RUSKA EMIGRACIJA U KULTURNOM ŽIVOTU GRAĐANSKE JUGOSLAVIJE
RUSSIAN EMIGRATION IN THE CULTURAL LIFE OF THE BOURGEOIS YUGOSLAVIA

Summary/Abstract: After the revolution and the civil war had been concluded, several million of people emigrated from the Soviet Union, a small number of whom arrived to the just founded Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Russian emigration was cordially and warmly received, both by the official organs of authority and by the population, particularly its Orthodox part. According to accessible data, about 62% of Russian emigrants were constituted by people with secondary school education, approximately 13% had a higher and high education, whereas only 3% of emigrants were illiterate. Several moments were characteristic of the Russian emigration in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes; they considered their exile as a temporary conditions and they lived in an „entirely refugees’ way”; they had a very intensive and developed social life, i.e. they lived an „intensively Russian life” creating numerous professional, political, cultural organizations; they had difficulties in adapting themselves to the new environment and including themselves into it, subordinating their entire activity to the future life in Russia; they did not renounce their old habits (traditionalism which contained in it many values of the old order and which had to secure the continuity with the former life) and, what is particularly important, of the „Russian spirit and Russian culture" by which they ennobled and enriched the environment into which they had arrived. In the Kingdom of Yugoslavia the emigration has formed a special school system which enabled it to preserve its identity and its national being. In addition to the national, educational and cultural significance, the Russian schools had also an expressed political function to educate the youth who had to be „the cultural detachment of Russia in foreign countries”. The cultural importance of the Russian emigration is particularly reflected in the number of eruditely educated professors and scientists who left a visible trace in the work of universities and scientific institutions of the Kingdom, raised the level of science and teaching, founded the study of scientific disciplines which were not cultivated until then in our country. The Russian emigration had also an intensive literary and artistic life and numerous workers in different domains of creativity, that reflected itself in the milieu they arrived in and which it ennobled, by its cultural mission, its zeal, its tradition and its spirit and made it more cultural and more enlightened.

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