The Russian Emigration: the Sociohistorical Phenomenon, its Role and Place in the Cultural and Historical Legacy

138 E. I. PivovarAs the opposition asserted itself in the foreign community and consolidated its relationships with the international revolutionary movement, it set for itself the task of presenting the Russian Empire to the global community as “the prison of the peoples,” of revealing the destructive elements of the Tsarist regime. The international response to the 1870s and 1880s Russian revolutionary movement helped forge ties between émigré colonies and societies and various political parties and movements in France, Germany, Italy, and Great Britain. Russian revolutionary centers abroad became part of the European and American po-litical landscape and of the global social and political revolutionary movement, thus getting involved with various institutions and social campaigns. For in-stance, on November 29, 1878, P. Kropotkin and N. Zhukovsky addressed the “Równosc” international meeting organized by the activists of the Polish revo-lutionary movement in Geneva. When the first Russian Marxists took part in in-ternational socialist congresses, it was a significant step in the establishment of European centers of Russian Marxism. For instance, P. B. Axelrod was invited to the illegal German Social-Democratic Party Congress in Switzerland, attended by August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and other leaders of German Social Demo-cratic movement.3 It is a well-known fact that Russian revolutionary radicals were the prevalent group among political émigrés in the 1900s–1910s Paris. Their ac-tivities involved, for example, a demonstration of protest against the 1908 visit of the French President to Russia, several antimilitaristic campaigns etc. In those countries which had no established groups of Russian political émi-grés (Belgium, Sweden, the Netherlands etc), individual political émigrés from Russia took part in the activities of local social and political parties and groups with similar political views. The leaders of the Russian political emigrat...