Karina Khasnulina1; 1 University of Leipzig, Germany
Discussion
With the end of World War II, the remaining group of 15,000 emigrants from the Russian Empire and the USSR in China found themselves subjected to forced migration. They constituted the remnant of a once substantial group of approximately one hundred thousand individuals hailing from diverse ethnic backgrounds who moved to China from the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Russians in China were the most religiously oriented group of anti-Soviet émigrés. Even those who were pro-Soviet often went to church (Manchester 2007). This paper deals with the role of the Church and its leaders in the forced migration of Russian émigrés from China in the first decade of the Cold War. On the one hand, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), with the Moscow Patriarchate restored in 1943, agitated the emigrant community to repatriate to their homeland. On the other hand, the priests of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) participated in the re-emigration of the community to other countries. They represented the interests of people who were considered outsiders in the “West”: refugees from socialist two countries, the USSR and China. Combining T. Tweed’s notion of religion that enables and constrains different types of movements or "crossings" (Tweed 2008) as well as a broader conceptualization of refugees (Gatrell 2013; Jansen and Lässig 2020), the project investigates how the religious actors such as the priests and laymen of the ROC and the ROCOR interpret geopolitics from their religious discourses and how did that shape the actions of these actors.
