Publications
After the turbulent events that took place in Russia between 1917 and the early 1920s, Russian political йmigrйs certainly remained in Switzerland, but a full-fledged Russian diaspora ceased to exist. The attitude in Switzerland toward Soviet Russia, and later toward the Soviet Union during the interwar period, was extremely negative. For example, in 1939, the head of the Swiss Foreign Ministry began a movement to have the Soviet Union expelled from the League of Nations (the only case of this happening in the history of this organization). In 1943, after an indigenous fracture ensued during the Second World War, the president of...
Switzerland (officially, the Swiss Confederation), located in the very center of Europe, gets its name from the Swiss canton, which comes from the early German word “Schwyz.” Switzerland’s more than 700-year history dates back to 1291 when an eternal union was formed between three forest cantons – Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden. Today, Switzerland is a republic formed by 26 cantons and has a population of approximately 7.5 million people.
Since antiquity, Switzerland has accepted travelers from Russia and has occasionally become a place of refuge for political exiles. In 1687, letters were exchanged between the...
In 2004 during Vladimir Putin’s visit to France and the city of Cannes he met with one of the oldest Russian immigrants from the first wave, the last subject of Imperial Russia 82-year-old Andrei Shmeman, and the President of Russia presented him with a new Russian passport. “For many years I lived with the dissonance in my soul of feeling myself to be absolutely Russian while at the same time remaining without citizenship, a stateless person. And now I am happy that I have finally found a motherland,” Andrei Shmeman said then.
For his entire life Andrei Shmeman lived with a so-called Nansen’s passport...
Have you asked yourself how a person gets to know literature? The answer can be found in childhood. Mothers and grandmothers read us books, and sometimes even fathers. Then we read them ourselves, getting up on our tiptoes and reaching for books from the shelves of our home libraries. Then we go to school and, beginning in the first grade, we enter the world of Russian literature. We start with Pushkin and work our way up to the contemporary era. As for foreign literature, it’s generally more an elective than something required and it’s often limited to two or three authors who receive marginal attention by Russian literature...
The next tragic story concerning the presence of Russians in Greece is linked to the events of the First World War, the Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Civil War in Russia. In the summer of 1916, under pressure from its allies, Russia sent an expeditionary corps to the Balkans. Two special infantry brigades totaling nearly 20,000 men arrived in Greek Thessaloniki. They immediately entered fighting on the Macedonian front, which produced the first victims of the campaign. In the winter of 1916-1917, many Russian soldiers had already died as a result of various epidemics and renewed fighting.
The remains of 400 Russian soldiers were buried...
In 2008, Russia and Greece marked the 180th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. This modest number could lead to confusion, however, as the historical, cultural and political fates of Russia (as the heir of Kievan Rus, Muscovy, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union) and Greece (in the broader sense – Byzantium) go deep into the centuries. They are so closely intertwined that a similar example in world history is unlikely to be found.
It is common knowledge that Orthodoxy came to Russia from Byzantium. Greek sources gave rise to Russian religious art, as well as philosophical and...
