Refugee history and refugees in Russia during and after the First World War

P. Gatrell

Notwithstanding their huge numbers in the modern world, refugees have attracted remarkably little attention from historians. Tony Judt, for example, began his much-admired magnum opus with a discussion of the post-1945 refugee crisis, but omitted to examine the population displacement associated with the Hungarian revolution, the conflicts in Cyprus and Yugoslavia, and the collapse of the Soviet Union [Judt 2005]. Eric Hobsbawm's magisterial history had little to say about refugees [Hobsbawm 1995]. One notable exception was Mark Mazower's interpretive history of twentieth-century Europe [Mazower 1998]. Where refugees do figure in the pages of history books, there is still a tendency to portray them as miserable flotsam and jetsam, as inescapable `victims' of war or revolution, not as deliberative and dynamic actors. Historians have been slow to wake up to the crucial insight that emerges from scholarship in the social and political sciences, namely that states make refugees, but that refugees can also make states [Soguk 1999; Ga- trell 2013; White 2017]. This alone is a sufficiently compelling reason to put refugees into the historiographical mainstream.

To be sure, important contributions were made by specialists around the middle of the 20th century. Sir John Hope Simpson and colleagues contributed a fundamental overview of `the refugee problem' in contemporary history. Simpson had served in the Indian Civil Service before becoming vice-president of the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission in 1926. Simpson urged European states to assist White Russian refugees who remained stranded in China following the Russian Revolution. He held out little hope of resolving the Jewish refugee crisis, given the barriers erected by Nazi Germany on the one hand and potential countries of settlement on the other. But by outlining the possibilities of economic progress in Eastern Europe, particularly agricultural improvement, Simpson believed that something might be done to discourage antisemitism and alleviate Jewish poverty, thereby helping to stem the potential outflow of refugees [Simpson 1939].

Two eminent Russian-Jewish scholars were also at the forefront of scholarship at this time. Eugene Kulischer wrote an informative account of population movements in early twentieth-century Europe. He interpreted inter-war instability in terms of frustrated migration; `superfluous' populations were unable to find an outlet for their labour in Western Europe or the world beyond Europe. During the war `the primitive way of promoting the passage of migratory currents came to be re-established. Frontiers where each immigrant had once been carefully filtered were crossed by millions whose passports were guns and whose visas were bullets'. According to Kulischer, Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union `destroyed the dam which had barred the human ocean of Eurasia from the rest of Europe'. Kulischer's anxieties translated into concern about overpopulation in Germany, following the influx of German `expellees' (Vertriebene), and in Eastern Europe. Land reform was one solution, but its effects were vitiated by the large number of `claimants'. The solution was to encourage birth control and planned emigration [Kulischer 1948, pp. 255, 290, 319-325].

Joseph Schechtman brought his knowledge of European history to bear on contemporary population movements in South Asia and the Middle East, with a series of books in the late 1940s through the early 1960s that advocated what he termed `permanent constructive solutions rather than palliative measures', organised population transfer being one possible `solution'. Schechtman nailed his colours to the mast by arguing that reset-tlement and integration rather than repatriation offered the best way forward. (He was particularly dismissive of Palestinian claims to a right of return.) His contribution is interesting on two counts: first, because he argued that history ought not to weigh heavily on the mind of refugees, in other words, refugees should transcend the past in order to concentrate on the future; and, secondly, because of his willingness to provide a global and comparative perspective to population displacement -- a way of joining the dots [Schechtman 1946; Schechtman 1949; Schechtman 1963; Ferrara 2011].

The First World War

During the First World War, civilians no less than military personnel experienced mass displacement. Although most informed observers anticipated a short war, the First World War lasted more than four years. European armies were expected to engage in military manoeuvres, without substantial costs for civilians. This vision quickly evaporated. Civilians no less than military personnel experienced war as displacement, as they were caught up in the fighting across large swathes of territory on the European mainland. This eruption caused non-combatants to avoid enemy occupation including the risk of conscription (or worse) by moving to the interior. In addition, the fraught conditions of prolonged war predisposed states to engage in the mass deportation of civilians who were believed to threaten freedom of military manoeuvre and to undermine the war effort more directly through espionage or other subversive activities. The Austro-Hungarian authorities targeted ethnic Ruthenian, Bosnian Serb, Slovenian and Italian-speaking minorities on the grounds of their imputed disloyalty. In 1914, Russia's military commanders deported from occupied East Prussia much of the German population which had not already fled westward to the German interior [Gatrell and Zhvanko, eds 2017]. In the Caucasus, Turkish military and political leaders targeted hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Armenian subjects as a potential `security threat'. Justifying their actions in terms of military necessity, the Ottoman state massacred Armenians indiscriminately or deported them to the remote parts of Anatolia and Mesopotamia. The historian Ronald Grigor Suny argues that the Young Turks and their supporters were `affectively disposed' towards treating the Armenian minority as a threat to the state, and that the First World War provided context and pretext for mass deportation [Suny 2015].

For these reasons, sites of displacement extended from Belgium to Armenia, taking in France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Prussia, the Russian Empire and Serbia. The German occupation of Belgium, France, Poland and Lithuania prompted the mass flight of civilians, as did Russia's invasion of East Prussia in 1914. In Anglo-American historiography, the war has tended to be informed by images of stalemate on the Western front and the combination of terror and boredom that trench warfare induced. But in other parts of the continent the experience was quite different. Here, armies and civilians were regularly on the move. One important component of this hectic mobility was the refugee crisis that afflicted Russia. Mention has already been made of civilian Armenians, many of whom made their way into Russian territory in order to evade Ottoman persecution.

In the Russian Empire the number of displaced civilians reached three million by summer 1915 and may have climbed to as high as six or seven million by the time Russia left the war in November 1917 [Volkov 1930, pp. 71-72]. As with data on prisoners of war, the figures do not reveal the number of refugees who never made it to safety. Refugees travelled huge distances, many of them venturing to the Urals, Siberia, Central Asia and the Far East. Nor was this displacement confined to 1914 and 1915; for example, fresh contingents of Latvian refugees arrived on Russian territory in August 1917 and again in February 1918 following the renewed German advance. Refugees accounted for around five per cent of the total population of the Russian empire on the eve of its collapse, and outnumbered the wage-earning population in the industrial economy. Eugene Kulischer suggested that `in two short years the movement of refugees and evacuees was as considerable as it had been during the migration to Siberia over a 25-year period, 1885-1909' [Kulischer 1948, p. 32]. Most of these refugees did not cross an internationally recognised border; they were and remained subjects of the Tsar. How far the Tsarist state was responsible for their plight and their relief became a defining issue for Russia's wartime politics, and a manifestation of a broad social calamity [Lohr 2003; Sanborn 2005].

In August 1915 Russian government ministers issued a decree stipulating that, `refugees (bezhentsy) are those persons who have abandoned localities threatened or already occupied by the enemy, or who have been evacuated by order of the military or civil authority from the zone of military operations' (in official parlance these were termed `forced migrants', vyselentsy). The statement added that refugees included `emigrants (vykhodtsy) from states hostile to Russia', testimony to the presence on Russian soil of Ukrainians (galichane) from Austrian Galicia, as well as Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire [Gatrell 1999, pp. 12-13]. The attempt to identify the refugee population for administrative and legal purposes betrayed uncertainties about the causes of internal population displacement. Was it caused by enemy troops who behaved in an uncivilised fashion, provoking civilians to lose a sense of self-control, or by the Tsar's troops who targeted particular groups? According to one explanation, `as soon as our troops withdraw, the entire population becomes confused and runs away'. Sometimes `voluntary' departure was the only alternative to almost certain conscription by the enemy. Civilians were also persuaded to leave their homes by the fear of being terrorised by enemy troops. Nor were these fears misplaced: `rumours are rife that the Germans have behaved abominably towards the local population'. These verdicts generally supported the view that population displacement was the product of mass panic by civilians; only a minority were believed to have taken a considered decision to leave.

Mass displacement was by no means solely dictated by a fearful civilian response to real or anticipated punitive action on the part of the enemy. The Russian general staff disposed of sweeping powers to enforce the resettlement of civilians, where this strategy was deemed appropriate. Army regulations permitted the military authorities to assume absolute control over all affairs in the theatre of operations. Civilians were sometimes removed indiscriminately from districts close to the front. `We didn't want to move, we were chased away ... we were forced to burn our homes and crops, we weren't allowed to take our cattle with us', in the words of one group of refugees. In vain did Latvian political leaders and relief workers protest that it made no sense to deport civilians of all ages from the province of Kurland: `old men, youths under the age of 15, women with young children -- none of these groups serve any military purpose and cannot render any assistance to the enemy'. In public, the Minister of the Interior maintained that military behaviour had no bearing on refugeedom (bezhenstvo), which in his opinion was `caused by a desire for self-preservation'. Liberal commentators openly accused the army of forcing civilians to leave their homes. Jews, Poles, Germans and other groups were particularly vulnerable, but gypsies too were deported from the vicinity of the front in July and August 1915. The Russian army also engaged in the deportation of Kazakhs and others from Central Asia, in the wake of the great revolt in 1916, turning them into refugees [Happel 2010]. So widespread were the army's tactics that a leading tsarist dignitary observed that `refugees' constituted a minority of the displaced population, compared to the hundreds of thousands of those who had been forcibly displaced [Gatrell 1999, pp. 31-32].

It comes as no surprise that historians who conducted research in the Soviet Union contributed very little to our knowledge of refugees. Refugees could not easily be accommodated in the official discourse that privileged the experiences, actions, and consciousness of the proletariat and the poor peasantry. For decades the only publication of note in Russian relating to population displacement in the era of the First World War was a brief and tantalising encyclopaedia entry on `refugeedom' by Abram Kirzhnits in the first edition of the Soviet historical encyclopaedia [Kirzhnits 1927]. Kirzhnits was at pains to emphasise that civilians quit their homes in Russia's western borderlands on account of enemy invasion in the first phase of the war, but that mass population displacement also resulted from the concerted actions of the tsarist army in deporting civilians from Grodno, Kovno, Kurland and other provinces. Kirzhnits termed this a `bacchanalia of forced migration' (bakkhanaliia vysleneniia) that ensnared Poles, Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Belarusians and Ukrainians. Kirzhnits relied upon official and semi-official accounts to paint a picture of the scale of the refugee crisis and the most notable organisations involved in relief work, including the assistance provided by trade unions in Moscow, Riga, Samara, and elsewhere. The sources remained buried in the archives of pre-revolutionary government and non-governmental institutions. But these institutions evaporated -- or were eviscerated -- and this helped foster historical amnesia about refugeedom.

Little work of note on the refugee crisis appeared in the Soviet era. One exception proves the rule: the memoirs of Evgenii A. Nikol'skii were written in exile and subsequently deposited in the Hoover Institution. His memoirs include around one hundred pages on `Refugees during the Great War [Nikol'skii 1934]. Nikol'skii had first-hand experience of assisting refugees as they travelled in summer 1915 from the vicinity of Kobrin/ Kobryn in Russian Poland, around 25 km from the front line, where many thousands had been kept in temporary refugee camps, to the Russian interior. Shortly afterwards he was engaged by Severopomoshch' (`Northern Aid'), part of the bureaucratic apparatus created by the Ministry of the Interior as a rival to the public organisations that were operating in the vicinity of the front (see below).

Post-Soviet scholars have begun to redress the balance. A. N. Kurtsev contributed a series of articles on the refugee crisis [Kurtsev 1999a; Kurtsev 1999b], and others have followed his pioneering example [Tumanova 2012]. Liubov Zhvanko has provided the first fully-worked out study of the causes and consequences of population displacement in Ukraine during the First World War and the era of revolution and civil war, painting a convincing picture of a society that was turned upside down during the era of war and revolution. She pays close attention to the creation of the category of `refugee', the actions of the multiple agencies that intervened on behalf of refugees in Ukraine, and the interaction of refugees and host communities across the revolutionary divide of 1917 [Zhvanko 2009; Zhvanko 2012].

However, non-Soviet historians were equally culpable of neglecting refugees in Russia. The `new social history' of the revolution concentrated upon organised social forces, whose actions impinged directly on the existing forms of state power and whose spokesmen left behind compelling accounts of political struggle. The dominant narratives of revolution in Western scholarship found little room for social activity that could not easily be accommodated within the framework of conventional political organisations. Refugees were overlooked in these narratives; they just did not `fit in'. Social historians were unwilling or unable to understand the significance of refugees in modern history. Only recently has this begun to be redressed [Gatrell 1999; Siegelbaum and Moch 2014].

The plight of refugees in the Russian Empire first came to the attention of the English-speaking world in 1915 when the Englishman John Pollock published an article in the Fortnightly Review. Pollock (1878-1963) belonged by virtue of his privileged background to the British elite. During the First World War he served as chief commissioner of the Great Britain-Poland Fund (originally the `Great Britain to Poland and Galicia Committee'). In July 1915 he travelled to Kiev under the auspices of the Russian Red Cross. His article described `a pool of human misery [...] a world apart from anything known before [.] its inhabitants are of one class, one type, one character, and they have but one name. They are the Refugees.' He added that this `wailing multitude [has] reached the point of complete apathy.' Most of them were Ruthenian peasants from Galicia who `in everything tend towards Russian culture' (sic). Pollock evoked the idea of the early medieval ``wandering of the peoples' as the only equivalent to this mass movement of population. Deploying another cultural reference, he described a baby at its mother's breast; the woman had `a face like Michelangelo's Delphic Sybil on the Sistine Chapel.' The only crumb of comfort was the delivery of hot meals and baths by a British committee headed by a Yorkshire engineer who had narrowly `escaped from death on the Galician oilfields.' There was also a promise of help from the Tatiana Committee (see below). In general, Pollock's account was characterised by a patronising tone, reinforcing a sense that refugees might be helped, but could not help themselves. This, and his repertoire of cultural allusions, makes it worthy of note [Pollock 1915].

A more extensive and informative account of refugees in Russia appeared in 1916, penned by British nurse Violetta Thurstan (1879-1978). Thurstan joined the British Red Cross in 1913 and spent several weeks helping the war wounded in Belgium until she transferred to the Russian Red Cross. She wrote of her experiences in two books including a unique account in English, The People Who Run: the Tragedy of the Refugees in Russia. After leaving Russia she returned to Belgium, where she was wounded, before taking up a position as a hospital nurse in Macedonia where she remained until the end of the war. After the war she turned her attention to other pursuits, but she did not abandon her interest in refugees. In 1923 she took a post with the Egyptian government as director of Bedouin industries in Arab refugee camps close to Cairo where women were employed in carpet making. In 1937 she worked in Spain helping wounded civilians during the civil war and working on behalf of prisoners. At the end of the Second World War her career in refugee relief continued when she joined the Catholic Relief Programme, evacuating and resettling children, working with prisoners of war and displaced persons in Italy, Egypt, and Austria. She belongs to that large body of British female voluntary aid workers who moved from country to country in the middle years of the 20th century, gaining expertise in the field as they did so [Oldfield 2006].

The People Who Run drew on Thurstan's experiences of the initial Russian retreat to Warsaw and the great retreat in summer 1915 during which she worked in a series of field hospitals. Like Pollock, she revealed a sensitive if somewhat patronising approach to ref- ugees--'some of the saddest people that ever were seen'--whose overcrowded accommo-dation meant `the indiscriminate mingling of the decent and the dissolute.' She frequently came into contact with apathetic refugees, but she drew a distinction between lethargy and `slacking and shamming,' since inertia could not be helped. Refugees had, in her view, lost a sense of self-respect, but they deserved sympathy: `their sorrow [...] is a vicarious one, for they have suffered and died in order that our homes, our country and our children shall be safe.' She distinguished between men and women:

The old men can be made content with a little tobacco and the company of their old cronies; perhaps, too, they are a little more used to travelling and mixing with the outside world than the women, who seem to miss terribly their accustomed seat near the stove among their familiar household goods [Thurstan 1916, p. 38].

Warming to her theme about population displacement and the consequences attendant on the collapse of patriarchal authority, including what she saw as a loss of moral compass, Thurstan praised female students in Petrograd who `have done admirable work in keeping the young girls straight and out of temptation' and singled out aid organisations that arranged classes for young boys `on the Boy Scout principles' who were taught a trade and thereby encouraged to keep out of mischief [Thurstan 1916, p. 72].

Thurstan was also attentive to the impact of the war on ordinary Russians who were confronted by a massive sudden influx of refugees. Poor households in particular faced mounting household bills as the price of food and rents rose. She noted the desperate situation in some provincial cities, such as Kazan, where refugees and locals were also ex-pected to share resources with Austrian prisoners of war and wounded soldiers who were being treated in the university medical school. In these circumstances, she could only express admiration for peasants who treated refugees `as members of the family' [Thurstan 1916, p. 142-143]. However, her compassion did not extend to Jews in general or to Jewish refugees in particular. Thurstan betrayed her own prejudices when announcing that `many Jews have on the whole German sympathies.' Nor did Jewish refugees `suffer so acutely from homesickness [since] they are wanderer by nature or sub-conscious instinct. They settle down more quickly [...] and take more easily to new work.' Another consid-eration in her view was that their situation was mitigated by `the extraordinary generosity shown by many Jews to their co-religionists,' by which she meant the financial aid from Jews living overseas [Thurstan 1916, pp. 150-153]. In her view, other refugee groups deserved greater sympathy and attention.

The accounts published by Thurstan and Pollock lend weight to the suggestion that the Russian refugee crisis generated a powerful sense of what has come to be called `distant suffering' that relied upon graphic representations of distress and allusions to culturally familiar episodes from the past [Boltanski 1999]. Pollock and Thurstan both appealed for donations from members of the British public. To be sure, Thurstan's emphasis on Allied charity was calculated to sustain the commitment of the British public to its Russian ally, but taking a broader view we can also see the articulation of a business-like humanitarian ethos in which considerations of value for money mattered no less than the relief of suffering.

The Russian cockpit: managing the refugee crisis

A complex pattern of response can be detected in respect of managing the refugee crisis in the Russian Empire. This response included actions taken by central government, by local authorities, by semi-official bodies, and by new national committees. In addition, there is abundant evidence of activism on the part of non-governmental organisations, charities, religious groups and private individuals. Many of these individuals were people of modest means and status. Some were professional social workers, lawyers and educationalists.

Government oversight of the refugee question rested with the new Special Council for Refugees (Osoboe soveshchanie po ustroistvu bezhentsev), which was established in August 1915. Like other special councils created in the same month, it was chaired by a cabinet minister, in this case the minster of the interior. It allocated around 200 million rubles in the course of the war, equivalent to more than two-thirds of total expenditure on refugee relief [Kirzhnits, 1927]. The special council was not immune from the effects of the growing economic crisis, and in December 1916 informed the organisations it funded of the need to adjust to a 50 per cent cut in their budget. At the same time, the Tsar's plenipotentiary in the Caucasus instructed relief agencies to enlist refugees in the search for paid work, in order to reduce their reliance on government funds. The question of entitlement emerged in discussions of the arrangements for the registration of refugees at a local level. In Khar'kov, for example, refugees who approached the municipality for assistance had to `demonstrate that they are actually from areas suffering from military action' [Komitet 1916, p. 453].

The Tatiana Committee (Komitet Ee Imperatorskogo Vysochestva Velikoi Kniazhny Tatiany Nikolaevny dlia okazaniia pomoshchi postradavshim ot voennykh deistvii) occupied pride of place in the operational arrangements for refugee relief. It collected and distributed cash and goods to all refugees. It published lists and photos of refugee children who had been separated from their parents. Although critics accused it of being an establishment entity, this was much less true of the committee's regional branches which, as in Novgorod, included priests, landlords, teachers, lawyers, workers and peasant farmers. It galvanised middle-class women into collecting money, distributing food and warm clothing, arranging temporary accommodation for refugees and finding them part-time work in order to maintain their morale [Komitet 1916, pp. 258-260, 416-417]. The committee supplemented its budget from the central government with private donations and from funds derived from organised campaigns such as those associated with the Tsar's daugh-ter's name-day. Its employees drew no salary, so overheads were low, as its chairman, senator Aleksei B. Neidgardt reminded the Russian public, in a barb directed at the rival public organisations [Gatrell 1999, p. 41].

Early in the war Tsar Nicholas II also approved the formation of the union of zemstvos and the union of towns. Their leaders envisaged closer collaboration between themselves, and in July 1915 they revived the joint organisation, Zemgor, which had briefly seen the light of day during the Russo-Japanese War. In addition to attempting to improve military supplies, Zemgor took steps to support refugees, particularly during the long and arduous journey from the western borderlands to the Russian interior. These self-styled public organisations (obshchestvennye organizatsii) maintained not only that the wheels of officialdom turned slowly and that civic activism outstripped anything that could be expected from organisations associated with the state, notably the Red Cross and the Tatiana Committee. Like the Tatiana Committee, the public organisations maintained an active profile at a provincial level [Pichon-Bobrinskoy 2005; Tumanova 2012].

Unlike prisoners of war, who were often confined to camps in remote parts of the empire, refugees were concentrated disproportionately in urban settlements. Towns and cities were transformed as a result. By the middle of 1916, more than one in ten inhabitants in some of Russia's largest towns were refugees; in Samara they made up almost thirty per cent, whilst in Ekaterinoslav and Pskov refugees reached around one quarter of the total and in Nizhnii-Novgorod 15 per cent [Gatrell 1999, p. 62-63]. Some early appeals for help made much of the expectation that refugees `will not be staying long in our midst. The enemy will leave the frontiers of Russia and the refugees will once more return to their own homes'. But few people probably believed this optimistic assessment, which was in any event quickly overtaken by the realisation that refugees would be around for some time to come. As the journal of the union of zemstvos argued in the autumn of 1915, `we must not lose sight of the fact that refugees are our guests, and not for a brief period either'. Some of them would wish to stay permanently [Izvestiia 1915, p. 63].

The refugee crisis was particularly troubling -- obviously for the refugees themselves, but also for local municipal authorities as well as ordinary residents. In Moscow public and private buildings alike were commandeered to provide them with temporary accommodation, a reminder that key urban points of contact -- railway stations, hotels, hospitals and so forth -- need to be included into any discussion of the metropolitan civilian experience of warfare. Municipal leaders in Kiev hastened to move them out of the city and further eastwards. As the refugee crisis lapped at the shores of relatively remote towns and cities in Siberia, hard-pressed local authorities determined the maximum capacity of towns such as Tomsk and Barnaul before encouraging refugees to settle on farmland rather than contribute to the housing and food crisis in urban centres, but refugees were reluctant to take this option.

Many refugees chose or were forced to settle in the countryside. Reports reached Vladimir that the government had plans to settle refugees in deserted peasant dwellings and to encourage peasants to take on others as farm workers. There was even talk, `in extreme cases', of forcing refugees to move to villages where they would form `a kind of military colony' (voennyi postoi). But the tsarist state never worked out a systematic plan of settlement, leaving this instead to the discretion of provincial governors and local authorities.

Abrupt physical displacement had an uneven impact. It entailed profound social and political consequences for the Jewish population of imperial Russia. In one sense the war liberated Russian Jewry, by forcing the tsarist government to recognize that it could no longer continue to sustain the Pale of Settlement -- in other words, that it was more important to defeat the real enemy than to maintain administrative controls over the Jewish population of the Russian empire. As the liberal-minded minister of agriculture put it, `one cannot fight a war against Germany and against the Jews'. Certainly, Jews continued to suffer all manner of harassment and physical abuse at the hands of the Russian army. However, once it was recognised that the movement of Jewish refugees could no longer be controlled by government agencies, the Pale of Settlement dissolved itself. On 15 August 1915 the government reluctantly conceded that `Jewish war sufferers' -- those who fled and those who had been deported -- should be allowed to settle in provincial towns such as Voronezh, Tambov and Penza, although not Petrograd or and Moscow. Consistent with pre-war Tsarist policy, Jewish refugees were forbidden to settle in villages. Leading spokesmen had no illusions that the August circular implied political emancipation, but they were nevertheless impressed by the potential gains that might be made. The practical outcome of this new dispensation for Jewish settlement was that two-fifths of all Jewish refugees moved to areas of the Russian empire that had previously been closed to them. Townspeople in the Russian interior who had scarcely set eyes on Jews now rubbed shoulders with them.

Representing refugees

Russia's refugees were regarded with a mixture of suspicion and sympathy. On the one hand the refugee was a figure of suspicion whose `spontaneous' action in fleeing suggested a loss of reason (compared, for example, to the deliberation that was believed to characterise pre-war migration) and testified to the potential to disturb social order in provincial Russia. Fears were expressed about the results of sudden mass displacement in relation to food, housing, public health and criminal behaviour.

Much of the associated iconography emphasised the magnitude of the refugee movement; typical of these was a picture of the throng gathered outside a refugee sanctuary in Petrograd -- `people of the most diverse condition and status (sostoianie), now united by the single general term, refugee'. Contemporary representations deployed metaphors of catastrophe, such as `flood', `avalanche', and a `plague of locusts' [Gatrell 1999, p. 197-198, 200]. As Liisa Malkki reminds us, `these liquid names for the uprooted reflect the seden- tarist bias in dominant modes of imagining homes and homelands, identities and nationalities' [Malkki 1995, p. 15-16].

Nevertheless, not all depictions of displacement evoked such disturbing images or carried such negative connotations. A dispossessed refugee might be imbued with the capacity to impart a civilising influence on the backward village, helping for example to demonstrate new farming techniques. A priest in Simbirsk remarked that

Even in this lonely backwater (zakholuste) the refugee movement has brought something new. The refugees who have arrived in the village, no matter how poor they may be, have shown the local population that there are shortcomings in their way of life and daily practices, that it is conceivable to live a better life, that it is possible to work a good deal more productively. Each of these half- starved refugees tells the peasantry that they -- the refugees -- cannot work as the peasants do here [Simbirskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti 1916, p. 572].

This was reinforced by a sense of superiority on the part of some refugees, such as Latvians who settled in Russia's impoverished central black-earth provinces who boasted that `we have long forgotten what it means to suffer from a harvest failure or to go without bread' [Gatrell 1999, p. 132]. Their displacement served to reinforce a sense of cultural distance between the virtuous Latvian yeoman and the backward Russian peasant.

Refugees who stayed on quickly exhausted the resources and patience of the urban population. Certainly, plenty of opportunities presented themselves to people who wished to exploit the vulnerability of refugees. Yet there were also reports, as from Riga, that `relations between local residents and our comrades are cordial. The ordinary people regard us as sufferers (stradal'tsev) who have fled the horrors of war. They give us presents, and ask after those who are most needy. Russian workers look upon us differently, as special mates (pomoshchniki) who can throw a shaft of sunlight into their dark barracks. They are very curious about our former living conditions, pay, orderliness, tidiness and so forth'. Moscow workers who belonged to sick clubs reportedly organised a collection for refugees and helped them to find work in the city, notwithstanding opposition from their less `conscious' colleagues. These efforts were imbued with a less interventionist and authoritarian approach than that adopted by relief agencies and charities [Gatrell 1999, pp. 128-140].

Other images testified to a degree of empathetic understanding on the part of the host population. In its first issue for 1916, the `family journal' Rodina published a drawing of `Two Flights' (Dva begstva), in which the plight of the refugee family was juxtaposed with the flight of Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus to Bethlehem. Accompanying verses urged the refugees not to lose heart [Gatrell 1999, p. 74]. Editors frequently focused upon a single refugee family; some of the poses were clearly contrived to create a genre photograph of the kind that had become fashionable at the turn of the century.

Towards the end of 1916 the Tatiana Committee planned a special exhibition to inform the Russian public about the living conditions and activities of refugees, who were not all `beggars, idlers and spongers' Four main themes were to be highlighted: conditions in Russia's borderlands before and during the war (including `the destruction of settlements, property and artistic monuments'); their `sorrowful journey', including the background to their displacement, the course of the refugee movement and the assistance given by government and public organizations; the living conditions in their new homes (including `the work undertaken by refugees and their impact on the local population'); and, lastly, the restoration of normal life in the regions cleared of enemy occupation. Something similar was entertained by Latvian activists at the same time. But nothing came of these elaborate plans [Gatrell 1999, p. 94; Kenins 1917]. In a related initiative the Tatiana Committee sponsored a remarkable project designed to gather first-hand material from refugees about their experiences before, during and after displacement. `Simple people' were encouraged to describe their experiences in their own words: `the material that is collected will be collated and organized systematically and will form part of a projected volume on the history of the refugee movement during the world war ... The most important thing is for the description to be sincere and truthful'. In the end, a small selection of published accounts privileged professional people [Gatrell 1999, p. 95].

Perhaps most remarkable in terms of its content were the words of a female eye-witness -- unfortunately, nothing of is known of her other than her name and gender. In a contribution to another short-lived journal, Sputnik bezhentsa (`The Refugee's Guide') she wrote:

Not so long ago, these people lived a full and independent working life. They had the right to be just like us, that is, indolent, rude and ungrateful. Now they have lost this prerogative; their poverty and helplessness oblige them to be meek and grateful, to smile at people they don't like, to answer each and every question without the right to ask questions of their own, to submit to the authority of people they don't respect and have no wish to know, to accept disadvantageous terms from those who wish to take advantage of their poverty and misfortunes [Vystavkina 1915].

Her observations have surely never been bettered as an eloquent expression of empathy, yet its poignancy and directness of tone only reinforces the point that most testimony is mediated by non-refugees.

Nationalising refugees

One fundamental decision taken by the tsarist state was to devolve much of the responsibility for the day to day relief of refugees on to new national committees. This had profound consequences for the course of politics in the Russian Empire.

Patriotic elites took the opportunity to mobilise public opinion on behalf of the suffering nation. Non-Russian political leaders constantly reminded their audience that invading troops had lately violated their homeland. Members of the Latvian intelligentsia argued that refugees from the Baltic lands presented a living testimony of German bar-barism; their presence brought home to the inhabitants of Petrograd and Moscow the consequences of territorial loss. Occupation was bad enough, but this calamity did not exhaust the fears expressed by national leaders [Liulevicius 2001]. Latvian, Lithuanian and Polish patriots lamented the prospect of `national dispersion. W. Grabski, speaking in July 1916 on behalf of the Polish national committee outlined the implications as follows:

Only continuous and close contact with the national group, whether in the distribution of allowances, the allocation of accommodation, the supply of clothing, the search for work, the offer of medical treatment, the satisfaction of all material and spiritual needs -- only this can guarantee and secure refugees on behalf of the motherland [Gatrell 1999, p. 156].

When they took to the road, refugees were by definition deprived of membership in a close-knit local community, but displacement offered them an opportunity to gain access to an enlarged national community, built on the foundations of a common sense of loss and the need for collective effort to regain what had been forfeited in wartime. It might even be possible to re-establish contact with those who had left the homeland long before the war: as one Latvian patriot put it, `the unity of Latvia demands that we register all such settlers and ensure that they do not lose their identity. The chronicler of Latvian displacement, Kristaps Bachmanis, described how these settlers `had been left alone with their destiny and so became estranged from the life of our people, our common fate, our grief and our longing for better future. Fortunately, he went on, `at last our refugees have enabled us to establish contact with Latvian settlers in Russia. Our purpose should be to do everything to destroy the wall between us and them' [Bachmanis 1916; Gatrell 1999, p. 158]. Displacement provided an opportunity to make amends for previous failures to assert national solidarity. According to Martynas Ycas, the Lithuanian activist who later served as president of the new republic, the LCWC `prepared the people for future action and created the foundations for a future cultural and political edifice ... It forced even non-Lithuanians to recognise that we ourselves were the masters of our country'. He spoke of those `live corpses of the nation [who] joined in the common work with a new impulse of love for our nation' [Balkelis 2004, p. 76]. Allowing for a degree of retrospective exaggeration, Ycas neatly encapsulated the sense of political mobilisation and the vision of national emancipation that refugeedom now made possible.

Elsewhere, philanthropic relief efforts mobilized Armenian society in the Caucasus. Dozens of committees, some of them active since the beginning of the war, organized programmes of relief. Although they were frequently accused of acting entirely independently of each other, this charge was not entirely fair. Welfare and relief agencies developed expertise in specific fields. By the end of 1916 the Caucasian Armenian Benevolent Society concentrated on the supply of foodstuffs. The union of towns took charge of public health, screening refugees for infectious diseases and building seven new hospitals to cope with those in greatest need. Orphanages were built and maintained by the Armenian central welfare committee, by the Armenian `maidens' committee' (Komitet armianskikh devits), and by `Fraternal Aid committees' in Yerevan and Etchmiadzin, the latter under the aegis of the Catholicos. But limited resources were thinly spread. The union of towns was overwhelmed. Erevan, with just one hospital and only a handful of doctors and medical orderlies, was simply not equipped to deal with the thousands of physically and mentally scarred refugees who congregated there in the summer of 1915 [Gatrell 1999, pp. 150-153].

Members of the Armenian elite in Moscow and Petrograd rendered assistance to the refugee population, though they were frequently charged with indifference to their plight. An Armenian committee in Moscow was headed by a member of the Cadet party, Alexander Khatisov. Wartime mayor of Tbilisi (which, like Baku, had a large Armenian population) and leading politician in his own right, Khatisov was joined by other Armenian liberals, including Moisei Adzhemov and M. I. Papadzhanov, both of them members of the Cadet fraction in the Duma. Nor were the citizens of Tbilisi quite so lethargic as was suggested. Armenian peasants were also praised for their willingness to help refugees, even though their own economic situation was itself precarious. In May 1916 the tsarist government approved the convocation of a special Armenian congress in Petrograd, the first occasion on which the regime had tolerated public discussion of the Armenian question' outside the Caucasus itself. Delegates confined themselves to formal discussion of relief efforts, including the care of orphans and the education of refugee children (40 per cent of Armenian refugees were under the age of 17). They also heard a patriotic opening speech from Mamikonian who declared that `it is better to eat Russian hay than Muslim bread' [Gatrell 1999, p. 154].