RUSSIAN
Excerpts from Wikipedia.org
Russians (Russian: Русские—Russkie ) are an East Slavic ethnic group, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries.
According to 2002 census, ethnic Russians make up about 79% of the population of Russia
Origins
Russians predecessors were the medieval East Slavic nation Rus’, who were also the predecessors of Belarusians and Ukrainians.
Some of the tribes that formed the modern Russian ethnicity were of East Slavic origin. Among those tribes were Krivich, Ilmen Slavs, Radimichs and Severians .A genetic study showed that the modern Russian at even though most of the Russian blood is Slavic, they also have some Finno-Ugric blood in them. Finno-Ugric peoples that lived among the Eastern Slavs became assimilated. Among those peoples were Merya and Muromian.
Little is known about the Russians and East Slavs in general prior to approximately 859 AD, the date from which the account in the Primary Chronicle (a history of the Ancient Rus from around 850 to 1110 originally compiled in Kiev about 1113) starts.
By 600 AD, the Slavs had split linguistically into southern, western, and eastern branches. The East Slavs flooded Eastern Europe in two streams. One group of tribes settled along the Dnieper river in what is now Ukraine; they then spread northward to the northern Volga valley, east of modern-day Moscow and westward to the basins of the northern Dniester and the Southern Buh rivers in present-day Moldova and southern Ukraine.
Another group of East Slavs moved from Pomerania to the northeast, where they encountered the Varangians of the Rus' Khaganate and established an important regional centre of Novgorod. The same Slavic population also settled the present-day Tver Oblast and the region of Beloozero. Having reached the lands of the Merya near Rostov, they linked up with the Dnieper group of Slavic migrants.
Emergence of Russian Ethnicity
According to most ethnologists, ethnic Russians originated from the earlier Rus people (East Slavs or Kievan Rus) and gradually evolved into a different ethnicity from the western Rus peoples, who became the modern-day Belarusians and Ukrainians. Early ancestors of the Russians were East Slavic tribes migrating to the East European Plain in the early Middle Ages. Most prominent Slavic tribes in the area of what is now European Russia included Vyatichs, Krivichs, Radimichs, Severians and Ilmen Slavs. By the 11th century, East Slavs assimilited the Finno-Ugric tribes Merya and Muroma and the Baltic tribe Eastern Galindae that used to populate the same area with them (now Central Russia).
Ethnic Russians known as Great Russians (as opposed to White Russians and Little Russians) began to be recognized as a distinct ethnic group in the 15th century. At that time, during the consolidation of the Russian Tsardom as a regional power, they were referred to as Moscow Russians. Between the 12th and 16th century, Russians known as Pomors migrated to Northern Russia and settled the White Sea coasts. As a result of these migrations and Russian conquests, following the liberation from the Mongol Golden Horde domination during the 15th and 16th century, Russians settled the Volga, Urals and Northern Caucasus regions. Between the 17th and 19th century, migrants settled eastwards in the vast, sparsely inhabited areas of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Cossacks played a major role in these territorial expansions and migrations.
Language: Modern Russian gradually evolved from the Old East Slavic and Church Slavonic between the 15th and 18th century. In the First All Union Census of the Soviet Union, in 1926, they were classified as a Narodnost.
Population
Russians are the most numerous ethnic group in Europe and one of the largest in the world with a population of about 140 million people worldwide. Roughly 116 million ethnic Russians live in Russia and about 20 million more live in the neighboring countries. A relatively significant number of Russians, around 3 million, live elsewhere in the world, mostly in the Americas and Western Europe, but also in other places of Eastern Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
Russian Diaspora
The largest number of Russians living outside Russia can be found in former republics of the Soviet Union
The earliest significant wave of ethnic Russian emigration took place in the wake of the Old Believer schism in the 17th century.
A smaller group of Russians (often referred to by Russians as the second emigration or second wave) had also left during World War II, they were refugees, eastern workers, or surviving veterans of the Russian Liberation Army and other anti-communist armed units who had served under the German command and evaded forced repatriation. In the immediate post-World War II period, the largest Russian communities in the emigration were to be found in Germany, Canada, the U.S., United Kingdom and Australia.
Ethnic Russians in China
Ethnic Russians in China (俄罗斯族) form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. They are the descendants of Russians who settled in China, and hold Chinese rather than Russian citizenship.
The first Russians recorded to have settled in China were the Albazin Cossacks who joined the Manchu imperial guard in 1685. Significant immigration began in 1897 with the construction of the China Far East Railway and increased after Russia's October Revolution. In the years after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, many Russians either emigrated to Australia or were repatriated to the Soviet Union; only a minority remained behind in China.
There is a district of Beijing known as Russiatown. It is settled primarily by Russian tradesmen from Siberia. The focal point of the district is a large market. Business signs are mostly in Russian and written in the Cyrillic alphabet, a surprise to many tourists.
Qing troops storming Albazin in 1685.
Albazinians
The Albazinians (Russian: албазинцы, Chinese: 阿尔巴津人) are approximately 250 modern descendants of about fifty Russian Cossacks from Albazin on the Amur River (黑龍江) that were resettled by the Kangxi Emperor in the northeastern periphery of Beijing in 1685. Albazin was a Russian fort on the Amur River, founded by Yerofey Khabarov in 1651. It was stormed by Qing troops in 1685. The majority of its inhabitants agreed to evacuate their families and property to Nerchinsk, whereas several young Cossacks resolved to join the Manchu army and to relocate to Beijing.
Much uncertainty surrounds their migration to China. It is believed that, upon their arrival to the imperial capital, the Albazinians met the descendants of 33 Cossacks that had been captured by the Chinese in 1667 and several Cossacks that had settled in Beijing as early as 1649 and had become the parishioners of the South Roman Catholic Cathedral in the downtown. The veracity of this oral tradition about the pre-Albazinian Russian diaspora in China is open to question.
The Albazinians formed a separate contingent of the imperial guard, known as the "unit of the yellow-stripe standard". Their first leader was Ananiy Uruslanov, or Ulangeri, a Tatar in the employ of the Manchu. The Russian surnames Yakovlev, Dubinin and Romanov were rendered in Chinese as Yao (姚), Du (杜), and Lo (罗). The Cossacks were permitted to marry the widows of the beheaded Chinese criminals.
Although the descendants of the Cossacks intermarried with the Chinese and gradually lost their command of the Russian language, the Russian Orthodox Church regularly sent missions to Beijing, starting in 1713. As a result, the Abazinians came to form the core of the Chinese Orthodox Church. In 1831, Ioakinf Bichurin reported that there were 94 Albazinians in the capital of China. Other Russian travellers noted that, apart from their faith, the Albazinians were thoroughly Sinicized and bore little physical resemblance to the Russians. By the end of the 19th century, their number was estimated at 1,000.
The Boxer Rebellion entailed the persecution of all Christians and Europeans in China. The Russian Orthodox Church claims that 222 Orthodox Chinese were martyred on 11 June 1900, including Father Mitrofan, who was later declared a holy martyr. An Orthodox chapel used to mark the burial place of the Chinese Orthodox martyrs in Beijing. It was destroyed in 1956 at the urging of the Soviet ambassador in China. Although several Albazinian families found it reasonable to move to the Soviet Union during the Cultural Revolution, the bulk of them still reside in Beijing and Tianjin.
Shanghai Russians
The term Shanghai Russians refers to a sizable Russian diaspora that flourished in Shanghai, China between the World Wars. By 1937 it is estimated that there were as many as 25,000 anti-Bolshevik Russians living in the city, the largest European group by far. Most of them had come from the Russian Far East, where, with the support of the Japanese, the Whites had maintained a presence as late as the autumn of 1922.
In the late 19th century, the Russian imperial government was shifting the focus of its investment to Manchuria. As a consequence, China's trade with its northern neighbour soared. As soon as there was a regular ferry service between Vladivostok and Shanghai, the Russian tea merchants started to settle in the commercial capital of China. About 350 Russian citizens resided within the Shanghai International Settlement in 1905. In order to protect their interests, the Russian Consulate was opened in 1896. The old building of the consulate, still occupied by the Russian diplomats, ranks among the Bund's minor landmarks.
The bulk of the Russian exile community relocated to Shanghai from Vladivostok following the fall of the Provisional Priamurye Government at the close of the Russian Civil War. Admiral Stark's squadron alone brought several thousand White Russians from Vladivostok in 1922. Many Harbin Russians, attracted by the booming economy of Shanghai, moved from Manchuria to the coast over the following years. Barred by both distance and money from joining established communities in Paris and Berlin, a large number gravitated towards Shanghai, a freeport at the time, requiring no visa or work-permit for entry. For this same reason it was later to become a refuge for Jews fleeing the Nazis.
Although free, and relatively secure, conditions for the émigrés were far from ideal. For one thing they were all stateless, as the Soviet government had revoked the citizenship of all political exiles in 1921. The only travel document most of them had was the Nansen passport, issued by the League of Nations. Unlike other foreigners in China they did not have the benefits conferred by extraterritoriality, which granted immunity from local laws, complex and almost impossible for foreigners to understand.
This was made worse by the barriers to employment opportunities, which in this international city required a good command of English as a minimum requirement. There were whole families that depended on wives or daughters who made a living as taxi dancers (hired dancing partners). A League of Nations inquiry in 1935 also found that 22% of Russian women aged between sixteen and forty-five in the city were involved in prostitution. Others, both men and women, turned to crime. In 1929 the British-run police force estimated that as much as 85% of the foreign criminals in Shanghai were Russian.
Some did manage to make a go of things, teaching music or French. Other women took work as dress-makers, shop assistants and hairdressers. By slow degrees, and despite the many difficulties, the community not only retained a good deal of cohesion but did begin to flourish, both economically and culturally. By the mid 1930s there were two Russian schools, as well as a variety of cultural and sporting clubs. There were Russian-language newspapers and a radio station. An important part was also played by the local Russian Orthodox Church under the guidance of St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco.
But it was the contribution that Russian women made to the entertainment industry, dancing and otherwise, that gave the city its exotic reputation, noted in the guidebooks of the day. Many sought a way out through connections with foreigners, either as marriage partners or as mistresses. A fictionalized portrayal of their predicament is presented in the James Ivory film The White Countess (2005). Those who were left became the focus of earnest campaigns by the League of Nations and others to end the "white slave trade."
The Shanghai Russians survived through the difficult days of the Japanese occupation, but left in the end with the advance of the Communists. They were forced to flee, first to a refugee camp on the island of Tubabao in the Philippines and then mainly to the United States and Australia. The Russian monuments of Shanghai did not escape the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. The Pushkin statue, funded by public subscription and unveiled on the centenary of the poet's death, was smashed by the Red Guards in 1966. It was subsequently restored in 1987, and remains the only monument to a foreign writer in China. The Orthodox Cathedral of St. Nicholas, consecrated and elaborately frescoed in 1933, was converted into a washing machine factory, and is now a restaurant.
Chinese People in Russia
Chinese people in Russia numbered 34,577 according to the 2002 census.
Chinese settlement in what is now the Russian Far East is believed to have begun as early as the 7th century A.D.; however, under the 1860 Convention of Peking, China's Qing Dynasty ceded these eastern territories, then known as East Tartary, to Russia. Large-scale Chinese immigration to territory actually under the control of the Russian Empire did not begin until the late 19th century. From 1878 until the early 1880s, thousands of Hui Chinese escaped from Xinjiang, Gansu, and Ningxia over the Tian Shan Mountains to Central Asia, fleeing persecution in the aftermath of the Hui Minorities' War; they became known as the Dungans. Separately, other groups of migrants, mostly Han Chinese, went to the Russian Far East.
Starting from the time of Russia's 1917 October Revolution and continuing up until the 1950s-1960s Sino-Soviet split, many aspiring Chinese Communists went to study in Moscow, including Liu Shaoqi, future President of the People's Republic of China, and Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek. There was a great deal of factional infighting among them, and a group was labeled as Trotskyists.
The most recent wave of immigration traces its origin back to 1982, when Hu Yaobang visited Harbin and approved the resumption of cross-border trade; immigration remained sluggish until 1988, when China and the Soviet Union signed a visa-free tourism agreement. However, visa-free travel was terminated only six years later.
