Publications

The history of Montenegro dates back to the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th century when Slavic tribes began to settle the Balkan Peninsula. In the Middle Ages, the Principality of Zeta became one of the hotbeds of Slavic culture. It was here, for example, that the first book in Cyrillic was printed in 1493. At the end of the 15th century, the plains of Zeta were seized by the Ottoman Empire, which forced the local Orthodox population to leave for the impregnable mountain areas called Black Mountain (literally “black, dense forests”). Since then, the name Montenegro has stuck, replacing Zeta. Taking shelter in...

The very phrase “Russian Africa,” in contrast to “Russian America” or “Russian London,” sounds very unusual, to say the least. Nevertheless, our compatriots began to settle in what was then known as the Dark Continent at the end of the 19th century. To this day, South Africa remains an important area for Russian emigres. History is silent about when the first of our compatriots settled in southern Africa. Numerous legends exist. According to one, the famous and influential Iloffs, a Boer family, had Russian roots. One of its pioneers was supposedly a Russian defector who had been sent by Peter I to study...

To the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate Your Eminences! On behalf of the Russkiy Mir Foundation and from me personally, I would like to express my sincere and deep condolences at the untimely death of His Holiness Patriarch Alexy. His death is a huge loss for us all – not only for the clergy and the laity, but for the multiconfessional, multiethnic and multicultural Russian world in its entirety. Despite its diversity, the Russian world is nevertheless united by its connection to the great Russian civilization, which is inconceivable without the spiritual and ethical direction based in Russian Orthodox...

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...