After the law on electronic subpoenas through Gosuslugi was swiftly adopted by the parliament and signed by Vladimir Putin, observers started talking about the upcoming second wave of mobilization in Russia (although formally the mobilization announced in September 2022 was never completed, that is, legally, nothing there is no need to additionally announce here) – and, accordingly, about a probable new wave of emigration. However, so far, according to indirect signs, no new mass exodus from Russia has been observed. Unlike in the autumn and spring of last year, airfare to Istanbul, Yerevan and beyond on the list did not skyrocket, and there are no five-day traffic jams at the border points with Kazakhstan and Georgia. Whether all (or almost all) who wish have already left and further the issue of emigration (or relocation, if someone prefers this word) will be decided individually. Either they are waiting for the actual announcement of a new mobilization in order to rush to Upper Lars, in the spirit of the proverb "until the thunder breaks out, the peasant will not cross himself."
But this is in Russia, but in exile a possible new wave has already been reflected. And very uncomplimentary. It was possible to come across more than once or twice “jokes” in the spirit of poorly disguised hazing: “April; they were not respected even by september.” Of course, “Septembers” are preceded by those who left immediately after the start of a full-scale war on February 24 (the term “February” was also in social networks). They have already managed to look down on the fugitives from the mobilization: they say, what have you been waiting for six months? This chain stretches far: those who bought tickets to Yerevan on the morning of the first day of the bombing of Kiev were sometimes looked askance by the political emigration of 2021 – “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations”. And they are all together indiscriminately – those who left in 2014 after the Crimean adventure of Putin and the subsequent 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, there have always been tensions between waves of emigrants. It's just that in Russia at the beginning of the 21st century, the length of emigration waves shortened in time, and the process itself accelerated. What used to take decades can now take only six months.
Friction between waves of emigrants has always been
In general, if you look at the world experience of waves of political emigration, Russia has one of the longest histories. Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet regimes succeeded each other, but new and new generations of emigrants met again and again in approximately the same countries – primarily in Western countries: in the USA, Western and Eastern Europe, later in Israel, and with relatively recent since – in Turkey and Transcaucasia.
In fact, this is a unique phenomenon more than a century and a half long. No European country has had such a long emigration.
For example, the French emigration who fled the Revolution returned en masse after the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814, that is, only 20-25 years after they had to leave their homes. Many received their property back through restitution. Only a few remained tutors in Pushkin's Russia.
The emigration of Republicans from Francoist Spain – primarily to Mexico and France – was long, up to 40 years, but final. 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, emigration was even shorter. Short-lived, in general, by historical standards, was the emigration from Nazi Germany, which left, for example, the future Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Parallels can be drawn with communist China, Iran, Vietnam and Cuba, but again we are talking about waves of emigration from the same type of regime and lasting only a few decades in each case. In the case of the Chinese, they still have such a "luxury" as their own alternative state – Taiwan (inspired by this example, Vasily Aksenov once wrote his political fiction – "Crimea Island": what would happen if the white emigration had its 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).
There is also talk of a fifth (after 2000) and a sixth (after 2014 or 2022), but the exact dates are disputed.
19th century: progressive intelligentsia
In fact, it is also necessary to single out a zero wave of emigration – from Herzen and Turgenev to Lenin and Gorky. At the same time, to unite all those who left tsarist Russia or fled from it from the 1850s to the 1910s, to put it mildly, is incorrect. Between them there were also frictions and differences, sometimes no less than between the emigration of Dovlatov and Brodsky and the "old men" from the white emigration.
Here is a characteristic quote from the memoirs of the Russian doctor and public figure Nikolai Belogolovy (1834-1895):
“At the end of the 60s, I especially took a liking to Geneva and went there right after leaving St. Petersburg. […] I led a solitary life and knew almost no one in Geneva; the old Decembrist Poggio, to whom I was attached by almost filial love, who lived permanently in Geneva, went to the mountains in the summer heat and returned only at the beginning of August to the city. Of the old emigrants, I knew only Herzen and Ogarev, but Herzen had already left Switzerland at that time and lived in Florence; Ogarev then seemed to be a half-destroyed man, kind and affable, but so lost due to memory loss of interests that I went to him occasionally only to visit him and, as it were, out of duty.
There were few young emigrants in Geneva at that time, but I shied away from getting to know and getting close to her, because everything in them is the incompleteness of their education and, as a result, the superficiality of their judgments, their idleness, their constant strife and gossip, not limited to domestic scandals, but carried out into print in the form of crude polemical pamphlets – all this made these people unsympathetic to me and did not arouse the desire to even know them in the slightest. I hasten to make a reservation, even then I was well aware that the young emigration was an involuntary and fatal product of our society and that it would be unfair to treat it strictly and blame it, but since the winter troubles forced me to look, first of all, in Geneva for personal peace, then entering into a stormy and passionate whirlpool of emigrant quarrels would directly contradict the goals of my arrival.
Sounds very modern. This could very well be written, in almost the same words, by our contemporary, who has been living abroad for a long time, about the recently moved relocators with their eternal scandals and skirmishes on Twitter.
Here is another interesting excerpt from the newspaper "Morning of Russia", which represented the interests of commercial and industrial circles, dated May 6, 1913, about Narodnaya Volya Degaev, the murderer of Lieutenant Colonel Sudeikin of the gendarme corps:
“At the beginning of 1882, Degaev received a business trip abroad, having two assignments: the first from Sudeikin – to get close to the emigrants and get their recommendations, and the second from the revolutionaries – to discuss the issue of Sudeikin's murder. But the old emigrants were distrustful of the nimble young man, and he had to return to Russia with nothing.
Similar suspicion between generations of emigrants still occurs today. In all more or less large political organizations of the Russian diaspora, they are constantly looking for agents of the Kremlin.
All more or less large political organizations of the Russian diaspora are constantly looking for agents of the Kremlin
Prince A. K. Solntsev-Zasekin explained in 1925 that old emigrants in the United States are not very sensitive to the experiences of new emigrants and continue to live in reality, where left-wing pamphlets were an advanced and progressive marker of the struggle against the tsarist regime:
“The Russian colony of America is not interested in every book. The tone is set by old emigrants. And if the agent of the State Publishing House “Novy Mir” filled its showcases with “classics of communism” and propaganda literature, then in other stores there will always be Marx’s “Capital” and old pamphlet revolutionary literature.”
XX century: emigrants "white" and "red"
And here are the arguments 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 gather all the spiritual and mental strength in order not to sink, not to lose touch with our native roots and not turn into miserable, useless townsfolk who drink and eat other people.
And the children's writer and literary critic Korney Chukovsky in 1965 writes: "… She saw old emigrants in Paris: a dying tribe – 30 invalids from the almshouse."
These two quotations from Sergei Dovlatov's "Craft" are quite characteristic, showing that the third wave of emigration felt different from the first two:
“… We are no better and no worse than the old emigrants. We are solving the same problems. We have the same weaknesses. The same complexes of strangers and neophytes.
“… We were warmly welcomed. Helped us to adapt and survive. To join the values of a wonderful country. We managed to avoid what the old emigrants experienced. 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 Alexander Genis reflected this even more deeply in a book about Dovlatov:
“The uniqueness of our emigration lay in the fact that we brought with us a huge experience, almost unfamiliar to the first two waves. In contrast to them, we arrived in America as plenipotentiaries of Soviet civilization in its most striking, characteristic and concentrated manifestation. As a result, we had nothing to talk about with the old emigration. Now, to be honest, I regret it, but then they all seemed to me ridiculous remnants, like Kisa Vorobyaninov.
In a similar way, as "Kisa Vorobyaninov", many of today's relocators perceive emigrants of the old, assimilated in the countries where they live, and cut off from Russian realities. And those pay them a hundredfold: they look down, despise and consider them out of touch with life long ago. One can only hope that one day this chain of waves of emigration and mutual reproaches in the spirit of “fathers and sons”, similar to the wheel of samsara, will still stop, because emigration from Spain, Germany and France once stopped: and now people are leaving there – who work, some to study – but these are clearly not waves of emigration. But how we get to this point is a completely different conversation.