Abstract: The article is focused on the creation and work of pro-Soviet Russian student organizations outside of the USSR in the 1920s. The research subject of this study is the activities of pro-Soviet public organizations of students in the first half of the 1920s. The research object of this study is the Russian students abroad.The aim of this article, based on an examination of the statutory documentation and correspondence of foreign pro-Soviet student unions and associations in the first half of the 1920s, is to study the nature of their work and their relationship with the Soviet public student organization Proletstud. The methodological basis of this study is the principles of historicism and objectivity; in this work, the historical-genetic and the historical-comparative methods are applied. The study's novelty lies in the analysis of unpublished (archival) and published (periodical) sources pertaining to the activities of pro-Soviet unions, which was carried out for the first time in historiography. The article is written on the basis of documents from the State Archive of the Russian Federation (collection no. 5574), the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (collection no. 17, op. 60), and information from periodical publications of emigrant and Soviet student press. The topic of the life of Russian students abroad has previously attracted the attention of scholars [1, 12-16, 19, 22-24, 27-29], but they focused solely on anti-Bolshevik youth organizations.
The article concludes that in the early 1920s, along with student emigrant organizations in European countries, student unions were created, which adhered to pro-Soviet positions. These unions were oriented towards active cooperation with Soviet organizations and students from the USSR represented by the Proletstud. The initiative to establish relations with the Proletstud came from foreign unions, but the contacts were unofficial and unstable for a number of reasons, and negatively affected the work of the unions.