Originally Posted by
Cypress
The basic gist is this:
Hundreds of thousands of Russians lived in northern China from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century.
They worked on and were affiliated with Russian railroads and Russian business interests in Mukden, Harbin, Shanghai, etc.
-After 1917, the Bolsheviks considered most of them to be White Russians, aka traitors to the Revolution, especially the ones that chose to remain in China.
-During the Japanese occupation, these Russians were considered by the Japanese Army to be collaborators with Chinese nationalists, living under a veil of constant suspicion.
-The Manchuko Puppet regime classified this ethnic Russians as second class citizens.
-After the Soviet occupation in 1945, most of these Russian men were shipped off to the Gulag, being considered by Stalin to be the remaining vestiges of Tsarist White Russians, western collaborators, and disloyal to Stalin and the communist regime. The Russian women in China were denied jobs and participation in the local economy by Soviet authorities. A lot of them never saw their men again.
-After the Chinese communists came to power there was a concerted effort to ethnically cleanse these stateless Russians, by harrassing them and getting them to leave China.
Basically, they were treated with suspicion or as enemies of the state by all the powers that played a role in that region after 1917.
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