Key words: Russian abroad, immigration, Tunisia Let's not curse the banishment. We will repeat it... the words of an ancient warrior, about whom Plutarch wrote: at night in a desolate land, far from Rome, I pitched a tent, and the tent was my Rome, "these are the words of V. Nabokov, historian Marina Panova, author of the book" Russians in Tunisia: The fate of emigrants of the "first wave "" (Moscow, RSUH Publishing House, 2008, 294 p), gives an epigraph to one of the paragraphs that tells about the Russian "Rome" created in Tunis. The author of the book has set herself a difficult task: to reproduce and expand in time the life of the Russian emigration of the" first wave "in Tunisia, to analyze the half-century stay of Russian colonists in Tunisia, to assess the" Russian " component in the socio-economic and cultural life of the country. Thus, Marina Panova's monograph is essentially the first application for a comprehensive study of the fate of the Russian diaspora in Tunisia*. The monograph is based on extensive archival material. According to the list of funds presented in the bibliographic section of the book, the author has done a great job in identifying and studying the material that tells about the life of Russian emigrants of the "first wave" in Tunisia. We are talking about the organization of Russian refugee camps, their socio-economic support, legal status (and its change after the recognition of Soviet Russia by France in 1924), employment problems and the difficulties of interethnic marriages. M. Panova lived in Tunis for many years. During the writing process, she had the opportunity to work at the National Archives of Tunis, the Archives of the University of Tunis, and the archives of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Tunis. The author's indisputable merit is the cited documents from the private collections of A. A. Shirinskaya-Manshtein, K. V. Makhrov, her own personal archive, as well as the attraction of many published sources - reference bo ... Read more