„W Harbinie dobrze było mieszkać…”. O potrzebie badań nad powojenną reemigracją tzw. harbińców do ZSRS
“It was Good to Live in Harbin ...”. On the Need for Research on the Post-War Re-Emigration of the So-Called Kharbintsy to the USSR

Summary/Abstract: The fate of the returnees from Harbin to the USSR in the 1950s and their possible impact on the slow erosion of the Soviet system remain a relatively unknown topic in Poland. Representatives of this group – as spouses of Polish repatriates from Kazakhstan – recently came to our country. It is difficult to say whether such marriages were frequent. While collecting reports from Kazakh Poles, the author managed to find two such people, representing two different generations: a woman born in Harbin, who came with her parents to the USSR as a small child, and a man born in the 1980s, whose father left the city as a child. Their family memories, however, will not be fully understood without showing the historical context and the unique role of Harbin in the social history of Russia. In the pre-revolutionary period, Harbin, as a Russian enclave in Chinese territory, was a kind of liberal experiment, and after the civil war and partially under Japanese occupation, the city played the role of a free market for ideas. Due to these factors, post-war Harbin emigrants to the USSR came with completely different baggage of experience, becoming a “suspect” group at once.

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