Red Russians in Queensland

Otto Pohl has just posted the first part of a series on the Russian Diaspora in Australia:

In the wake of the failed 1905 Revolution, the Tsarist regime exiled numerous Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries and other political opponents to Siberia. Thousands of these internal exiles,however, managed to escape to Manchuria and then make their way to Queensland on Japanese ships by 1915. After 1915, the First World War cut off this first wave of Russian immigrants to Australia.

The Australian government was clearly suspicious of the, shall we say, leftward leanings of many of the new arrivals and it looks like they had a pretty tough time of things in their first few years.

This article came about, by the way, as a result of Ian’s attempts to buy a copy of a Solzhenitsyn book in rural Queensland, which you can read about here.

Tagged as: Culture, History