Archive for the ‘harbin & shanghai’ Category
Czesław Miłosz relates the story of an independently wealthy Warsaw Jew named Felix, who had taken up residence in Vilnius’s Hotel Europa*. In 1939 Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had discovered just enough friendship for one another to partition Poland between them along the euphemistic “peace boundary” (or Molotov-Ribbentrop line), and Felix was now seemingly trapped in Vilnius within an enlarged Soviet Union. Moreover, in the summer of 1940 he was relieved of his moveable assets by a duplicitous lawyer acquaintance. However, Felix found a way out by Trans-Siberian rail across the continent-sized USSR to its Far-East border with Japanese-occupied Manchuria. This was even less feasible than it may sound, as the Soviets permitted such travel only to those with a Japanese visa – and by mid-1940 it was no longer possible to acquire such a visa legitimately.
However, in Vilnius lived a rabbi named Silberstein with preternatural gifts of prescience: while exit visas were still to be had, he had done the rounds of the overseas consulates and filled his passport with as wide an array of stamps as possible. There also existed in Vilnius at that time extremely gifted illustrators, graphic designers and printers. Rabbi Silberstein’s Japanese visa therefore served as a template and could be duplicated as needed but, as Miłosz writes, “it was marked by one defect: no one in the city knew the Japanese alphabet, and therefore could have guessed that each visa contained the name of its first owner. When the five-hundredth Silberstein passed over the Manchurian frontier, the Japanese began to worry…”
Whether this part of the story is apocryphal in whole or in part, Felix did escape to Shanghai and thence via Australia to USA, only to be killed in a motor vehicle accident in Hawaii.
It is also likely that the good rabbi’s original bona fide visa was one of those issued by Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese Vice-Consul in Kaunas in independent Lithuania, and one of the Righteous Among The Nations. His story can be read on Wikipedia.
*see the essay collection Proud To Be A Mammal: Essays on War, Faith and Memory, pub Penguin, 2010.
The Manchurian city of Harbin, or Kharbin as it tends to be transliterated by Russians, became known as Belyi Kharbin, or “White Harbin”, to the Soviets, who depicted it as the refuge of the reactionary and royalist White Guard and its sympathisers. The history of Russian Harbin is much more complex and varied than this only partly true Soviet characterisation would suggest.
For starters, of course, Harbin was a pre-Revolutionary railway city when there was no such thing as Reds or Whites. The Russian community was founded in 1898 as the hub of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway. The early settlers, therefore, were not politicised but were frontiersmen and pioneers, working on the railway and attracting all the support facilities that the town needed – builders to create housing, technical experts, service professionals such as doctors and teachers, shopkeepers and restaurant owners. The February 1913 census of Harbin enumerated 34,313 Russians in Harbin (Kharbintsy), almost exactly half the town’s total population of 68,549. In addition, there were 5,032 mostly Russian Jews and 2,556 Poles. Like many new settlements, there was out-migration as well – for instance, some engineers and labourers worked on a temporary contract and then left Harbin, while other Russians evacuated during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/05 – but the general trend was incoming, with an increasing influx in the four or five years up to the census date.
Of course, this settlement was greatly boosted by the wave of incoming White Russians after the Revolution. Again, it is important to note that many of these used Harbin as a stopping-off place en route to elsewhere. Perhaps between 100,000 and 200,000 Russians arrived in Harbin during the 1920s but the settled Russian population was smaller – for instance, there are precise counts of 55,959 in 1927 and 55,924 in 1935, showing just how many were in transit.
But these figures also conceal significant differences within the community: although there were indeed plenty of veteran White officers and soldiers, royalists and old intelligentsia, not all of Harbin’s 55,000 or so Russians in the late 1920s and early 1930s were Whites. The situation is complex. In September 1920, the Russians in Harbin had become officially stateless and, to compound matters, Sino-Soviet agreements of 1924 decreed that henceforth only Chinese and Soviet citizens could work on the Chinese Eastern Railway and in its extensive ancillary operations in the city. This was the tipping point for Harbin Russians. They were faced with a choice – either accept Soviet or Chinese citizenship, or remain stateless and become unemployed. This was the point at which the Russian community in Harbin really split into opposing political camps.
The situation did not improve. In 1935, the USSR sold its share in the Chinese Eastern Railway to the government of what in 1932 had become the Japanese Manchurian puppet state of Manchukuo. At this date, the majority of Soviet citizens, including those who had opted for citizenship after 1924 and often held only provisional Soviet passports, moved to USSR. The movement was not auspicious. Their fate was to become immediately suspect in the eyes of the Soviet state. In September 1937 the NKVD moved to repress the 25,000 or so Harbiners in USSR. Some were accused of being Japanese spies, some were regarded as White Guard veterans, others still as having engaged in bourgeois professions or occupations such as owning a hotel or being involved in business. They were deported to labour camps or executed.
Significant numbers of Russians still remained in Japanese Harbin. They were obliged to register with the Japanese Bureau for the Affairs of Russian Émigrés. By October 1936, there were 25,942 Russian Harbiners on its books (plus some 1,952 Soviet officials and other citizens). By 1942, this number had risen to 36,711. This rise probably reflects improved registration more than incoming migration or natural increase.
In August 1945, the Soviet Army defeated Japan and occupied Manchukou, receiving at least a tentative welcome from many Harbiners, exhausted as they were by their decades of exile and insecurity. The latest turn of events was not auspicious either, however: the Soviets were keenly interested in the voluminous files of the Bureau for the Affairs of Russian Émigrés and some 15,000 Harbiners were promptly arrested, deported to labour camps or summarily executed. Those not arrested were permitted to apply for Soviet passports. China regained control of Manchuria in 1949. In 1954, the USSR granted Harbin Russians the right to be repatriated to such virgin land destinations as Kazakhstan and Altai. Some Harbiners took up this offer, while the remainder, sensing the closing pages of the final chapter of Russian Harbin, chose to emigrate, heading overseas to Australia, USA and various South American countries.
Today surviving Harbiners and their descendants form communities in Moscow, Novosibirsk, Omsk and Yekaterinburg, as well as in diaspora cities such as San Francisco and Sydney. There is a rising interest in the history of Russian Harbin, including among genealogists. There are resources available for Harbin family history research but these are dispersed – there are archival and library holdings in, for example, Moscow, St Petersburg and Khabarovsk in the Russian Far East. We welcome enquiries from researchers investigating their Harbin Russian family trees and are available for professional research assignments in Russia.
From the 1842 Treaty of Nanking onwards, Shanghai had been a British and subsequently international city planted on Chinese soil. The International Settlement in Shanghai, with its neighbour the French Concession, was its own jurisdiction: as well as existing outside Chinese systems of justice and taxation, it developed its own defence, in the form of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, and police, the Shanghai Municipal Police Force. Moreover, as a free port, it was open to all, which explains its pull to those not in possession of passport or visa during the great European crises of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Nazism. Even before stateless refugees arrived in Shanghai, however, it had a thriving Jewish community.
First to arrive was a small but influential community of Baghdadi Jews, wealthy trading families such as the Ezras, Hardoons, Kadoories and Sassoons whose business networks extended from Cairo to Bombay to Singapore to Hong Kong and Shanghai. These established branches in Shanghai within just a few years of the 1842 Treaty – for example, the Sassoons opened their first Shanghai office in 1845. Some of these families were British subjects, some Ottoman (before WW1) or Iraqi (after WW1).
The Baghdadi Jews founded Mizrahi or Sephardic synagogues in the International Settlement:
Beth-El, Peking Road, 1887 Shearith Israel, Seward Road, 1900 Ohel Rachel, Seymour Road, 1920 Beth Aharon, Museum Road, 1927
This development pattern shows the westward drift of the Jewish community from the densely built and increasingly overcrowded neighbourhoods of the eastern riverfront.
The same movement was also shown by the German and Russian Jews, who arrived in Shanghai somewhat later – from the 1870s – and tended to follow more modest occupations, running bars and cafes and small hotels, as well as engaging in trade and clerical work. They set up Ashkenazi synagogues:
Ohel Moishe, Seward Road, 1906 Ohel Moishe (sic), Ward Road, 1927 prayer house, Seymour Road, 1934 prayer house, Rue Bourgeat, 1937 New Synagogue, Rue de la Tour, 1941
For family historians, it is worth knowing that there have been two Ashkenazi synagogues with the same name at different locations within the International Settlement.
Sakhalin Island, in the Russian Far East, north of Japan, was of interest to the Tsarist Empire for a multitude of reasons: its proximity to the mouth of the Amur River, its mineral reserves, its strategic location in the push and shove of its relations with Japan, its potential value as a hub in the development of a navigable northern sea route which would join the sea ports of European Russia, such as Archangel and Murmansk, over the top of Siberia, to Manchuria. Russia was keen to colonise the island but it was not a natural destination for settlers – even discounting its utter remoteness, its climate and landscape were not exactly hospitable. Russia therefore pursued its traditional policy of establishing a penal colony, which it did from 1857.
Chekhov visited Sakhalin in July 1890 and, fascinatingly, in order to understand the human geography of the island, conducted his own personal, unofficial census of the population. He printed his own census forms on which to record the place of residence, the name, the status of the individual (convict, exile or “settler”, peasant formerly exiled, or free person), relationship to head of household, age, religion, place of birth, year of arrival on Sakhalin, occupation, literacy and marital status. He covered the island singlehandedly over three months. The Island of Sakhalin, the fine book that resulted from his stay, was published in Russia in 1895 and is available in an English language translation by Luba and Michael Terpak.
The Russian presence in Sakhalin was barely 30 years old when Chekhov visited and the writer found a frontier society with all the usual trimmings (drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, boredom etc). A distinction was maintained between convicts and exiles, the former being criminals (including army deserters) and the latter ex-convicts. The exiles were also termed “settlers”, as if they had come of their own free will. After 10 or six years, an exile was freed and legally acquired the status of a “peasant formerly exiled”. A “free person” was an individual who had voluntarily arrived in Sakhalin: this category covered wives and family of a convict or exile, but also traders, seafarers and the civil and prison service administration.
The political exiles came from all across the Russian Empire. Chekhov mentions Finns, Polish Catholics, Ukrainians and Armenians from Yerevan guberniya, for instance. Many of the other types of resident were vague or evasive about such details as their place of birth, their age or their date of arrival on Sakhalin. Not a few were unsure of their names, or had acquired new names. Chekhov lists the following surnames:
Besprozvaniya – “Nameless” Bezbozhny – “Godless” Bezotechestva – “Countryless” Boganov – “Godgiven” Koloda – “Fetter” Nepomnyashchy – “Unremembered” Neizvestnovo Zvaniya – “Man With No Name” Zamozdrya – “Behind Walls”
Note that these are the actual surnames in use, not the answers to Chekhov’s questions.
Chekhov also notes that marriage was not in favour anywhere on the island:
“Nowhere else in Russia is illicit marriage so widely and notoriously prevalent, and nowhere else does it take the peculiar form it does on Sakhalin. Illicit marriage or, as it is called here, free cohabitation, does not find objectors among either the officials or the priesthood but, on the contrary, it receives encouragement and is sanctioned. There are settlements where not even one legal marriage is encountered… Free couples… beget children for the colony and therefore there are no reasons to pass separate laws for them at registration”.
Siberia inhabits the popular imagination as a vast penal colony stretching from taiga to tundra, horizon to godforsaken horizon; a journey’s end of deportation and exile; a kind of limbo in which the politically unacceptable were quarantined for indefinite but invariably soul-destroying periods and permafrozen into powerlessness by the Russian state, whether imperial or Stalinist.
And all this is true. But there is another and paradoxically contrary Siberia which coexists with the first and which is a surprising land of opportunity and optimism. From the early 19th century, migrants from across European Russia began to see and seek out the potential of colonising the sparsely populated but resource-rich lands east of the Urals, where Asian Russia begins. In Siberia, the long controlling arms of the Russian Orthodox Church and the centrist state did not always reach, and land was available for the taking rather than inevitably belonging to a prince or count or some other absentee landlord. So pioneers, from freed serfs and landless peasants to dissenting Old Believers, continued to push eastwards in their horse-drawn carts, beyond Yekaterinburg and Omsk, towards the Far East. The opening of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891 suddenly accelerated this flow. By 1899 the Railway stretched as far as Chita, subject to a Lake Baikal ferry crossing from Irkutsk.
In 1896, following a concession from China, work began on a spur of the Trans-Siberian Railway called the Far East Railway or Chinese Eastern Railway. This left Russian territory after Chita, cut across Manchuria and through the city of Harbin, re-entering Russian territory just outside the port of Vladivostok. The railway was completed in 1903 and prominent amongst its engineers and workers were an estimated 7,000 Poles.
Poles were no strangers to Siberia and the Far East. Thousands had been deported there following uprisings against Russian rule in 1831 and 1861-63. Poor peasants from the Kingdom of Poland emigrated to Siberia in search of land. By the start of WW1, there were perhaps 70,000 Poles living in Siberia and Manchuria, with a notable community, thriving and organised, in Harbin.
The First World War increased this number, with the arrival both of prisoners of war and of evacuated peasants from the Russian Polish gubernia of Lublin, Łomża and Siedlce. The subsequent Revolution and Civil War brought further refugees including the so-called Trans-Amurians, Polish gentry who had settled beyond the Amur River in 1910 and fled the Bolsheviks for Harbin in 1917; and the remnants of the 5th Siberian Division of Fusiliers which escaped the Bolshevik forces and were evacuated from Harbin, via Vladivostok, in the summer of 1920.
Most of the Poles in eastern Siberia and the Far East removed to newly independent Poland between 1921 and 1925, although a small community remained in Harbin, Manchuria in the 1930s. In Poland, those who returned from Siberia were known as Sybiraki irrespective of their own, or their family’s, origins as colonists, exiled political prisoners, PoWs or wartime refugees. While some went on to enjoy successful careers in the young Poland, other veterans could not assimilate into the new post-War society and remained nostalgic for Siberia.
Family history research in Siberia is, needless to say, not straightforward. Bluebird Research has a professional researcher able to make searches but the prospects of success very much depend on the quality and precision of the background information available to us at the start of the investigation. We are happy to provide a free opinion. Additionally, we are always interested in increasing our own knowledge and understanding and would be delighted to hear from family historians who have undertaken successful searches in Siberia or Manchuria.
In 1947/48, up to 6,000 White Russian émigrés returned voluntarily from Shanghai to the Soviet Union.
These were the families of Tsarist army officers and other loyalists who had left Russia after the Revolution in 1917 and headed due east to Vladivostok, Harbin and Mukden (now Shenyang). Some had taken a more southerly route, via Tihwa (where some settled temporarily in the aftermath of the Revolution), Lanchow and Chungking. While many remained in the largely Russian city of Harbin, and some refugees settled in Peking, Sinkiang and Tientsin, many headed by road or rail to the autonomous city of Shanghai where, by the mid-1920s, the Russian community may have numbered as many as 35,000. Numbers are uncertain – the official 1926 census of the foreign population of Shanghai estimated only 5,000 White Russians (whereas figures for other nationalities are quite precise – e.g. 6,910 British, 3,418 American etc). The true number may have been at some point mid-way. The reason for the uncertainty is partly that the White Russians did not settle solely in the International District and the French Concession but lived across the city and, more especially, that as a stateless people they had no diplomatic representation and no single community organisation.
More White Russians arrived in Shanghai in 1932, following the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Many initially took jobs as manual labourers, working in warehouses and kitchens, to survive. However, Shanghai was a cosmopolitan city and White Russian culture re-asserted itself and began to thrive. As well as exile and reduced circumstances, the White Russians also suffered from being stateless; while some took Chinese citizenship or, in the case of women, married Europeans or Americans and acquired their citizenship, many remained in a state of diplomatic limbo.
In 1941 Soviet Russia joined the Allies fighting Nazi Germany in WW2, its Great Patriotic War, and this, and the defeat of Japan, made a return to their homeland begin to look more attractive to homesick and stateless White Russian exiles in Shanghai. The tipping point came when, in the summer of 1947, in a seeming gesture of reconciliation, Stalin offered Soviet citizenship to all Russian émigrés in the Far East. Repatriation began in August 1947, with sailings to Nakhodka and Vladivostok, from whence the returnees boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway. The homecoming was not as the more optimistic repatriates had expected and there were no freedoms to enjoy. In exchanging statelessness for Soviet citizenship, they found that they were settled against their will in industrial cities such as Kazan, Kemerovo, Molotov (today re-named Perm) and Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg again).
But it was a case of a rock and a hard place. In May 1949 the Chinese Communists took Shanghai and the inter-War “Paris of the East”, with its clubs and cabarets, its lively amd prosperous international community, which had briefly revitalised by the period of American occupation from September 1945, was doomed. Under the aegis of the International Refugee Organisation, between 5,000 and 6,500 White Russians – those who had refused to be repatriated to the Soviet Union, including some 1,500 especially vulnerable who had taken up and then quickly renounced Soviet citizenship – were temporarily resettled at an abandoned US naval base at Guiuan on Tubabao Island in the Philippines, from whence in early 1951 they made their way to San Francisco, USA.
White Russian family history is therefore vastly complicated. Successfully tracing back family lines from home in the diaspora, often via a temporary residence in Western Europe or the Far East, to Russia is a difficult business. Records for Shanghai and Harbin, for example, are piecemeal but do exist. For example, in the case of Shanghai, there survive more than 30,000 registration cards for Russians resident in Shanghai circa 1938-45 and more than 50,000 personnel files are now held in the Russian regional state archive in Khabarovsk.
Alternatively, if you know the exact place of origin within Russia (or Ukraine or Belarus), it may be possible to leap over the difficult years of the C20th and begin research at archives or register offices in Russia but this is not always straightforward either, due to access restrictions.
We are always interested in White Russian family history research stories, especially those with a Harbin or Shanghai connection, and would be pleased to hear from you if you are willing to share information. Our professional research services cover Russian family history in Harbin and Shanghai and we welcome enquiries and provide free assessments.