CAEN, France

After the grand ceremonies on the Normandy beaches on Sunday for the anniversary of D-Day, President Vladimir Putin was driven to the ornate prИfecture here for a series of meetings, and to hand my 83-year-old uncle his first passport.

It was a brief and quiet meeting, but it was well reported in the Russian media. The notion that a Russian ИmigrИ would live his entire life in France without taking any citizenship because, as Andrei Schmemann explained, "I'm a Russian," seemed as striking to the Russian reporters as it had been to Nikita Mikhalkov, the Russian filmmaker who included my uncle in a recent documentary about the Russian emigration. His story reached Putin, who apparently decided that ending Andrei Schmemann's estrangement was a perfect fit in his efforts to build bridges to the Russian diaspora.

As he handed Uncle Andrei the passport, Putin said the tumult of the 20th century had left millions of Russians outside their homeland. "Many of them, the large majority, and you are one of them, ardently maintained the traditions of our country," he said.

"I have awaited this moment my entire conscious life," my uncle replied. "I was raised in the spirit of Russian traditions, culture and Orthodoxy. I have always been a Russian in my soul." He spoke clearly and without an accent, noted the Russian reporters; "he is old," wrote one, "but his clear voice and straight back reveal a military record."

In fact he never served in the military. Nor was my uncle ever a die-hard Russian nationalist. He worked until retirement in a high- end art gallery on the Left Bank, he still indulges a taste for fine wine and fine food, and in general he has always lived quite happily in Paris. But throughout his life, he has also been an example of one of the phenomena of our age - the lifelong ИmigrИ.

Every age has known its exiles and emigrants, of course, imperial Russia not least among them. But the massive upheavals of the 20th century found entire peoples - many fleeing Communist totalitarianism - stranded outside their homelands and struggling to continue living the life of their lost nation in another land. On a lesser historical scale than the Jews, the most remarkable of history's scattered nations, some created entire ИmigrИ cultures, with their own history, literature, politics, religion and promised land. For some, like the Germans, Koreans and Vietnamese, the dream was reunification; for others, like the Hungarians, Poles or other East Europeans, it was to eventually return home.

The Russian experience was extraordinary in that the Bolshevik revolution killed or drove out almost the entire intellectual, military, social and commercial elite of a vast empire. Nabokov, Bunin, Wrangel, Nijinsky, Kandinsky, Koussevitzky, Chaliapin, Balanchine, Kerensky, Sikorsky, grand dukes, counts, generals, archbishops, professors - all who were not killed fled to the West, to be joined over the decades by new waves of exiles.

In effect, an entire culture was abruptly transferred west, its bearers convinced, especially in the first decade after the Russian revolution, that their calling was to safeguard "Russianness" as long as the motherland was captive.

The Russian ИmigrИ culture sank its strongest roots in Paris. These days, sites like the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on Rue Daru or the cemetery at Sainte GeneviХve des Bois - where the likes of Felix Yusupov, the killer of Rasputin, and Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet star, are buried - are enjoying a steady stream of tourists from Russia.

Inevitably, however, the emigration gave in to assimilation and dispersion, especially in America and other countries with a tradition of immigration. My father (and Andrei's twin brother), Alexander Schmemann, a Russian Orthodox priest and theologian, took our family to the United States in 1951 and found his Zion there. He died in 1983. In a talk he gave in 1977, he ruminated on the peculiar world into which he was born: "I, for one, never emigrated from anywhere: I was already born an 'emigrant,' and although I have never been in Russia, I have always, since I was conscious, identified myself unequivocally as a Russian - and this despite my having lived almost 30 years in France and accepted French culture as something very close, almost my own. In recent years, I can say without exaggeration that I not only have embraced America, but have dedicated the major part of my life's work to it."

But my uncle never questioned what world he belongs in. It wasn't a political act not to take citizenship, he explained. Accepting a French passport, he believed, was to become French, which he was not. He traveled on a Nansen passport, a travel document for refugees first adopted by the League of Nations in 1922, and he enjoyed all French social benefits (his wife, son and two daughters all have French citizenship). A tall, athletic man, he had attended a Russian military school founded by ИmigrИs in Paris (whence the military bearing), and he became the head of the association of Russian cadets. In recent years, he helped found several such schools in Russia - including one in Petersburg of which Putin spoke knowledgeably. Schmemann also directed a Russian scout organization and its summer camp, and he sat on many an ИmigrИ board.

In short, he remained a Russian. At 83, with an ailing wife, he may not use that new passport a lot. But he is no longer an ИmigrИ.