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White émigré

Russian subject who left Imperial Russia

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Through Russian Revolution, Soviet Union and East Asia

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.

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.

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