History of Russian emigrants in Poland in 1919-1939: new sources and modern historiography

Abstract

The article considers the main problems of the history of the Russian emigrants on the basis of studying the Russian and Polish archives in the context of the contemporary Russian and Polish historiography. There are identified and critically comprehended the materials of the key assets in the Polish archives. The article sums up the intermediate results of the study of the history of Russian emigrants in the Russian Federation and the Republic of Poland. The purpose of the article is to identify the weak points of this section of the Russian historiography, as well as the characteristic of the basic directions of the Polish historiography in the section “Emigrantology”. The comparison of the directions of the development of the first-wave emigre history in both countries based on the comparative analysis of the main researches of the modern Russian and Polish historiography allows outlining a number of underexplored questions. The authors faced the challenge of giving a sampling, but the most representative picture of the comparative studies in this section of the Russian and Polish historiography. The authors’ attention was primarily paid to the historical and historical-cultural works, rather than to the researches on legal issues. As a result of the comparative review, there are a number of conclusions. In particular, it was noted that the Russian historiography is not able to conduct comprehensive studies due to the sheer lack of trained personnel (knowledge of the history of the Republic of Poland, Polish-Soviet relations and the Polish language). At the same time, the Polish historiography has reached a qualitatively new level of research, as evidenced by the establishing of the new educational and scientific specialty (Emigrantology), a part of which is the academic module on the history of the Russian emigrants in Poland.