Two Russias Abroad: How Russian Émigrés Shaped the West’s Perception of Russia

Russian emigrés who fled after the 1917 revolution proudly preserved Russian culture while those who left after 1991 distanced themselves and adopted Western criticism of their homeland.

Russophobia in the West has a long pedigree. A caricature of Russia as “backward,” “imperialist,” “hostile,” and “authoritarian” has circulated for centuries, with roots in geopolitics and cultural prejudice. One significant, yet under-examined, accelerant among many is a narrow stratum of post-Soviet émigrés who, from the 1990s through today, refract Russia through a Western moral lens and treat denunciation as enlightenment. Although the wider diaspora is heterogeneous, ranging from apolitical to moderate to traditionalist, Western institutions have often elevated this small, vocal subset as native authorities, rewarding simplification with prestige. As a result, critique ossifies into catechism, grievance passes for expertise and Russophobia acquires a credentialed gloss. In this essay, the term post-Soviet émigrés refers specifically to those who have left the present-day Russian Federation, and not émigrés from other former Soviet republics.

In the prevailing geopolitical climate, the distinction matters more than ever. As I argued in my earlier essay The Decline of Understanding: How America Lost the Ability to Study the World, the decay of US academia, characterized by the hollowing of Area Studies, has led to profound deficiencies in understanding civilizations like Russia and replaced scholarship with ideological conformity. That is the first driver of Western hostility. The second, examined here, is the sociology of a strata of the post-Soviet diaspora whose advancement often depends on translating Russia into the West’s preferred moral narrative. Together, intellectual decline and incentivized denunciation create a climate in which policy is fashioned from caricature rather than knowledge.

Against this backdrop, the contrast between two Russian diasporas becomes essential. The exiles of 1917, custodians of a shattered civilization, preserved a proud, spiritual continuity with Russia whereas many of those who left after 1991 sought belonging through repudiation, adopting Western frames that cast Russia as something to escape rather than understand. What follows traces the roots of this divergence and shows how these two waves came to embody opposing relationships to Russia and to the West, an opposition that now echoes through media, universities and foreign policy alike. While the history of Russian emigration is complex and internally diverse, this essay deliberately sketches its main fault-lines in plain, measured language so that readers unfamiliar with Russia can better grasp what is at stake in these distinctions.

The First Exodus: Custodians of a Vanished Civilization

For this generation, exile was both a tragedy and a calling. They saw themselves as the last bearers of a great spiritual tradition extinguished at home. From Paris to Prague, Berlin to Harbin, they founded Russian schools, churches, publishing houses and literary circles. They printed newspapers like Poslednie Novosti (The Latest News)3 and journals like Sovremennye Zapiski (Contemporary Notes)4, where writers such as Ivan Bunin, Zinaida Gippius, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Pitirim Sorokin, Georges Florovsky, and later Vladimir Nabokov, kept the Russian word alive.

Among the most poignant symbols of this spiritual exile was the composer Sergei Rachmaninov who left Russia in December 1917 after the revolution. Though he achieved immense material success in the West, he remained haunted by the loss of his homeland. His later works, especially the All-Night Vigil and the Third Symphony, are saturated with the cadences of Orthodox chant and the tolling of Russian bells, motifs that evoke the vast, prayerful melancholy of the Russian landscape.

In America he lived surrounded by wealth yet confessed to friends that he felt “like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.”5 His music, luminous with nostalgia, became a kind of liturgy for the lost Russia, a bridge between memory and eternity. Through Rachmaninov, one hears the essence of the first émigré generation, which is the longing to preserve the spiritual Russia within the heart even when the land itself was gone.

This cultural self-confidence derived from two sources. First, the White émigrés had been formed within a classical, pre-revolutionary culture that saw Russia not as an appendage of Europe but as a distinct civilization despite an ethnically diverse aristocracy, many of whom had Western European roots. Second, their exile imbued in them a sense of mission to safeguard “true Russia” from Bolshevik barbarism. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR) became not only a religious but a civilizational institution, sanctifying the very idea of Russia-in-exile.

For the White émigré, to be Russian was not a stigma, it was a sacrament. They carried with them Pushkin and Dostoevsky, the icons of Orthodoxy and a metaphysical conviction that Russia’s suffering was redemptive. Bunin, the first Russian Nobel laureate in literature, wrote that “Russia has fallen, but she is not lost,”6 while Nikolai Berdyaev spoke of the Russian idea as “universal in spirit, orthodox in soul and tragic in destiny.”7

The West, for these émigrés, was both refuge and foreign land. It was a place of material comfort but spiritual emptiness. They admired Western science and order but viewed its rationalism as sterile. In preserving their Russianness, they were also resisting assimilation into what they perceived as the desacralized world of the modern West. Their loyalty to a metaphysical Russia, not the Soviet state but to Holy Russia, gave them coherence and pride.

The Second Exodus: Children of a Collapsed Utopia

Unlike the White émigrés, the post-Soviet diaspora had no sacred homeland to preserve. They did not leave behind an empire of faith or a classical culture but a decaying bureaucracy and a crumbling superpower. For many, “Russia” had become synonymous with dysfunction. Emigration was an escape from humiliation, not a lament for a lost ideal.

Crucially, this generation was educated in a Soviet secular worldview that derided religion and dismissed pre-revolutionary culture as aristocratic relics. Their cultural references were less Pushkin and Gogol than Soviet realism, Western pop and the language of material success. Thus, when they arrived in the West, they were already ideologically pre-aligned with it.

Moreover, the collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with the triumph of liberal globalism. The Western model of democracy and consumer capitalism seemed not only victorious but morally inevitable. To many post-Soviet émigrés, adapting to this model became a way of shedding the perceived “backwardness” of their homeland. The desire to integrate, to prove one’s belonging to the “civilized world”, often required internalizing the West’s anti-Russian narratives.

From media and academia to Silicon Valley startups, the new émigrés found that the easiest way to succeed was to echo Western tropes about “Putin’s dictatorship”, “Russian imperialism” and the virtues of Western democracy. In elite institutions especially, anti-Russian sentiment functioned as social currency. It also offered psychological catharsis where denouncing Russia could feel like emancipating oneself from a childhood of scarcity and state cynicism.

The Loss of Continuity and the Death – and Return – of the “Russian Idea”

By 1991, three generations had grown up without deep religious faith, aristocratic tradition or philosophical grounding. The language of moral hierarchy, duty and metaphysical destiny had been replaced by cynicism and bureaucratic survivalism. When the Soviet edifice collapsed, there was nothing left to believe in – no tsar, no party, no God.

The émigrés of 1917 fled with culture while those of 1991 fled without it. The former built émigré universities, journals and churches. The latter built LinkedIn profiles. The first generation produced writers and philosophers, the second produced programmers and YouTubers.

This difference is not a moral judgment but a reflection of historical trauma. The 20th century broke the chain of memory. The post-Soviet émigré was not a descendant of Dostoevsky’s pilgrim or Tolstoy’s seeker but of Homo Sovieticus – pragmatic, skeptical, cynical and spiritually uprooted.

Yet, even amid this long eclipse, the old Russia did not die. In the final years of the Soviet Union and immediately after, the return of exiles such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vladimir Horowitz symbolized a reawakening of the spiritual memory that the Soviet state had tried to erase. Solzhenitsyn, the conscience of the nation, returned from Vermont in 1994 not as a dissident seeking vengeance but as a prophet seeking reconciliation. His very homecoming testified that the Russia of the spirit, of conscience, Orthodoxy and sacrifice, had survived underground, waiting for the right hour to speak again.

Likewise, Horowitz’s 1986 return to Moscow after sixty years in exile became an emotional pilgrimage. His piano, trembling with nostalgia and devotion, filled the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with music that seemed to heal a wound between generations. They proved that the thread of cultural continuity, though frayed and hidden, still pulsed beneath the surface of Soviet materialism, longing for home. Through the continuity of their work, Rachmaninov, Solzhenitsyn and the earlier generation of émigrés safeguarded abroad the dignity of Russia, her memory and her people.

When the post-1991 émigrés encounter Western hostility toward Russia, they often lack the internal resources to resist it. The White émigrés had an inner compass anchored in a metaphysical vision of their homeland that many post-Soviets do not. For them, to defend Russia can feel like defending the dysfunctional state that once humiliated them. As such, to attack it feels liberating, an act of moral self-cleansing and, in Western eyes, a ticket to legitimacy.

What further sharpens the contrast is that the West itself had changed. The world that received the 1917 exiles was not the world that greeted the 1991 cohort. To see how this altered reception molded attitudes and amplified denunciation, we turn to the milieu that absorbed them.

Western Absorption and the Convert’s Zeal

The post-1991 émigrés, by contrast, arrived in a post-Christian, post-national West dominated by liberal universalism and technocratic capitalism. In such a world, identity is transactional where belonging is earned through conformity to ideological norms. Western society demanded not just adaptation but ideological loyalty, an acceptance of the narrative that the West is the end of history and Russia its recalcitrant antagonist.

In the globalized metropolises of the 2000s, Russianness became suspect. The post-Soviet emigrant could belong only by disavowing origins. Thus, many Russians abroad, especially in academia and media, became zealous critics of Russia, outpacing even their Western peers in condemnation. This mirrors the psychology of the convert – those who renounce their origins often denounce them most loudly to prove moral purity.

In the eyes of Western elites, the Russian who condemns Russia serves a dual function as validation of Western moral superiority and as an instrument of ideological warfare. In return, the émigré receives recognition, grants, fellowships or simply the comforting illusion of belonging. It is a Faustian bargain – acceptance in exchange for the renunciation of one’s civilizational self.

The Problem of “Credentialed Narrators”

They speak chiefly to Western and emigrant audiences and represent a small, politically marginalized subset of Russians. Yet, Western media and policymakers frequently adopt their interpretations uncritically as authoritative insight into Russia as a whole. The epistemic consequence is distortion where anecdote and moral judgment displace longitudinal analysis, linguistic and archival immersion, or dialogue with Russian scholarly traditions. What emerges is not knowledge but caricature – a Russia imagined as an undifferentiated autocracy, incapable of rational statecraft or cultural complexity.

This is where the distinction between the 1917 custodians and the post-1991 converts matters. The first diaspora, even in exile, produced institutions of depth, namely parishes, schools and journals that preserved civilizational memory. The second, as filtered through a few credentialed narrators, often produces performative certainty without civilizational humility. The difference is not merely stylistic. It shapes how the West understands (and mis-understands) a major power.

Faith, Meaning and the Emotional Register of Exile

This contrast surfaces in literature and art. The émigré poets of the 1920s such as Georgy Ivanov, Vladislav Khodasevich and Marina Tsvetaeva wrote of sorrow and faith, of the metaphysics of loss. Their descendants in the 2000s write memoirs of trauma, corruption and self-liberation from Russia’s “darkness.” One writes from the soul’s tragedy, the other from the ego’s emancipation.

The White émigré saw Russia’s fall as a cosmic event, the post-Soviet exile sees it as proof of backwardness. The former’s sorrow was anchored in love, the latter’s contempt in alienation. The difference is ultimately theological. Pre-revolutionary Russian culture, even among secular intellectuals, was suffused with Orthodoxy’s sense of suffering as redemptive. Soviet modernity, and the neoliberal order that followed, expelled this dimension from consciousness. What remains is irony, cynicism and the cult of self-realization.

Why the Distinction Matters Now

This feedback loop between institutional ignorance and incentivized emigrant narratives helps explain why Western discourse so often defaults to caricature. Policy built on caricature tends toward escalation and failure. By contrast, attending to the older tradition of émigré thought such as the Rachmaninov witness, the Horowitz homecoming and the Solzhenitsyn return, reminds us that another register exists, one that sees Russia as a civilizational subject rather than a moral object.

Recognizing the difference between the custodians of 1917 and the converts of 1991 thus becomes a practical intellectual duty. It restores lost complexity and checks the performative certainty that now substitutes for knowledge in many Western forums.

Reclaiming Russianness in a Multipolar World

Some of the most thoughtful contemporary Russian voices abroad comprising Orthodox philosophers, independent scholars and musicians are reviving the White émigré’s patriotism, seeing Russianness not as chauvinism but as an existential stance rooted in community, faith and endurance. They contrast this with the West’s culture of atomization and perpetual self-negation.

In this sense, the current global confrontation between Russia and the West has reopened the identity question for the diaspora. The old pattern of assimilation through repudiation may no longer suffice. In a West gripped by cultural exhaustion, the Russian sense of continuity and meaning may again appear not archaic but prophetic.

From Exile to Renewal

Where the White émigré saw exile as a cross, the post-Soviet émigré saw it as escape. Where one wrote poetry of loss and transcendence, the other writes polemics of resentment and moral superiority. Between them lies not merely time, but the death, and partial return, of continuity: the “Russian idea” that once bound spirit, culture and destiny into one.

If we are to escape the present climate of credentialed caricature, we must recover that continuity and listen again to those who guarded Russia’s soul in exile. Out of exile and alienation alike, a new consciousness of Russianness may yet emerge, one that is not nostalgic, not imitative, but aware of its civilizational vocation which is to endure, to remember and to stand firm against the tides of forgetfulness.