Hello, French former history student here, I followed a class on the Russian Revolution, and studied a bit the subject of migrations related to it. Pre-apologies for the writing style. The book L’exil russe. La fabrique du réfugié apatride (1920-1939) [The Russian exile. Creating the stateless refugee] by Catherine Goussef, an historian specialized in Russian and East-European migrations during the XXth century, helped me a lot. My answer will be French-focused since I studied it more thoroughly than other countries.

In fiction, the typical russian refugee is an aristocrat, because it makes for colorful characters. However that is a stereotype. Russian refugees after the Revolution were quite a heterogeneous group. Tsarist officers, administrators and urban bourgeois but also peasants: a third of the refugees were from the lower class of society. So a good mix between lower, middle and upper class people. Most of those people came from the western part of Russia, and especially Ukraine and the Cossacks regions. Big cities were well represented also. Why south-west Russia ? Because that’s where most of the fighting took place during the Revolution. Stating the obvious, but war is a big “incentive” to become a refugee. Most of the refugees fled Russia through the south and boats going from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and the Western Europe. For those going on land, it was through Poland or the Balkans.

Now how many ? That’s very complicated to answer. First of all because Russian borders changed after WW1. You had refugees AND Russians inhabiting former Russian land at the same time. As such there was sometimes confusions between refugees and those inhabitants. And after the Revolution some people came back, others left again etc. Between sources you have 700 000 to 2 000 000 refugees in the early 20s. In France an estimated 80 000 refugees came. That’s a lot a people. After the international recognition of the USRR between 1922-24, there was a short consensus to send the refugees back to Russia. The idea was widely unpopular among the refugees who were usually against the Bolsheviks. It didn’t really work in the end. France welcomed Russian refugees to mark its opposition to the Bolshevik regime. Also because it desperately needed workers for its economy after WW1. All of this under the nice umbrella of republican fraternité.

And that’s where it gets interesting: entries in France are relatively low from 1918 to 1922, then spike clearly between 1923 and 1926, and then again in 1928-1930. When the French economy needed workers, the government gave the refugee status to everyone, but when the economy was in a low, refugees had to go in the waiting line with migrants workers. Since 1921, the Russian refugees were stateless individuals, because the USSR stripped them of their nationality. To conclude, the Russian refugees had pretty much the same treatment as an immigrant worker from Spain or Italy.

Tldr question by question : Between 700 000 to 2 000 000 refugees. A mix of aristocrats, middle-class and peasants. In the case of France, the same problems as every immigrant workers.

I can add to what /u/neoprodi shared.

I have seen roughly the same numbers for refugees. 10,000 fled from Ukraine when the Red Army invaded in 1919, heading mostly to Poland. Following them, 135 – 150,000 fled Crimea with Baron Wragnel’s army in 1920, 70,000 of them civilians, and the majority from poorer backgrounds. This group settled around the Black Sea, mostly near Constantinople, where the French government (which had been supporting Wrangel) placed them in refugee camps. 50,000 other Volunteer Army soldiers and civilian refugees were settled by the British in Lemnos, Cyprus, Egypt, and finally in Serbia in the summer of 1921. Poland took in another 550,000 refugees in July 1921, 560,000 arrived in Germany in 1920. Thousands of Whites in the East fled to China, especially around Harbin and Shanghai.

In total, somewhere between 750,000 – 2 million people fled Russia in the early 1920s.

/u/neoprodi mentioned how the typical White Russian refugee in memory is an aristocratic ex-officer, usually reduced to taxi driving or some other menial labor. Scholars have recently helped us understand the true complexity of the White emigré population, which was much more diverse than it the image the diaspora actively created for itself. Former White officers and displaced elites were no more than a fraction of the population.

On to your third question – yes, refugees constituted a major problem for other nations. In fact, they arguably forced a revolution in humanitarian rights, including the recognition of the refugee as a political category whose plight other states had a responsibility to.

The largest problem was that these refugees were stateless. 19th century Europe was built on a framework of nation states that now had totally crumbled in Eastern Europe and in Asia Minor, where former imperial powers had collapsed into anarchy. Moreover, the new states that sprang up actively persecuted their own citizens, and stripped them of nationality, as the Soviet Union did to White refugees in 1921. Legal scholars obsessed over the stateless White Russian as an “invisible” figure, guaranteed no rights by anyone.

This created huge problems. Whereas pre-war Europe had been very liberal as regards movement between nations, the Great War had put up huge administrative walls to movement and created distrust for foreign nationals. Stateless immigrants were distrusted – they had no loyalty to any state. Few nations wanted an influx of refugees and refused to naturalize them(France is notably the only power in the inter-war period to strongly encourage immigration, again as /u/neoprodi noted – the United States strongly opposed immigration between protectionist trade unionist movements and nativist sentiment). Most states favored repatriating the refugees to Russia, but horror stories about the Red Terror persuaded few to go.

So, no national government could solve this refugee crisis. Therefore, a transnational solution had to be found, which the League of Nations did by appointing Norweigan Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen as High Commissioner of Russian Refugees. Nansen surrounded himself with experts to determine the legal status of stateless refugees. He came up with a document that would allow them to circulate, called the Nansen Certificate or the Nansen Passport. This document allowed Russian refugees to move where work and naturalization could take place (although it had many restrictions, including preventing readmission for immigrants into the nation that issued the Nansen Passport).

Nansen’s passport cleared the administrative hurdle for Russian refugees. Arguably, it also revolutionized humanitarian rights by guaranteeing the stateless the ability to circulate. In 1924 the Nansen Passport was extended to Armenians, then Assyrians being persecuted by nationalist Turkey.

And here is where I have to disagree with some that /u/neoprodi. Russian immigrants were treated by the French government similarly to ones from Italy and Spain (although the French applied very racialist thinking to who they allowed into the country). However, the term rights for refugees in this period only applied to the groups I listed. Italians were the notable exception. In the 1920s, many were beginning to illegly leave the country to flee Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. The League of Nations rejected applying the Nansen Passport to them, for fear of insulting Italy, a League member.

Sources:

Bruno Cabanes, The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918-1924

Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century