Russian diaspora

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The term Russian diaspora refers to the global community of ethnic Russians, usually more specifically those who maintain some kind of connection, even if ephemeral, to the land of their ancestors and maintain their feeling of Russian national identity within local community.

The term "Russian speaking or Russophone diaspora" (русско-говорящая диаспора) is used primarily to describe non-Russians who were citizens of the USSR or Russian Federation and for whom Russian is a first language (i.e. Jews, Tartars). An alternate, more traditional term to collectively refer to this group is Rossiyane (россияне).

A sizable wave of ethnic Russians emigrated during a short time period in the wake of the October Revolution and Civil War, known collectively as the White emigres. A smaller wave of Russians (often referred to by Russians as the second emigration or second wave) had also left during World War II, many were refugees, eastern workers, or surviving veterans of the Russian Liberation Army and other anti-communist armed units who evaded forced repatriation. In the immediate post-World War II period, the largest Russian communities in the emigration were to be found in Germany, Canada, the USA, United Kingdom and Australia.

A significant amount of Russian Jews were permitted to emigrate from the Soviet Union beginning with the late 1960's to Israel, sometimes referred to as the third wave (третьая волна). Many of them began arriving from Israel to the United States where they formed several Russian speaking enclaves, such as the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn in New York City.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, significant emigration of citizens of the Russian Federation to various parts of the world has taken place. Israel and Germany have recieved the largest shares of Russian speaking immigrants in the nineties, because of incentives institutionalized by the governments of both countries.

Nowadays, the largest number of Russians outside Russia itself is to be found in former republics of the Soviet Union; sizeable Russian-speaking populations also exist in the USA, in the European Union and in Israel. According to Russian government data, there are almost ten million Russians in Central Asian countries (over half of them in Kazakhstan), 11 million in Ukraine, about one million in the independent republics of the Caucasus, 1.3 million in Belarus, half a million in Moldova, and a million and a half in the three Blatic states that were formerly part of the Soviet Union (800,000 in Latvia, 430,000 in Estonia and 340,000 in Lithuania). The rest of the European Union is home to roughly 200,000 Russian speakers; as many as 850,000 live in the USA. Many Russians also live in Brazil (70,000), Canada (60,000), and Argentina (50,000), as well as Australia and New Zealand (20,000).