220 of the 7,000 Russian Old Believers Living Abroad Return to Russia and Settle in Far East

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 3 – Some 220 Old Believers from US, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay have returned to Russia under the terms of Vladimir Putin’s program for their accelerated acquisition of citizenship. The first eight of them were given passports last week. The returning Old Believers will form distinct agricultural communities in the Russian Far East.

            About 100 Old Believers returned to Russia a decade ago, but in recent years, Putin has made their coming back a priority, naming a Kremlin official to oversee the program, authorizing two lengthy visits by officials to Old Believer communities in the Americas, and offering not only an accelerated path to citizenship to attract them back.

            But the total number of returnees from a decade ago and now is small relative to the total number of Old Believers who might come.  Russian experts say that there are some 7,000 in all. If so, that means that fewer than five percent have returned, a remarkably small number given the efforts Moscow and Vladivostok have devoted (vz.ru/society/2019/11/4/288753.html).

            The Old Believers returning now, Vzglyad notes, “are the children and grandchildren of those who in tsarist times lived in the Transbaikal and the Priamurye and then fled from Soviet power into China.” After 1949, they fled again, this time mostly to Brazil and Australia but also to Bolivia, Uruguay, Canada, New Zealand and the US states of Alaska and Oregon.