18 June 2009
New Immigrants Live Russian and American Lives
Russian-American communities found to be adaptable and enterprising
Washington — The recent wave of immigrants to the United States from the former Soviet Union is unique in its ethnic and social diversity. It is also likely to combine adaptation to American life with a strong sense of separate cultural identity, according to researchers and the immigrant community.
Following the gradual relaxation of Soviet exit restrictions in the late 1980s, the United States experienced an unprecedented surge in immigration from the area. U.S. immigration statistics indicate that more than 433,000 arrivals from Russia and other former Soviet republics received permanent resident status between 1990 and 1999, compared with roughly 65,000 from the end of World War II through 1989.
“I am amazed at the difference in the structure of this group,” says Vera Kishinevsky, author of Russian Immigrants in the United States: Adapting to American Culture. “It used to be primarily Russian Jews and professionals. Now you see Kazakhs, you see Tartars, you see Ukrainians and basically all ethnic groups.”
Marina Shron, a bilingual Russian-American writer from New York, says most people in this group come to the United States not because of political pressures but in search of better opportunities and new experiences. For the most part, they are “people who leave not because they have to, but because they want to,” says Shron, who is the co-author, with Denis Sasha, of the book Red Blues: Voices From the Last Wave of Russian Immigrants.
PIONEERS AND DISSIDENTS
Immigrants from the Russian Empire and later from the Soviet Union came to the United States in several great waves. In the second half of the 19th century, impoverished residents of the empire’s western provinces — mostly Poles, Byelorussians and Lithuanians — came to America in search of a better life. This group included many Jews and members of some oppressed religious minorities, as well as a number of political exiles.
Another major wave of immigration followed the tumult of the October (or Bolshevik) Revolution of 1917. The so-called “White Russians” included many members of the Russian intellectual and artistic elites: engineers and inventors like Vladimir Zvorykin, Igor Sikorsky and Alexander M. Poniatoff; composers Alexander Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky; and writers Vladimir Nabokov and Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, known in America as Ayn Rand.
After World War II, emigration from the Soviet Union practically stopped. It picked up again in the era of detente in the 1970s. Rather than risking international censure for jailing prominent dissidents, the Soviet regime allowed some of them to emigrate. Sometimes, as in the case of writers Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky, it actually forced them to leave.
Under the Helsinki Accords of 1975, a growing number of Soviet Jews was able to leave the country. Trips by Soviet artists to the West resulted in several spectacular defections, like that of dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who later served as artistic director of the American Ballet Theatre in New York.
In the 2000 U.S. Census, nearly 2 million Americans claimed Russian ancestry, and almost the same number listed “the Soviet Union” as the country of their family origins. After Poles (more than 6 million), Russians are today the largest Slavic group in the United States.
SEPARATE IDENTITY
Judging by a number of recent press reports and interviews, the new wave of immigrants from Russia and the former Soviet Union is highly enterprising and capable of adapting to American life. But it also is creating a vibrant Russian-American environment that blends the lifestyles and aspirations of both cultures.
Kishinevsky points out that the number of Russian-language art events, publications, services and even kindergartens cropping up in major U.S. cities shows that full cultural assimilation is no longer the goal of this group. Its members tend to provide their children with bilingual and intercultural education and want them to maintain a sense of separate identity within the larger U.S. society.
”We brought quite a few books from Odessa,” says 30-year-old Pavel, who came to the United States in 1988 with his parents and grandparents. After settling down in the Washington area, his family quickly discovered a well-stocked local Russian bookstore. Today, Pavel speaks good Russian and keeps in touch with his parents’ Odessa friends, many of whom also live near Washington.
At the same time, he remembers that his family never felt intimidated by America. The family attitude toward the new place was one of expectation and curiosity. “America is good. It is also different, so we should know why it is different. We really wanted to succeed in America,” he says.
Alexandra, in the United States since the early 1990s, tries to protect her American-born 9-year-old son from what she sees as negative aspects of American mass culture, “especially television.” In that, she says, she has the full support of her American husband. She sends the boy to an international school and is raising him to speak three languages simultaneously: English, Russian and German.
“I want him to be open-minded and at home everywhere, a citizen of the world,” she says.
Shron states that children of the more recent immigrants are likely to think of themselves as Russian Americans or Russians. “They are interested in everything Russian — Russian names, Russian-American writers,” she says, adding that this has not always been the case with earlier generations.
BECOMING MORE SIMILAR
Immigration still has its traumas: trying to get by in a new language, establishing one’s professional credentials, adapting to new social conventions. But the more recent arrivals from Russia and Eastern Europe also say that countries have become more similar and the culture shock of coming to America is much less than that experienced by earlier generations.
Most important, they say, emigration has lost the gravity it had as the irreversible, often tragic decision it was under communism. Those who were leaving the Soviet Union usually assumed they never would see their native country again.
Kishinevsky, who came to the United States 30 years ago, says that in her youth, “Russians left Russia the way people die,” cutting all emotional ties to the old country and the people they left behind. Today, she says, they can travel back and forth, visit their relatives and watch Russian television.
Shron agrees. “It makes it much easier because you don’t feel you are leaving your culture behind, entering an entirely new world,” she says.
