“The second emigration refers to those who took the opportunity to flee to the West during World War II - primarily to Germany, and then, in the early 50s, mostly emigrated to the United States. Unlike the first wave, they did not know the West. Although many of them went through Soviet camps and only a few supported Germany’s fight against the Soviet Union (in the hope of liberating Russia from Bolshevism) "
The second, or, as they call it, post-war emigration, began in 1942 in Hitler’s Germany, more precisely, in its camps for Russian prisoners of war and in the Ostov and refugee camps. And after the end of the war, mainly in defeated Germany, an unexpected, strange and incomprehensible problem arose, called by the English-speaking victors DP (Displaced Persons), that is, displaced persons, of whom, also unexpectedly, there were many. It was from this multitude of “persons” that the second wave of Russian emigration then arose.
A feature of the emigration processes of this period was, firstly, that a significant part of emigrants (including the first wave) left Europe overseas - to the USA, Canada, Australia, South America; secondly, the fact that some of the “old” emigrants after the Second World War ended up in territories that were ceded to the USSR or included in the zone of Soviet influence.
If we try to leave ideological assessments behind the scenes, we can pay attention to some specific features of the second emigration.
* Emigration was forced, political, anti-Soviet in nature. However, unlike the first emigration, some people became political opponents of the Soviet regime not in the Soviet Union, but much later, for example, after being captured or being forcibly taken to Germany.
* Fear of returning home. Some of the future emigrants were not active opponents of the regime, but it was not without reason that they feared reprisals in the event of a possible return home.
* The second outcome was already Soviet. These were citizens of the USSR, had experience of life under Soviet rule and knew the real Soviet reality,
which left clear “imprints” of the Soviet way of thinking and behavior in the actions of the emigrants.
* The bulk of the second emigration, before it found itself outside the Soviet Union, recognized the legitimacy of the existing political regime in Russia, but subsequently questioned this.
* In the second emigration (unlike the first), there was already a desire to “break out” of the closed country. The occupation was the occasion that made it possible to open the borders closed by the Bolsheviks.
* The second emigration, with the help and assistance of representatives of the first emigration, managed to create an ideological platform for the overthrow of the Soviet regime.
At the beginning of the war, everything painful in the structure of the Soviet state was revealed. The cruelty of the Stalinist regime towards people living in the territories of the USSR covered by the Germans resulted in numerous people defecting to the side of the enemy. This was the greatest tragedy in the history of wars, the tragedy of a large state. People were afraid of cruel repressions and inhumane treatment of their destinies. The thirst for revenge, the desire for liberation from the Stalinist regime forced some soldiers and officers of the Red Army to participate in military operations as part of the German army.
The second wave of emigration was caused by events related to the Second World War. It was mainly composed of persons displaced beyond the borders of the USSR during the war ("ostarbeiters", prisoners of war, refugees) and who evaded repatriation. According to official data, the number of displaced persons who did not return to their homeland amounted to 130 thousand people, according to some experts - 500-700 thousand people.
Prisoners of war captured by German troops during the war with the USSR. Of these, by May 1945, 1.15 million people remained alive.
Refugees. Many of those who had previously had trouble with the authorities or were afraid of ending up again in the hands of the NKVD took advantage of the German occupation to escape from the USSR.
Those who decided to fight against the Red Army or help the Germans in the fight against it. From 800 thousand to a million people volunteered to help the occupiers of their homeland. It is interesting to note that the Soviet Union became the only European country whose almost a million citizens enlisted in the enemy army.
Migrants in these categories were declared by the Soviet government to be “traitors” who deserved “severe punishment.” At his insistence, on February 11, 1945 in Yalta, during the Crimean Conference of the leaders of the three allied powers - the USSR, the USA and Great Britain - identical, although separate agreements were concluded with the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States of America on the extradition of all Soviet citizens to representatives of the Soviet Union , both prisoners of war and civilians “liberated” by the Anglo-American armies. Soviet citizens were forcibly loaded onto trains to be sent to the Soviet zone of occupation, and from there transported to the USSR, and those who were not shot immediately upon arrival joined the population of the Gulag. Many future displaced persons ended up in German camps from Soviet camps. For example, among the writers - Sergei Maksimov3, Nikolai Ulyanov4, Boris Filippov5 And the poet Vladimir Markov6 and the artist Vladimir Odinokov7 “tasted” life in the terrible German camps for Russian prisoners of war.
The Yalta meeting of the three - Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill, which took place in February 1945, became fateful. At this meeting, among the important issues of the time, only a small part of the busy program of the Yalta conference was devoted to repatriation. This question, of course, was very important both for Stalin and for the Russians who found themselves abroad. True, many then did not believe that Roosevelt and Churchill would agree to Stalin’s demand to return - of course, to death - everyone who lived in the Soviet Union before 1939. Return, regardless of their will. However, the Yalta troika reached general agreement on such an action. The “Yalta Agreement” legalized the forced repatriation of all Soviet citizens in Western countries. In May 1945, the repatriation document was re-signed in the Saxon city of Halle (the birthplace of the famous German composer George Handel). General de Gaulle did not participate in the Yalta conference, but being in
Moscow back in 1944, signed a similar agreement there on the mandatory repatriation of all Soviet citizens
As a result of the second wave of emigration, the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (SBONR) was founded - a political organization that embarked on the path of open opposition to the Stalinist system. It created the Russian Library in Munich, which became a center of Russian culture in Germany in the late 40s. Its representatives organized church parishes, providing much-needed spiritual assistance to all persecuted people at that time. They created the largest scientific and publishing institution that has ever existed in emigration - the Institute for the Study of History and Culture of the USSR in Munich, which existed until 1972. The Museum of Russian Culture in San Francisco, Homeland Society Museum in Lakewood - this is also the merit of the “second” emigration.
Numerous organizations of Russian emigrants were located in Munich: the National Labor Union (NTS), the Central Association of Political Emigrants from the USSR (COPE), radio stations broadcasting to Russia. In Munich, the Institute for the Study of History and Culture of the USSR was actively functioning, publishing the works of many Russian emigrants. The “magazine of literature, art and social thought” “Grani” began publishing here in 1946. In 1951-1954, the literary criticism magazine (almanac) Literary Contemporary was published in Munich. In 1958, the publishing house TSOPE published the anthology collection “Literary Abroad” with works by I. Elagin, S. Maksimov, D. Klenovsky, L. Rzhevsky and others.
As for America, along with the New Journal, which continued to publish, which eagerly published writers of the second wave of emigration, there were several large publishing houses of Russian books; including the publishing house named after Chekhov, which published in 1953 the anthology “In the West” (compiled by Yu. Ivask), which included poems by O. Anstey, I. Elagin, O. Ilyinsky, D. Klenovsky, V. Markov, N. Morshen, B. Nartsisov, B. Filippov, I. Chinnova.
It is difficult to accurately determine the number of people who returned home voluntarily or involuntarily. In the article “On the Deepian Past,” Lyudmila Obolenskaya-Flam gives a total figure of 5,218,000, which she took from Tatyana Ulyankina’s book “The Wild Historical Strip”11. But he immediately clarifies that Nikolai Tolstoy12 in his book “Victims of Yalta” increases this figure by 300 thousand people.
The third wave of Russian emigration differed significantly from the first two in that its representatives were born during the years of Soviet power, their childhood and youth were spent in the conditions of the so-called socialist society with all its advantages and vices. The upbringing itself was sharply different from their predecessors. Most of the future emigrants witnessed the victory of the Soviet people over world fascism, experienced pride in their country, and the pain of loss. Many of them were affected by Stalin's repressions. During the “thaw”, those who would form the backbone of the third wave of emigration began to write and formed.
At first, no one thought about any emigration. Yes, perhaps, except for A. Solzhenitsyn, no one was going to overthrow Soviet society. The generation of the “sixties” firmly believed in, as they said then, “Leninist norms of party and state life.”
However, by the beginning of the 60s it became obvious that there would be no fundamental change in politics and the life of the people. N. Khrushchev's visit to the exhibition of artists in the Manege and his meeting with writers and artists in 1963 marked the beginning of the curtailment of freedom in the country, including freedom of creativity. The next twenty years of stagnation became a difficult test for the creative intelligentsia. If venerable writers still managed to break through the obstacles of censorship, not without losses, then, of course, for most authors the road to the reader was closed. Some writers, despite the opposition of state security agencies, transferred their works to the West, where they were published and then returned to the country (“tamizdat”). Numerous literature lovers then printed them out on typewriters and photocopiers, and these tattered homemade books passed from hand to hand (“samizdat”). There were widespread meetings between underground writers and readers in various research institutes, clubs, universities, and cafes. The authorities were unable to stop this process.
Persecution began against A. Solzhenitsyn (after 1966, not a single one of his works was published in his homeland) and V. Nekrasov (he was expelled from the party, the KGB carried out searches at his apartment). I. Brodsky was arrested and exiled to forced labor. V. Aksenov, A. Galich, S. Dovlatov were intimidated in the KGB. even if the author did not write on current topics, but was only engaged in formal research, he was in trouble.
The consequence of this was a revision by the most persecuted writers of many previously undisputed values, resentment (if not anger) towards their homeland and forced emigration.
The first person officially allowed to travel abroad in 1966 was the writer and journalist Valery Tarsis (who had previously spent several years in KGB psychiatric hospitals). Following him, Vasily Aksenov, Joseph Brodsky, Georgy Vladimov, Vladimir Voinovich, Alexander Galich, Sergey Dovlatov, Alexander Zinoviev, Viktor Nekrasov, Sasha Sokolov, Andrei Sinyavsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Dina Rubina and many other writers went abroad.
The only thing that brought them closer to the emigrants of the first two waves was their complete rejection of Soviet power and the Soviet state. Otherwise they were completely different from their predecessors. They had no religious upbringing, they had no nostalgia, they did not know the life of the Russian diaspora and essentially continued what they were doing in their homeland. Their tragedy was that they had to reject the system in which they sacredly believed, and thus the representatives of the third wave of emigration found themselves in a vacuum: there was no connection with the past, ties with the present were severed. Many, in connection with this, gained faith and returned to the religion of their fathers, which in Russia at that time was a crime.
The old Russian emigration created the “Magic Reserve of the Russian Language” Maria Rozanova, carefully preserving the wonderful Russian speech for descendants. But she could not understand the linguistic changes that had occurred in her homeland during the 70 years of Soviet power, and literature could not help but reflect the real state in which society lived. The third wave brought to emigration the language of Soviet society and the concepts of life associated with it (even if rejected by them), was distinguished by its attention to the avant-garde and post-avant-garde (which are a reaction to the prevailing non-standard, new, chaotic situation, completely alien to older generations), many of their books were combined with the experience of world literature of the twentieth century. According to Z. Shakhovskaya, “is there anything specifically emigrant? ?? the author’s italics did not have time to appear in the books that appeared here” Z. Shakhovskaya “One or two Russian literatures?” - P.59, they “cannot be counted among emigrant literature...” there, all emigrants continue to do the same things they did in their homeland.
The largest and, perhaps, outside of all directions, writer of the third wave of Russian emigration is, undoubtedly, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, although he himself stubbornly refuses to consider himself an emigrant, in every possible way emphasizing the violent, forced nature of his departure from Russia.
The main and essentially the only book of art by Solzhenitsyn created abroad is the epic “The Red Wheel,” which describes the most important events from August 1914 to April 1917. The writer makes the center of his novels the disaster of 1914 in East Prussia and the fate of Stolypin, the October unrest of 1916 in Russia and Lenin's actions during this period, the February Revolution with its paradoxes, and, finally, the preparation of the October Revolution. A huge number of documents were used to write the novel. And everything is united by the multi-valued metaphor of the fiery wheel: “WHEEL! - rolls, illuminated by fire! independent! unstoppable! everything is oppressive!” Biographies and biographies of real historical figures are juxtaposed with stories about the life activities of fictional characters, among whom the closest to the author are student Sanya Lazhenitsin and officer-intellectual Vorotyntsev.
Thus, the main theme of Solzhenitsyn, like many other representatives of the third wave, was hatred of the system, but not of the homeland itself, the theme of history and thoughts about the Russian people.
Having emigrated, Solzhenitsyn did not lose touch with his homeland. Despite the fact that he was accused of treason, slandered, and slandered (his literary and journalistic activities irritated many representatives of Soviet society), the writer did not become embittered and did not break ties with his homeland, which had driven him out of the country. Moreover, a few years later (in 1994) he returned, but to a different homeland - free and highly appreciative of the writer’s work.
The literature of the third wave of Russian emigration is multifaceted, multifaceted and multi-styled. Sometimes the reader cannot find common ground in the works of writers of this period. Despite the fact that they are united by time, upbringing, the basic principles of the system, instilled from birth, creative people scattered throughout the globe, finding their own style, their own special genre, their own language. The former concentration of Russians in foreign countries no longer existed, the old “Russia in miniature” abroad disappeared, emigrants became more disunited, settled alone or in small groups in various remote parts of the globe: North America began to be widely settled by Russians, large Russian regions appeared in New York and other major US cities. The goal of preserving the original Russian culture and language disappeared; new trends, forms, and genres appeared and took shape.
On the verge of realistic and post-avant-garde prose is the work of Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990), who emigrated to the USA in 1978. The writer defiantly abandoned the role of a life teacher and acts as a narrator of fascinating, funny, touching stories of the life of a “little man”, causing both joy and sadness. His stories are imbued with a love for people mixed with a smile, which brings him closer to Teffi.
The writer retained his style of relaxed storytelling about good people overcoming the absurdity of life in his works about Russian emigration, the best of which is the story “The Foreigner” (1986). “We are six brick buildings around a supermarket, inhabited mainly by Russians. That is, recently by Soviet citizens. Or, as the newspapers write, third-wave emigrants.” The writer tells a funny and at the same time sad story about the everyday life of emigrants. “In the Union, Zyama was a lawyer. In America, from the very first days I worked as a loader at the base” - this is the sad reality. And such is the fate of everyone: in order to survive in the new society of money and material values, our writers and critics became taxi drivers, artists and architects became janitors or loaders. Some tried to continue what they started in their homeland, but what they wrote “sold sluggishly.”
“There was no freedom at home, but there were readers. There was enough freedom here, but there were no readers” - this is the main tragedy of all third-wave emigrants. For many, emigration was “not salvation, but death” Naum Korzhavin:
I know myself:
There is also sky here.
But he died there
And I won’t rise again here
Every day I
I get up in a foreign country, -
Naum Korzhavin writes bitterly in the poem “Now light, now shadow...”, or:
There are friends there - I’m eager to see them today,
Remembering with sadness:
At least now I’ll go to Paris and Rome,
They won't let you into Omsk.
Thus, the creative emigrant of the third wave is not tormented by nostalgia, longing for his homeland, he does not dream of white birch trees; they do not know pre-revolutionary Russia, they do not idealize it like their predecessors, but the Soviet homeland remains a secret for them, they know little about it, since they left another Russia. Thus, they found themselves in emptiness, in a vacuum, they had no roots. Their main tragedy was that they could not express themselves; few people were interested in their work. Abroad, they were able to spread their wings, but there was nowhere to fly - such is the paradox of the creativity of the third wave of emigrants.
To summarize, we should once again note the main problems and the most important differences in the creativity of representatives of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd “wave” of emigration.
Most of the writers of the first and second waves of Russian creative emigration saw themselves as guardians and successors of Russian national culture. The Russian idea of conciliarity, the merging of man with the world, society, nature, and space, was present in the works of the older generation of writers from Russia abroad.
The running theme of all Russian literature abroad is the theme of Russia, longing for it; everything that has passed away seems beautiful and whole. Emigrant writers idealized Russia, the “Russian home,” and their works were imbued with nostalgic motifs.
Some authors devoted their works to understanding the causes of the revolution. All representatives of creative emigration categorically did not accept the new system in their homeland, sharply rejected new trends, and could not get along with them.
The most common theme of literature abroad was the life of the emigration itself. The tragedy of existence and ways to at least temporarily overcome it, the painful search for God, the meaning of life and human destiny constituted the content of many books.
The third wave of Russian emigration differed significantly from the first two in that its representatives were brought up during the years of Soviet power, their childhood and youth were spent in the conditions of the so-called socialist society. She brought to emigration the language of a Soviet society that was new to her predecessors and the life concepts associated with it.
The only thing that brought them closer to the emigrants of the first two waves was their complete rejection of Soviet power and the Soviet state. Otherwise they were completely different. They had no religious upbringing, they had no nostalgia, nostalgia for their homeland. Their tragedy was that they had to reject the system in which they sacredly believed, and thus, representatives of the third wave of emigration found themselves deprived of both the past and the present, and lost their roots.
This means that for the entire Russian creative diaspora, emigration was not salvation, but destruction, spiritual death.
Mass emigration is closely connected with the history of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century. The First World War, revolutions, and the collapse of political regimes were the reasons for the resettlement of masses of people. But if at the turn of the century emigration from Russia was predominantly economic or religious in nature, then during the First World War political trends began to prevail in it. After the October Revolution and the associated civil war, millions of its citizens fled from Russia. This was the so-called “first wave” of mass emigration precisely for political reasons. Who was it and how many of them left the former Russian Empire?
Russian emigration of the first post-revolutionary wave, often called “White,” is a unique phenomenon unparalleled in world history. And not only by its scale, but also by its contribution to world and Russian culture. The first wave of emigrants not only preserved, but also enhanced many traditions of Russian culture. It was they who wrote many brilliant pages in the history of world literature, science, ballet, theater, cinema, painting, etc. It was they who created the “mainland”, not indicated on any map of the world, with the name “Russian Abroad”.
The first emigration consisted of the most cultured strata of Russian pre-revolutionary society, with a disproportionately large share of military personnel. According to the League of Nations, a total of 1 million 160 thousand refugees left Russia after the revolution. About a quarter of them belonged to the White armies, which emigrated at different times from different fronts. In 1921, the League of Nations and the Red Cross Society made the first attempt to register Russian refugees in the Slavic countries, Romania and Turkey. There were about 800 thousand of them. Modern historians assume that at least 2 million people left Russia. By the way, Lenin called this figure in his time. There is no complete data on the number of military personnel who left Russia.
Geographically, this emigration from Russia was primarily directed to the countries of Western Europe. The main centers of Russian emigration of the first wave were Paris, Berlin, Prague, Belgrade, and Sofia. At the same time, the Russian emigration chose France as the unifying country, and Paris as its capital. “The main reasons for such a decision were political, economic and moral. But the most important thing was the fact that for many years there were stable contacts between Russia and France, which influenced the formation of two cultures - Russian and French. France was the only country that recognized Wrangel’s government. She signed an agreement according to which its representative took Russian refugees under his protection on behalf of the country.” The first wave of emigrants considered their exile to be a forced and short-term episode, hoping for a quick return to Russia after what they thought was a quick collapse of the Soviet state.
The famous polar explorer Nansen was appointed Commissioner for Russian Refugees by the League of Nations. Nansen put forward a project to create temporary identity cards for immigrants from Russia. In 1926, more than 30 countries agreed to issue the Nansen passport. It was a temporary identity document that replaced the passports of stateless persons and refugees. These passports greatly eased their situation in various countries. All immigrants from Russia received refugee status only in 1926, when persons of Russian origin who did not enjoy the protection of the USSR and did not become subjects of another state began to be considered Russian refugees. It should be noted that many refugees deliberately did not accept another citizenship, hoping to return to Russia. But the position of the Soviet government towards them became tougher from year to year. According to the Decree, the following were deprived of citizenship:
a) persons who have stayed abroad continuously for more than five years and did not receive Soviet passports before June 1, 1921;
c) persons who voluntarily fought in the armies that fought against Soviet power, or were members of counter-revolutionary organizations,” etc., etc.
Among the emigrants were such outstanding figures as: I. Bunin, A. Kuprin (until 1937), M. Tsvetaeva (until 1939), Chaliapin, Rachmaninov, Zvorykin and others.
Several thousand people entered the French Foreign Legion, becoming its most “disciplined and combat-ready and most valued part.” “Russian legionnaires bore the brunt of the fight against the Rifans, Kabyls, Tuaregs, Druze and other rebel tribes in the period 1925-1927. In the hot sands of Morocco, on the rocky ridges of Syria and Lebanon, in the stuffy gorges of Indo-China, Russian bones are scattered everywhere
The first years of emigration were also difficult for civilians. “Except for a few bankers, restaurant owners, doctors and lawyers, Russian refugees lived in extreme poverty, in impossible conditions; some died of hunger,” having neither money, nor work, nor social rights - this is how the German researcher X.-E. Volkmann describes the situation in post-war Germany, where already in 1919 the main stream of emigrants poured. The emergence of many emigrant trade unions there was dictated primarily by the desire for mutual assistance. But they all depended on charitable organizations, of which the main ones were the Russian Red Cross (which stored pre-revolutionary funds abroad for the care of prisoners of war) and, of course, foreign institutions: the International Red Cross (the American one especially helped) and the Catholic Church (which did not hide the fact that in addition also pursues another charitable goal: “an incentive to convert to the union” and even directly to Catholicism; for this purpose, the “Pontifical Oriental Institute” was created already in 1917; however, as Volkman notes, no success was achieved in this field).
In 1921 - 1924, the Republican-Democratic Association (RDO) of Russian emigrants was created, uniting in its ranks a wide political spectrum of Russian liberal democrats from the Cadets to the right Socialist Revolutionaries and Socialists. The organization was headed by a prominent figure of the Cadet Party P.
N. Milyukov. Both associations claimed to be the flagship of the political life of Russian abroad, sought to extend their influence to the military formations of the emigration, youth, developing and trying to implement plans for creating an underground movement in Soviet Russia.
An important factor stimulating the political activity of emigration was changes in the internal policy of the Soviet government. The transition to NEP aroused special hopes and expectations among the Russian emigration. Speaking at a rally in December 1927 in Prague, one of the leaders of the RDO and “Peasant Russia” S.S. Maslov said: “Since 1921, when the NEP was introduced, communism began to die, because the communist party, having abandoned the primitive forced economy of equalization, thereby refused to implement its communist ideology and program. The decline in national income is the inevitable failure of the slogan of industrialization and the growing the accumulation of private commercial capital in private trade turnover - these are the mines and those knots that the Soviet government cannot cut.
In 1924, speaking at a rally in Prague, one of the leaders of the RDO group B.N. Evreinov stated: “Currently, the entire center of gravity of the counter-revolutionary struggle against Soviet power comes down to discrediting it before foreign powers and inflating all sorts of sensational rumors about communists and about the USSR It is advisable to send these rumors to Russia in the form of printed messages, so that when reading them, the population believes that this is the real truth, hidden from them.”
In general, it is important to note the following main characteristics of the first emigration:
* Emigration was forced, political, anti-Bolshevik in nature. For the majority, refusal to emigrate meant physical destruction in their homeland. Emigration is associated with the military defeat and retreat of the White Army.
* The first outcome is active anti-communists and opponents of the Soviet regime, who offer all kinds of resistance to it, including armed resistance (White movement) and, for the most part, do not recognize it
legitimacy. The political and military goal is the overthrow of the Soviet regime.
* The first wave is still legally subjects of the Russian Empire.
* The overwhelming majority of the first emigration were Orthodox, which generally determined their system of values and behavioral orientations. From here arose the mission of preserving the Orthodox religious experience and Orthodox values, which was actively recognized by the “cultural layer” of the first emigration. Orthodoxy acted as the basis of worldview and at the same time as an integral part of ideology. And in many ways, the political split in emigration was associated with an underestimation of the role of Orthodoxy, neglect or rejection of Orthodoxy by part of the emigration political elite.
* The idea of temporary stay abroad. A significant part of the first emigration did not intend to settle abroad forever and actively supported the idea of returning to Russia.
* Specifics of the composition of the first emigration. A significant layer of bearers of Russian culture left on a mass scale. This made it possible to build a Russia Abroad.
* Transfer of political movements and parties from Russia to Russian diaspora. The consequence was a significant political split in the ranks of the first emigration, which was never overcome.
Return of some emigrants
There were several reasons that became the prerequisites for this turn of events:
Another form of political agitation. The Bolsheviks spoke of “come to their senses” and “repentant” supporters of emigration, who expressed a desire to return to Russia and were generously accepted into their historical homeland.
The USSR was considered the main winner of Nazi Germany, which significantly increased its “popularity” in the eyes of former emigrants.
Victory in World War II became a great reason for supporters of migration to forgive the Bolsheviks, and this even applied to many White Guards.
The first wave of Russian emigrants who left Russia after the October Revolution had the most tragic fate. Now the fourth generation of their descendants lives, which has largely lost ties with their historical homeland.
Unknown continent
The Russian emigration of the first post-revolutionary war, also called the White one, is an epochal phenomenon, unparalleled in history not only in its scale, but also in its contribution to world culture. Literature, music, ballet, painting, like many scientific achievements of the 20th century, are unthinkable without Russian emigrants of the first wave.
This was the last emigration exodus, when not just subjects of the Russian Empire ended up abroad, but bearers of Russian identity without subsequent “Soviet” impurities. Subsequently, they created and inhabited a continent that is not on any map of the world - its name is “Russian Abroad”.
The main direction of white emigration is the countries of Western Europe with centers in Prague, Berlin, Paris, Sofia, and Belgrade. A significant part settled in Chinese Harbin - by 1924 there were up to 100 thousand Russian emigrants here. As Archbishop Nathanael (Lvov) wrote, “Harbin was an exceptional phenomenon at that time. Built by the Russians on Chinese territory, it remained a typical Russian provincial town for another 25 years after the revolution.”
According to estimates by the American Red Cross, on November 1, 1920, the total number of emigrants from Russia was 1 million 194 thousand people. The League of Nations provides data as of August 1921 - 1.4 million refugees. Historian Vladimir Kabuzan estimates the number of people who emigrated from Russia in the period from 1918 to 1924 to be at least 5 million people.
Short-term separation
The first wave of emigrants did not expect to spend their entire lives in exile. They expected that the Soviet regime would collapse and they would be able to see their homeland again. Such sentiments explain their opposition to assimilation and their intention to limit their lives to the confines of an emigrant colony.
Publicist and emigrant of the first won Sergei Rafalsky wrote about this: “Somehow that brilliant era when emigration still smelled of dust, gunpowder and blood of the Don steppes, and its elite could imagine replacing it at any call at midnight, was somehow erased in foreign memory.” usurpers" and the full complement of the Council of Ministers, and the necessary quorum of the Legislative Chambers, and the General Staff, and the Corps of Gendarmes, and the Detective Department, and the Chamber of Commerce, and the Holy Synod, and the Governing Senate, not to mention the professorship and representatives of the arts, especially literature "
In the first wave of emigration, in addition to a large number of cultural elites of Russian pre-revolutionary society, there was a significant proportion of military personnel. According to the League of Nations, about a quarter of all post-revolutionary emigrants belonged to the white armies that left Russia at different times from different fronts.
Europe
In 1926, according to the League of Nations Refugee Service, 958.5 thousand Russian refugees were officially registered in Europe. Of these, about 200 thousand were received by France, about 300 thousand by the Republic of Turkey. Yugoslavia, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Greece each had approximately 30-40 thousand emigrants.
In the first years, Constantinople played the role of a transshipment base for Russian emigration, but over time its functions were transferred to other centers - Paris, Berlin, Belgrade and Sofia. Thus, according to some data, in 1921 the Russian population of Berlin reached 200 thousand people - it was they who were primarily affected by the economic crisis, and by 1925 no more than 30 thousand people remained there.
Prague and Paris are gradually emerging as the main centers of Russian emigration; in particular, the latter is rightly considered the cultural capital of the first wave of emigration. The Don Military Association, whose chairman was one of the leaders of the white movement, Venedikt Romanov, played a special place among Parisian emigrants. After the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933, and especially during World War II, the outflow of Russian emigrants from Europe to the United States sharply increased.
China
On the eve of the revolution, the number of Russian diaspora in Manchuria reached 200 thousand people, after the start of emigration it increased by another 80 thousand. Throughout the entire period of the Civil War in the Far East (1918-1922), in connection with mobilization, the active movement of the Russian population of Manchuria began.
After the defeat of the white movement, emigration to Northern China increased sharply. By 1923, the number of Russians here was estimated at approximately 400 thousand people. Of this number, about 100 thousand received Soviet passports, many of them decided to repatriate to the RSFSR. The amnesty announced to ordinary members of the White Guard formations played a role here.
The period of the 1920s was marked by active re-emigration of Russians from China to other countries. This especially affected young people heading to study at universities in the USA, South America, Europe and Australia.
Stateless persons
On December 15, 1921, the RSFSR adopted a decree according to which many categories of former subjects of the Russian Empire were deprived of the rights to Russian citizenship, including those who had stayed abroad continuously for more than 5 years and did not receive foreign passports or relevant certificates in a timely manner from Soviet missions.
Thus, many Russian emigrants found themselves stateless. But their rights continued to be protected by the former Russian embassies and consulates as the corresponding states recognized the RSFSR and then the USSR.
A number of issues concerning Russian emigrants could only be resolved at the international level. For this purpose, the League of Nations decided to introduce the post of High Commissioner for Russian Refugees. It was the famous Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. In 1922, special “Nansen” passports appeared, which were issued to Russian emigrants.
Until the end of the 20th century, emigrants and their children remained in different countries living with “Nansen” passports. Thus, the elder of the Russian community in Tunisia, Anastasia Aleksandrovna Shirinskaya-Manstein, received a new Russian passport only in 1997.
“I was waiting for Russian citizenship. I didn't want anything Soviet. Then I waited for the passport to have a double-headed eagle - the embassy offered it with the coat of arms of the international, I waited with the eagle. I’m such a stubborn old woman,” admitted Anastasia Alexandrovna.
The fate of emigration
Many figures of Russian culture and science met the proletarian revolution in the prime of their lives. Hundreds of scientists, writers, philosophers, musicians, and artists ended up abroad, who could have been the flower of the Soviet nation, but due to circumstances revealed their talent only in emigration.
But the overwhelming majority of emigrants were forced to find work as drivers, waiters, dishwashers, auxiliary workers, and musicians in small restaurants, nevertheless continuing to consider themselves bearers of the great Russian culture.
The paths of Russian emigration were different. Some initially did not accept Soviet power, others were forcibly expelled abroad. The ideological conflict essentially split the Russian emigration. This became especially acute during the Second World War. Part of the Russian diaspora believed that in order to fight fascism it was worth entering into an alliance with the communists, while others refused to support both totalitarian regimes. But there were also those who were ready to fight against the hated Soviets on the side of the fascists.
White emigrants from Nice addressed the representatives of the USSR with a petition:
“We deeply mourned that at the time of Germany’s treacherous attack on our homeland there were
physically deprived of the opportunity to be in the ranks of the valiant Red Army. But we
helped our Motherland by working underground.” And in France, according to the calculations of the emigrants themselves, every tenth representative of the Resistance Movement was Russian.
Dissolving in a foreign environment
The first wave of Russian emigration, having experienced a peak in the first 10 years after the revolution, began to decline in the 1930s, and by the 1940s it completely disappeared. Many descendants of the first wave of emigrants have long forgotten about their ancestral home, but the traditions of preserving Russian culture that were once laid are largely alive to this day.
A descendant of a noble family, Count Andrei Musin-Pushkin, sadly stated: “Emigration was doomed to disappearance or assimilation. The old people died, the young gradually disappeared into the local environment, turning into French, Americans, Germans, Italians... Sometimes it seems that only beautiful, sonorous surnames and titles remain from the past: counts, princes, Naryshkins, Sheremetyevs, Romanovs, Musins-Pushkins.” .
Thus, at the transit points of the first wave of Russian emigration, no one was left alive. The last was Anastasia Shirinskaya-Manstein, who died in Bizerte, Tunisia, in 2009.
The situation with the Russian language, which at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries found itself in an ambiguous position in the Russian diaspora, was also difficult. Natalya Bashmakova, a professor of Russian literature living in Finland, a descendant of emigrants who fled St. Petersburg in 1918, notes that in some families the Russian language lives even in the fourth generation, in others it died many decades ago.
“The problem of languages is sad for me personally,” says the scientist, “because I emotionally feel Russian better, but I’m not always sure of using certain expressions; Swedish sits deep in me, but, of course, I’ve forgotten it now. Emotionally, it is closer to me than Finnish.”
Today in Adelaide, Australia, there live many descendants of the first wave of emigrants who left Russia because of the Bolsheviks. They still have Russian surnames and even Russian names, but their native language is already English. Their homeland is Australia, they do not consider themselves emigrants and have little interest in Russia.
Most of those who have Russian roots currently live in Germany - about 3.7 million people, in the USA - 3 million, in France - 500 thousand, in Argentina - 300 thousand, in Australia - 67 thousand Several waves of emigration from Russia mixed here. But, as surveys have shown, the descendants of the first wave of emigrants feel the least connection with the homeland of their ancestors.
Image caption Over the past hundred years, 4.5-5 million people have left Russia
The first famous political emigrant from Russia was Prince Andrei Kurbsky.
He exchanged long letters with Ivan the Terrible, more like political and philosophical treatises, but his opponents captured the essence in two phrases.
“Like Satan, who imagines himself to be God,” Kurbsky denounced the king.
“We are free to reward our slaves, but we are also free to execute them,” he retorted.
According to many, even after 500 years, the disagreements between the Russian government and the opposition mainly fit into these two phrases.
Without delving too far into the past and focusing on an era closer to us, we can say that from 1917 to the present, Russia has expelled five waves of emigration. They differ not only in time, but also in characteristic features that make each of them different from the others.
Patriotic emigrants
After the Civil War, the number of Russian emigrants reached, according to international organizations, 1.16 million people.
The first wave of emigration left the most striking mark in history. There were two reasons for this.
Firstly, most of the intellectual elite of pre-revolutionary Russia, world-famous people - writers Bunin and Kuprin, singer Chaliapin, composer Rachmaninov, actress Olga Chekhova, helicopter designer Sikorsky, television inventor Zvorykin, philosopher Berdyaev, chess champion Alekhine and many - found themselves in exile other.
Secondly, the White emigrants were patriots like no other, they left Russia only in the face of a direct threat to their lives, stayed together for decades, cultivated their Russianness in every possible way and declared themselves to the world precisely in this capacity.
Many fundamentally renounced the citizenship of their host countries and lived with so-called “Nansen” passports.
Some, like General Nikolai Skoblin and Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband Sergei Efron, cooperated with the GPU if only they would be “allowed to return.” Others sang “Evening Bells” with tears in their eyes and bequeathed, like Chaliapin, to throw a handful of “native soil” taken from Russia on the coffin.
In 1945-1947, about two thousand emigrants, mainly from France, repatriated. Moscow used the return of the “repentant enemies” for propaganda purposes, and they were ready to forgive the Bolsheviks a lot for the victory in the war and became emotional when they saw the golden epaulets, dear to their hearts, on the shoulders of the Soviet generals.
In 1966, 85-year-old Alexander Kerensky was offered a final chance to see his homeland. There was only one condition: to publicly recognize the “Great October Revolution”. On the eve of the half-century anniversary of the revolution, this would look impressive. He refused.
Since the 1950s, when quite a lot of Soviet artists, athletes and tourists appeared in the West, emigrants actively sought to communicate with them, putting them in an uncomfortable position.
Emigrants in the shadows
The second wave of emigration turned out to be more numerous than the first: more than one and a half million of the 8.4 million Soviet citizens who, for various reasons, ended up in the Third Reich remained in the West (4.5 million returned or were forcibly returned to the USSR, about 2.2 million people died).
According to historians, policemen and other collaborators who retreated with the Germans, there were no more than 200 thousand among them. The rest were captured or were forcibly taken to work in Germany, but they considered it better not to return, having learned that for Stalin “there are no prisoners, there are traitors.”
Some 450,000 Nazi prisoners were sent directly to Soviet camps or exile, not counting those who were allowed to return home and who were later arrested.
Many ostarbeiters worked on the farms of small entrepreneurs and bauers. As the Soviet army advanced westward, their German masters began to curry favor with them, hoping that they would put in a good word for them when the Russians arrived, and were amazed to see that the liberated Ostarbeiters were treated not as dear compatriots, but as suspicious subjects.
Unlike the first, the second wave of emigration passed unnoticed, leaving no known names (the only exception was the historian Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov).
Firstly, it consisted not of intellectuals, but of ordinary people.
Secondly, a significant part of it was formed by residents of Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and the Baltic countries, as well as representatives of the Muslim peoples of the USSR who did not associate themselves with Russia.
Thirdly, these people did not dream of returning, but were terrified of being extradited to the USSR, and did not advertise themselves, did not maintain contact with each other, did not write books, and did not engage in public activities.
At first, in a number of cases it was still possible to leave the USSR legally. In 1928-1929, the “Iron Curtain” came down completely. For 40 years there were no emigrants from a closed society in the generally accepted sense of the word. There were defectors and “defectors.”
From 1935 to 1958, there was a law under which escaping across the border or refusing to return from abroad was punishable by death, and family members of a defector faced 10 years in the camps.
Mostly high-ranking security officers and diplomats fled, and only after realizing that the ax had already been raised over them and they had nothing to lose.
In 1928, Boris Bazhanov “left” across the Iranian border, having previously worked for five years as Stalin’s personal secretary.
The most famous “defector” of the Stalinist period is the former leader of the revolutionary Baltic sailors, later the Soviet plenipotentiary in Bulgaria, Fyodor Raskolnikov, who in April 1938, having received a summons to Moscow and fearing reprisals, went to France, publishing an open letter in the press with accusations against Stalin . A little over a year later he died in Nice under suspicious circumstances.
Image caption State Security Commissioner Genrikh Lyushkov - the highest-ranking security officer defectorThe head of the Khabarovsk department of the NKVD, Genrikh Lyushkov, fled to China in 1938, and the resident of Soviet intelligence in Republican Spain, Alexander Orlov (Feldbin), fled to the USA. Lyushkov shot himself in August 1945, fearing to fall into the hands of his former colleagues; Orlov lived safely until 1973.
The Soviet authorities did not touch the mothers of Orlov and his wife who remained in Moscow, since he sent a telegram to Stalin and Yezhov from board the ship, promising otherwise to give out such information that the USSR would be in trouble.
In 1946, the escape of the Canadian embassy codebreaker Igor Guzenko, who exposed Soviet atomic espionage in the United States, caused a lot of noise.
When Soviet people began to travel abroad more often, and the rule on criminal liability of relatives was abolished, the number of “defectors” increased by the dozens.
Those who remained in the West were Assistant Secretary General of the UN Arkady Shevchenko, German historian and consultant of the CPSU Central Committee Mikhail Voslensky, Bolshoi Theater ballet soloists Mikhail Baryshnikov, Rudolf Nuriev and Alexander Godunov, champion figure skaters Lyudmila Belousova and Oleg Protopopov, chess player Viktor Korchnoi.
Shevchenko’s son, who worked in Geneva, was urgently returned to Moscow. He was escorted to the plane by GRU station officer Vladimir Rezun, who later became famous as a historian and writer Viktor Suvorov. In his homeland, Shevchenko Jr. was fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and his further employment was handled personally by Gromyko and Andropov, since without instructions from the very top such a person would not have been hired anywhere.
Under Stalin, Soviet intelligence services carried out a merciless hunt abroad for defectors and generally undesirable persons.
There are numerous cases of defectors being kidnapped or killed in the western sectors of Berlin and Vienna. The servicemen were told moralizing stories about how so-and-so betrayed his homeland, but “the Soviet people found him and shot him.”
In the NKVD / MGB there was a “special bureau” (later the 8th department), headed by the famous “terminators” Leon Eitingon and Pavel Sudoplatov. Each operation was personally sanctioned by Stalin (officially by a secret resolution of the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee), agents were awarded orders for the successful completion of “special tasks”, and, say, Trotsky’s killer Ramon Mercader was awarded the star of the Hero of the Soviet Union.
The most famous are the murders of Trotsky, General Kutepov and the leaders of Ukrainian nationalists Yevgeny Konovalets and Stepan Bandera. The former head of the white government of the Northern region, General Miller, was kidnapped and taken from France to the USSR, where he was shot.
Political emigration is a worldwide phenomenon. But other dictators, with rare exceptions, did not pursue fugitives abroad. He ran away - that means he ran away.
American historian Richard Pipes explained Stalin's behavior as a legacy of medieval Russian political culture, according to which the ruler was considered not only a state leader, but also the unlimited master of his subjects, and drew parallels with the capture of runaway slaves and serfs.
White generals Krasnov and Shkuro, who fell into the hands of the Soviet authorities at the final stage of the war, were hanged in Moscow “for treason,” although they had not been citizens of the USSR for a single day and could not betray it in any way.
Image caption Stalin's last argumentObviously, what mattered to Stalin was not his passport, but the fact of his birth on Soviet territory. It was not the country that was viewed as a place where people lived, but people as an annex to the land. The right of a person to determine his own identity did not fit into the framework of this mentality.
After Bandera's killer Stashinsky surrendered to the German authorities and an international scandal arose, Khrushchev dispersed the special department.
Subsequently, fugitive Soviet intelligence officers were regularly sentenced to capital punishment in absentia, having been informed about this in writing, but no attempt was made to carry them out.
According to many, under Vladimir Putin, the Russian special services are back to their old ways, although, of course, not on the same scale as under Stalin.
After the murder in Qatar in 2004 of the former “vice-president of independent Ichkeria” Zelimkhan Yandarbiev, two employees of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff were arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, whom the emirate authorities handed over to Russia after confidential negotiations.
True, Yandarbiev was on the international list of terrorists. Similar operations were carried out by the intelligence services of other states, in particular the USA and Israel.
Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in 2006 from poisoning with radioactive polonium, who was not involved in terrorism, but only disseminated information offensive to Vladimir Putin, repeatedly stated that an assassination attempt was being prepared on him, and before his death he blamed the Russians for his death. intelligence services.
Emigrants in law
In December 1966, while in Paris, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin said: “If there are families separated by the war who would like to meet their relatives outside the USSR or even leave the USSR, we will do everything to help them solve this problem.” This event is considered the beginning of legal emigration from the USSR.
Moscow began allowing Soviet Jews, Germans and Pontic Greeks to leave for the purpose of family reunification. From 1970 to 1990, 576 thousand people took advantage of the opportunity, with half occurring in the last two years.
Sometimes people left at the call of distant relatives, leaving their parents in the USSR, but everyone understood the rules of the game.
Unlike emigrants of the first and second waves, representatives of the third left legally, were not criminals in the eyes of the Soviet state and could correspond and call back with family and friends. However, the principle was strictly observed: a person who voluntarily left the USSR could not subsequently come even to his mother’s funeral.
For the first time, economic motives played a significant role in emigration. A favorite reproach against those leaving was that they went “to buy sausage.”
Two people are animatedly discussing something, a third one comes up and says: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we need to go!” Soviet joke
Many Soviet citizens viewed the opportunity to leave as a privilege. This gave rise to envy and fueled everyday anti-Semitism.
At the state level, Jews began to be viewed as an “unreliable contingent.” Difficulties in getting a prestigious job, in turn, increased emigration sentiments.
The level of emigration depended entirely on the current state of relations between the USSR and the West. As soon as things got complicated, those who wanted to were started to be turned away, often without explanation. The expression arose: “to sit in denial.” Sometimes this condition lasted for years, and the person who applied to leave was immediately fired from his job, leaving him without funds.
The head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, and some other members of the leadership sought a complete stop to emigration, since the very fact that so many people were “voting with their feet” for “decaying capitalism,” in their opinion, undermined the “moral and political unity of Soviet society.”
In addition, the third wave of emigration included prominent dissidents of the time, most notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In the decree on the creation of the Cheka, one of the main punishments for “counter-revolutionaries” and “saboteurs” was expulsion from the Soviet Republic. Soon the authorities realized that this was perhaps not a punishment, but a reward. Over half a century, the exotic measure was applied only three times: to 217 prominent intellectuals exiled in the fall of 1922 on the so-called “philosophical ships,” Trotsky and Solzhenitsyn.
In the second half of the 1970s, it began to be used widely, but in a veiled form.
The practice of depriving cultural figures of Soviet citizenship in absentia during their stay abroad, for example, Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina Vishnevskaya and Yuri Lyubimov, became widespread.
Dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who was serving a prison sentence, was exchanged for Communist leader Luis Corvalan, who was arrested by the Chilean junta.
Other dissidents, including Russians, were offered to immediately leave “along the Israeli line,” threatening arrest and trial if they refused.
It was impossible to predict who would be escorted out immediately, like Lyudmila Alekseeva, and who would be forced to “sit on the sidewalk,” like Bukovsky. According to historians of the human rights movement, this was an intimidating factor. If dissidence turned into an easy pass abroad, many would want it.
During the years of Gorbachev's perestroika, emigration became easier, scientific and cultural exchanges expanded, and trips by private invitation became more frequent. Soviet citizens were given the opportunity to buy currency from the State Bank at a commercial rate, if, of course, they had the money.
The main innovation was that emigrants, after many years of ban, were allowed to visit the USSR. It was they who formed the widespread opinion that “Gorbachev opened the borders,” although in reality this happened later.
Under Gorbachev, “letting go” became more liberal, but the basic principle remained unchanged: a citizen must justify to the authorities the need for travel and obtain permission. Only in 1992 did it become possible to obtain a foreign passport with virtually no restrictions and not have to report to anyone.
Economic emigration
In the 1990s, Russia was hit by the fourth wave of emigration.
Unlike the Soviet period, people no longer burn bridges behind them. Many can be called emigrants at a stretch, since they plan to return or live “in two houses.”
Russian statistics are incomplete because they count as emigrants only those who have renounced their citizenship, which the vast majority do not.
According to information from the immigration authorities of receiving states, 805 thousand people resettled in the United States, Canada, Israel, Germany and Finland alone in 1992-1999. Taking into account the fact that we are not talking about the entire former USSR, but only about Russia, the fourth wave has surpassed the first and second in scale.
According to experts, if in the 1990s everyone could leave the country, there would have been many more of them.
It turned out to be a psychological shock for many Russians that a visa, it turns out, is available not only for leaving one’s own country, but also for entering a foreign one. While emigrants and defectors were few in number and viewed as victims of totalitarianism, everyone was a welcome guest. Then the situation changed dramatically.
Western countries are not rubber, and are already overloaded with immigrants. It is not customary to leave not only citizens, but also holders of residence permits without social assistance. Many criminal and semi-criminal elements have migrated abroad from Russia.
However, sociologists point to immigration and visa policies as one of the main reasons for the spread of anti-Western sentiment among Russians, especially young ones. According to them, emigration from the USSR was encouraged as long as it was a means of fighting a geopolitical enemy, and they were not needed in a personal capacity.
Talented and proud
In the 2000s, emigration from Russia fell by about half. But important changes have occurred in its qualitative composition, which has given rise to talk about a fifth wave.
According to the Demography.ru website, of the 218,230 people who left for Europe, North America and Australia in 2004-2008, 18,626 received highly paid positions in large companies, 24,383 are engaged in science and high technology.
Secondly, according to many, under Vladimir Putin, dissidents and political emigrants have reappeared in Russia.
The most famous figures of the fifth wave are Boris Berezovsky, Akhmed Zakaev, Yuliy Dubov, Vladimir Gusinsky and Leonid Nevzlin.
Political reasons are not necessarily related to the presence of an immediate threat, Yuli Dubov,
Russian emigrant businessman
The first three live in London. The Russian authorities consider them criminals, but the British court saw political motives and selective application of the law in their cases.
The creator and former owner of Euroset, Evgeny Chichvarkin, achieved the removal of criminal charges against him in Russia, but considered it better to remain in London.
Former Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov and his wife Elena Baturina live mostly abroad, although they do not recognize themselves as emigrants.
The famous lawyer Boris Kuznetsov, who, in particular, supported in court the claims against the state of the family members of the crew of the Kursk submarine, Andrei Borodin, who headed the Bank of Moscow under Luzhkov, the parents of the murdered Chechen girl Elza Kungaeva, the Islamic activist Dagir Khasavov, and supporters of Eduard Limonov Mikhail Gangan, left , Andrey Nikitin, Sergey Klimov, Anna Ploskonosova, Alexey Makarov and Olga Kudrina, former deputy of the Izhevsk City Duma Vasily Kryukov, participant in the demonstration on Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012 Alexander Dolmatov.
In London alone, according to available data, over 300 thousand immigrants from the former USSR permanently reside. In addition to London and New York, numerous Russian communities, often with their own schools, media and street signs in Russian, have formed in Spain, Montenegro, Thailand, Cyprus and the south of France.
It is impossible to definitely call this emigration political. The vast majority were not subjected to any persecution. However, political motives undoubtedly influenced the decisions of many of them.
“There are those who are simply no longer satisfied with the situation in the country. Political reasons are not necessarily related to the presence of an immediate threat. They may be related to the expectation of something,” Yuliy Dubov told the BBC Russian Service.
After Vladimir Putin’s decision to run for a third term and a number of recent events, which, according to observers, became a demonstration of the policy of “tightening the screws,” there was talk in Russia of strengthening emigration sentiments.
According to political observer Semyon Novoprudsky, following the “philosophical ships” of the early 1920s, Russia is awaiting “philosophical planes” - “massive external or internal emigration of the majority of decent people in this country.”
According to a Levada Center survey conducted at the end of October, 22% of citizens - five percent more than in 2009 - dream of leaving, and among people aged 18 to 39 the figure is 43%.
Sociologists predict an increase in emigration by 10-15 thousand people per year.
The most active, smart and mobile are leaving Dmitry Oreshkin, political scientist
Among the political emigrants of the fifth wave, oligarchs and officials, immigrants from the North Caucasus, anti-corruption fighters who offended the interests of certain high-ranking persons, national Bolsheviks and other radicals predominated, who were ambiguously perceived by society. Now emigration sentiments have spread to ordinary members of the urban middle class. And, unlike the Soviet era and the “dashing 90s,” it is not sausage that attracts them. In this regard, some analysts are talking about a separate sixth wave.
“Part of society has fallen into depression, and there is a growing feeling that the country is marking time or even degrading,” says Levada Center director Lev Gudkov.
According to Gudkov, the Kremlin is calm about the exodus of talented and critically thinking people, as it weakens the opposition.
“The country’s intellectual potential is being washed away: the most active, smart and mobile are leaving,” says political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin.
However, leading expert at the Center for Current Political Affairs Pavel Salin believes that Vladimir Putin is unlikely to go so far as to allow mass exodus from the country.