Ebook: New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles, 1920-1945

Three major waves of emigration from Soviet Russia followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Russian Civil War. While emigrants in the first wave have been identified mainly with a vague notion of aristocratic taxi drivers, Robert Johnston, through a collective biography of the roughly 120,000 Russians who lived in France during 1920-45, in particular in Paris, shows that this first wave of Russian emigrants made a much more significant contribution to French life and to western knowledge of Russia.