ABSTRACT
The great majority of our Russian migrants, like other immigrants of their generation, came to Australia by boat. The flow of Russians from Europe more or less ended in 1951, although Russians were still coming from China and would continue to do so until the early 1960s. But this was not the end of activity at the docks involving our Russian migrants. Since the establishment of parishes and the physical construction of churches, aged-care homes and church-based benevolent societies occupied so much of the Russians’ energies in the early years, this tended to become the pivot of the Russian migrant community. In Sydney, some Russian-Jewish families continued to see themselves as Russian, as well as Jewish, cementing this by sending their children to Saturday Russian school. The tensions surrounding communism and Soviet espionage in Australia were exacerbated by the defection of Russian diplomat and undercover Soviet intelligence agent Vladimir Petrov in 1954 and the subsequent Royal Commission on Espionage.
