Atypical Russians: Kalmyks, Jews and Gypsies among white emigrants in the Kingdom of SCS/Yugoslavia 1918-1941

In the newly erected state after the First World War, the Serbian people became a part of a community together with new peoples, and built new interethnic experiences and relations. During the interwar period, the Serbs achieved interactive social relations not only with the traditional peoples of the Yugoslav territories, but also with ethnic elements that arrived in modest numbers from the vastness of the Euro-Asian fields. Among the numerous and diverse Russian white emigrants, which the wheel of history brought and halted on Serbian ethnic and historic territories, the atypical Russians also found themselves there. They were non-Slavic Russian minorities, such as Kalmyks, Jews and Gypsies. The Kalmyks' history, private life and collective past in the area of Yugoslavia had only been discovered in the domestic and international historiography to a certain extent. The goal of this paper is to - at least partially - shed light and give insight into that segment of the Yugoslav and white emigrant past. The reconstruction of their lives has been done mainly through the press of the time that offers a significant amount of information and represents an important historic source for that research subject. Even though, only exclusively, some members of these ethnic groups left a significant mark in Serbian culture, and no matter that they did not manage to survive as a compact community, due to violent and tragic episodes in the Balkan past winds, their spatial and temporal existence was a constituent part of the peoples in the Balkans, which makes this community sufficiently interesting to be researched and being an important contribution to the ethnic and minorities studies.