Istanbul Prototype for Later Centers of First Russian Emigration, Turkish Scholar Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 25 – The most important centers of the first Russian emigration were Paris, Berlin, Prague and Belgrad, but for a brief period, the largest and most important center of the anti-Bolshevik Russians who fled Russia at the end of the Russian Civil War was in Constantinople as Istanbul was then known.

            Because the Russian community was there only briefly, between 1919 and the late 1920s, and because almost all of its members moved on to other locations, Istanbul as a center of the Russian emigration has not received the attention the others have. Now, a Turkish scholar has helped fill the gap.

            Turkan Oljai, a historian at the University of Istanbul, has now published an article entitled “Thank You, Istanbul. The Russian White Emigration on the Turkish Shores, 1920s-1930s” (trtrussian.com/mnenie/spasibo-stambul-russkaya-beloemigraciya-na-tureckom-beregu-1920-1930-gg-7331938).

            She says the Istanbul emigration was formed in three stages, the “aristocratic,” the “Denikin,” and the “Wrangel.” The first consisted of wealthy Russians who fled there in 1919; the second of people associated with General Denikin who came in February 1920; and the third, after the defeat of Wrangel in Crimea in November 1920.

            Most of the approximately 167,000 of the total had to sell off their possessions and work in the lowest paid professions. But they remained active in the realms they had been part of in Russia, with military personnel maintaining their organizations, literary figures continuing to write and publish and artists, musicians and actors practicing their crafts.

            The glory years of the Istanbul emigration were between 1920 and 1924 when the city was under Allied occupation. When that ended, so too did the Russian diaspora for all practical purposes. And four years later, the remaining emigration in the city published Russians on the Bosphorous, the last literary work issued there.

            Oljai offers detailed lists of the various figures involved in these efforts, and it is these details which will make her work so valuable to specialists. But she deserves praise for drawing attention to the fact that Turkey was not just a way station for many Russians but an important place for the emigration in its own right, if only for a relatively brief time.