The Yugoslav historiography of the Russian emigration of the first wave

Abstract

The article examines the Yugoslav historiography of the Russian emigration of the first wave. The article highlights several main stages in the history of the study of the phenomenon of the Russian diaspora, identifies the key thematic areas of the work of Yugoslav historians on a given issue, analyzes the main issues related to individual works. The study of this topic allows us to reconstruct the change in attitude to the problems of a certain phenomenon in historical science, depending on political and social transformations. This issue is especially relevant when analyzing scientific and journalistic works within a certain political and regional community. It is important to note a certain specificity of the research literature of Yugoslavia on the history of Russian emigration. The authors of the works considered in the article mainly focused on the problems associated with the stay of Russian emigrants in Yugoslavia, since in the 1920s the kingdom was one of the main centers of emigration. The present study has a scientific novelty, since the works of Yugoslav researchers on the topic of Russian emigration were previously considered only as part of the historiography of the Russian diaspora as a whole. Most of the papers on this topic have been published in the last 30 years. However, the works of the first half and the middle of the 20th century devoted to the problems of the Russian diaspora are of particular historiographical value, since they reflect the transformation of attitudes towards Russian emigration of the first wave of the Government of Yugoslavia and its public. In turn, studies published over the past three decades highlight the vast range of activities of Russian emigration in the 1920s – 1930s. They were written using a large amount of archival data and other sources.