Echo of Omsk in Harbin: Participants in the White Movement in Eastern Russia in 1920 (by the diary of I. S. Ilyin)

The authors of the article focus on the participants of the White Movement who appeared in exile in Harbin, the center of the Chinese Eastern Railway’s alienated zone, as a result of the collapse of the Eastern Front of the Civil War, during 1920. The main source of the research is the unpublished diary of Colonel Iosif Sergeevich Ilyin (1885–1981), which is stored in the State Archives of the Russian Federation.
Based on the history-biographical method within the framework of an anthropological approach, the article analyses the behavioral practices of the White Movement leaders, the strategies of social adaptation of military emigrants to new conditions and the psychological and ideological crises of refugees. Moreover, the researchers’ aim is to show how the personality of the diary’s author and his involvement in the process of adapting to the new environment influence on the portrayal of the Harbin reality in 1920.
The article emphasizes the importance of using ego-documents to study the consciousness of the participants of the White Movement, who were at the “breaking point” and started their lives in exile from scratch.

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