Not without stage fright, the young house teacher from Vaud, Olympe Rittener, attended a masked ball in Siberian Krasnoyarsk for the first time in January 1884. How did the Swiss woman experience this celebration in the Russian province? What particularly stood out to her about the local peers and their social behavior? What was on the mind of the graphic artist Ernst Derendinger when, in 1917, with a revolver in hand, he defended the shared Moscow apartment building alongside Russian neighbors during the skirmishes of the October Revolution? And what was going through the mind of the barely sixteen-year-old dairy farmer's daughter Valy Wüthrich when, in 1943, after her parents had gone missing in Stalinist captivity, she fled with her two younger brothers from the western Russian front belt to Switzerland?

Over 20,000 Swiss men and women emigrated to the Tsarist Empire from the late 17th century until World War I to build a new existence. The Russian Empire, particularly in its westward-oriented modernization efforts, allowed qualified foreigners to achieve a faster rise or better living conditions than their home countries could offer. After the October Revolution, many Swiss returned to their homeland, and to this day, the old migration tradition has not been revived.

The source volume allows the people in question to speak for themselves. Previously unpublished memoirs, letters, and interviews provide an authentic insight into Swiss life in Russia. They illustrate the everyday life of emigration and shed light on the confrontation between Swiss identity and Russian otherness from the Tsarist era to the post-Soviet present.