ABSTRACT
Manchuria was not the only destination for Russian refugees, though it was the largest. On the eastern coast of China, two cities with large international settlements dominated by the British and the French were common destinations: Shanghai, in the south, and Tianjin (then known as Tientsin), in the north. The fortunes of the Russians in Shanghai improved somewhat in the 1930s, as people found their feet. Shanghai Russians formed a complex network of overlapping and sometimes competing associations, with the Russian Emigrants’ Committee at its centre, headed by former imperial Russian consul Victor Grosse. The Russian-Jewish community – numbering about 6000 in the mid1930s, compared with 15,000-plus White Russians – led a separate and parallel existence. The Second Sino-Japanese War began with the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Tianjin, Beijing and Chiang Kai-shek’s capital, Nanjing, in 1937. But the end of the Second World War had created a whole new set of challenges for Shanghai’s Russians, and perhaps opportunities too.
