Swiss emigration to Russia

There was significant emigration of Swiss people to the Russian Empire from the late 17th to the late 19th century. Rauber (1985) estimates that a number of 50,000 to 60,000 Swiss lived in Russia between roughly 1700 and 1917.

The late 18th and early 19th century saw a flow of Swiss farmers forming colonies such as Şaba (Bessarabia, at the Dniester Liman, now part of the Ukraine), besides specialists of various professions, working as winemakers, cheesemakers, merchants, officers or governesses. The Russian-Swiss generally prospered, partly merging with German diaspora populations. Early Swiss emigrants to Russia were not poor, but brought money with them, establishing themselves as specialist elites, choosing Russia as migration target because it offered greater opportunities for their trades than America. Only in the later 19th century, with Russian industrialization, saw significant migration of lower social classes.

Most of these Swiss diaspora populations returned to Switzerland in during the interwar period in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and especially as a result of the Dekulakization under Joseph Stalin during 1929-1931.

The most famous Swiss to have lived in Russia are probably the mathematician Leonhard Euler and the military officer Franz Lefort, a close associate of Peter the Great. Lefortovo district in modern Moscow still bears his name. Other notable Russian-Swiss include botanist Johannes Ammann, artist and architect Leonhard Christian Gottlieb Leonardowitsch Schaufelberger, entrepreneur Arnold Schaufelberger, politician Frederic Cesar de la Harpe and general Antoine Henri Jomini in the tsarist period and Fritz Platten and Jules Humbert-Droz in the Soviet period. In 1918, Platten saved Vladimir Lenin's life in St. Petersburg, and in 1923, a Russian-Swiss assassinated Bolshevik leader Vatslav Vorovskii in Lausanne.

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