Eugene M. Kulischer

Eugene Mikhailovich Kulischer (1881 to 1956) was a Russian-American sociologist and an authority on demography, migration and manpower. Born in Kyiv, the son of the Russian historian Michael Kulischer, he fled Russia for Germany in 1920, then Denmark, Paris in 1936 and the United States in 1941, so that he was himself a displaced person, a phrase he is credited with coining. With his brother Alexander he wrote Kriegs- und Wanderzüge (1932) and later Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917 to 1947 (1948). He argued that individual short-distance movements combine to produce great population shifts and that no migration occurs in isolation. In America he advised the International Labor Office, the Office of Strategic Services, the Census Bureau, the Army and the Library of Congress, and he died in Washington in 1956.