White émigré

• 1. Introduction

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  White émigrés changed the face of a covered arcade in Istanbul. Russian women who arrived with almost nothing began selling flowers there, and the place once known as Hristaki Passage became Çiçek Pasajı. Between 1917 and 1920, somewhere between 900,000 and 2 million people left the former Russian Empire. They came from every class: soldiers, Cossacks, intellectuals, dispossessed landowners, and officials of the Imperial government. Some opposed the Bolsheviks on principle. Others simply found themselves on the wrong side of a change in regimes. What held this scattered people together across four continents? And what did the world do to them once they arrived? Among those who left in the years that followed were figures the Soviet government expelled directly. They included the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and the philosopher Ivan Ilyin.

• 2. An Empire Dispersed

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  The Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were among the first European footholds for those who had crossed through Turkey. Large numbers also reached Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, France, Germany, and Iran. The communities in Berlin and Paris each grew large enough to sustain their own institutions. Officers who had been fighting across Siberia moved east rather than west, bringing their families toward Harbin, Shanghai, and other cities in China and Central Asia. After American and Japanese troops withdrew from Siberia, some émigrés continued on to Japan.

  In the Ottoman Empire, approximately 150,000 White Russians arrived in the years after the Revolution. Istanbul, with a population of around 900,000 at the time, absorbed the great majority. Across the Pacific, the Philippines admitted around 800 Russians fleeing the 1917 Revolution; about 250 settled in Mindanao to work in abaca plantations. Between 1949 and 1951, Philippine President Elpidio Quirino admitted 6,000 more White Russians who had fled China after the communist takeover. They settled on Tubabao island in Guiuan, Samar.

  World War II reshaped the communities again. About 10,000 White Russians were serving in the French Army when Germany invaded France in 1940. Between 3,000 and 5,000 served Germany on the Eastern Front, often as interpreters in the Wehrmacht or Waffen-SS. After the war, many communities migrated once more, reaching the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and countries across Latin America and South Africa.

  Tens of White Army veterans, with estimates ranging from 72 to 180, volunteered to fight for Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. It was an early measure of what the communities believed their continuing mission required.

• 3. Flag and Conviction

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  General Pyotr Wrangel, upon the White army's defeat, declared: "The battle for Russia has not ceased, it has merely taken on new forms." White émigrés overwhelmingly saw the Soviet Union not as Russia's successor but as an occupying force. They considered the years from 1917 to 1991 a period of anti-Christian occupation. The pre-revolutionary tricolor, the white-blue-red flag, served as their banner. Some organizations also flew the ensign of the Imperial Russian Navy.

  Many émigrés held monarchist sympathies, though a significant number preferred what they called an "unpredetermined" stance. They believed Russia's political structure should be settled by popular vote after liberation, not decided in advance. Whatever their differences, most shared the conviction that their duty was to preserve pre-revolutionary Russian culture until they could bring it home.

  Captain Vasili Orekhov, publisher of the magazine Sentry, put that duty into words that spread through the émigré world: "There will be an hour , believe it , there will be, when the liberated Russia will ask each of us: 'What have you done to accelerate my rebirth.' Let us earn the right not to blush, but be proud of our existence abroad. As being temporarily deprived of our Motherland let us save in our ranks not only faith in her, but an unbending desire towards feats, sacrifice, and the establishment of a united friendly family of those who did not let down their hands in the fight for her liberation."

  The Russian All-Military Union, the Brotherhood of Russian Truth, and the NTS were among the organizations formed to resist the Soviet regime. The Soviet secret police responded with infiltration campaigns, including TREST and the Inner Line. After 1933, some right-wing émigrés attempted to model parties on Germany's National Socialists, producing short-lived groups like the ROND. Others moved in the opposite direction, adopting pro-Soviet sympathies and joining organizations like the Mladorossi, the Evraziitsi, or the Smenovekhovtsy.

  At the 1938 All-Diaspora Council, Bishop John of Shanghai and San Francisco gave his vision of the diaspora's religious purpose. He was later canonized as a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. His statement at the council was this: "To the Russians abroad it has been granted to shine in the whole world with the light of Orthodoxy, so that other peoples, seeing their good deeds, might glorify our Father Who is in Heaven, and thus obtain salvation for themselves."

  In the Soviet Union, the label "white émigré" was used as a mark of contempt. Among the communities themselves, "first-wave émigré" was the preferred name, a term that quietly claimed the departure from Russia was not permanent.

• 4. Monuments to the Lost

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  Lenin had condemned the First World War as an imperialist war. The Soviet state built no monuments to the roughly 2 million Russians killed between 1914 and 1917. White émigrés treated that silence as an obligation. In Brussels, Seattle, and Harbin, they raised monuments to the executed Emperor Nicholas II. In Shanghai, a monument honored Alexander Pushkin, Russia's national poet. A planned Pushkin monument in Paris fell through when a dispute arose with the French Ministry of Fine Arts over its precise location.

  At Mourmelon-le-Grand in France, a memorial was raised for those Russians killed serving in the Russian Expeditionary Force. The émigrés built a hermitage alongside it, transplanted fir trees, and constructed a Russian-style farm to make the foreign ground feel like home.

  The design of war memorials was kept deliberately simple, with no sculpture that could carry a symbolic interpretation. Orthodox churches built alongside the memorials were styled after medieval churches from Novgorod and Pskov, an architectural choice seen as politically neutral. The intent was to draw in communities that otherwise could not agree on anything.

  Both left-wing and right-wing émigrés, who fiercely disagreed about most things, came together at war memorial services. These were among the very few occasions when all the scattered communities could gather in one place.

  In France, where the largest overseas Russian community lived, commemorations of World War I had become central to French national life after 1918. Russian graves in France were painted white, matching the color of French and Allied graves. German graves were painted black. Within the Russian community in France, that distinction was widely noted as a sign of alliance. In 1927, Orthodox Metropolitan Evlogii spoke at the war monument in Valenciennes. He declared: "Blood spilled on the soil of beautiful and glorious France is the best atmosphere to unite France forever with a Russia national and worthy."

  An émigré columnist in Paris, writing about a 1930 memorial dedication, gave the grief a voice: "We lost everything , family, economic situation, personal happiness, the homeland...Are our sufferings good to anyone? In truth-we have nothing, we have lost everything. Weep, weep." Another émigré newspaper that same year offered a different framing: "Peoples honor heroes. To the living: care, to the dead: memory. We in a foreign land do not have a tomb of an 'unknown soldier', but we do have thousands of suffering people. They are our honor and our justification before the world. Their wounds and suffering are for Russia. They remain true to honor and obligation. That is our Russian passport."

  King Alexander of Yugoslavia, a committed Russophile, welcomed Russian émigrés to his kingdom. Yugoslavia developed nearly as many Russian war memorials as France. Those memorials typically honored Serbian war dead and members of the Czechoslovak Legions alongside the Russians, giving them a Pan-Slavic character. A planned Orthodox church in Osijek would have featured busts of Emperor Nicholas II, King Peter I, and King Alexander. The design would have linked the Houses of Romanov and Karađorđević.

  Between 1934 and 1936, an ossuary was built in the Novo Groblje cemetery in Belgrade. It held the bones of Russian soldiers killed across the world. King Alexander contributed 5,000 dinars toward the construction costs. When the memorial opened in 1936, Patriarch Varnava of the Serbian Orthodox Church declared: "The Russians bore great sacrifices on our account wishing to defend Serbs at a time when powerful enemies attacked tiny Serbia from all sides. And the great Slavic soul of the Russians did not allow it to be looked upon with indifference that a fraternal Slavic people should perish."

  Karel Kramář, a wealthy conservative Czechoslovak politician and Russophile, worked with Russian émigrés to build an Orthodox church in Prague. He described it at its opening as "a monument of Slavic connection" and said it should "remind Russians not only of their former sufferings but also about the recognition on the side of the Slavs." A service at the Russian war memorial in Terezin in 1930 drew a large crowd. It was described as "a Russian-Czech political demonstration in a manifestation of Slavic mutuality." The underlying argument was that Russians had died so that Czechs might be free.

  In Germany, right-wing Russian émigrés found their offers to join Totensonntag rebuffed. The German Day of the Dead was a ceremony right-wing German veterans refused to share with men who had fought against Germany. Social Democratic Party veterans were willing to include them. These veterans used the ceremonies to argue that all nations had been victims of the First World War. November 11 was not a German national holiday; no one in Germany wished to mark the day the Reich had lost the war. Totensonntag served in Germany the role that November 11 served in Allied nations. The internationalist tone of the SPD ceremonies left many right-wing Russian émigrés feeling out of place.

  The memorials built across the 1920s and 1930s outlasted the Soviet era. By the 1990s, the Byzantine eagle, one of the symbols the communities had carried through exile, had been readopted as an official emblem of the post-Soviet Russian state.

• 5. Moscow of the Orient

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  Harbin was founded by Russians in 1896. After the Revolution, the existing community was reinforced by émigrés, though most Russians in Harbin had arrived before the First World War. By 1920, approximately 127,000 people in Harbin had come from Russia. This made it one of the largest Russian-speaking cities in East Asia, and it had become known as the Moscow of the Orient.

  One visitor in 1923 described the Russian women of Harbin as "ladies as well gowned as at the Paris races." Men were described as "faultlessly garbed by European standards." He wondered openly how they achieved what he called this "deceptive appearance." The community had made it their mission to preserve pre-war culture on the Manchurian plains. Two opera companies performed in the city, alongside numerous theaters staging the traditional classics of the Russian stage.

  "Moya-tvoya" was a pidgin language that had developed in the 19th century. It combined aspects of Russian and Mandarin Chinese, having originated among Chinese workers in Siberia. Chinese merchants in Harbin considered it essential for doing business there.

  In 1937, White émigrés in the region fought alongside the Soviet Red Army during the Soviet invasion of Xinjiang.

  The prosperity of Harbin was not the typical experience of Russians in China. In Shanghai and other cities, the conditions for stateless Russians were far harsher, and for many women, catastrophic.

• 6. Darkness in China

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  In 1924, the Chinese government recognized the Soviet Union. White Russians who refused Soviet citizenship were rendered stateless as a result. Unlike other Europeans, Americans, and Japanese living in China, they lost the protection of extraterritoriality. White Russians born in China were not eligible for Chinese citizenship either.

  A League of Nations survey in Shanghai in 1935 measured the extent of prostitution in the community. It found that 22 percent of Russian women between 16 and 45 were engaging in it to some extent. Most had arrived penniless, and ethnic prejudice combined with an inability to speak Chinese made professional work difficult to find. White Russian women in Beijing largely concentrated in the "Badlands" area adjoining the Beijing Legation Quarter, centered on the alley of Chuanban Hutong. Some found professional work teaching music or French; others worked as dressmakers, shop assistants, and hairdressers.

  The Shanghai Russian Regiment, the only professional standing unit within the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, offered a path for many men. By the mid-1930s, Shanghai's Russian community had built two schools, Russian-language newspapers, a radio station, and a variety of cultural and sporting clubs. Despite severe difficulties, the community found a degree of cohesion.

  The American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews described frequenting "cafes of somewhat dubious reputation." He went there with the explorer Sven Hedin and the scientist Davidson Black. Their purpose, Andrews wrote, was "to have scrambled eggs and dance with the Russian girls."

  Japanese general Kenji Doihara initially offered food and shelter to tens of thousands of Russian émigré women. They had fled to the Far East after the defeat of the White movement. Having established their dependence, Doihara forced the women into prostitution, building a network of brothels across China where they worked under inhuman conditions. Heroin and opium were promoted as a way to cope. Once addicted, the women were used to spread opium use among Chinese clients, earning one free pipe for every six they sold.

  Japanese scientists conducted human experiments on White Russian men, women, and children in Unit 731 and Unit 100, gassing, injecting, and vivisecting their subjects. Records and testimony from Unit 731 included accounts of a Russian girl and her mother being gassed. A Russian man was described as being cut in two and preserved with formaldehyde. Some children grew up inside the walls of Unit 731, having been infected with syphilis. A Youth Corps member recalled the subjects he saw scheduled for syphilis testing: "One was a White Russian woman with a daughter of four or five years of age, and the last was a White Russian woman with a boy of about six or seven."

  Senior Sergeant Kazuo Mitomo, a Unit 100 staff member, described his work: "On some of the prisoners I experimented 5-6 times, testing the action of Korean bindweed, bactal and castor oil seeds. One of the prisoners of Russian nationality became so exhausted from the experiments that no more could be performed on him, and Matsui ordered me to kill that Russian by giving him an injection of potassium cyanide. After the injection, the man died at once. Bodies were buried in the unit's cattle cemetery." Unit 100 staff also poisoned and drugged prisoners with heroin, tobacco, and other substances over weeks at a time. Survivors who could no longer be used for experiments were told they would receive medicine, then executed with potassium cyanide or gunshot.

  The Russian Orthodox Church in Shanghai offered a spiritual and cultural anchor amid these catastrophes. St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco guided that community through the years of statelessness. A broader institution of the same kind would preserve the diaspora's identity across the decades that followed.

• 7. Church and Legacy

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  The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad was formed in 1924, acting as the spiritual and cultural center for Russian Orthodox communities in exile. Separation from the Russian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate lasted until the 17th of May 2007. On that date, the Act of Canonical Communion reestablished canonical ties between the two bodies. The division had lasted more than 80 years.

  Scouts-in-Exile and similar youth organizations worked alongside the church to raise children with knowledge of pre-Soviet Russian culture and heritage. After the Second World War, most émigré organizations shifted away from armed resistance, concentrating on self-preservation and educating the next generation. Active anti-Soviet combat was carried on almost exclusively by the NTS.

  The Byzantine eagle, carried in exile for decades, was among the symbols the émigré communities bequeathed to the post-Soviet Russian state. It was readopted as an official emblem of the Russian Federation.

  In East Asia, "White Russian" remains the most commonly used term for this diaspora. Some of those it describes were of Ukrainian or other ethnicities and were not culturally Russian. Since the end of the 1980s, "first-wave émigré" has become more common inside Russia itself. It is a sign that the people who left, and the culture they carried, are finally being named on terms closer to their own.