White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia
The very word ‘Russia’ evokes romance and exotica. Glittering onion domes, Zhivago and Lara in the snow, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Or the hammer and sickle, Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev. Or spies -- the Cambridge Five, the Petrovs -- and oligarchs who own football teams and political foes who are poisoned, imprisoned, shot. Somehow always bigger than ordinary life, more revolutionary, more evil, more tragic.
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White Russians, Red Peril:
A Cold War History of Migration to Australia
Sheila Fitzpatrick | 2021
Sheila Fitzpatrick discovered the allure of Russia in the 1960s. She went to Moscow in 1968 to work in the Soviet archives. This launched her career as one of the world’s leading scholars of Soviet history and cultivated a prodigious ability to scour the archival material, as is evident in her new book, White Russians, Red Peril. Since returning to Australia in 2012, she has turned her attention to transnational history, following in the footsteps of other Australian historians, such as Joy Damousi (acknowledged in this book) who has written about Greek migration to Australia after the Second World War.
Fitzpatrick’s interest is in the Russian migration; not a straightforward topic given the multinational make-up of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. In the introduction, she responds to her own question, ‘Who is Russian?’ by showing how convoluted that answer is: Ukrainian, Balt, part-Polish, Jewish, Greek-Russian, Cossack, White Russian, Soviet citizen. The list goes on and is complicated further after a war in which the Soviet Union had been an ally but then assumed the mantle of the communist foe.
In what I think is her best book, Everyday Stalinism, Fitzpatrick asserts that people understand and remember their lives in terms of stories. It is also people’s stories that an historian uses to engage the reader in their account of the past; an account that relies on primary sources but also on the scholar’s experience and analysis to make sense of the “scattered data of ordinary life”. This time Fitzpatrick has to contend not with state-sanctioned narratives but with individuals’ sometimes true, sometimes made-up stories, concocted out of the instinct to survive as a displaced person in a hostile country, to keep a job, to get on a ship headed away from the destruction and violence of war-ravaged Europe, Japanese-occupied Manchuria or the Chinese Communist Party.
White Russians, Red Peril starts with the displacements that forced people to journey to Australia from the Russian Revolution of 1917 onwards. Fitzpatrick says she chose the Petrov affair in 1954, when Soviet spies Petrov and his wife defected to Australia, as a conclusion, although the migrations from Harbin and other parts of China, which feature prominently in the book, did not finish until the early 1960s. Her reason is the “anti-communism so relentlessly expressed by post-war Russian migrants, and the intelligence activity that always buzzed around them”.
And why not, for who doesn’t like a spy story? We get that in the last chapter – and in bits and pieces earlier on. But it’s rather an anti-climax. It turns out that ASIO was more interested in Australian-born communists and rarely took up the offers of fanatical anti-communists to inform on their communities. We get lovely pen pictures of the Russian Social Club (the ‘red’ Russian club in a basement in George Street, Sydney) and of the White Russian Russkii dom. We also discover that Petrov wasn’t up to the job, neither able to recruit agents from anti-communist nor left-leaning Russian migrants. And we meet Anatoly Gordeev, sent to Australia to repatriate Soviet citizens the West had ‘stolen’. The hapless Gordeev had little success but his reports were preserved in the Russian State Archive. Fitzpatrick mined these to give her a new angle on Soviet sympathisers, mainly ‘rootless young people…doing it tough in Australia’.
Another of her primary sources was Avstraliada, the Russian-language community history journal published from 1994 to 2014, the entirety of which Fitzpatrick sat down and read. She acknowledges this insight into the Russian community might be lopsided, based on memory and nostalgia and designed for public consumption. Moreover, as she documents, the community had rifts and sub-groups, determined by religious as well as political affiliation, and by the background to their emigration, from Europe or China in particular, all of which also tinted the record.
Out of her meticulous research emerge snippets of people’s experience, which are scattered throughout the book. I found it hard to keep track of all the characters, having to return to the index to check who they were. In the chapter on the White Russians for example, Fitzpatrick discusses the Brisbane Archpriest Valentin Antonieff, assuming we’d remember he had come to Australia in the 1920s. She goes on to tell us Antonieff had been interned for spreading fascist propaganda. This more extreme right-wing behaviour – membership of the Russian Fascist Party in China and collaboration with the Nazis – is another theme of the book but, as with the Reds, seems to be an outlier.
These fragmented portraits and Fitzpatrick’s often tentative inferences about people’s actual views blur the picture of Russian migration to Australia. In the book’s conclusion, Fitzpatrick decides that for most people simply coming to terms with life in a new country was the major preoccupation: finding a job, getting qualifications recognised, buying a house, becoming more Australian. Being political was way down the list, while nostalgia for Russianness, whether that be for the martyred Imperial family, the great Russian novelists and composers or cosmopolitan Harbin, persisted. It still does.
Reviewer: Francesca Beddie served as an Australian diplomat in Russia. She is a member of PHA (NSW & ACT) with a special interest in Russia at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century.
White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia is published by Black Inc.