White émigrés () were Russians who emigrated from the territory of the former Russian Empire in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. They were in opposition to the revolutionary Bolshevik political climate. Many White Russian émigrés participated in the White movement or supported it. The term is often broadly applied to anyone who may have left the country due to the change in regimes.
Some white émigrés, like Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, were opposed to the Bolsheviks but had not directly supported the White movement; some were apolitical. The term is also applied to the descendants of those who left and who still retain a Russian Orthodox Christian identity while living abroad.
The term "émigré" is most commonly used in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. A term preferred by the émigrés themselves was "first-wave émigré"; "Russian émigrés" or "Russian military émigrés" if they participated in the White movement. In the Soviet Union, the term "white émigré" generally had negative connotations.
Since the end of the 1980s, the term "first-wave émigré" has become more common in Russia. In East Asia, the term "White Russian" is the term most commonly used for such Russian émigrés, although some have been of Ukrainian and other ethnicities, and were not culturally Russians.新疆文史资料选辑: 第三辑[Z]. 乌鲁木齐: 新疆人民出版社, 1979. 25.
Most white émigrés left Russia from 1917 to 1920 (estimates vary between 900,000 and 2 million). Some managed to leave during the 1920s and 1930s, or were expelled by the Soviet government (such as, for example, Pitirim Sorokin and Ivan Ilyin). They spanned all classes and included military soldiers and officers, Cossacks, intellectuals of various professions, dispossessed businessmen and landowners, as well as officials of the Russian Imperial government and of various anti-Bolshevik governments during the Russian Civil War. Not all of them were ethnic Russians; other ethnic groups were included.
Distribution
Most émigrés initially fled from Southern Russia and Ukraine to Turkey and then moved to other Slavic countries in Europe (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland). A large number also moved to Israel, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Iran, Germany and France. Some émigrés also fled to Portugal, Spain, Romania, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, and Italy. Berlin and Paris developed thriving émigré communities.
Many military and civil officers living, stationed, or fighting the Red Army across Siberia and the Russian Far East moved together with their families to Harbin (see Harbin Russians), to Shanghai (see Shanghai Russians) and to other cities of China, Central Asia, and Western China. After the withdrawal of American and Japanese troops from Siberia, some émigrés traveled to Japan.
During and after World War II, many Russian émigrés moved to the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand — where many of their communities still exist in the 21st century. Thousands of emigres, of them 3,000 to 5,000 on the Eastern Front, served Germany in the Wehrmacht or in the Waffen-SS, often as interpreters.
Ideological inclinations
White émigrés were, generally speaking, anti-communist and did not consider the Soviet Union and its legacy to be representative of Russia but rather of an occupying force. They consider the period of 1917 to 1991 to have been a period of anti-Christian occupation by the Soviet regime. They used the pre-revolutionary tricolor (white-blue-red) as their flag, for example, and some organizations used the ensign of the Imperial Russian Navy.
A significant percentage of white émigrés may be described as monarchists, although many adopted a position of being "unpredetermined", believing that Russia's political structure should be determined by popular plebiscite.
Many white émigrés believed that their mission was to preserve the pre-revolutionary Russian culture and way of life while living abroad, in order to return this influence to Russian culture after the fall of the USSR. Many symbols of the White émigrés were reintroduced as symbols of the post-Soviet Russia, such as the Byzantine eagle and the Russian tricolor.
A religious mission to the outside world was another concept promoted by people such as Bishop John of Shanghai and San Francisco (canonized as a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad) who said at the 1938 All-Diaspora Council:
Many white émigrés also believed it was their duty to remain active in combat against the Soviet Union, with the hopes of liberating Russia. This ideology was largely inspired by General Pyotr Wrangel, who said upon the White army's defeat "The battle for Russia has not ceased, it has merely taken on new forms".
White army veteran Captain Vasili Orekhov, publisher of the magazine Sentry (Chasovoy), encapsulated this idea of responsibility with the following words:
Organizations and activities
The émigrés formed various organizations for the purpose of combating the Soviet regime such as the Russian All-Military Union, the Brotherhood of Russian Truth, and the NTS. This made the white émigrés a target for infiltration by the Soviet secret police (e.g. operation TREST and the Inner Line). Dozens of White Army veterans (numbers vary from 72 to 180) served as volunteers supporting Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Some white émigrés, labeled "Soviet patriots," adopted pro-Soviet sympathies. These people formed organizations such as the Mladorossi, the Evraziitsi, and the Smenovekhovtsy. After 1933, there were attempts to copy the NSDAP and cozy up to the German National Socialists, thus the short-lived parties such as the ROND (Russian Popular Liberation Movement) came into existence in Germany.
One of the most notable forms of activities by Russian émigrés was building monuments to Russian war dead of World War I, which stood in marked contrast to the Soviet Union, which did not build any monuments to the 2 million Russians killed between 1914 and 1917, as the war had been condemned by Lenin as an "imperialist war". Besides for the war dead, other monuments were put up. In Brussels, Seattle, and Harbin, monuments were built to honor the executed Emperor Nicholas II while a monument was put up in Shanghai to honor Alexander Pushkin, Russia's national poet. In fact, a monument to Pushkin would have been built in Paris had not a dispute arisen with the Ministry of Fine Arts over its precise location. The popularity of monuments for the war dead reflected not only sadness over the war dead, but also a way to bring together the often badly divided émigré communities shattered across Europe, Asia and North America. Monuments for the war dead were often a way to symbolically recreate Russia abroad with example at the monument for those Russians killed while serving in the Russian Expeditionary Force (REF) in France at village of Mourmelon-le-Grand having a hermitage built near it together with transplanted fir trees and a Russian style farm to make it look like home. To build community consensus around the war memorials, the design of the memorials were deliberately kept simple, with no sculpture which could be given a symbolic meaning, thereby ensuring that no particular interpretation of the war could be put forward other than grief over the war dead. The design of Orthodox churches at the war memorials was done in the style of medieval Orthodox churches in Novgorod and Pskov as this architectural style was seen as politically neutral and hence able to bring the communities together better.
Both left-wing and right-wing émigrés who otherwise passionately disagreed came together to honor the war dead of World War I, which was virtually the only occasions when overseas Russian communities could all come together, explaining why such memorial services were so important to the émigré communities. The neo-classical style which typically adorned war memorials in Imperial Russia was consciously avoided as building a war memorial in that style was viewed as expressing support for restoring the monarchy. The sense of loss was not only for those the war monuments honored, but due to the sense of loss caused by defeat. As a columnist in an émigré newspaper in Paris wrote about the dedication of a memorial to the REF in 1930: "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". Such monuments were also a way of commanding respect from the host communities with an émigré newspaper saying in 1930: "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".
This was especially the case in France, the home of the largest overseas Russian community, where services honoring the events of World War I were a major part of French life after 1918, and where by honoring the Russian war dead allowed the Russian émigrés in France to take part in the ceremonials, letting the émigrés feel like a part of the wider French community. In 1927, the Orthodox Metropolitan Evlogii spoke at the war monument in Valenciennes: "Blood spilled on the soil of beautiful and glorious France is the best atmosphere to unite France forever with a Russia national and worthy". The fact that the crosses of the Russians buried in France were painted white-the color of the French war dead and allies-while the crosses of the German war dead were painted black was widely noticed within the Russian community in France as a sign that the French regarded them as allies. In Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, war memorials to the Russian war dead were presented in Pan-Slavic terms, as a symbol of how Russians had fought together with the Czechs and Serbs in the war. Serbian King Alexander of Yugoslavia was a Russophile who welcomed Russian émigrés to his kingdom, and after France, Yugoslavia had the largest Russian émigré community, leading to Yugoslavia to have almost as many war memorials to the Russian war dead as France. War memorials in Yugoslavia usually also honored both Serbian war dead and the members of the Czechoslovak Legions who died in the war, giving them a decidedly pan-Slavic feel. A planned Orthodox church to honor the Russian prisoners who died in an Austrian POW camp outside Osijek would have featured busts of the Emperor Nicholas II, King Peter I and King Alexander to emphasis how the Houses of Romanov and Karađorđević had been allied in the war, linking the Russian and Serbian experiences of the war.