Russian and Soviet immigrants

Significance:Between 1870 and 2004, a time span encompassing the nineteenth century Russian Empire, seven decades of the Soviet Union, and the post-Soviet Russian Federation, roughly 4 million people immigrated to the United States from Russia. Of the more than 75 percent of those immigrants who came between 1890 and 1915, 44 percent were Jewish. An even larger percentage of post-Cold War immigrants from Russia have been Jewish. Because of the ethnic diversity of the Russian domains, many of their immigrants have not been ethnic Russians. Because of this ethnic diversity, immigrants of Russian origin, although numerous, have never been a strong political or cultural force as a group in the United States. Nevertheless, many of them have made significant contributions to science, technology, and the arts.

There have been three waves of immigration from the various Russian domains since the late nineteenth century. The first and largest wave occurred between 1870 and 1915 and included mainly peasant and working-class families from western Russia and the Ukraine. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent civil war (1918–21), large numbers of nobility, intellectuals, and members of the middle class fled or were deported. Some immigrated directly to the United States. The third wave began in 1969, when the Soviet Union eased its emigration policies to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel, and the United States granted these migrants refugee status.

Early Russian Immigration

The earliest immigrants from Russia to what is now the United States settled in Alaska between 1733 and 1867, when Alaska was a Russian territory. Russian fur trappers and traders married to native Alaskan women established permanent settlements at Kodiak in 1790 and at Sitka in 1795. Although they exerted a cultural influence on the native population that has persisted into the twenty-first century, the total number of ethnic Russians who settled in Alaska never exceeded one thousand, and most of them returned to Siberia after Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia, like the United States, needed people to develop large tracts of thinly populated territory. Needing manpower, the czarist government actively discouraged immigrant brokers, favoring voluntary and involuntary relocation from European Russia to Siberia and Central Asia. The Russian government had a system of penal transportation throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and provided relocation subsidies to farmers wanting to homestead during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Settlers in Siberia enjoyed more political and religious freedom than those who remained in European Russia. In 1885, the czarist government passed a law prohibiting emigration of Russian citizens other than Jews and Poles.

Until 1863, the mass of Russian peasantry consisted of serfs whose landlords controlled their movements and places of residence. Reforms instituted during the next decade increased peasant autonomy. However, the paternalistic system of village councils that replaced serfdom left Russia’s rural masses with little incentive to migrate to cities in search of industrial employment, relocate to the country’s own frontier areas, or emigrate to America. The extreme inertia of Russian peasants was one reason why the czars relied so heavily on convict labor to develop Siberia.

Nearly one-half of all immigrants from Russia who arrived in the United States before 1917 were Yiddish-speaking Jews from communities within the Pale of Settlement, a region that had been part of Poland until Russia annexed it during the late eighteenth century. After annexation, the social and economic position of Jewish inhabitants deteriorated. Increased discrimination, restrictions, and hostility on the part of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians culminated in waves of pogroms. The czarist government ignored and sometimes encouraged these organized, brutal attacks on Jewish communities. In response to the pogroms, poverty, and increasing intolerance, roughly one-half of Russia’s estimated 4 million Jews emigrated between 1890 and 1915, 1.4 million of them to the United States.

Most of these immigrants settled in urban areas in the Middle Atlantic states, especially in New York City. A large majority, 88 percent, had been town-dwelling artisans and service workers in Russia, not agricultural workers. Many found employment in the garment industry. Russian Jewish immigrants brought with them a strong work ethic, a tradition of caring for their own in a tightly knit community, and respect for education—all traits that served them well in the New World. Within a generation they were almost completely integrated into the economic life of America. In 1970, the median income of Americans of Russian descent was 130 percent of the median for White Americans as a whole. Except for their religious observances, Russian Jews as a group have retained relatively little of their Old World heritage, and of what they have retained, almost none of it is Russian.

Slavic immigrants from the Russian Empire gravitated toward American cities with heavy industries, mainly in the Midwest. As with many immigrant groups, continued cultural identity centered around religious affiliation, which gave Poles and Ukrainians who were Roman Catholics a distinct advantage over Russian Orthodox immigrants, whose own church had no official head in the United States between 1917 and 1960.

Only about 65,000 of the 3 million immigrants from the Russian empire to the United States between 1870 and 1915 were ethnic Russians. Most modern Americans who claim Russian cultural roots are, in fact, Carpatho-Russians, whose ancestors immigrated from the Galicia region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Carpatho-Russians converted from Roman Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy after coming to America and form the backbone of the Russian Orthodox Church in America.

Immigrants from Russia during the early twentieth century tended to be left-wing in their political leanings and active in trade unions. This association of Russians with political radicalism reinforced prejudices against people already considered alien and undesirable on the grounds of language and customs. After the Russian Revolution, during the Red Scare of 1919–20, anti-Russian xenophobia included a supposed threat of violent revolution. Fear of political radicalism helped frame immigration quotas based on America’s ethnic makeup in 1890, before significant immigration from Russia had taken place.

Second Wave, 1920–1960

The Russian Revolution of 1917, subsequent bitter civil war, political repression, and extreme economic hardship produced a flood of refugees from Russia during the early 1920s. Because the US Immigration Act of 1924 set the quota for Russia at only 2,248 immigrants per year, few refugees from that period were admitted directly as permanent residents. Over the next decade, however, many more managed to circumvent the quota. Fourteen thousand of the thirty thousand immigrants in the second wave entered the United States as refugees from Western Europe and Manchuria on the eve of World War II. Among the arrivals from Manchuria were Russian Old Believers. Members of this religious sect who had earlier settled in Alaska and Oregon still speak Russian and retain customs dating back to the seventeenth century.

Though numerically the smallest of the three waves of Russian immigration, the second wave included a number of prominent figures, including Alexander Kerensky, Russia’s head of state between February and November of 1917, who became a professor at Stanford University in California; the author Vladimir Nabokov; the television pioneer Vladimir Zworykin; the inventor of the helicopter, Igor Sikorsky; and Wassily Leontieff, who would win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1973.

At the end of World War II, nearly 1 million Soviet citizens remained in Germany as prisoners of war and conscript laborers. Most were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union, but approximately thirty thousand were admitted to the United States.

Third Wave, 1969–2005

Except for an occasional highly publicized defector, restrictive Soviet emigration policies prevented further Russian emigration to the United States between 1945 and 1969. In 1969, pressure from the United States resulted in the Soviet Union’s agreeing to permit Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel, as a condition of a general treaty establishing more normal commercial relations. The United States classified Soviet Jews as refugees from political and religious persecution, which exempted them from overall annual limits on immigrant visas.

For many Soviet Jews, the principal reason for emigrating was economic advancement, and the ultimate destination was the United States. Between 1969 and 1985, when Soviet immigration policies relaxed and citizens of other ethnic backgrounds became free to leave the country, 300,000 Jews from the Soviet Union were admitted as permanent residents to the United States. These third-wave immigrants were typically well educated and eager to make the most of increased economic opportunities. Most were nominal Jews who had not actively sought to practice their religion in the Soviet Union. The new immigrants disappointed their Jewish American sponsors by having little interest in the faith-based cultural practices that still form an important part of the lives of many descendants of first-wave Russo-Jewish immigrants. A majority of them settled initially in the Middle Atlantic states; later years saw increasing numbers of them relocate to the West Coast and the Sun Belt states. Areas with high concentrations of technology-intensive industries have also been magnets for people with degrees in mathematics and engineering.

At first, these third-wave immigrants tended to be politically conservative. This changed after several decades of experience tempered their unquestioned early enthusiasm. In contrast to the experience of earlier Russian immigrants, these new Americans have seen their children face declining opportunities and a poor social safety net for those who fail to prosper. Many of them have expressed a desire to return to Russia—if it were still the country they had left during the 1970s. Although no legal barriers prevent their remigration, the collapse of Soviet communism gutted Russia’s own social safety net and the excellent Russian education system that had prepared these people to be successful in a competitive economy, without a compensatory change in the overall standard of living.

Post-Soviet Challenges for Immigrants

After the collapse of Soviet communism, prospective immigrants from Russia lost their status in the United States as political refugees and had to begin competing for scarce work and residency visas on an equal footing with immigrants from most other countries. Consequently, the number of legal immigrants from Russia dropped dramatically.

Russia has also become a source of undocumented immigrants to the United States, although the numbers are low compared to undocumented migrants from Latin America. The “Russian mafia” has become, in the popular imagination, synonymous with organized cybercrime. While organized crime is rampant in the former Soviet Union, its influence in America appears to be limited.

One area of questionably legal to frankly criminal immigration operations is the mail-order bride industry. Nearly half of the women advertised as mail-order brides since 1990 have been Russian or Ukrainian. At its peak, during the mid-1990s, the mail-order bride industry brought a maximum of six thousand Russian women into the United States on legal visas, or perhaps three thousand Russians and Ukrainians. Since then, the US government has made it much more difficult for American citizens to obtain visas for prospective spouses of foreign origin. Consequently, the mail-order bride industry has evolved into a cover for prostitution.

Twenty-first Century Trends

Immigration from Russia to the United States has lost its value as a propaganda tool for reinforcing American stereotypes of Russia as a totalitarian country. The numbers and proportions of new migrants from Russia are both steadily declining and expected to continue to do so, especially as Russia has a low birthrate and has itself become a destination for numerous immigrants from East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Despite declining Russian immigration, nationals from other former Soviet states have moved to the US in larger numbers during the twenty-first century, most notably refugees from Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainians took advantage of President Donald Trump's limits on Muslim refugees, which subsequently opened up opportunities for other groups such as those from Ukraine to move to the US in the late 2010s and early 2020s. By 2019, approximately 1.2 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union lived in the United States; of those, the two largest groups came from Russia (over 390,000 total) and Ukraine (about 355,000 total). Following Russian president Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine in early 2022, many immigrants from former Soviet republics who lived in the US began to separate themselves from their Russian identities, fearing discrimination from those outside their communities and wishing to separate themselves from policies with which they disagreed.

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