I recently found a document in a bundle of papers I was given that had once belonged to a senior scholar in the field of modern Chinese history. With a covering letter dated 13 August 1956, it’s a 20 page packing list detailing the contents of seven crates of the documents of the Shanghai office of the Russian Emigrants’ Association from its establishment in 1926 to 1946 (in the main). (A little confusingly, this body was actually known as the Russian Emigrants’ Committee). The file originates from the CIA, and the packing list dates from Spring 1949 when the US navy took out of the city the records of the Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch along with some other records that are now in the US National Archives, notably the Russian Emigrants Committee Registration Cards. Here’s a taste of what was taken from the Russian Emigrants’ Association.

And another

The SMP Special Branch archive and associated records were transferred to the National Archives by the CIA in 1979. You can find the catalogue and an introduction here. But of this substantial collection of material from the Russian Emigrants’ Association I can see no trace in the National Archives catalogue, nor anywhere else. Perhaps it’s still with the CIA. There’s growing scholarly and genealogical interest in the history of this community: Katya Knyazeva has been writing about it, and steadily surfacing material and making it available online. Marcia Ristaino’s pioneering Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (2001) set the agenda and framework, but there is much that can be learned about the experiences of this, the single largest community of Europeans in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s.