The Homesick Million

By Huntington, William Chapin (1884-1958)

Subjects: Political refugees, Soviet Union, Russians, Russian Revolution 1917-1923, Refugees, History

Description: Mr. Huntington was Commercial Attaché of the American Embassy in Petrograd at the time of the March and the Bolshevik revolutions, and friendships and acquaintances made then were resumed and extended later in France and other European countries. His book is the most complete account yet published of that huge dispersion through which something like a million Russians, a large part of whom were of "bourgeois" upbringing and tastes, let alone those who were leaders in their various fields, were scattered to the four winds. The French émigrés of a century and a half ago were a handful in comparison. Important portions of that tragic story—the lot of those who fled to the Far East, for example, or emigrated to South America—are not considered here. Mr. Huntington sticks to Europe and more particularly to Paris, the center of the emigration, both in numbers and in organized effort. The exiles’ jobs and their problems—those of bringing up children in a foreign land, for instance, of training citizens for that future Russia of which so many exiles dream, of preserving their religion—their tangled politics, their newspapers, books, and authors; all this and much more is considered in detail and with understanding sympathy. Mr. Huntington’s story suffers somewhat from the air which all of us breathe. Although tens of thousands of Russian refugees are still living in difficult circumstances, without secure jobs as well as without a country, the world assumes that after fifteen years the bulk of the problem must be, as the Bolsheviks are so fond of saying, "liquidated." Americans, particularly, forget, if they ever understood, the sort of Europe into which these hordes of unfortunate men and women were flung. Four years ago, after a careful survey of the situation, an American organization, the United Russian Relief, undertook to act as a clearinghouse for the various relief agencies then working, as well as to raise funds for what was planned to be a sort of "relief to end relief." It was the financial crash of the autumn of that year, and not any change in the situation of the refugees themselves, which compelled the U. R. R. to postpone its efforts. What has happened everywhere since then need nct be retold. Its effect on the already precarious posilion of innumerable Russian refugees can be guessed. With many millions of our own citizens out of work, however, the plight. of the "homesick million" is likely to be overlooked. Nostalgia for a lost cause or a lost homeland makes very appealing reading for those who are thoroughly comfortable and sure of themselves. It is less relished in times like these. The Russian emigrés are facts, nevertheless, and such they will continue to be for an indefinite time to come, and here, sympathetically and intelligently told, is a significant chapter in their story for those who are interested. [from The Saturday Review of Literature (New York), December 23, 1933, pp. 372-373: https://archive.org/details/sim_saturday-review_1933-12-23_10_23/mode/2up ] A Pathetic Story Writing with "deep sympathy" about the almost forgotten Tsar’s friends and relatives, generals, capitalists and their aides, the author bemoans the fate of the former parasites now living out of Russia. "Every sixth man has a university diploma and two-thirds of the population are high school graduates, but most of them are forced to live by the sweat of their brows." What a tragedy! But a lot of them make a good living by writing lies about Soviet Russia for the capitalist press. [from Soviet Russia Today (New York), February, 1934, p. 17: https://archive.org/details/sim_update-ussr_1934-02_2_12/mode/2up ] Another interesting Review is available on The New Republic (New York), January 10, 1934, p. 258: https://archive.org/details/sim_new-republic_1934-01-10_77_997/mode/2up .