White Russian Fascists and White/Red Russian Alliances in Shanghai

This picture of White Russian fascists in Harbin in 1934 popped up on twitter the other day, courtesy of Peter Harmsen, the author of the books Shanghai 1937 and Nanjing 1937 – you can follow his regular and interesting tweets at @chinaww2. I’ve posted myself about Russian fascists in China before but the political allegiances of the Russians in Shanghai just before and during World War Two were many and varied.

Some did form pro-fascist groups, others actively worked with the Japanese and Nazis in the hope that the USSR would be defeated and they’d be able to regain their former positions and property. However, as the article from June 1941 below shows, following the Nazi invasion of the Sioviet Union some White Russians did join with the Soviet Russian community in Shanghai to oppose the attack. This is, of course, understandable and admirable in some ways – more so than becoming fascists (of course there was always a rather large strain of anti-Semitism among many White Russians which swayed them) though sadly many of those who did seek to return to the USSR during the war and afterwards mostly ended up in Stalin’s gulags.