ABSTRACT
Ataman Semenov was the only Cossack warlord who survived to join the diaspora of Whites from the Russian Far East. The remnants of OMO languished in Grodekovo while most of their comrades had been scattered by the winds of war across the Far Eastern taiga, Mongolia and China, into squalid refugee camps, desperate bands of White fugitives, detachments of Merkulov’s army, Red prison camps, foreign armies or on the wings of fate. Some were among the 16,000 mostly destitute Russians who crossed the Chinese frontier at Hunchun in search of refuge in Manchuria in autumn 1922. In comparison, Cossack émigrés from southern Russia and the western Siberian front were already settling down to new lives in dozens of organized, though usually impoverished, stanitsas in Bulgaria (18), Serbia (4), Greece (4), Rumania (2), Hungary and Tunisia and eventually Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg and farther flung environs. Manchuria’s Marshal Chang Tso-Lin was hospitable to the incoming refugees in spite of his occasional differences during the Russian Civil War era with Semenov and other Whites, and allowed them to find employment, buy and sell land and start new lives.1
