Russians and Russian-speakers have a long history in the Northwest. The territory that is now the state of Alaska was controlled by the Russian Empire in the early 1800s.
When the United States purchased the territory in 1867, most Russians went back to their homeland, but some settled in Alaska and California.
According to Harvard research, during the first great wave of immigration from all of Europe to the United States in the late 1800s, most Russian immigrants were groups seeking asylum from religious persecution.
These groups included Russian Jews and groups in conflict with the Russian Orthodox Church, such as the Russian Molokans and the Russian Old Believers, or Starovery.
Following the October Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War, in the years between 1917 and 1920, many members of Russia’s former wealthy ruling class came to the U.S. They mostly settled in large urban areas such as New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco.
During the Soviet era, emigration was prohibited, but in 1970, restrictions were loosened, prompting another wave of Russian Jewish immigrants escaping anti-Semitism.
In the years that followed, political reform prompted an increase in economic immigration and in the early ’90s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, thousands of citizens of the former Soviet Union came to the U.S. as political refugees.
According to research by the University of Washington’s demography department, in 1999, Russians were the third largest immigrant group in Washington state, after Mexicans and Filipinos.
Traditional beetroot borscht soup. Try the recipe here. Photo via Flickr.
Today there are pockets of Russians in Kent, South Snohomish County, Tacoma, and particularly Bellevue, where Russian and other Slavic languages are often heard. According to the United Way of King County, in South King County school districts, Ukrainian and Russian are the second and third most common second languages after Spanish.
For Washington state Home Care Aides, while data are incomplete, the top primary language non-English speaking Training Partnership students select is Russian.
Although census data sometimes group Russian-speakers together, not everyone who speaks Russian is Russian in nationality. Russian is an Eastern Slavic language, closely related to Ukrainian and Belarusian, and widely spoken in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Latvia, and Estonia.
Like many languages of Slavic origin, Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, developed in the 9th century during the first Bulgarian empire and formalized by Greek monk St. Cyril.
The alphabet contains 33 letters, some borrowed from Greek and Hebrew, and many are reminiscent of English letters either in appearance, sound, or both.
Top photo via Flickr by Mariano Mantel
Read the story about Home Care Aide Anna Rudova here and how to make borscht soup here.
