White émigré

White émigrés were Russians who emigrated from the territory of the former Russian Empire in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. They were in opposition to the revolutionary Bolshevik political climate. Many White Russian émigrés participated in the White movement or supported it. The term is often broadly applied to anyone who may have left the country due to the change in regimes.

Some white émigrés, like Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, were opposed to the Bolsheviks but had not directly supported the White movement; some were apolitical. The term is also applied to the descendants of those who left and who still retain a Russian Orthodox Christian identity while living abroad.

The term "émigré" is most commonly used in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. A term preferred by the émigrés themselves was "first-wave émigré"; "Russian émigrés" or "Russian military émigrés" if they participated in the White movement. In the Soviet Union, the term "white émigré" generally had negative connotations.

Since the end of the 1980s, the term "first-wave émigré" has become more common in Russia. In East Asia, the term "White Russian" is the term most commonly used for such Russian émigrés, although some have been of Ukrainian and other ethnicities, and were not culturally Russians.

Most white émigrés left Russia from 1917 to 1920 (estimates vary between 900,000 and 2 million). Some managed to leave during the 1920s and 1930s, or were expelled by the Soviet government (such as, for example, Pitirim Sorokin and Ivan Ilyin). They spanned all classes and included military soldiers and officers, Cossacks, intellectuals of various professions, dispossessed businessmen and landowners, as well as officials of the Russian Imperial government and of various anti-Bolshevik governments of the Russian Civil War period. Not all of them were ethnic Russians; other ethnic groups were included.