ABSTRACT
Australia, remarkably, was the country that took in the largest number of Russian displaced persons – stole them, in the Soviet view – until the much larger and more multicultural United States overtook it in a late spurt. Russians have been almost totally invisible in Australia’s postwar migration story. Anti-communism was the visible common bond among the Russians coming to Australia after the war, and at first glance it seems relatively straightforward. Ukrainian-Russian was a very common mix and one of the most ambiguous, as a large part of the population of the area now called Ukraine spoke Russian and was Russian by official nationality. The mixture of German and Russian was not unusual in a Baltic or Eastern European context, since many émigrés came from Russian lineages that were originally German, Germans having been a core element in the service-based nobility created in eighteenth-century Russia by Peter the Great and his successors.
