Refugees became a problem in the twentieth century, necessitating the creation of institutional measures to protect those who had been forced to leave their homelands. Migration has been an integral part of human history and a way in which mankind has survived by moving away from danger and adapting to new circumstances and environments. The term “refugee” was first used to describe the Huguenots, who fled France after 1685 when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes that had allowed the Protestant Huguenots to practice their faith openly. Subsequently, various other political crises produced refugees, for example those who left France after the revolution in 1789 to avoid political persecution. But it was the aftermath of the First World War which produced a wave of refugees who were unable to return to their countries of origin. Amongst such refugees, Russians were a serious problem that required a solution. These Russian refugees were followed by subsequent waves of émigrés, and a discussion of the state of such people can illuminate not only aspects of the history of Russia but may also help to elucidate aspects of the plight of refugees and the attitudes that this engendered.

The historian Michael Marrus observes that in earlier eras, refugees might be welcomed by rulers if they were not judged to be a political menace and were viewed as being useful to society. Huguenots were welcomed both in Britain and in Brandenburg, with Berlin becoming a notable center. Both Peter the Great and Catherine the Great tried to encourage immigrants to the tsarist empire.Footnote ¹ It made little sense to uproot poorer people who could make less of a contribution to a new society. The nature of warfare meant that since armies were dependent on local populations for food and shelter the occupied population was less likely to be turned into refugees. Refugees, therefore, were not often a problem for states. In the modern era, however, changes in armaments and the nature of armed conflict have meant that enemy civilian populations as well as the enemy’s armed forces were targeted. Famine and forced starvation have been used as a method of both waging war and dealing with dissent and have led to refugee movements.

The problem of how to deal with refugees became much more acute after World War I. This saw the collapse of four empires: the Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German, and meant not simply political transformation but profound social and economic change as well. The conflicts between the successor states engendered more movement among the population. After WWI, statesmen were faced with Russian, Ukrainian, and Armenian refugees who could not return home. The numbers displaced were far larger than previously and the time spent displaced and moving about was much longer than in earlier religious and political upheavals. The response to this refugee crisis was to appoint Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, as the first High Commissioner for Refugees to the League of Nations in 1921. Nansen directed efforts to alleviate the famine in Russia and in 1922 brought in the so called “Nansen passports” for stateless refugees. This was an important measure as it gave refugees a legal status that allowed them to travel and to find work. In 1924 Nansen suggested that the bulk of refugee work be transferred to The International Labor Organization, which could deal with the long-term problems of employment and settlement. By 1930, when Nansen died, most of the main issues associated with the refugees seemed to have been dealt with.

The rise of fascism and National Socialism engendered a new wave of refugees, but this began with political opponents to the regimes, and many assumed that their stay abroad would be short. In the years immediately preceding WWII, this exodus turned into a panic-stricken flight particularly of Jews.Footnote ² The 1930s revealed the impotence of world leaders when dealing with the dictators, but Gil Loescher considers that it became accepted that the world had a responsibility towards refugees who were victims of human rights abuses.Footnote ³ The end of WWII saw an estimated 60 million refugees in Europe. Many had been uprooted during the war and occupation by Nazi forces, and with the ending of the conflict people fled before the advancing armies.

This immense problem put pressure both on European states and on the military authorities who were administering areas of enemy territory. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) was established to provide temporary emergency aid for displaced people. This was intended to help civilians uprooted by the war and to return them to their homelands as quickly as possible. UNRRA had no power to resettle refugees and displaced people to other countries. Instead, it identified displaced people, placed them broadly in national categories and shipped them back to the countries from which they had originally come. In the first five months after the end of the war, UNRRA and the Allied military command managed to repatriate nearly three quarters of the displaced people in Europe. The wishes of these people were not taken into account and many of those who had originally come from the USSR faced arrest, imprisonment, and even death on their return.

The United States, which provided the majority of the funds for UNRRA, became increasingly critical of the repatriation policies and also of what was perceived to be pro-Soviet sympathies. Accordingly in 1947 the US cut funds to UNRRA and worked to establish the International Refugee Organization (IRO), which focused not on repatriation but on resettlement of refugees and displaced people. In the debate within the UN General Assembly the IRO was mandated to protect individuals who resisted repatriation because of “persecution or fear, based on reasonable grounds, of persecution because of race, religion, nationality or political opinions.”Footnote ⁴ For the first time, therefore, the international community made refugee eligibility dependent on the individual rather than on group membership and accepted the individual’s right to flee from political persecution to a safe country.Footnote ⁵ The year 1950 saw the foundation of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and in 1951 the Convention for the Status for Refugees attempted to establish principles to make responses to refugees more reliable and ensure protection and solutions for them. This focused on Europe and problems in other parts of the world such as the Far East or India and Pakistan were not really considered. The UNHCR and the Refugee Convention, however, were the basis on which subsequent measures for dealing with refugees were based.

The Russian revolution witnessed the displacement of millions of people within the territories of the Russian empire. It is estimated that around one and a half million people emigrated, in addition to the Soviet state losing territories that had been part of the empire with a population of approximately 10 million people. The post-1917 exiles represented the political, social, and intellectual elite of imperial Russia. Contrary to the popular myth, it was not just the aristocracy, which numbered approximately 140,000, who left. A high proportion of the émigrés could be considered members of the intelligentsia and represented the entire spectrum of political opinion. About one sixth were university graduates and two-thirds had completed secondary education. Men outnumbered women by more than two to one. The very young and the old might were deemed to be refugees rather than political émigrés who had made a decision to leave.

Initially many saw themselves as repeating earlier patterns of political exile and thought that they would be able to return home within a generation, just as the French émigrés after 1789 had done. Had these Russian refugees taken Polish exiles after 1830 as their example, they would have seen that exile could last much longer. For those who had been the elite of imperial Russia, it was difficult to accept that they had lost power to a group whom they saw as unrepresentative extremists and that they would not be returning home. Many of the policies of the NEP period were interpreted as evidence that the Bolsheviks could not continue with their ideological position and would have to become more reasonable. When communications with the USSR became increasingly difficult in the 1930s, Iosif Stalin’s policies were often interpreted in a nationalistic light. Moreover, Europe was not a particularly welcoming place. After the devastation of WWI, Europe was dealing with its own problems, and economic crises meant that foreign nationals were the first to lose their jobs. Not surprisingly, it was said of émigrés that they “lived on their suitcases” and thought that they were bound to go home very shortly.

Those who had been part of the anti-Bolshevik forces during the Civil War were particularly inclined to hope for a return home. After the defeat of the White Armies and their evacuation, initially there was an expectation that the following summer would see a new army returning to save their homeland. As that desire seemed to become increasingly unlikely, these people waited for a new war that would help them defeat the Bolsheviks. Oleg Beyda’s work examines the attitudes of these members of the White Armies. His research is for the specialist familiar with the background. It is based on a detailed examination of documents in a vast range of archives and at times makes for uncomfortable reading. These remnants of the Civil War had found an identity and camaraderie in the White Armies. The difficulties of refugee life meant that they continued to maintain their links with their military formations and the Russian All-Military Union (Russkii Obsche-Voinskii Soiuz, ROVS) kept their allegiance. He shows that despite the declaration of war being quite unexpected, the majority of ROVS members greeted the news of Adolf Hitler’s attack on the USSR as the start of an anti-Bolshevik campaign. Exact numbers are difficult to obtain but it is likely that several thousand people worked with the Nazi forces in the rear of the fighting for the most part as interpreters or civil engineers (112). Having experienced the brutalization of the Civil War, they were once again exposed to violence and brutality during the Nazi occupation. Many justified their own behavior and that of the Nazi authorities in terms of an anti-Bolshevik campaign. Some were antisemitic and associated Jews with the Soviet regime. Many “tried to help the Russian population and prisoners of war” (186), and some thought that the war would enable them to reclaim their lands (127–29), some were plainly horrified by what they witnessed and tried to leave as quickly as possible and returned as broken men. Few were as honest as Vladimir Kovalevskii, who after the war wrote “along with other Russian interpreters I repeatedly questioned myself: was Soviet power really so hated by the Russian people … Or maybe it was all just tales, skillfully crafted by the Germans, to justify their aggressive policy and future division of Russia. In the latter case, arriving here [with them] we were playing an ugly role, betraying our Motherland and serving the enemy. This doubt hurt me a lot” (208).

As Beyda illustrates, most of these exiles saw the war “through an impenetrable fog of illusion” (178). Moreover, although they had focused on an anti-Bolshevik campaign ever since they had left Russia, they continued the mistakes of the White Army leadership in that they had no clear idea of what might constitute the regime in a liberated Russia. During the Civil War the White Army generals had said that they could not decide the future of Russia, but their appeal to a Constituent Assembly was an appeal to an institution that had failed, and to do this was politically inept. As Beyda states: “The émigrés never perceived the Second World War in all its complex dynamics. Instead, they viewed everything through ideological lenses: and the only thing that interested them at the time was the new stage of the anti-Bolshevik struggle” (216). This blinded them to the fact that the Nazis were fighting a different kind of war, which had the subjugation of the USSR and its population as its goal. The Nazi defeat and these errors of judgement led to more humiliation that echoed the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Civil War. Unsurprisingly no one continued with this sad legacy.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s work on Displaced Persons (DPs) deals with a different group of Russians. Amongst historians of Russian emigration, those who left the USSR as a result of the WWII are known as the second wave of émigrés. Many had been taken as forced laborers to the Third Reich and others were prisoners of war. Fitzpatrick also emphasizes that Displaced People included Jews, some of whom were liberated from concentration camps and others who had found sanctuary in the USSR. Their perspective often differed from Russian and east European DPs. Fitzpatrick very elegantly uses her late husband’s letters and those of her mother-in-law, both of whom were Latvian, to illustrate some of her arguments. The Russian DPs differed from the post- 1917 émigrés in that they were not members of the elite, and their outlook and values were conditioned by life in the Soviet Union, which often led to friction with the earlier émigrés.

Fitzpatrick has examined a huge range of both diplomatic and personal stories, including interviews with repatriates in Russian archives. Thus, she fills a notable gap in the literature by providing a more nuanced picture of both the attitudes of the Soviet authorities and what happened to those who returned. She argues that dealing with the DPs at the end of WWII was arguably a success story. The DPs were dealt with relatively quickly, and they had a degree of agency about their lives in the DP camps that has not been the case with subsequent groups of refugees. Ultimately, their refusal to be repatriated led both to a change in policy and to a variety of different possibilities becoming available for some of these people. Most importantly, this refusal to be repatriated led to them being defined as anti-communists. This meant that with the onset of the Cold War, they were seen as being acceptable for resettlement and their wartime record, which in many cases might to some degree have been considered as collaborationist, was largely ignored. Thus, they were seen as victims of communism and their opposition to repatriation could be understood in those terms. Only in the 1970s did doubts begin to be raised about the wartime activities of some of these people.

Fitzpatrick provides a fascinating detailed picture of life in the DP camps. The majority of men were occupied in trade on the black market. One might add that for the British and Americans, the black market was seen as an illegal activity associated with corruption and profiteering. For those who had lived under Nazi occupation, however, the black market did not carry such associations, as it had been seen as a way ordinary people could do a little to outwit the system. For young women, the DP camps were a relatively safe way to have children. Mönchenhof was a camp run by the earlier generation of Russian émigrés associated with the NTS (Natsionalno-Trudovoi Soyuz or National Labor Alliance). There was a church, schools, visiting lecturers, a pharmacy, a dentist, and a hospital. Cultural life there was warmly recalled by its inmates. There were other camps for other nationalities; many did not live in camps but in private accommodations. The way in which people worked the system, either by adapting their life histories to suit the demands of the authorities or moving around in the various zones of occupation to earn money or receive education are all examples of human inventiveness and ability to adapt. The problem of DPs in Europe was indeed dealt with relatively quickly either by resettlement or absorption, particularly in Germany, which had to deal with the hard-core of those with mental or physical illness, people with criminal or security records, and who were not seen as acceptable refugees by other states (230). Fitzpatrick also illustrates the difficulties facing these people. As one correspondent wrote to my father in 1948: “the worst is the depressing psychological state of knowing nothing, of indecision and helplessness.”Footnote ⁶ In retrospect, dealing with DPs in Europe was a fairly efficient operation; but for the individual during the process, things could seem very difficult and uncertain.

For very many DPs the US was the desired destination. America had always been seen as the country of refugees where new opportunities existed and the streets might well be paved with gold. But others were accepted by Australia, Canada, and South America. The majority of Russian exiles wanted to leave Europe, which seemed more dangerous with the risk of repatriation to the USSR by Soviet repatriation commissions. Moreover, much of eastern Europe where there had been substantial Russian communities of post-1917 émigrés were now becoming part of the communist bloc. The illusion that Russians would be able to return home had dissipated, and those who left the USSR during the war were able to tell the previous generation of émigrés how life had changed. It was clear that they had to forge a new life and integrate into a new society, and this might be easier to do further away from Europe. Many members of the first wave of émigrés had died and the cultural center of the emigration moved from Europe, particularly Paris, to New York.

All refugees have a tragic story to tell. Moving away from the people and places with which they are familiar, often being subject to the dreadful brutality of conflict and particularly of civil war and then having to create a new life in new circumstances was not easy. As one old Russian émigré once said to me: “Yes it was good that we were able to come to America and live here but for some people the process of creating a new life for the second or third time was too much and it broke them.”Footnote ⁷ One can also understand why much work on Russian émigrés has focused on cultural questions; Ivan Bunin’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1933 or an examination of Vladimir Nabokov’s writing in both Russian and English is a more uplifting subject. The politics of the emigration tended to be more depressing. Some tended to revolve round the old questions of what had gone wrong in 1917 and the politics of the Civil War. The next generation tried to find a different approach to the problem, and as Fitzpatrick writes there was no shortage of groups to join (100). But although some were able to produce a succinct and lucid analysis of what was wrong with the Soviet system, no group has been able to produce a workable alternative. One is reminded of the old joke: “Where there are two Russians, there will be three political parties.” The émigrés continued to need each other because no one else really understood the problem.

Both Beyda and Fitzpatrick have worked in a huge array of archives and sources and produced a very detailed picture of what happened. Beyda analyzes those Russians who, as Talleyrand is supposed to have said about the restoration of the Bourbons, “Had forgotten nothing and learned nothing.” Fitzpatrick has produced a fascinating account of the next wave of refugees who had to adapt to new circumstances. These accounts help one to understand some of the attitudes that such lives and trajectories engender. Fitzpatrick asks why the resettlement of DPs was relatively successful and why the world has been unable to deal with the new waves of refugees with which it is faced? All those writing on refugees seem to agree that there needs to be a will to solve refugee problems. After WWI Nansen wanted to deal with the refugee crisis in Europe. After WWII, the onset of the Cold War combined with the need to resettle Jews from Europe, meant that President Harry Truman and others needed to find a workable solution. Even then, it was surprising to read how much prejudice there was against Jewish refugees, even after there was information about what had happened during the Holocaust.

Now the estimate for the number of refugees globally is around 80 million. This is partly a result of political crises and warfare but for some also due to environmental problems. The length of time spent in refugee camps for very many is not just decades but generations. It is not clear if anyone has the will to produce a humane solution to the problem of refugees, and there are too many displaced people for one solution to fit them all. Unfortunately, too, there is the problem of human prejudice, some of which is caused by situations that have been experienced, but much of it is because somehow groups of people seem to represent a real or imagined threat. These books make one reconsider the crises that brought about the movement of people and all the personal tragedies that these dislocations of population represent. Sadly, historians are aware that few learn from the past even when such histories can tell us a great deal.