White émigrés were Russians who emigrated from the territory of the former Russian Empire in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. They were in opposition to the revolutionary Bolshevik political climate. Many White Russian émigrés participated in the White movement or supported it. The term is often broadly applied to anyone who may have left the country due to the change in regimes.
Some white émigrés, like Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, were opposed to the Bolsheviks but had not directly supported the White movement; some were apolitical. The term is also applied to the descendants of those who left and who still retain a Russian Orthodox Christian identity while living abroad.