The article is devoted to the historical-anthropological reconstruction of the repatriation of „compatriots“ to the USSR from Romania and Bulgaria in the post-war years. Based on archival sources, it reconstructs the plans and circumstances of the resettlement of Old Believers („Lipovans“) in 1945–1947. By the end of the Great Patriotic War, when the Red Army entered Romania and Bulgaria, over 30,000 Russian Old Believers were living there. They were descendants of those who had fled to the Ottoman Empire from the Russian Empire in the 18th–19th centuries. In all Eastern European countries, the primary focus of the Soviet government was on „Soviet citizens“ who found themselves outside the homeland during military operations (e. g., the „Tauride Bulgarians“). Representatives of this distinctive ethno-confessional community, by contrast, had never formally held Soviet citizenship and had historically settled in these territories even before the emergence of the national states. The initiative for their „return“, expressed by some Lipovans, fell under the purview of the local military administration and of the Representative of the Council of Ministers of the USSR for Repatriation Affairs. As a result, between 1945 and 1947, 1,500 Russian Old Believers from Bulgaria and over 5,000 from Romania were resettled. The first groups of these returnees were settled in the southern regions of the Ukrainian SSR, while two groups in 1947 were settled in Krasnodar Krai and Astrakhan Oblast.
