves

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  Soviet prisoners of war, eastern workers, and surviving veterans of the Russian Liberation Army formed the core of the 'second wave.' These were soldiers who had served under German command during World War II and then evaded forced repatriation. In the immediate postwar years, the largest Russian emigre communities settled in Germany, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

  Following the establishment of the State of Israel, many Russian Jews made their way to that country along with non-Jewish relatives. The current estimate of Russians in Israel stands at 300,000. That figure reaches one million when including those who were registered in the Soviet Union as ethnic Jews rather than as Russians.

  Leon Trotsky, a dissident of the Soviet Communist Party, found refuge in Mexico in the 1930s after being expelled from the Soviet Union. In 1940, he was assassinated there by NKVD agent Ramon Mercader.

  Emigres who left after Stalin's death but before the era of perestroika are grouped into the 'third wave.' Most of them departed in the 1970s. They were predominantly Jews, Armenians, and Russian Germans. Finland, which borders Russia and served as a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire from 1809 until 1917, today has 102,487 native Russian speakers.

• 5. Scattered Across Distant Lands

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  Russians are among the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. Today approximately 15,600 live there, mostly in northern Xinjiang and also in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang.

  Japan disputes Russia's claim to the Kuril Islands. The Soviet Union annexed that chain in 1945, following Japan's surrender at the end of World War II. The Soviet Red Army expelled all Japanese from those islands. The chain was resettled with Russians and other Soviet nationalities.

  A few Russians settled on the Korean Peninsula in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. South Korea today has an estimated Russian population of around 70,000. About half of that group traces its heritage to the Koryo-saram, ethnic Koreans who had settled in the former Soviet Union.

  Singapore's Russian community is estimated at 4,500 by the local Russian embassy, a figure from 2018. They form a largely professional and business-oriented group, with hundreds owning companies or leading branches of major Russian firms. President Vladimir Putin visited Singapore on the 13th of November 2018 to break ground for a Russian Cultural Center. During that visit, it was noted that 690 Russian companies were operating in the country. The largest single concentration of ethnic Russians living outside Russia is in Ukraine, where a 2001 census recorded 8.3 million people.

• 6. The Soviet Inheritance

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  In Belarus, the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought no perceivable change in the status of ethnic Russians. The situation in Latvia and Estonia was very different. In those countries, people without ancestors who had been citizens before the Soviet occupation of 1940-1991 faced a distinctive legal problem. If they had not claimed Russian citizenship while it was available, they were classified as non-citizens.

  Kazakhstan is home to nearly three million ethnic Russians, representing 14.6% of the population as of 2025. Latvia counted 434,243 ethnic Russians in 2025, making up 23.4% of the population.

  After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia fell into an economic depression throughout the 1990s. That depression drove many Russians to leave for Western countries. It ended in 2000. During those same years, ethnic Russians who had been living in other post-Soviet states moved back to Russia.

  Lord Ashcroft polled ethnic Russians in Ukraine a week after the 2022 invasion began. Eighty-two percent said no part of Ukraine was rightfully Russian. Those polls excluded Russian-occupied Crimea and parts of the Donbas. A separate question found that 65% of Ukrainians agreed there was more that united ethnic Russians in Ukraine and Ukrainians than divided them. Among those identifying as Russian ethnicity, that figure was 88%.

  The United States counted 2,432,733 ethnic Russians as of 2023. Brazil's estimate for the same community ranged from 1.8 to 3 million, as of 2018.