Thousands of Russians fled from Russia after the Bolsheviks came to power

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Many of those who left Russia during the Civil War considered the coming to power of the Bolsheviks as a temporary annoying misunderstanding. They were sure that they would soon return to their homeland.

By the end of 1919, it became clear to almost everyone in Russia that the Bolsheviks had won the Civil War. White armies were defeated in all directions: in Siberia, in the Russian north, near Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was then called). In the fall, near Moscow, the so-called Armed Forces of the South of Russia (ARSUR) missed the last chance to crush Soviet power and indiscriminately retreated to the country's Black Sea coast.

Yakov Steinberg / Central State Archive of Cinema, Photo and Sound Documents of St. Petersburg / russiainphoto.ru /

During the few years that Russia was torn apart by internecine conflict, the level of cruelty and violence shown by the parties has reached the highest limit. Both reds and whites carried out widespread terror, which consisted of mass executions and hanging. “… The hour has come when we must destroy the bourgeoisie, if we do not want the bourgeoisie to destroy us,” wrote the newspaper Pravda on August 31, 1918: “Our cities must be mercilessly cleansed of bourgeois rot.

All these gentlemen will be registered and those who pose a danger to the revolutionary class will be destroyed. … The anthem of the working class will henceforth be a song of hatred and revenge!"

Under these circumstances, the defeated could either surrender to the mercy of the merciless victor, or flee.

Emigration from the country began even after the collapse of the autocracy and the imperial system in March 1917. The richest of its citizens left Russia, who had enough funds for a comfortable existence in the capitals of Western Europe.

With the Bolshevik coup and the beginning of the Civil War, the outcome of those dissatisfied with the new government increased significantly. When it finally became clear that the white movement was doomed, it acquired a mass character.

In February-March 1920, the defeated and demoralized units of the ARSUR were evacuated from the Black Sea ports. Since the Red Army was literally advancing on the heels of the white people, the landing on ships in Novorossiysk was extremely poorly organized and was carried out in an atmosphere of complete chaos and panic. “There was a struggle for a place on the ship - a struggle for salvation …

Many human dramas were played out on the haystones of the city during these terrible days. A lot of bestial feeling poured out in the face of impending danger, when naked passions drowned out the conscience and man became a fierce enemy to man, recalled General Anton Denikin, commander of the troops.

Ships of the white squadron, Italian, British and French ships took more than 30 thousand soldiers and civilian refugees to the Crimea, ports of Turkey, Greece and Egypt.

Several tens of thousands more were unable to evacuate. When the Bolsheviks occupied the city, many of the White Cossacks who remained here were mobilized (both voluntarily and forcibly) into the Red Army and sent to the Polish front. Much sadder was the fate of the officers of the Armed Forces. Some of them were shot, some committed suicide.

“I remember the captain of the Drozdovsky regiment, who was standing not far from me with his wife and two children of three and five years old,” recalled one of the eyewitnesses of the Novorossiysk catastrophe: “Having crossed and kissed them, he shoots each of them in the ear, baptizes his wife, her; and now, shot, she falls, and the last bullet in herself …"

Crimea became the last stronghold of the Armed Forces of the South of Russia, renamed the Russian Army. Forty thousand White Guards were opposed by the Southern Front of the Red Army of Mikhail Frunze, which numbered four times as many soldiers. Peter Wrangel, who replaced Denikin as commander, understood that he could not hold the peninsula.

Long before the general offensive of the Reds on the Perekop Isthmus in early November 1920, he gave the order to prepare a large-scale evacuation.

In contrast to Novorossiysk, the evacuation from Yalta, Feodosia, Sevastopol, Evpatoria and Kerch took place in an orderly and more or less calm manner. “The first thing I would like to note is the absence of panic,” wrote Pyotr Bobrovsky, a member of the white government of the peninsula, in his diary “Crimean Evacuation”: “There was a great mess, the government’s iron hand was not felt.

But still, albeit randomly, with a delay, someone gave orders, someone followed them, and the evacuation went on as usual. By the time the Red Army broke through the fortifications of the isthmus and reached the Crimean ports, the evacuation had already been completed.

More than 130 thousand soldiers and civilians were taken out of the peninsula on 136 ships of the White Navy and the Entente.

The first point of their stay was Istanbul, from which they soon scattered around the world. “What I was no longer: a washerwoman, and a clown, and a retoucher for a photographer, a toy master, a dishwasher at a cafeteria, I sold donuts and Presse du Soir, I was a palmist and a loader in the port,” he recalled his life in the capital of Turkey, Private Georgy Fedorov: “I clung tightly to everything that could only be caught so as not to die of hunger in this huge foreign city”.

The Far East, which came under Soviet rule only by the end of 1922, became the last major focus of resistance to Soviet power in Russia, due to its remoteness from Moscow and Petrograd. Most of the tens of thousands of refugees from this region settled in neighboring China, which at that time was experiencing the so-called Era of the Militarists (1916-1928).

The country was divided between military-political cliques, constantly gnawing among themselves and strongly interested in attracting professional white officers with valuable combat experience to their side. After the capture of Manchuria by the Japanese in 1931, many White Guards entered the service of the "land of the rising sun."

In total, for the entire period of the Civil War, from 1, 3 to 2 million people left the country. Some of the emigrants soon returned to their homeland, deciding to come to terms with the new government.

Others hoped that the Bolsheviks would not hold out for more than five or seven years, and then they could safely come home to build a new Russia. These dreams never came true.