Alla Shelyapina
Performance of the Ensemble "Grenada" in one of the Russian clubs in Argentina. Photo courtesy of Tatiana Vladimirskaya
Argentina is home to the largest Russian diaspora in Latin America. Why is it in this country? Who are those people and why were some of them recognized with Soviet battle honors from World War II?
We visited a meeting of the Discovery World Club of the Russian Folk Ensemble "Grenada" at the Russian Committee for Cooperation with Latin America with the aim to find out more details. The ensemble does a lot of research promoting Russian culture and language in Latin America and informing Russians about people living in the southern part of the American continent. Tatiana Vladimirskaya, the artistic director of the ensemble and researcher at the Institute of Latin America Studies, told us about the Russian diaspora in Argentina.
– There are some people in Argentina who were honored with USSR orders from the time of the Great Patriotic War. Who were they and what were they awarded for?
– I used to know one Argentinian repatriate family. Its head, Felix Verzhbitsky, was so proud of being awarded the Order of the Great Patriotic War. It took me a long time before I dared to ask how an Argentinian resident of Buenos Aires had been able to join the Soviet battle against fascism. Later I found out that during the Great Patriotic War, our nation was greatly supported by quite a few Argentine residents, including the native Argentines and those called "Russians" in Argentina. The latter include ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles whose ancestors came to Latin America from the Russian Empire.
They helped in a variety of ways. They raised money, sewed clothes for the soldiers, and knitted socks and mittens for them. There were those who organized a team that obstructed Argentina from shipping strategic supplies to Nazi Germany. My Argentine friends' father was a member of this team. He was honored with a Soviet order. The team was led by Joseph Grigulevich, a man I had the good fortune to meet while he was working in Moscow. Joseph had come to Argentina at a young age. He was looking for his father who had left Russia to escape poverty early in the twentieth century.
The Russian émigré community is quite diverse in Latin America. Joseph Grigulevich's fate is quite typical for some of those commonly referred to as "Russians". Most of the diaspora was formed by labor emigrants who had left pre-revolutionary Russia to seek work. They often had a strong empathy for their homeland that had been forsaken out of need and helped the Soviet Union. There are some descendants of people who fled from the October Revolution of 1917, as well as children of revolutionaries that had emigrated because of political persecution in the Russian Empire. For instance, Argentina became home to several sailors from the famous mutinous battleship Potemkin.
There is a considerable population of Russian émigrés in Paraguay. They are descendants of officers of the tsarist army who took part in the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia in the 1930s. Russian officers came from Europe following the call of General Belyaev. They fought on Paraguay's side and secured that country's victory in the bloody war. Ever since then, Russians have been heroes to Paraguayans. The Russian diaspora includes wealthy and noble people.
– Why are there so many descendants of Russians in Argentina?
– Back in the late nineteenth century, the Argentine government strived to encourage industrious Europeans to settle here. There was uninhabited land in the north of Argentina, on the border with Paraguay and Brazil. Those areas were very hot and difficult to cultivate. Most of the emigrants from Russia were landless peasants from the southern provinces. However, there were also people from the Baltic states, inhabitants of Jewish villages, Old Believers, and members of religious sects. Volga Germans were a special group that was also often referred to as Russians.
People were given plots of land, but they were often in the jungle. To cultivate it, it was first necessary first to clear it and get rid of the lush vegetation. For instance, they had to cut down quebracho trees. Their name translates as "axe-breaker"! This description alone gives you an idea of how hard it was for people to clear their plots. Even today you can hear familiar names and surnames in the Argentine provinces of Misiones, Entre Rios, and Corrientes. However, Russian speech is heard less and less often in these well-tended fields... Indeed, descendants of the first Russian emigrants still comprise the most population of the hottest, though northern, lands of Argentina.
– Until recently, the locals considered such a diverse emigre community in terms of ethnic composition to be Russians. Why was it so? Were they not interested in the details?
– I believe this is a common situation. No matter what country we go to perform in the world, the word "Russian" means all of us - representatives of huge Russia or the Soviet Union (some people are not even aware that our country has a different name nowadays). Well, back in those old days, who was supposed to figure out the ethnicity of a newcomer? They were Russians, that's it! There were often Bulgarians, Serbs, and Hungarians who used to be referred to as Russians in Argentina and Paraguay, as well as in other Latin American countries.
There is another interesting detail. Employees at the Buenos Aires migration center used to write down the Slavic surnames of immigrants based on the way they sounded in Spanish. Many descendants of the first immigrants cannot trace their genealogical roots today because they do not know how their surname sounded in Russian. For instance, we were contacted by Paraguayan Russians. They thought their surname should be pronounced as the Shishpanovs. We made an attempt to investigate of our own accord whether this was the case. Yet, how can this be ascertained if there is no letter corresponding to the "sh" sound in the Spanish language? The immigration official had somehow written down their last name in his own way using four letters for one sound...
Here's another fun fact. Many packages of the famous mate, which is actually mostly produced in the Misiones Province, feature the company name, "Los Hermanos Hreniuk" ("The Hreniuk Brothers"). I think members of the Grinyuk family once came to Argentina, and their names were written "approximately".
– Groups of Russian immigrants used to settle in communes in the city as it was easier to live in an unknown country. How did this happen?
– It is true that not all migrants made it to the remote jungle outskirts of the country. Many of them settled in the ports of entry, such as Buenos Aires or Montevideo, the capital of neighboring Uruguay.
At first, people couldn't afford good accommodations, so they stayed in hovels, and huts with no windows and only a front door. A few families used to stay together. Russians did their best to settle close to each other, to stick together. Thus, communities of compatriots were built along the perimeter of the port city of Buenos Aires. Back then, there were low-cost, abandoned lands.
As such a commune settled in, people arranged a social center where they could meet on their days off. As a rule, such a center was not something like a tavern where people would gather to eat and drink. It was rather a club or a cultural center where they could play music, set up a choir, or a dance group. Once we were shown the 1918 poster for The Inspector General at the Vostok Club! Can you imagine? The influence of the far-away homeland, where cultural centers like clubs, houses, and palaces of culture had already begun to appear, was felt even here, across the ocean!
Ensemble "Grenada" in the Russian Club named after Vissarion Belinsky (Argentina), 1990. Photo courtesy of Tatiana Vladimirskaya
Thus, Russian clubs were established along the city's perimeter. We as staff of the Institute of Latin America Studies had no idea that they existed. But they lived and operated! Think about it: Vladimir Mayakovsky Club, Vissarion Belinsky Club, Maxim Gorky Club, Alexander Pushkin Club, Nikolai Ostrovsky Club, Dnipro Club, Vostok Club... We first visited Buenos Aires in 1989. By that time, these clubs were attended by several generations of Russian immigrants. Each community goes to its own club. Visiting another one was a rare occurrence since transportation was very expensive in the Argentine capital. However, holidays were traditionally celebrated together. And everybody lived in peace and friendship.
– During the Soviet Union, the Russian diaspora in Argentina supported our country. What happened after the collapse of the USSR?
– Let me share my observations. We first came to Russian clubs in Buenos Aires in 1989. In 1990, we visited the "Russian" Misiones Province. We were surprised that we felt quite at home there, 8,700 miles away from our country. However, when we came back to the town of Obera in Misiones in 1991, we were struck by negative changes. Instead of the "Russian" diaspora, we found its fragments. There were Russians here and Ukrainians there. Those who advocated friendship between the peoples stayed under the term "Russians". Those who started to refer to themselves as "Ukrainians" (though there are many Ukrainians among the Russians) used to say, "Don't go to them", "Don't listen to them!", "Perform only at our place!". After all, they did come to our performance, though not immediately. It looked really silly.
Where did this come from? There were talks that emissaries had been coming there before the collapse of the Soviet Union. I don't know exactly but most likely they weren't even from Ukraine but from Canada or the United States. They aggressively agitated the diaspora against Russian clubs, saying, "Why are you going to Russian clubs if you are not Russians?" They did their best to make people enemies of each other. Eventually, they succeeded in breaking up the Russian-speaking diaspora that used to be very united. We observed this both in the provinces and in Buenos Aires.
Truth be told, it really hurts us to see this development. The situation has worsened since there is now rampant propaganda against everything Russian in Argentina, both in the Western and local media. The latter, in fact, are managed by their pro-Western owners. So it's extremely challenging to be Russian right now. And we all need to do our best to help those Argentine Russians who resist the effort to break their spirit and oppose the policy aimed at further disuniting people.
(to be continued)
