The displacement of the White Russians following the Russian Civil War produced one of the largest and earliest politically defined refugee diasporas of the interwar period. This exodus provides a vantage point on the legal status and political identity of post-1920 migratory groups, and since statelessness exists as a condition between jurisdictions, rather than belonging to any single one, a transnational analysis is not merely useful but methodologically necessary. This project will examine how White Russian émigrés navigated and influenced the emerging interwar practices, both international and local, that were used to govern and deal with so-called ‘stateless’ people through a comparison of the contrasting governance environment of Paris and Shanghai.
For this project, ‘White Russians’ refers to subjects of the former Russian Empire who, during and immediately after the Civil War, were a part of the White movement or were civilians who fled due to anti-communist political beliefs. ‘Statelessness’ refers to a person who lacks any form of recognised nationality and is thus incapable of being issued or possessing a legally accepted national passport. ‘Shaping governance’ will be interpreted to mean measurable two-way interactions between these stateless persons and their residential authorities or institutions, primarily through traceable means, such as petitions, mutual-aid infrastructures, and policing/surveillance.
My working hypothesis is that statelessness, rather than simply being a condition imposed from above, functioned as a driver of institution-building from below: White Russian communities constructed work, welfare, and documentation, while their host authorities responded through a formalisation of categories and controls relating to the recognition of nationhood. The League of Nations’ Nansen passport provides the transnational entry point, as an internationally derived mechanism explicitly designed to be used across jurisdictions, it allows us to ask how a single supranational instrument was locally adapted and contested across greatly different sites.
To keep the project manageable, I will focus on 1920s-30s White Russian communities in Paris, a relatively consolidated national administrative setting, and Shanghai, a multi-jurisdictional imperial treaty-port. This project will aim to discover whether similar mechanisms of community authority and documentary governance emerged under structurally dissimilar conditions, and what those similarities or divergences reveal about how statelessness as a transnational legal category was negotiated on the ground.
The project draws on three bodies of sources. First, international and humanitarian records on refugee categorization and mobility (including debates and practices surrounding documentation). Second, émigré-produced sources such as newspapers, organisational bulletins, and memoirs, to reconstruct how émigrés presented their own status, legitimacy, and collective purpose. Third, host-state and municipal materials, such as legal and policing/surveillance records, to gauge tensions between refugee self-organization and external governance. Hoover’s Russia Abroad Digital Collection, an open-access archive that has digitised more than one million pages from nearly six hundred Russian émigré newspapers, provides an in-depth comparison of discourse across sites and years. The supranational perspective will be granted through the use of Claudena Skran’s work Refugees in Inter-War Europe. Municipal sources will rely on archival resources for the cities of Paris and Shanghai themselves, such as the Archives du ministère des Affaires étrangères for Paris, and the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) files dedicated to the status of White Russians in Shanghai from 1920-44.
This project contributes to the historiography of transnational history by connecting diaspora social life and political organisation to the development of refugee governance, rather than treating ‘refugees’ as passive objects of policy. It also challenges blanket narratives of ‘the White Russian diaspora’ by asking whether similar mechanisms of community authority and governance emerged in a European capital and an East Asian treaty-port. Likely counterarguments are that émigré influence on governance is overstated and that émigré sources exaggerate their own political unity. I will address these by comparing personal émigré narratives against administrative records, and by foregrounding the internal fragmentation along class, regional, and political lines that existed within the White Russian diaspora.
The main challenges to this project are the linguistic diversity of the sources, uneven or incomplete archives, and the potential for the geographic scope of the covered communities to expand. The project must therefore keep a tight focus to Paris/Shanghai and use term-consistency checked machine translation to allow for close reading of original-language passages rather than relying on secondary sources.