The only European/Russian relatives my family kept track of were some of my grandmother's family in France. They were from Nancy - and apparently some of them still are - before moving the family bakery to Paris. I'm led to understand they were fairly patriotic and consequently the Germans got the guys who were in the Army in 1940, but everyone else made it over the mountains to Spain. When the war was over they went right back to Paris.

A while back I was reading a wargaming magazine which gets me to suspect rising religious conservatism is what convinced my relatives to move to Paris before WWI. One of the big French heroes who died at Verdun had rejoined the Army after briefly leaving for a successful writing career (sort of a fin-de-siecle version of Tom Clancy, French bravery and technical superiority defeat the horrible Germans and vicious English)... and a successful right wing political career, all French values are ultra Catholic etc.

In Nancy. I suspect that local politics got to the point where people not *that* far removed from the Pale of Settlement decided this was a great time to move to the big liberal city.