The Legacy of the Cold War: Post-Colonial Identity among Former Russophone Residents of Harbin

The Legacy of the Cold WarPost-Colonial Identity among Former Russophone Residents of Harbin Laurie Manchester (bio) On Easter Sunday in 1954, Soviet officials in Manchuria announced that for the first time since 1935, all Soviet citizens were eligible to repatriate to the USSR. Most of the Russophone population took out Soviet citizenship in 1946, after the Red Army liberated Manchuria from the Japanese. This population consisted of those who fled to China during and after the Russian Civil War, those who migrated to Manchuria to work on the Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) after it was founded by the imperial state in 1898, or their descendants, who were often the product of intermarriages between the two groups. Approximately 80 percent of Manchurian Russians decided to repatriate to the Soviet Union.1 The rest migrated to capitalist countries, mainly Australia, the United States, Argentina, and Brazil. Once the right to return was announced in 1954, the Russian diaspora in Manchuria was split into two hostile camps. Although Russophones were never formally expelled by the Chinese communist state, by 1966 approximately 1,000 remained. Roughly 100,000 repatriated from China to the USSR, beginning in 1954—the largest ever repatriation of Russophone End Page 327 individuals born abroad, much larger than the few thousand émigrés who repatriated from European countries to the Soviet Union after World War II.2 This article examines the legacy of the Cold War, and the persistence of diaspora, for former residents of Harbin in communist and capitalist countries, after they reunited 35 years after their departure from Harbin. Harbin, the capital of "Russian" Manchuria, was unique from other cities to which White Army refugees flocked for a number of reasons. First, Harbin was run as a Russian colonial zone on land leased from the Chinese government, with its own police and laws, until 1920. Though never technically part of the Russian Empire, it thus resembled Poland, Finland, the Baltic countries, and Bessarabia, former parts of the Russian Empire that were not under Bolshevik control before World War II. Like these regions, Harbin possessed a Russian infrastructure, including Russianlanguage schools and higher educational institutions. But unlike other former parts of the Russian Empire, Russophones remained the cultural elite even after the Japanese occupied Manchuria in 1931. It was possible for Russophone individuals in Harbin to engage in virtually all white-collar professions without learning another language, and those who worked for the CER lived prosperously until 1935, when the Japanese bought the railroad. Because the Soviet Union operated the CER with the Chinese from 1924 until 1935, Harbin was also the only place in the world where stateless Russophone refugees, Soviet specialists, and Russophones who had migrated to the region before 1917 lived side by side. All of its Chinese residents who interacted with Russian speakers—mainly through employment or their work as vendors—spoke at least pidgin Russian, and educated Chinese often sent their children to Russian-language schools. Perceived racial differences prevented assimilation of Russophones into the indigenous population. In essence, Harbin was the closest replica to imperial Russia in the world between 1917 and 1945. When the Red Army arrived in August 1945, Manchuria underwent Sovietization. All émigré organizations, including educational institutions, were closed and replaced with Soviet equivalents, and up to 10,000 Manchurian Russians were sent to the Gulag for having engaged in anticommunist activities or having worked for the Japanese. While Sovietization also took place among the smaller émigré populations in newly communist countries in Eastern Europe following World War II, many had already fled End Page 328 by the time the Red Army arrived or subsequently moved westward. The last Soviet school in Harbin shut its doors in 1962, when the Soviet Union, after five years of worsening relations with China, closed its consulate in the city. Sovietization in Manchuria did not, however, entail religion: all religious institutions remained functioning. Russian remained the lingua franca of Harbin until the early 1950s, when the Chinese began to assert primacy. Although Russians dominated the Russophone population of Harbin both before and after 1917, Harbin was home to almost every national minority from the Russian Empire. Most were educated in Russianlanguage schools...