2026 Theses Doctoral

Politics of Displacement: Russian Refugees in Bulgaria and the European Order, 1917-1934

Marantzidou, Charis

The mass displacement unleashed by the Russian Revolution turned refugee management into a diplomatic problem. This dissertation examines how the distribution, settlement, and administration of Russian refugees became mechanisms through which states, international organizations, and refugee leaders negotiated power, sovereignty, and political order in interwar Europe. Focusing on Bulgaria, it explores the specific dynamics of the country’s relations with Russian anti-communist refugees—who were linked to Russia’s former imperial regime—as well as with the Soviet Union and the European Great Powers.

This dissertation argues that the Russian refugee crisis of the interwar years was not simply a humanitarian emergency but a laboratory for statecraft. In Bulgaria, Russian refugees were more than a problem to be managed: they became a political resource. Used as policy tools and bargaining chips in diplomatic negotiations, they helped set key priorities for the Bulgarian state in the 1920s and 1930s. Russian refugees held a distinctive position in the postwar European order: they were at once a stateless population, anti-Bolshevik political actors, and symbolic representatives of a state that had ceased to exist. Their presence compelled state and international officials to grapple with fundamental questions of sovereignty, citizenship, and international protection.

The Russian refugee population in Bulgaria was heterogeneous and politically charged—civilian and military, elite and ordinary—but consistently read through the lens of anti-communism.. Situated in a frontier state bordering the Soviet Union, these refugees functioned simultaneously as a material population in need of administration and as a symbolic register of Bolshevik violence and its consequences. The continued presence of organized military formations also meant that the boundary between soldier and refugee remained unstable, requiring ongoing efforts of classification and control.

As early transmitters of detailed knowledge about Soviet rule, Russian refugee representatives compelled international and Bulgarian authorities to confront the practical realities of Bolshevik governance. This encounter generated a range of administrative experiments, including negotiated resettlement schemes, camp-based containment, and organized repatriation programs. Bulgarian authorities, in turn, learned to mobilize the refugee population for domestic political purposes: to identify and isolate internal enemies, to justify administrative reform in the name of modernization and order, and to strengthen bargaining positions in negotiations for foreign credit.
Refugees themselves drew on Bulgarian state resources to sustain their own project of political and national survival directed against the Soviet regime.

The dissertation argues that refugee governance fused anti-Bolshevik security concerns with emerging humanitarian frameworks, producing regimes of protection that were simultaneously forms of surveillance and political control. For states bordering the Soviet Union, Russian refugees and former White soldiers thus constituted both a humanitarian challenge and a direct encounter with Soviet power in exile.

Ultimately, the dissertation demonstrates that refugee policy became a site where sovereignty, diplomacy, and security converged. Humanitarian assistance to Russian refugees was not separate from geopolitics but constitutive of it, forming one of the earliest institutional arenas in which European states and international organizations engaged the Soviet Union as a governing reality. The gradual acceptance of the Soviet government into the international community also marked the erosion of the Russian refugee’s exceptional status. As the Soviet government became a diplomatic actor and exclusion was replaced by incorporation, the exceptional status of Russian refugees began to erode, and with it, the institutional foundations of their protection. The result was a system in which concerns about refugees were never solely about displacement, but about the reach, stability, and influence of Soviet power in interwar Europe.