The Russian settlement in Shanghai, its exile and its destruction after the Communist takeover are virtually unknown to history. Yet it is a fascinating story, superbly researched and told in this book by an author, John B. Dunlop, who has devoted his life to the study of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Perhaps, rather, one should refer to it as two half books skilfully bound together. In the second half the author keeps strictly to his title, the emigration of the Russian community first to the Philippines and subsequently to the USA. Thus he omits what could have formed the substance of a further two half books: the subsequent fate of the Russian minority in Communist China and the story of how their eventual settlement in San Francisco developed after their arrival in 1950. The first part of the book highlights the role and character of Archbishop John Maximovitch (1896–1966), subsequently sanctified by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR); in the second half he moves more into the background, while the story of the community's exile to the island of Tubabao in the Philippines is brilliantly told, turning documentary sources into a fascinating recreation of an obscure strand of history.
Dunlop paints a remarkable portrait of a man deserving his sainthood, a man whom this author met at the very end of his life and who dispensed wise and encouraging words to a scholar just embarked on his own life's work of defending religious liberty in the face of active Communist atheism. The man who emerges from the darkness of 1917 (when he was only twenty-one and quickly forced into exile) is surely established in these pages as one of the outstanding figures of the Russian Orthodox Church in the twentieth century. Mikhail Borisovich Maximovitch owed his theological education to Belgrade University and the Serbian Orthodox Church. In 1926 he took monastic vows and the name of John. He was not physically imposing and suffered from a minor defect of speech, but his subjugation to the discipline of his Church was total.
Arriving in Shanghai to look after his flock, John proved himself a man of principle and of action. The Soviet regime was using the renascent Moscow Patriarchate from 1945 to persuade exiled believers to return to Russia and Dunlop recounts its deviousness in trying to break John's will and make him yield to the authority of Patriarch Alexi i. John showed signs of succumbing to the blandishments, but before long turned back to ROCOR, the Church in Exile, and remained its stalwart supporter to the end of his life.
Chapter iii describes a man of prayer and almost incredible discipline, the epitome of the Russian monastic ideal which few ever emulated. Dunlop devotes forty pages to this description, but he emphasises, too, that John constantly reached outward. As well as paying meticulous attention to the monastic hours and the performance of public worship, he cared deeply for children, especially during the years of deprivation, the Second World War. Some of these were Chinese, rescued off the streets. At times he even pushed beyond the norm. There is little precedent for his actively disliking food, outside the periods of strict fasting; and, more surprisingly, his spurning of proper rest. He mostly slept in a chair so that he could keep awake more easily. One had thought that sleep was one of God's tender gifts to humanity.
John appears as a man of action when the challenge to save his people, some six thousand of them, was threatened by the advance of Chinese Communism during the civil war. He was principally responsible for finding them a foreign refuge and relocating them. The countries of the world seemed to be systematically closing their doors and even the IRO, the agency responsible for refugees at the UN in Geneva was, with some heroic individual exceptions, unhelpful.
Surprisingly, it was the Philippines which eventually offered asylum. Even this was grudging at first, though the sterling quality and determination of the displaced people eventually won over many hearts. To present-day eyes, the place would have seemed idyllic: a tiny uninhabited island with a beautiful beach, backed by pristine rain forest, and joined by a bridge to a larger inhabited island. A ship literally dumped the first wave of refugees here, where there was neither a single roof nor running water. The discipline and determination of the Russians, backed by John's religious direction (which allowed for worship by Catholics and Protestants, as well as Orthodox), soon prevailed and they won the respect of the regime. Dunlop's long section on the relocation of this community rescues from obscurity a heroic chapter of mid-twentieth century history.
Archbishop John did not stay long. He was certain that Tubabao could not furnish the long-term needs of this community, so he moved to the United States, where he lived mainly in Washington DC and assumed the role of lobbyist for his people. Eventually, after contacting innumerable people in authority, his intercessions were effective and in June 1950 President Truman signed a bill allowing the immigration of the Russians. They still had to undergo much vetting (might not Russians, in those fraught days, be Communists?), but a substantial number, in several waves, settled in the San Francisco area, where they and their successors live today.
It is at this point that one almost gasps in disappointment. Archbishop John was to live for another sixteen years, first in Europe, then as spiritual leader of the San Francisco Russians. He was also a redoubtable protagonist of ROCOR, which at that time stoutly resisted unification with the Moscow Patriarchate. Yet the author closes his work with less than a page of summary, referring the reader to a work in French for this ‘brief, tumultuous, and often torturous (sic) period’.
This lacuna, alongside absence of information on what subsequently happened to those Russians who remained in China and the lack of an index, does not spoil the effect of a substantial contribution to Russian Christian history.
