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 not.
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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 a significant effect on emigration from Russia was the Russian Jewish population.
Following the establishment of the State of Israel, many Russian Jews fled to the country along with their non-Jewish relatives, with the current estimate of Russians in Israel totalling 300,000 [1] (1,000,000 including Russian Jews who in the Soviet Union were not registered as Russians but rather as ethnic Jews). [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. [3]
In the twentieth 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 the Russian emigration, left during World War II. They were refugees, Soviet POWs, eastern workers, or surviving veterans of the Russian Liberation Army and other collaborationist 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, Russian Germans. Most left in the 1970s.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia suffered an economic depression in the 1990s. This caused many Russians to leave Russia for Western countries. The economic depression ended in 2000. Also, during this time, ethnic Russians who lived in other post-Soviet states moved to Russia. [4]
Upon the start of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent mobilization, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled abroad. [5] [6]
Some 20 to 30 million ethnic Russians are estimated to live outside the bounds of the Russian Federation (depending on the definition of "ethnicity"). [7] Official census data often considers the only nationality.[ citation needed ] The number of native speakers of the Russian language who resided outside of the Russian Federation was estimated as close to 30 million by SIL Ethnologue in 2010. [8]
| Country | Ethnic Russians |
|---|---|
 Ukraine | 8,300,000 (2001) [9] |
 Kazakhstan | 3,500,000 (2022) [10] |
 United States | 3,100,000 [11] |
 Brazil | 1,800,000 [12] |
 Germany | 1,213,000 [13] |
 Belarus | 706,992 (2019) [14] |
 Uzbekistan | 640,000 |
 Canada | 622,445 [15] |
 France | 200,000 to 500,000 [16] |
 Latvia | 445,612 (2023) [17] |
 Kyrgyzstan | 400,000 [18] [19] |
 Argentina | 350,000 [20] |
 Israel | 300,000 [21] |
 Turkmenistan | 300,000 [22] |
 Estonia | 296,268 [23] |
 Lithuania | 141,122 (2021) [24] [25] [26] [27] |
 Azerbaijan | 140,000 [28] [29] |
 Italy | 120,000 (2006) [1] |
 Spain | 118,801 (2023) [30] |
 Moldova | 111,000 (2014) [31] |
 Turkey | 100,000 (2022) [32] |
 Finland | 78,400 (2015) [33] |
 United Kingdom | 73,000 (2020) [34] |
 South Korea | 70,689 (2024, Including population if Korean Russian living in Korea;36,168) [35] |
 Tajikistan | 68,200 [36] |
 Australia | 67,550 [37] |
 United Arab Emirates | 56,600 [38] |
 Cuba | 50,200 [38] |
 Venezuela | 34,600[ citation needed ] |
 Austria | 30,249 [39] |
 Georgia | 26,586 [40] [41] |
 Romania | 23,000 [42] |
 Sweden | 20,930 [43] |
 Belgium | 20,000 [44] |
 China | 15,600 [45] |
 Bulgaria | 15,595 [46] |
 India | 6,000 to 15,000 [47] |
 Norway | 13,914 [48] |
 Greece | 13,415 (in 2021) [49] |
 Poland | 13,000 [50] |
 Armenia | 11,911 (2002) [51] |
 Japan | 11,634 [52] |
 New Zealand | 10,235 [53] |
 Portugal | 5,103 |
 Hong Kong | 5,000 [54] |
 Qatar | 5,000 [55] |
 Singapore | 4,500 [56] |
 Serbia | 3,290 [57] |
 Mexico | 1,600 to 2,000 [58] |
In Albania, the presence of Russians first occurred at the end of 1921, with thousands of former White Army soldiers settling in the nation at the request of Prime Minister Ahmet Zogu. [59] After the Second World War, hundreds of Soviet civilian and military experts were sent to Albania. [59] The Soviet Union withdrew specialists from the country in 1961, resulting in about half of the Russian diaspora being forced to remain in Albania permanently. [59] [ clarification needed ] The Russian-speaking diaspora today numbers only about 300 people. [59]
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;[ clarification needed ] cemeteries bearing Cyrillic letters remain.[ citation needed ]
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 numbers of Russian immigrants already. Local populations were generally distrustful of their cultural differences. [3]
Dissenters of the official Soviet Communist Party like the Trotskyists and their leader, Leon Trotsky, found refuge in Mexico in the 1930s, where Trotsky himself was assassinated by NKVD agent Ramon Mercader in 1940.
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 Russia. Some Harbin Russians moved to other cities, including Shanghai, Beijing, and Tianjin. By the 1930s, Shanghai's Russian community had grown to more than 25,000. [60]
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 with Russians and other Soviet nationalities.[ citation needed ] A few Russians also settled in the Korean Peninsula in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. [61]
The population of Russians in Singapore is estimated at 4,500 by local Russian embassy in 2018; [62] 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. [63] President Vladimir Putin visited Singapore on 13 November 2018 to break ground for Russian Cultural Center, which will also house a Russian Orthodox church. [64] During the meeting of State Heads, President Halimah mentioned that there were 690 Russian companies in Singapore [65]
There are about 40 Russian families living in Manila, Philippines. [66]
Finland borders Russia directly, and from 1809 until 1917 was a Grand Duchy of Finland in personal union with the Russian Empire. As of 2013, Finland had 31,000 Russian citizens, which amounted to 0.56% of the population, [67] and 80,000 (1.5%)[ clarification needed ] speak Russian as their mother tongue.
Today the largest ethnic Russian diasporas outside of Russia exist in former Soviet states such as Ukraine (about 9 million), Kazakhstan (3,644,529 or 20.61% in 2016), [68] Belarus (about 1.5 million), Uzbekistan (about 650,000) [69] Kyrgyzstan (about 600,000) [70] and Latvia (471,276 or 34.7% in 2020). [17]
The situation faced by ethnic Russian diasporas varied widely. In Belarus, for example, there was no perceivable change in status. But in Estonia and Latvia, [71] people without ancestors that had been a citizen of those countries before the Soviet occupation of 1940–1991, and who did not request Russian citizenship while it was available, were deemed non-citizens.
In March 2022, a week after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 12% of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine said they did not believe that any part of Ukraine was rightfully part of Russia, according to Lord Ashcroft's polls which did not include the Russian-occupied regions of Crimea and parts of the Donbas. [72] 65% of Ukrainians – including 88% of those of Russian ethnicity – agreed that "despite our differences there is more that unites ethnic Russians living in Ukraine and Ukrainians than divides us." [72]
As of 1 May 2024, Latvia had a total population of 1,862,700. Demographic features of the population of the historical territory of Latvia include population density, ethnic background, education level, health of the populace, economic status, religious affiliations and other aspects of the population.
According to the United Nations, Ukraine has a population of 37.9 million as of 2024.
Belarusians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Belarus. They natively speak Belarusian, an East Slavic language. More than 9 million people proclaim Belarusian ethnicity worldwide. Nearly 7.99 million Belarusians reside in Belarus, with the United States and Russia being home to more than 500,000 Belarusians each. The majority of Belarusians adhere to Eastern Orthodoxy.
Israelis are the citizens and nationals of the State of Israel. The country's populace is composed primarily of Jews and Arabs, who respectively account for 75 percent and 20 percent of the national figure, followed by other ethnic and religious minorities, who account for 5 percent.
The history of the Jews in Russia and areas historically connected with it goes back at least 1,500 years. Jews in Russia have historically constituted a large religious and ethnic diaspora; the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest population of Jews in the world. Within these territories, the primarily Ashkenazi Jewish communities of many different areas flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of antisemitic discriminatory policies and persecution, including violent pogroms.
The Polish diaspora comprises Poles and people of Polish heritage or origin who live outside Poland. The Polish diaspora is also known in modern Polish as Polonia, the name for Poland in Latin and many Romance languages.
Serbian diaspora refers to Serbian emigrant communities in the diaspora. The existence of a numerous diaspora of Serbian nationals is mainly a consequence of either economic or political reasons.
At the end of 2023, the world's Jewish population was estimated at 15.7 million, which is approximately 0.2% of the 8 billion worldwide population. Israel hosts the largest Jewish population in the world, with 7.1 million, followed by the United States with 6.3 million. Other countries with core Jewries above 100,000 include France (440,000), Canada (398,000), the United Kingdom (312,000), Argentina (171,000), Russia (132,000), Germany (125,000), Australia (117,000) and Brazil (107,000). The number of Jews worldwide rises to 18 million with the addition of the "connected" Jewish population, including those who say they are partly Jewish or that have Jewish backgrounds from at least one Jewish parent, and rises again to 21 million with the addition of the "enlarged" Jewish population, including those who say they have Jewish backgrounds but no Jewish parents and all non-Jewish household members who live with Jews. Counting all those who are eligible for Israeli citizenship under Israel's Law of Return, in addition to Israeli Jews, raised the total to 25.5 million.
The Greek diaspora, also known as Omogenia, are the communities of Greeks living outside of Greece and Cyprus.
The Ukrainian diaspora comprises Ukrainians and their descendants who live outside Ukraine around the world, especially those who maintain some kind of connection to the land of their ancestors and maintain their feeling of Ukrainian national identity within their own local community. The Ukrainian diaspora is found throughout numerous regions worldwide including other post-Soviet states as well as in Canada and other countries such as Poland, the United States, the UK and Brazil.
Russian Americans are Americans of full or partial Russian ancestry. The term can apply to recent Russian immigrants to the United States, as well as to those who settled in the 19th-century Russian possessions in northwestern America. Russian Americans comprise the largest Eastern European and East Slavic population in the US, the second-largest Slavic population generally, the nineteenth-largest ancestry group overall, and the eleventh-largest from Europe.
The Kurdish population is estimated to be between 30 and 45 million. Most Kurdish people live in Kurdistan, which today is split between Iranian Kurdistan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkish Kurdistan, and Syrian Kurdistan.
Greeks have been present in what is now southern Russia from the 6th century BC; those settlers assimilated into the indigenous populations. The vast majority of contemporary Russia's Greek minority populations are descendants of Medieval Greek refugees, traders, and immigrants from the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Balkans, and Pontic Greeks from the Empire of Trebizond and Eastern Anatolia who settled mainly in southern Russia and the South Caucasus in several waves between the mid-15th century and the second Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29. As during the Genocide of the Pontic Greeks, the survivors fled to the Upper Pontus.
The Moldovan diaspora is the diaspora of Moldova, including Moldovan citizens abroad or people with ancestry from the country, regardless of their ethnic origin. Very few of them have settled in other parts of the world, but there is a significant number of them in some countries, mostly in the former Soviet Union, Italy, Spain, Romania, Portugal, Greece, Canada, and the United States of America.
The Chechen diaspora is a term used to collectively describe the communities of Chechen people who live outside of Chechnya; this includes Chechens who live in other parts of Russia. There are also significant Chechen populations in other subdivisions of Russia.
The Belarusian diaspora refers to emigrants from the territory of Belarus as well as to their descendants.
The Azerbaijani diaspora are the communities of Azerbaijanis living outside the places of their ethnic origin: Azerbaijan and the Iranian region of Azerbaijan.
Armenian populations exist throughout the world. Although Armenian diaspora communities have existed since ancient times, most of the Armenians living outside of Armenia today are either descendants of Armenian genocide survivors or more recent immigrants from post-Soviet Armenia. According to various estimates, the total number of ethnic Armenians in the world is approximately 11 million, a majority of whom live outside of Armenia.
The Georgian diaspora refers to both historical and present emigration from Georgia. The countries with the largest Georgian communities outside Georgia are Turkey and Russia. The Georgian diaspora, or the dispersion of Georgian people outside of Georgia, began to take shape during various historical periods. However, a significant wave of emigration occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly during times of political upheaval, such as the Russian Empire's expansion into the Caucasus region and the Soviet era.
Azerbaijani populations exist throughout the world. About 8.2 million Azerbaijanis live in Azerbaijan, making 91.6% of the country's population. According to the CIA website, Azerbaijanis are the second ethnic group in Georgia and in Iran.
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