Ilya Klishin

Journalist, media consultant

Emigrants from Russia today often skeptical about those who are just going to move. Media consultant Ilya Klishin in historical and literary examples shows that this is a characteristic feature for the Russian emigration of the last one and a half centuries, and the friction between the waves of emigrants always existed.

After the law on electronic summons through the “State Services” was rapidly adopted by the parliament and signed by Vladimir Putin, observers spoke about the future second wave of mobilization in Russia (although formally, mobilization, announced in September 2022, was never completed, that is, it was not necessary to announce anything additionally here) - and, accordingly, the likely new wave of emigration. However, so far, by indirect signs, no new mass outcome from Russia is observed. Unlike the fall and spring of last year, the prices for flights to Istanbul, Yerevan did not take off on the list, and there are no five -day traffic jams on border posts with Kazakhstan and Georgia. Either all (or almost all) those who wanted have already left and further the issue of emigration (or relocation, if this word is more pleasant for someone) will be decided individually. Either the ads of the new mobilization actually wait to rush to the upper Lars - in the spirit of the proverb "until the thunder is awake, the man does not cross himself."

But this is in Russia, but in exile a possible new wave has already been reflected. Moreover, very uncomfortable. You could meet more than once or two “jokes” in the spirit of poorly covered grandfather: “April; They were not even respected even September. ” Of course, “September” is preceded by those who left immediately after the start of a full -scale war on February 24 (the term “February” was also on social networks). Those have already managed to look down on the fugitives from mobilization: they say, what did you expect six months? This chain stretches far: those who bought tickets to Yerevan on the morning on the first day of Kyiv’s bombing, sometimes watched the political emigration of 2021 - “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations”. And on them all together indiscriminately - those who left in 2014 after the Crimean adventure of Putin and the following hybrid war in the Donbass. Everyone in this hierarchy repeats the same thing in essence: "Everything was clear to us."

And this is not a specific phenomenon of the last ten years. No, if you look at the history of political emigration from Russia over the past 150-170 years, the friction between the waves of emigrants has always been. It’s just that in Russia at the beginning of the XXI century the length of the emigration waves decreased in time, and the process itself accelerated. What previously occupied decades can now occupy only six months.

Friction between the waves of emigrants have always been

In general, if you look at the world experience of waves of political emigration, Russia has one of the longest stories. The tsarist, Soviet and post -Soviet regimes replaced each other, but new and new generations of emigrants again and again met in about the same countries - primarily the countries of the West: in the USA, Western and Eastern Europe, later in Israel, and from a relatively recent time - in Turkey and Transcaucasia.

In fact, this is a unique phenomenon of more than one and a half centuries. Not a single European country had such long emigration.

For example, the French emigration, which fled from the revolution, returned to the masses after the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, that is, only 20–25 years after they had to leave their homes. Many in restitution received their property back. Only a few remained tutors in Russia from Pushkin.

The emigration of the Republicans from Francian Spain - primarily in Mexico and France - was long, up to 40 years, but the final one. After the death of the dictator in 1975 and the restoration of democracy, there were no new mass waves. In the case of Portugal and Greece of Black Colonels, the emigration was even shorter. In general, by historical standards, there was a short-lived emigration from Nazi Germany, which, for example, had the future Chancellor Willy Brandt, left for, for example.

It is possible to draw parallels with communist China, Iran, Vietnam and Cuba, but again we are talking about waves of emigration from one in the type of regime and duration in each case only a few decades. In the case of the Chinese, they still have such a “luxury” as his alternative state - Taiwan (inspired by this example, Vasily Aksyonov wrote his political fiction at one time - the “island of Crimea”: what would happen if the white emigration had his own state).

Traditionally, historians distinguish four waves of Russian emigration:

• First (1917–1924): from 1.5 to 2 million people,
• second (1941–1945): several hundred thousand people,
• third (1965–1988): up to half a million people,
• Fourth (after 1989).

They also talk about the fifth (after 2000) and the sixth (after 2014 or 2022), but they argue about the exact dates.

XIX century: progressive intelligentsia

In fact, it is also necessary to distinguish a zero wave of emigration - from Herzen and Turgenev to Lenin and Gorky. At the same time, to unite everyone who left tsarist Russia or fled from it from the 1850s to the 1910s, to put it mildly, incorrectly. Between them there were also friction and differences, sometimes no less than between the emigration of Dovlatov and Brodsky and the “old people” from white emigration.

Here is a characteristic quote from the memoirs of a Russian doctor and public figure Nikolai Belogolovy (1834–1895):

“In the late 60s, I especially chosen Geneva and went there right on the exit from St. Petersburg. [...] I led the solid life and almost knew anyone in Geneva; The old Decembrist Houso, to whom I was tied by almost my son -in -law, who lived constantly in Geneva, went to the summer heat in the mountains and returned only by the beginning of August to the city. Of the old emigrants, I knew only Herzen and Ogarev, but Herzen at that time had already left Switzerland and lived in Florence; Ogarev then seemed to be a dilapidated person, kind and friendly, but before that, due to the loss of memory, the interests that I came to him occasionally only to visit him and, as it were, according to his responsibility.

There was little young emigration in Geneva then, but I evaded acquaintance and rapprochement with her, because everything in them is the incompleteness of their formation and, as a result, the superficiality of their judgments, their idleness, their constant consumptions and gossip, which were not limited to home scandals, but carried out in the form of gross polemic brochures, all this did these people not like these people not likely And it did not cause a desire to even know them at least. I hasten to make a reservation, I even understood well that the young emigration was an involuntary and fatal product of our society and that it would be strictly related to it and to condemn it at least unfairly, but since the winter scrains forced me to look primarily in Geneva of personal rest, the entry into the turbulent and passionate whirlpool of the emigrant quarrels would directly contradict the purposes of my visit. ”

It sounds very modern. This could, in almost the same words, write our contemporary, living abroad for a long time, about recently moved relocates with their eternal scandals and skirmishes on Twitter.

Here are another interesting endurance from the newspaper “Morning of Russia”, representing the interests of trade and industrial circles, dated May 6, 1913 about the people of the people of Degaev, the killer of the lover of the corps of the gendarmes of Sudeikin:

“At the beginning of 1882, Degaev received a business trip abroad, having two instructions: the first from Sudeikin - to get closer to emigrants and enlist their recommendations, and the second from revolutionaries is to discuss the issue of the murder of Sudeikin. But the old emigrants reacted with distrust of the agent, and he had to return to Russia with nothing. ”

A similar suspicion between generations of emigration is found today. In all more or less large political organizations of the Russian diaspora, they are constantly looking for Kremlin agents.

In all more or less large political organizations of the Russian diaspora, they are constantly looking for Kremlin agents

Prince A.K. Solntsev-Zasekin in 1925 explained that the old emigrants in the United States are not very sensitive to the experiences of new emigrants and continue to live in reality, where the left brochures were an advanced and progressive marker of the fight against the royal regime:

“The Russian colony of America is not interested in any book. The tone is set by old emigrants. And if the Agent of the State Publishing House “New World” filled his windows “classics of communism” and propaganda literature, then in other stores there will always be “capital” Marx and the old brochure revolutionary literature. ”

XX century: emigrants "white" and "red"

And now the reasoning after the Second World War, when the differences between the first and second waves became obvious. From the diary of the publicist and translator Nikolai Pashin for 1945:

“The experience of the old emigration constantly shows us that if we remain in exile for a long time, we will have to collect all spiritual and mental forces in order not to go down, not lose touch with our native roots and not turn into miserable, no one who has no one, who strongly and overthrow the other people.”

And the children's writer and literary critic Korney Chukovsky in 1965 writes: "... she saw in Paris old emigrants: the endangered tribe - 30 disabled people from the almshouse."

These two quotes from the “craft” of the writer Sergei Dovlatov are very characteristic, showing that the third wave of emigration felt great from the first two:

“... We are no better and no worse than old emigrants. We solve the same problems. We have the same weaknesses. The same complexes of strangers and neophytes. ”

“... we were welcomed. They helped us adapt and survive. Join the values ​​of a wonderful country. We managed to avoid what the old emigrants survived. And we are grateful to everyone who contributed to this. We took out of Russia not only Palekh caskets. Not only coral and amber beads. ”

And even more deeply this was reflected by Alexander Genis in the book about Dovlatov:

“The uniqueness of our emigration was that we carried with us a huge experience, almost unfamiliar to the first two waves. In contrast, we arrived in America by plenipotentiary representatives of Soviet civilization in its most vivid, characteristic and concentrated manifestation. As a result, we have nothing to talk about with the old emigration. Now I am honest, I regret it, but then they all seemed to me funny remnants, like Kisa Vorobyaninov. ”

In a similar way as “Kisu Vorobyaninov”, many today's retains perceive the emigrants of old, assimilated in the countries where they live and divorced from Russian realities. And they pay them a hundredfold: they look down, despise and consider it for a long time to come off life. It remains only to hope that once this chain of emigration waves and mutual reproaches in the spirit of “fathers and children” will still stop, because the emigration from Spain, Germany and France has once stopped: and now people leave-some to work, some to study-but this is clearly not waves of emigration. But how can we be at this point - this is a completely different conversation.