Eugene M. Kulischer

Eugene M. Kulischer (Russian: Евгений Михайлович Кулишер, 1881–1956) was a Russian American sociologist, an authority on demography, migration, and manpower, and an expert on Russia. Kulischer coined the phrase “displaced persons” and was among the first to seek to document the number of persons lost in the Holocaust as well as the subsequent relocation of millions of Europeans after World War II.

Born in Kiev in 1881 he died in Washington D.C, on April 2, 1956. Like his father, Michael Kulischer a noted Russian historian, he insisted that no migration occurs in isolation. Along with his brother Alexander, he worked on Kriegs-und Wanderzüge, Weltgeschichte als Völkerbewegung (War and Migration; World History as Peoples' Movements), (Berlin-Leipzig, Walter de Gruyter, 1932) and Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917-1947. They were intended to show that migrations and wars go hand-in-hand.

In a way, Kulischer was himself an example of a displaced person. Following the Russian Revolution (1917), he fled Russia for Germany in 1920. Following the collapse of the Weimar Republic, he fled Germany for Denmark. In 1936 he went to Paris. In 1941 — at the age of 60 — Kulischer "crossed clandestinely the demarcation line between the occupied and the unoccupied parts of France" and went to the United States; his brother Alexander, "when crossing the demarcation line, was arrested by Pétain's gendarmes and died in a concentration camp.”

In the United States Kulischer “served successively as consultant or staff member of the International Labor Office, the Office of Strategic Services, the Bureau of the Census, the Department of the Army, and the Library of Congress. His major works include The Displacement of Population in Europe (Montreal, 1943), and Europe on the Move (New York, 1948)”. At the heart of Kulischer's work is a simple axiom: individual short-distance movements in their combined action create great population shifts. An expansion of that concept is his oft quoted dictum:

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