Russian Americans

RUSSIAN AMERICANS. Before the 1920s, the story of the Russian American Left in the United States is largely the story of the Russian Jewish Left in America. Especially before 1910, the vast majority of political organizations that purported to be run by and for Russians were in reality run by and for Russian Jewish immigrants, and the vast majority of those who contributed to and staffed the leftist Russian-language periodical publications in the United States were Russian Jews. Most political activity associated with the Russian Left occurred after 1881, when the mass immigration of Jews from the Russian Empire began.

The earliest Russian political activists in the United States, however, were not Jews. William Frey (born Vladimir Konstantinovich Geins) came to the United States in 1868 and spent some time trying to set up communal colonies in Kansas. Vladimir Stoleshnikov, a former follower of Russian radical Petr Tkachev, came in the late 1870s. And Sergei Schevitsch, a highly talented, multilingual nobleman, immigrated in the 1870s and became an editor for the New Yorker Volkszeitung. Both Frey and Schevitsch had connections with the Jewish agrarian Am Olam (Eternal People) movement, under whose auspices many Russian Jews, including Abraham Cahan, came to the United States. Contact between the Russian Jewish immigrants and these non-Jewish Russians was extensive in the early days of the Jewish labor movement.

The early political associations and the early publications of the Russian Jewish immigrants were designed to give the appearance of being exclusively Russian. The Russian Workingmen’s Union (founded 1884), the Labor Lyceum (founded 1885), and the Russian Progressive Union (founded 1886) were all in reality Jewish labor organizations—with Russian names—whose leaders clung to the theories and practices of their recent revolutionary past in Russia. An organization called the Russian-Jewish Workingmen’s Association (Rusisher-Idisher Arbayter Farayn in Yiddish) shows a transitional moment when Russian Jewish intellectuals began to recognize the Jewishness of their constituents.

The Russian leftist press in the era of Jewish mass immigration was almost exclusively Jewish but was guarded about revealing this fact. Its history, which is closely linked with the history of the Russian Left in America, can be divided into two phases.

The first phase, from 1889 to 1894, was dominated by three closely related conflicts, two of them political and one of them social. The first political conflict concerned the activism the Russian progressive press was advocating: was it intended to further the cause of the Russian narod (people), in whose name the Jewish intellectuals had struggled before they emigrated, or was it intended to further the cause of the American workers, including the masses of poor, uneducated Jews who had recently arrived from Russia? The second political conflict concerned the role of the revolutionary intelligentsia: were the intellectuals to play the role of a revolutionary vanguard leading the masses to political enlightenment and freedom, as Petr Lavrov, the theorist of Russian populism, had urged, or were they to stand back and allow the oppressed members of society (narod, workers) to revolt spontaneously? The social conflict concerned the ethnic identity of those who edited the Russian-language journals and newspapers: were they Jews, with the interests of their coreligionists at heart, or were they Russians, with either the interests of the Russian narod or the interests of non-Jewish Russian workers in America (of whom there were very few) at heart?

Znamia (The Banner, 1889–1890) was a perfect example. If one did not recognize the names of its editors and many of its contributors, one would take this for a purely Russian publication. Both Schevitsch and Stoleshnikov were involved at some point with Znamia. It published work not only by its “American” contributors (Michael Zametkin, Morris Hillquit, Philip Krantz, and others) but also by such Russian radicals as Pavel Akselrod (a Russian Jew who remained in Russia), Lavrov, and Nikolai Chernyshevsky (who died during the first year of Znamia’s short life). Apart from a few references to Jewish matters, everything about the paper served to remind the reader that the Russian revolutionary movement was at the center of things.

The story was much the same with other Russian-language leftist journals of this era. Progress (1891–1894), edited by Isaac Hourwich, was just as committed to the Russian revolutionary movement and just as heavily staffed by Jewish émigrés as Znamia had been. Other journals showed the same profile: Russkii Listok (Russian Leaflet, 1892) and Russkie Novosti (Russian News, 1893), both published by the highly Russified Jewish intellectual George M. Price; Spravochnyi Listok (Information Leaflet, 1892–1893) and Russko-Amerikanskii Vestnik (Russian-American Herald, 1893), both edited by I. Rozental’ and Mitia Gretsch; and Ezhegodnik (Annual, 1899), edited by Dr. Sergei Ingermann.

The Russian-language newspapers came into being at a time when the Jewish intellectual community in the United States was still wrestling with the conflict between socialism and anarchism. The publications in this first phase can all be described as socialist, rather than anarchist, but the socialism they represent is a peculiar mixture of the pre-Marxist radicalism the Jewish intellectuals had brought from Russia and a rudimentary Marxism most of them had first encountered in the United States. The programmatic editorial statement in the first issue of Znamia is filled with uncritically applied Marxist phrases, but the journal included in its pages plenty of material from the pre-Marxist days of the Russian revolutionary movement.

The second phase, from 1910 onwards, was more complicated than the first. Russian-language publications in this phase showed more concern with events in Russia than did publications of the first phase, but the reasons for this concern were different. In the earlier phase a combination of social snobbery and political naïveté had led the Jewish intellectuals to present themselves as Russians. But since then the Jewish labor movement in the United States had focused its attention on Jews and settled on Yiddish as its medium of discourse. In the new phase, then, Russian-language publications had little role to play in the American Jewish labor movement. Such publications sprang into existence specifically to address issues relating to Russia. Recent events had made these issues particularly pressing, so there was no lack of material. The revolution of 1905, for example, and the great political and social upheavals that followed it brought the Russian revolutionary struggle to a position on the world stage it had never occupied before.

Russian political organizations in the United States showed a greater variety of political orientations than they had in the previous period. There were Russian sections of the Socialist Party (founded 1901); after the Bolshevik-Menshevik split in Russia in 1903, there was a pro-Bolshevik party in America called the Federation of Russian Social Democratic Organizations of America; and there were anarchists and socialist revolutionaries.

One of the most active and influential Russian intellectuals in America in these years was Leo Deutsch (1855–1941), a Jewish socialist with an impressive record of activism and sixteen heroic years of Siberian penal servitude behind him. Though Deutsch devoted considerable effort to writing about the lives of Jewish revolutionaries, especially in the American Yiddish press, he was a cosmopolitan, which in his circles meant he was committed above all to the Russian—and ultimately international—revolutionary struggle, without special regard for Jews.

Deutsch was the founding editor of Novyi Mir (New World, 1911–1938), one of the most influential Russian-language publications in America. It boasted an extraordinary circulation of fourteen thousand in 1914. Leon Trotsky, who lived in the United States from January to May of 1917, was one of the émigré intellectuals who edited this journal. Novyi Mir supported the October Revolution in Russia and represented a Bolshevik point of view.

Deutsch’s other paper was called Svobodnoe Slovo (The Free Word, 1915–1916). It was sponsored by the Russian Social-Democratic Party and devoted itself to attacking the czarist regime and promoting international Marxism. Since it was largely a theoretical publication, it lacked the public appeal of Novyi Mir and folded after a year. Many, but not all, of its collaborators were Russian Jews active in the American labor movement.

Most other Russian-language publications were short-lived. There was, for example, the largely anarchist Golos Truda (Voice of Labor, 1911–1917); Volia (Freedom, 1915), a socialist revolutionary organ to which Leo Deutsch contributed; Russko-Amerikanskii Rabochii (The Russian American Worker, 1908), sponsored by the Russian Social Democratic Organization in America. Finally, the Communist Russkii Golos (Russian Voice), which began publication in 1917, remained pro-Soviet for many years.

Hoerder, Dirk, ed. “Russians.” In The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s–1970s: An Annotated Bibliography, vol. 2. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Vil’chur, Mark Efimovich. Russkie v Amerike (The Russians in America). New York: First Russian Publishing Corporation in America, 1918.

Price, George M. “The Russian Jews in America.” Translated by Leo Shpall. Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society 48 (1958–1959).