After the Russian Empire’s collapse, the USSR hemorrhaged aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals. The first refugee wave came during the Russian Civil War. These exiles became known as “White émigrés” due to their association with the White armies that fought the Red Army. As refugees from the Revolution overran Europe, 400,000 stateless people arrived in France. Fifty thousand settled in Paris. Most émigrés worked in service or entertainment jobs as drivers, door attendants, ticket-sellers, singers, or dancers. Others made lasting contributions to art, music, literature, ballet, and film.
1. Art
Paris reigned as a global art center while the Bolshevik Revolution splintered Russian society. Russian émigré artists such as Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939) found a home in Paris among the French Impressionists and abstract artists there.
Known for his bold brushstrokes, vibrant color use, and evocative landscapes, Korovin became one of the greatest twentieth-century Russian Impressionists.
Born into a ruined merchant family, Konstantin Alekseevich Korovin forged his own way in life. As a member of the Abramstvo Circle, a rural artists’ colony, Korovin joined the Imperial Academy of Arts and later worked as the Bolshoi Theater’s chief set designer. During World War I, he supported the Imperial Army as a camouflage security specialist.
At home, a small wooden house built on a rural wasteland, Korovin preferred a simple country life. He welcomed other artists there, worked at his easel, and spent hours talking to peasants, hunters, and fishermen in the village. Inspired by his surroundings, Korovin’s paintings reflect a deep love for humans and nature.
By 1918, the Soviet government confiscated Okhotino, Korovin’s beloved estate, along with the land, house, and even its contents. Now homeless and listed as a “non-working user,” Korovin developed a migrant lifestyle characterized by deep poverty. During the 1921-1922 Russian famine, which killed an estimated five million people, Korovin survived on little food and fewer art supplies. During this time, he taught painting at the State Free Art Workshops. In 1922, Korovin, who had a heart condition, a sick wife, and an invalid son, devised a plan to escape the country.
Under the guise of organizing an exhibition and seeking medical treatment, Korovin received approval from Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Commissar of Enlightenment, to leave the country on a temporary trip.
Korovin never returned.
In Paris, he scraped a living together with work that paid—designing one-time costumes and sets for private theaters and ballets. With the rise of film, commissions dwindled. By the 1930s, poverty closed in on Korovin. Reduced to painting on cardboard with watercolor and oils, the artist felt consumed with nostalgia for his homeland.
In one of his last letters, Korovin admitted, “I keep remembering Okhotino. Such nature, woods, and the river. . . Was it not paradise? . . . I do not really know or understand what I was guilty of. I worked a lot and have not sinned towards the people. I cannot understand people living in our beautiful and mysterious land.”
Nevertheless, Korovin found inspiration everywhere. “There is nothing that is not beautiful in nature,” he once said.
He died as he lived—on the move—and after a fall, as bombs exploding on the streets of Paris announced the start of the Second World War.
Today, Korovin’s paintings exist in museum collections worldwide, from London’s National Gallery to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Korovin’s legacy lived on in the work of his student, Georgy Lapshin (1885-1950). Lapshin, who owned a Moscow art studio before the Revolution, emigrated to France in 1924. As a member of the Society of French Artists, Lapshin’s work appeared in exhibitions across Europe.
Serge Poliakov, another Russian painter associated with the New School of Paris, made his way to France due to the war. His abstract structure and luminous colors inspired Yves Saint-Laurent, who designed a Poliakov-style dress in 1965.
After the end of the Russian Civil War, Zinaida Serebriakova, a student of Ilya Repin and a fan of Edgar Degas, left Leningrad in 1924 to complete a quick mural commission. When she tried to return, the Soviets blocked her. Separated from her children, Serebriakova struggled to create in exile.
Despite this, Serebriakova became a popular portrait painter in her adopted country and the first Russian woman to gain recognition as a major painter.
2. Literature
With Tsarist Russia’s collapse, everything “Russian” briefly went into vogue in Europe, from Russian literature and cuisine to Cossacks and impoverished Russian nobles. A pervasive image exists of Russian poets wasting away in poverty-stricken Parisian boarding houses or languishing in smoke-filled cafés reeking with melancholy.
This trope is rooted in the harsh realities that many White émigrés faced.
Overwhelmed with the sheer number of refugees, many nations, including France, capped the number of Russian immigrants allowed into the country. Many refugees experienced prejudice and struggled to survive.
In 1922, Vladimir Lenin ordered the Cheka to arrest and deport 220 “irreconcilable” anti-Bolshevik intellectuals aboard “philosophers’ ships.” The regime countered this “humanitarian act” by warning them that they would be shot if they returned home.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin (1870-1953), whose prose grappled with life after Russia, became an internationally acclaimed author.
Born in rural Russia to an impoverished noble family, Bunin became addicted to reading from a young age. After joining the Sreda Circle literary group, Bunin won the Pushkin Prize twice. Bunin is best known for Falling Leaves, Cursed Days, The Life of Arseniev, and Dark Avenues.
A “social democrat” who never identified as a blueblood, Bunin condemned the Bolshevik Revolution as a human and cultural catastrophe. From 1919 to 1920, Bunin edited an anti-Soviet Volunteer Army newspaper. In January 1920, the couple boarded an evacuation ship for Constantinople.
Bunin’s novel Cursed Days, based on his revolutionary diary, presaged the anti-utopian ideas later popularized by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.
Bunin’s first book published in exile was Scream. In 1933, Bunin became the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Afterward, Bunin gave away 120,000 francs from his Nobel Prize money to other struggling émigrés.
When World War II broke out, Bunin refused to collaborate with publications operating in occupied territories, and his income dwindled. Bunin and his wife retreated to a mountain villa outside Grasse. There, they sheltered Jewish friends under the noses of the occupying German forces. Without any money to live on, Bunin contacted the Union of Writers in Russia for help in the winter of 1946. Until then, Bunin’s new work could not be published in the Soviet Union, and he received no royalties for previously published novels.
That year, Novaya Zemlya published Dark Avenues. Bunin received $300.
When the war ended, the Bunins returned to Paris. During his final years, the writer received a monthly pension from Jewish-American philanthropist Frank Atran. Bunin died in a Paris attic room from heart issues in 1953.
He had survived Lenin, Hitler, and Stalin.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) became one of France’s most famous Russian émigré writers, known for novels such as Pale Fire, Lolita, and Invitation to a Beheading. In 1919, Nabokov fled from Soviet-occupied Crimea under a burst of machine gun fire.
Paris was the place where Nabokov had a love affair, struggled with poverty and bureaucracy, and held court with other White émigré writers from a Montparnasse café. Nabokov’s breakout success novel, Pnin, centers on a Russian refugee who at first seems like a humorous figure but whose story reveals layers of tragedy.
This circle of impoverished but important literary refugees included Aleksandr Kuprin, Ivan Shmelyov, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Georgy Ivanov (1894-1958), another poet of Russia’s Silver Age, is remembered for his prose poem, “Disintegration of the Atom,” a brilliant, haunting exploration of émigré despair.
Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya (1872-1952), known as “Teffi,” created vivid, humorous, and nostalgic fiction from her Paris perch. Teffi escaped the Red Army during the Civil War, buried in fur coats like her compatriots, on a ship navigating frigid waters into the unknown.
By the time the refugees found their way to Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, or France, these coats became threadbare symbols of another life.
Yuri Felsen (1894-1943), known as the “Russian Proust,” wrote gripping psychological works such as Deceit, infused with rich imagery and wicked humor. The Russian-Jewish writer opposed the Soviets and joined the White forces before emigrating in 1920. Felsen wrote three novels in Paris by the outbreak of World War II.
In German-occupied Paris, he was arrested, released, and hidden by friends. When the Resistance attempted to smuggle Felsen across the Swiss border, the Nazis arrested him again. He was sent to the gas chamber on arrival in Auschwitz in 1943.
With most of his manuscripts lost or destroyed, this anti-totalitarian writer remains little-known today.
The bisexual poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) became the lioness of the Russian émigré poets. After the Civil War, Tsvetaeva was reunited in Paris with her husband Sergei Efron, an ex-White Army officer. In exile, she published a collection of poems, After Russia. In 1939, Tsvetaeva followed Efron back to Russia when the NKVD recruited him. He was executed after arrival. Tsvetaeva’s daughter ended up in a labor camp. Her son died in World War II. Devastated, Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. Later, Russian poet Joseph Brodsky would claim, “The greatest poet in the twentieth century was a woman.”
Many exiled writers scraped together a living by writing for refugee newspapers, while others became famous novelists. Their works explore themes of love, loss, identity, trauma, disassociation, paranoia, and memory. These human elements continue to resonate with readers across time.
3. Ballet
The ballet world did not escape Russian influence. For centuries, France dominated the ballet scene. In 1909, Sergei Diaghilev founded the Ballets Russes in Paris and established a new trend.
Diaghilev’s unique skill lay in harnessing a potpourri of creative talent. By World War I, these included avant-garde artists, costumiers, and designers like Pablo Picasso and Leon Bakst, dancers like Vaslav Nijinsky and Mikhail Fokine, and musicians like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev. The Ballets Russes debuted groundbreaking works such as Afternoon of a Faun, Apollo, and the Rite of Spring.
When the Revolution occurred, Diaghilev remained in France. His company had a strong influence on the evolution of ballet during the 20th century.
Some of the greatest dancers in the Ballet Russes included Tamara Karsavina, Tamara Toumanova, and Irina Baranova, known as choreographer George Balachine’s “baby ballerinas.”
At age six, Tamara Toumanova danced for Anna Pavlova. By age 10, she landed a leading role in the Paris Opera. She claimed to have been born in a boxcar in Russia as her mother and tsarist officer father fled the Bolsheviks. In 1931, Balanchine invited her to join the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo.
Known as the “Black Pearl of the Russian Ballet,” Toumanova gained an international reputation, dancing abroad and appearing on the silver screen.
Like Toumanova, Irina Baronova came to the Ballets Russes as a “baby ballerina” whose family fled revolutionary Russia. These “baby ballerinas” toured over 300 days out of the year. Baronova became a prima ballerina, first in France and later in New York.
Other émigrés who influenced dance culture in France included Cubo-Futurist artist Natalia Goncharova and her husband, Mikhail Larionov. This duo invented the abstract art style known as Rayonism. In exile, they became leading Ballets Russes designers.
4. Music
Music, like the other arts, flourished in exile. One of the most famous White Russian émigrés, pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), fled revolutionary Russia in 1917. For the next few decades, he conducted a demanding cycle of concerts across the United States and Europe. Rachmaninoff also founded TAIR, a Paris publishing house that focused on works by Rachmaninoff and other exiled composers.
Rachmaninoff’s musical activities in Paris put him at the center of the Russian émigré community. Between 1929 and 1931, Rachmaninoff summered in France near Rambouillet, where he socialized with other Russian émigrés.
For the quarter of a century between leaving Russia and his death, Rachmaninoff only composed six new works. By 1930, he felt the urge to create again and found a retreat where he could compose in solitude.
In 1930, he built Villa Senar in French-speaking Lucerne, Switzerland. Here, he composed his famous Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini during the summer of 1934. His Symphony No. 3, also written there, fused a bittersweet echo of the Jazz Age with memories of a lost Russia and the dissonant notes of Europe on the brink of war. During World War II, Rachmaninoff financially helped other Russian exiles and donated benefits from his concerts to the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany.
World War II saw the rise of another Russian émigré musician who became the voice of the French Resistance.
Born to an aristocratic family in Petrograd, Anna Yurievna Betulinskaya (1917-2006) became a famous French singer. Before Anna’s first birthday, the Bolsheviks shot her father as an “enemy of the Revolution.” Using the jewels that she had sewn into her clothes, Anna’s Greek mother fled to France. In 1934, Anna entered the Ballets de Monte Carlo and took music lessons from Sergei Prokofiev.
She supported herself by playing the guitar and singing in Paris’ Scheherazade cabaret. Because she felt her Russian surname was too hard to pronounce, Anna chose the name Marly out of a telephone directory. When the Second World War hit France, Anna escaped to London. There, she met General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the French government in exile.
In 1941, Anna read an English newspaper account about the Battle of Smolensk, which stopped the German offensive on the Eastern Front in its tracks.
Inspired by the story, she began to pick out a rhythmic tune about anti-Nazi partisans:
“We will go where the crow does not fly,
And the beast cannot make a passage.
No force nor person will make us retreat.”
When Anna sang her new song for a group of friends, French journalist Joseph Kessel exclaimed, “This is what France needs!”
“Chant des Partisans,” broadcast on the BBC, became the rallying cry of the Resistance. Charles de Gaulle would later tell Marly, “You turned your talent into a weapon for France.”
By the war’s end, Anna Marly became a French star, writing 300 songs and performing for Allied troops across Europe. In 1969, Leonard Cohen recorded Anna Marly’s song “Le complainte du partisan” (The Lament of the Partisan) as “The Partisan.”
5. Film
From Cossacks to countesses, most émigré actors and actresses ended up in Hollywood. Many also worked in the French film industry. While some became actors, others lined up as film extras, their faces memorialized in brief flashes of blinding light. Even novelist Vladimir Nabokov became a film extra, experiencing a sense of alienation working as an anonymous shadow in an electric night.
One celebrated actor, Ivan Ilych Mozzhukhin, achieved fame in both France and America. He launched his career as a romantic star of the late Tsarist-era cinema.
After the Revolution, Mozzhukhin wound up in France, where he worked as an actor, screenwriter, and director. He joined an artistic émigré community in Paris led by Joseph Ermolieff and Aleksandr Kamenka, a Ukrainian-born director who founded Films Albatros. From an old Pathé studio in Montreuil, they went on to create some of the finest postwar French films.
Mozzhukhin also collaborated with Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov. The filmmaker famously used the actor’s face to make an emotional montage of identical sequential shots known as the “Kuleshov Effect.” This film editing technique is still used today, notably in Game of Thrones.
Films Albatros soon advanced in the cinema industry. During the 1920s-1930s, the studio produced almost 50 films. Mozzhukhin acted, wrote, and directed multiple screenplays.
In 1921, he launched Child of the Carnival as his first French film credit. The next year, The House of Mystery appeared, followed by The Burning Crucible and Kean, where he played alongside his actress wife Natalya Lisenko. Mozzhukhin also played Michael Strogoff in the 1926 epic. When Rudolph Valentino died, Hollywood snapped up the tall actor with hypnotic eyes as the new “Russian Valentino.”
In 1927, Mozzhukhin starred in the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer. When his Hollywood career failed to take off, he returned to Europe. Like many émigré stars, Mozzhukhin’s career declined when the transition from silent screen revealed his Russian accent and pigeonholed him into more limited roles.
During his lifetime, Mozzhukhin starred in over 80 films.
During the Silent Screen era, many émigré filmmakers continued to use pre-revolutionary cinematic techniques such as the “Russian Ending.” In a changing postwar world, the demand for tragedy faded, and happy endings, or at least satisfying conclusions, became the norm. People wanted to laugh. They wanted to forget the war. The Russian Ending, infused with dark realism, did not fit a new generation looking for amusement.
Some cinematographers struggled to adapt to changing tastes, which put tragic endings out of style. Others adapted by turning sad scenes into dreams. This allowed filmmakers to blend the Russian Ending with a happy dénouement that pleased audiences during the Roaring Twenties.
These Russian films, infused with a French ambiance, inspired a new generation of directors. These included Jean Renoir, who decided to abandon his career in ceramics for the cinema after seeing Le Brasier Ardent. Renoir became known for enduring classics such as the great anti-war film La Grande Illusion.
As émigré filmmakers evolved with the times, the Russian Ending, along with the White Russian diaspora and its failed fight against the Soviets, faded into history.
