San Francisco's Russian Diaspora from Revolution to Cold War

by Dr. Nina Bogdan, redacted from McGill-Queen's University Press, July 30 2025 blog.

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In researching Before We Disappear into Oblivion, I was delighted to find so many voices celebrating, contemplating, and analyzing the Russian community and its formation in San Francisco in the 1920s. As a generally literate and often well-educated group, Russian émigrés (post-Bolshevik Revolution arrivals in the US) shared their experiences in correspondence, personal journals, and émigré newspapers. Apart from the more introspective writings, however, there were also commentaries on American society and its structure. Russian émigrés encountered pressure to Americanize and fully assimilate in a society that was divided, not just in terms of class, a type of social structuring with which émigrés were familiar, but in terms of race.

Émigrés became cognizant of the importance of being white in America upon entry at Angel Island Immigration Station. “Whiteness,” however, was both meaningless and irrelevant to Russian identity, and, importantly, émigré efforts to maintain cultural heritage provided somewhat of a buffer to hold off the coercive processes of assimilation, both overt and unspoken.

Moreover, the San Francisco Russian community was quite multifaceted in the inter-bellum period (1918–1940). The émigrés arriving on the West Coast of the United States came from a range of social classes. A significant contingent of (non-Orthodox) Spiritual Christians and Russians of other faiths, both Jewish and Christian, also made their home in San Francisco (émigrés were generally, though not exclusively, Eastern Orthodox). The Spiritual Christians began arriving prior to World War I and, at least initially, considered the Bolshevik Revolution a positive development. Despite radically differing views, especially with respect to political ideology, these groups faced similar challenges in their efforts to adjust (or not) to American life. Simultaneously, the diverse and multiethnic environment of inter-bellum San Francisco (census records of the period indicate residents’ national origins in Central and South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and most US states) influenced the process of acculturation for newcomers, who experienced a heterogenous community upon arrival.

Before We Disappear into Oblivion examines the evolution of Russians into Russian Americans in the context of the inter-bellum period, which also included the phenomena of the first Red Scare and the Great Depression, both events seminal with respect to identity formation. In the post-World War II era, thousands of additional Russian refugees, displaced from countries where they had settled, dealt with similar issues in the hysteria accompanying the McCarthy era, the second “Red Scare,” but benefited as well from the post-War economic boom. Cold War politics were also critical to identity formation – a “loyal” American was anti-Communist in the narratives of the period and the rising wave of discontent among marginalized Americans, culminating in the 1960s Civil Rights movements (which included African Americans, Native Americans, and Chicanos), was nothing more than a communist conspiracy in the eyes of many recently arrived Russian refugees, traumatized after decades of displacement and loss.

Trauma characterized the experiences of both Russian émigré waves discussed in Before We Disappear into Oblivion, due not only to the violence of the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War (1918–1922), but forced departure, perennial refugee status, and loss of country and family. The assimilation process in the United States had its own pitfalls for people intent on maintaining cultural heritage. Inter-bellum nativist hostility and on-going accusations (both inter-bellum and post-War) of secret communist sympathies led to vast numbers of Russians changing their names and attempting to further obscure their ethnic background.

Such obscuring of ethnic history was a precursor to the formation of a generic “white” identity in the United States, particularly with respect to the larger migration of Eastern Europeans as a group, millions of whom arrived in the early twentieth century. On the lowest rung of the ladder of the “European” segment of the racial hierarchy in America according to “scholars” such as Madison Grant (an enthusiastic proponent of eugenics in the inter-bellum period), Eastern European immigrants and their children shed language and cultural markers expeditiously, consequently becoming a people without history. Society deemed the customs and traditions of these immigrants, often peasants seeking economic opportunity, as both backward and “foreign,” and their ethnicity (then referred to as “race”) inferior. Nor could these immigrants claim ancestral participation in the historic key events that had shaped America – e.g. the American Revolution, the formation of the Union, or the American Civil War. What was left to them was an artificial, constructed, generic, and homogenized white identity (labeled “Caucasian”) both legal and cultural, rooted in eugenics narratives, with no connection to their own ancestry. Moreover, in times of economic hardship or social unrest the binary of whiteness vs non-whiteness has been reinforced by demagogues who use the problematic racial history of America to promote an agenda of fear and insecurity, placing one side on a collision course with the other.

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San Francisco Russian Diaspora: Stories from the Roaring Twenties

Join us for an in-person seminar with Dr. Bogdan for a fascinating look into Russian immigrant life in the 1920's.

Saturday, October 11, 2025

2:00 - 4:00 pm

Russian Center of SF

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