Female: Getting to know the Russian-Americans can be somewhat like looking at the country’s much loved Matryoshka dolls. Keep going deeper and you’ll always find something new and beautiful inside.
Olga: The Russian-Americans are those who respect and love Russian, who speaks the Russian language, who identifies themselves as Russian-Americans.
Male: Russian-American’s a person who lives in America but say Russian tradition, Russian culture.
Svetlana: The Russian-Americans, on my opinion are the people who came from the former Soviet Union from the different parts of their country who respect, know Russian culture, know Russian language and who are interested in all events which are happening right now in Russia.
Female: The Russian people have a long history in America. The first wave of Russians came to the Alaskan territory as fertrators in the 1700s. This frontier community thrives in subsequent years and by 1795, the Russian Orthodox Church had established a strong presence there.
Olga: The first wave was not immigrants, it was internal migration. Through Siberia, the first Russians came to Alaska.
Female: Many of these early settlers return to Russia when the United States purchased Alaska in 1867.
Olga: When they left that the Russian Orthodox Church had a long influence and they had 12,000 parishioners after the Russians left from the ethnic minorities of Alaska then.
Female: In the late 19th century, Russians fled to the US to escape religious persecution. These immigrants, many of them Jewish, settled primarily in New York and Pennsylvania.
Olga: The immigration started in 1920 and it continued to 1939 after the revolution in Russia in Russia in 1917 when the civil war began.
Svetlana: The people who came to the United States at that time, they’ve wanted to come back all the time so they preserved the culture, the language most of all other waves.
Female: Between 1820 and 1920, it’s estimated that over 3 million people immigrated from Russia to the United States.
Svetlana: Then we have been to New York. It’s a New York up state to the Russian Orthodox Church. It’s a big community there of first immigration wave.
Female: The children born to immigrants of the post revolution period worked hard to preserve their language, although many of them have no first time knowledge of Russia.
Svetlana: All people there never been to Russia although then they were born in Europe, in United States, but they speak perfect Russian.
Female: The Soviet era immigrants, who arrived during the 1940s and ‘50s, have very different perspectives about their homeland and those who came before them.