Through a series of events a non-anonymous blogger would say in more detail, this weekend I ended up hearing a lot about the town of Harbin and the people who lived there.
Its all an interesting read, really.
The decade from 1913 to 1923 saw Russia through World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. In the 1920s Harbin was flooded with about 100,000 to 200,000 Russian émigrés fleeing from Russia which included leaders, officers, soldiers of the White movement, members of White governments in Siberia and the Russian Far East, the intelligentsia, and ordinary people. On September 8, 1920, the Chinese Republic announced that it no longer recognized the Russian consulates in China. On September 23 China ceased relations with representatives of Imperial Russia and deprived Russians of extraterritorial rights. Overnight Russians in China found themselves stateless. Soon afterward, the Chinese took control of the institutions in Harbin such as the courts, police, prison, post office, and some research and educational institutions.Some of these Harbin Russians ended up coming to Canada, and since it was the late teens and early 20s, they ended up coming mostly to central Alberta. Quite the tale, really.
