Russian diaspora

The Russian diaspora is the global community of ethnic Russians. The Russian-speaking (Russophone) diaspora are the people for whom Russian language is the native language, regardless of whether they are ethnic Russians or, for example, Belarusians, Tatars, or Jews.

Map of the Russian diaspora.
  Russia
  + 1,000,000
  + 100,000
  + 10,000
  + 1,000

The number of ethnic Russians living outside the Russian Federation is estimated at roughly between 20 and 30 million people (depending on the notion of "ethnicity" used), the majority of them in countries of the Former Soviet Union; about 30 million native speakers of Russian are estimated to live outside the Russian Federation (compared to 147 million living within the Russian Federation).[1]

The largest overseas community is found in the United States, estimated at some 3.1 million people. The next largest communities of Russian speakers outside the former Soviet Union are found in Germany and in Israel, both of unknown size but estimated at around 1.2 million people in Germany and around one million in Israel. In addition, in Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, The United Kingdom, New Zealand, Paraguay and Venezuela, several hundred thousand citizens each identify as being of at least partial Russian descent.

History

A significant ethnic Russian emigration took place in the wake of the Old Believer schism in the 17th century (for example, the Lipovans, who migrated southwards around 1700). Later ethnic Russian communities, such as the Doukhobors (who emigrated to the Transcaucasus from 1841 and onwards to Canada from 1899), also emigrated as religious dissidents fleeing centrist authority. One of the religious minorities that had significant effect on emigration from Russia was the Russian Jewish Population.

From the 1820s to the 1920s, Russian Jews underwent waves of mass migration west spanned roughly a century and totaled around 2.5 million people. In the eleven years leading up to 1910, one of every seven Jews in Russia had left the country. Jews in particular were threatened in Russia at this time by widespread intolerance and subsequent pogroms and threatened violence against them. Many Jews in Russia and other Eastern European countries decided that emigrating to Europe and the Americas where tolerance of Jews was growing or already established was necessary for their own safety as tensions in Russia grew.[2]

The Russo-Japanese War, World War I, and the Russian Revolution that became a civil war happened in quick succession from 1904 through 1923 with some overlap and heightened the strain on Russia and particularly the men expected to participate in military service. A major reason for young men specifically to emigrate out of Russia was to avoid forced service in the Russian army.[2]

In the nineteenth century, Emigration from the Soviet Union is often broken down into three "waves" (волны) of emigration. The waves are the "First Wave", or "White Wave", which left during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then the Russian Civil War; the "Second Wave", which emigrated during and after World War II; and the "Third Wave", which emigrated in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

A sizable wave of ethnic Russians emigrated in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922. They became known collectively as the White émigrés. That emigration is also referred to as the "first wave" even though previous emigrations had taken place, as it was comprised the first emigrants to have left in the wake of the Communist Revolution, and because it exhibited a heavily-political character.

A smaller group of Russians, often referred to by Russians as the "second wave" of Russian emigration, left during World War II. They were refugees, Soviet POWs, eastern workers, or surviving veterans of the Russian Liberation Army and other anticommunist armed units that had served under the German command and evaded forced repatriation. In the immediate postwar period, the largest Russian communities in the emigration settled in Germany, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Emigres who left after the death of Stalin but before perestroika, are often grouped into a "third wave". The emigres were mostly Jews, Armenians, Germans, and other peoples who resided outside the former borders of the Russian Empire but now found themselves inside the Soviet Union. Most left in the 1970s.

In the early 1990s, Russia experienced one of the most dramatic periods in its history. As a result, the former administrative Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union became a separate sovereign state. The fall of the Soviet Union resulted in an upsurge of international migrations to Russia, which overwhelmingly involve population movements between Russia and other post-Soviet states.[3]

Statistics

States in which Russian is an official, semi-official, and working language.

Some 20 to 30 million ethnic Russians are estimated to live outside the bounds of the Russian Federation (depending on the definition of "ethnicity"). Official census data often considers only nationality. The number of native speakers of the Russian language who reside outside of the Russian Federation is estimated as close to 30 million by SIL Ethnologue.[4]

Former Soviet Union
Countryethnic Russians
Ukraine8,300,000 (2001)[5]
 Kazakhstan3,619,002 (2017)[6]
 Uzbekistan640,000
Belarus800,000[7]
 Kyrgyzstan400,000[8][9]
Latvia570,000[10]
Moldova370,000 (2004)[11]
Estonia310,000[12]
 Turkmenistan300,000[13]
Lithuania180,000[14]
 Azerbaijan140,000[15][16]
 Tajikistan68,200[17]
 Georgia26,586[18][19]
 Armenia11,911[20]
Former Warsaw Pact
Countryethnic Russians
 Romania30,000[21]
 Bulgaria15,595[22]
Poland13,000[23]
Outside former Soviet Union or Warsaw Pact
Countryethnic Russians
United States3,100,000[24]
Germany1,213,000[25]
Israel1,000,000[26]
Canada550,520[27]
France 200,000 to 500,000 [28]
 Argentina350,000 [29]
Brazil340,000[30]
Italy120,000 (2006)[31]
Finland78,400 (2015)[32]
 Spain70,927 (2016)[33]
 Australia67,550[34]
 United Arab Emirates56,600[35]
 Cuba50,200[35]
 United Kingdom35,000 (2013)[36]
 Venezuela34,600[37]
 Austria30,249[38]
 Sweden20,930[39]
 Belgium20,000[40]
 China15,600[41]
 Hong Kong5,000[42]
 Norway13,914[43]
 New Zealand10,235[44]
 Qatar5,000[45]
Singapore4,500[46]
Serbia3,290[47]

Former USSR

Ethnic Russians in former Soviet Union states according to the most recent census

Today the largest ethnic Russian diasporas outside of Russia exist in former Soviet states such as Ukraine (about 8 million), Kazakhstan (3,644,529 / 20.61%) 2016,[48] Belarus (about 1.2 million), Latvia (about 620,000), Uzbekistan (about 650, 000)[49] and Kyrgyzstan (about 600,000).[50]

The situation faced by ethnic Russian diasporas varied widely. In Belarus, there was no perceivable change in status, but in Estonia and Latvia,[51] they were labelled foreigners or non-citizens if none of their ancestors had been a citizen of those countries before the Soviet occupation and if they did not request Russian citizenship while it was available.

East Asia and Southeast Asia

Russians (eluosizu) are one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. They are approximately 15,600 living mostly in northern Xinjiang and also in Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang. In the 1920s, Harbin was flooded with 100,000 to 200,000 White émigrés fleeing from Russia. Some Harbin Russians moved to other cities, such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin. By the 1930s, Shanghai's Russian community had grown to more than 25,000.[52]

There are also smaller numbers of Russians in Japan and in Korea. The Japanese government disputes Russia's claim to the Kuril Islands, which were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1945 after the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. The Soviet Red Army expelled all Japanese from the island chain, which was resettled by Russians and other Soviet nationalities. A few Russians also settled in the Korean Peninsula in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.[53]

The population of Russians in Singapore is estimated at 4,500 by local Russian embassy in 2018;[54] they are a largely-professional and business-oriented expatriate community, and among them are hundreds of company owners or local heads of branches of large Russian multinationals.[55] President Vladimir Putin visited Singapore on 13 November 2018 to break ground for Russian Cultural Center, which will be home for the first Russian Orthodox church in the region.[56] During the meeting of State Heads, Mdm. Halimah mentioned that there were 690 Russian companies in Singapore [57] There are about 40 Russian families living in the Manila Philippines https://pravoslavie.ru/80526.html

Americas

Russian settlement in Mexico was minimal but well documented in the 19th and the early 20th centuries. A few breakaway sectarians from the Russian Orthodox Church, partial tribes of Spiritual Christian Pryguny arrived in Los Angeles beginning in 1904 to escape persecution from Tsarist Russia and were diverted to purchase and colonize land in the Guadalupe Valley northeast of Ensenada to establish a few villages in which they maintained their Russian culture for a few decades before they were abandoned; cemeteries bearing Cyrillic letters remain.

In the late 1800s, there was a large influx of Jewish immigrants to the United States from Russia and Eastern Europe to escape religious persecution. From the third of the Jewish population that left the area, roughly eighty percent resettled in America. There, many still desired to hold onto their Russian identities and settled in areas with large amounts of Russian immigrants already. Local populations were generally distrustful of their cultural differences.[2]

Dissenters of the official Soviet Communist Party like the Trotskyites such as its leader, Leon Trotsky, found refuge in Mexico in the 1930s, where Trotsky himself was assassinated by Ramon Mercader in 1940.

Some Ukrainian Americans, Belarusian Americans, Russian-speaking Jewish Americans, Russian-speaking German Americans, Georgian Americans, Azerbaijani Americans, Armenian Americans, and Rusyn Americans identify as Russian American.

Other

Russian Orthodox Church in Belgrade, Serbia

Finland borders Russia directly (Finland was an autonomous Russian Grand Duchy between 1809 and 1917 but not part of the Soviet Union, which came about in 1922) and has 31,000 Russian citizens, which amounts to 0.56% of the population,[58] and 80,000 (1.5%) speak Russian as their mother tongue.

See also

  • Russian language in post-Soviet states

References

  1. native speakers of Russian do not necessarily identify as ethnically Russian; notably, in Ukraine, 5.5 million native speakers of Russian self-identified as ethnic Ukrainians in the 2000 census (see demographics of Ukraine); in Israel, up to a million Russian speakers may or may not identify as "ethnic Russians" on top of self-identification as Jewish.
  2. Diner, Hasia R (2004-08-23), The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000, University of California Press, pp. 71–111, ISBN 978-0-520-93992-9, retrieved 2020-12-08
  3. Uma A. Segal Professor of Social Work University of Missouri; Doreen Elliott Professor of Social Work University of Texas at Arlington; Nazneen S. Mayadas Professor Emerita University of Texas at Arlington (13 December 2009). Immigration Worldwide : Policies, Practices, and Trends: Policies, Practices, and Trends. Oxford University Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-19-974167-0. Retrieved 1 September 2013.
  4. reporting 137 million native speakers within the Russian federation as of 2010, out of 167 million native speakers worldwide. Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig (eds.). 2014. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International
  5. out of 8.3 million Ukrainian residents who identified as ethnic Russians, 0.3 million identified Ukrainian as their primary language; conversely, out of 37.5 million who identified as ethnic Ukrainians, 5.5 million identified Russian as their primary language. (2001 census) Archived 2006-11-26 at the Wayback Machine
  6. "Численность населения РК по отдельным этносам 2017г". Stat.gov.kz. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  7. CIA Factbook in 2014 estimates 8.3% ethnic Russians out of a population of 9.61 million.
  8. "Демографические тенденции, формирование наций и межэтнические отношения в Киргизии". Demoscope.ru. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  9. "The World Factbook". Cia.gov. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  10. CIA Factbook in 2014 estimates 26.2% ethnic Russians out of a population of 2.16 million.
  11. 369,896 or 9.39% of total population according to the 2004 census Archived 2007-11-24 at the Wayback Machine
  12. CIA Factbook in 2014 estimates 24.8% ethnic Russians out of a population of 1.26 million. (2013)
  13. "Turkmen pledge on Russian rights". News.bbc.co.uk. 9 July 2003. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  14. 5.8% of the total population according to the Lithuanian census of 2011.
  15. "The World Factbook". Cia.gov. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  16. "Southern Caucasus: Facing Integration Problems, Ethnic Russians Long For Better Life". EurasiaNet.org. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  17. "Итоги переписи населения Таджикистана 2000 года: национальный, возрастной, половой, семейный и образовательный составы". Demoscope.ru. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  18. "Population Census 2014" (PDF). geostat.ge. Retrieved 5 June 2018.
  19. Georgia: Ethnic Russians Feel Insulated From Tensions, Radio Free Europe
  20. "(2002 census)" (PDF). Docs.armstat.am. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  21. "Informatii utile - Agentia Nationala pentru Intreprinderi Mici si Mijlocii". Mimmc.ro. Archived from the original on 13 May 2007. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  22. "National Statistical Institute". Nsi.bg. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  23. Polish Statistics (PDF). Stat.gov.pl. 2011. ISBN 978-83-7027-521-1. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  24. self-reported ethnicity as of 2007; 0.4 million Russian-born.
  25. "Russian migrants residing in Germany—this includes current and former citizens of the Russian Federation as well as former citizens of the Soviet Union". Destatis.de. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  26. "Monthly Bulletin of Statistics". Cbs.gov.il. Retrieved 2011-03-22.
  27. self-reported ethnic origin as of 2011; 107,300 gave Russian as single ethnic origin; an additional 443,220 gave Russian as one of several ethnic origins im "multiple ethnic origins responses".
  28. "La communauté russe en France est "éclectique"". Russieingo.com. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  29. //www.lanacion.com.ar/sociedad/por-que-hay-tantos-rusos-argentina-tan-nid2248366
  30. . 28 September 2007 https://web.archive.org/web/20070928112137/http://rusharbin.com/content/view/61/27/1/1/. Archived from the original on 28 September 2007. Retrieved 11 January 2018. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  31. "Statistiche demografiche ISTAT". Demo.istat.it. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  32. http://www.stat.fi/tup/suoluk/suoluk_vaesto_en.html
  33. "Foreign population by nationality, provinces, sex and year". Instituto Nacional de Estadística. Spain's National Institute of Statistics. 2017. Retrieved 12 December 2017. Search ("consultar selección") by "Nacionalidad" = "Rusia", "Provincias" = "TOTAL ESPAÑA", "Sexo" = "Ambos sexos" (both sexes) and "Año" = Your year of choice.
  34. "Australian Bureau of Statistics". Abs.gov.au. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  35. "Créditos". Cubagob.cu. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  36. "Nationality and country of birth by age, sex and qualifications Jan - Dec 2013 (Excel sheet 60Kb)". Ons.gov.uk. Office for National Statistics. Retrieved 11 June 2014.. 35,000 Russian nationals and 39,000 Russian-born residents estimated for 2013 (based on 2011 data).
  37. Joshua Project. "Country - Venezuela". Joshuaproject.net. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  38. Statistik Austria. "STATISTIK AUSTRIA - Bevölkerung nach Staatsangehörigkeit und Geburtsland". Statistik.at. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  39. "Folkmängd efter födelseland 1900–2017" (in Swedish). Statistics Sweden. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
  40. Belgian residents from the ex-USSR countries that resided in Belgium in 2008: 21,655. An estimate of 50,000 was given by diaspora organisation russian-belgium.be, based on extrapolation of naturalization data, online polls among their members, and a loose definition of "Russian" as anyone who has been exposed to the Soviet education system or who speaks Russian.
  41. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2007-09-28. Retrieved 2006-12-17.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  42. "坦言集:俄羅斯在港 - 東方日報". orientaldaily.on.cc. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  43. "Statistics Norway". Ssb.no. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  44. "3. Facts and figures – Russians, Ukrainians and Baltic peoples – Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand". Teara.govt.nz. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  45. "Qatar's population - by nationality". bq Magazine. Archived from the original on 22 December 2013. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  46. "Meet the Russian risk takers making safe Singapore their home". SCMP.com.
  47. "Миграциони профил Републике Србије за 2013. годину" (PDF). Kirs.gov.rs. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  48. "Численность населения Республики Казахстан по отдельным этносам на начало 2016 года". Stat.gov.kz. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  49. Uzbekistan: People: Ethnic Groups. World Factbook of CIA
  50. John Pike. "KYRGYZSTAN: Economic disparities driving inter-ethnic conflict". Globalsecurity.org. Retrieved 5 April 2015.
  51. "Russians beyond the Limits of Russia", O.I. Vendina, Geography newspaper, no. 11, 2001 (in Russian)
  52. "Tales of Old Shanghai - cultures - Russians". Talesofoldchina.com. Archived from the original on 28 September 2007. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  53. Clark, Donald N. (1994), "Vanished Exiles: The Prewar Russian Community in Korea", in Dae-Sook Suh (ed.), Korean Studies: New Pacific Currents, University of Hawaii Press, pp. 41–58, ISBN 0-8248-1598-X
  54. Pang Xue Qiang (31 March 2018). "Meet the Russian risk takers making safe Singapore their home". SCMP.com.
  55. Drankina, Yekaterina (2008-03-10), "Сингапурский десант", Kommersant Den'gi, 9 (664), retrieved 2009-07-30
  56. "President Halimah & Putin break ground for new Russian Cultural Centre & Orthodox church", Mothership, 2018-11-13
  57. "Despite differences, Singapore and Russia have 'long-standing friendship': President Halimah", Channel News Asia, 2018-11-13
  58. Tilastokeskus: Ulkomaiden kansalaiset (Statistics Finland: Foreign Citizenship) in Finnish, 2013
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.