How Russian Americans Feel One Year After Trump’s Election
The night Donald Trump was elected president of the United States was the beginning of a year-long struggle for the Birnbaum family. Hank Birnbaum, a middle-aged American who lived in Russia for 25 years, voted for Hillary Clinton. His wife Martina, who was born in Russia and has been in California for 14 years, voted for Donald Trump. “In my home, frankly, it’s been difficult,” Hank says of their relationship since Trump was elected.
He says that since the election Russians living in America and Americans of Russian descent have noticed a rise in anti-Russian sentiment in the mainstream media. This rise, according to Birnbaum, has pushed his wife to support Russian President Vladimir Putin more and more. “In our family life, we just can’t even talk about it. It’s always in my face. It surrounds me. Our kids were born in Russia, and they just sort of leave the room if they see some politics coming up.”
The Birnbaums’ conflict comes at a time of heightened tension between the United States and Russia. Trump often praised Putin during his campaign. Five months before Trump won, reports of possible collusion between members of his election campaign and the Russian government started to appear. No evidence has surfaced so far linking members of Putin’s government directly to Trump, however there is evidence that members of the Kremlin and Russian hackers tried to affect the outcome of the election in favor of Trump. As Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation continues, Russian citizens and people of Russian descent living in California have complained that the relentless focus on Russia has ignited a new feeling of anti-Russian phobia.
Birnbaum, who is not ethnically Russian but holds Russian citizenship, says he has been visited four times by the Federal Bureau of Investigation since Trump was elected because of his close connections to the Russian-American community. “I have had the F.B.I. come directly to me,” Birnbaum says. “And I’ve spoken to others in the Russian community, and they even asked me, ‘Hey, has the F.B.I. come around to you yet, too?’” According to Birnbaum, many prominent and well-known Russian-Americans in the Bay Area have had frequent visits by the F.B.I. “They said from the start, ‘Don’t worry. You aren’t in trouble or anything,’” Birnbaum says.
He recalls two F.B.I. officers standing at his front door one early morning last spring. “‘But we’re just curious as to what the nature of your contact is with the Russians,’” Birnbaum recalls them saying. He suspects that his work with the Russian community over the past 14 years, including his connections with the now-closed Russian consulate in San Francisco, has made him a person of interest. (In August, the consulate was forced to close amid a tit-for-tat diplomatic escalation between Washington and Moscow.) “It may also be because I posted a picture of myself and [former Russian ambassador Sergey] Kislyak on Facebook,” Birnbaum says, chuckling. Kislyak served as ambassador to the United States from 2008 to 2017, returning to Russia in July amid accusations of espionage. Birnbaum, who works as a bilingual tour guide at Fort Ross State Historic Park, a historic Russian settlement 90 miles northwest of San Francisco, seems suspicious of Kislyak’s role in the 2016 election, yet appreciates the support the former ambassador gave to the Fort Ross Dialogue, an organization that encourages collaboration between Russian and American business and cultural organizations.
While Birnbaum’s encounters with the F.B.I have been dramatic, other members of the Bay Area’s Russian community report more subtle manifestations of an increasingly hostile environment towards Russians. Nick Buick is the director of the Russian American Community Services in San Francisco, which provides meals and care to Eastern European senior citizens. Buick, a well-known spokesperson for the second generation Russian-American community in San Francisco, has experienced harassment firsthand since the election. “My personal license plate on my car says ‘Cossack,’” Buick says. (Cossacks are a group of Slavic peoples who have inhabited Ukraine and Russia for several hundred years.) “I have people that drive past me and flip me the bird a lot right now,” Buick says angrily. He attributes this to generalizations made about Russians and Russia by CNN, Fox News and the other major media outlets. Referring to the people who have flicked him off, Buick says, “Well, what do they see on CNN? What do you expect?”
Buick pauses for a second in order to get his point across. “Let’s pretend you are an Irishman. Imagine every time you turn around there’s a billboard that says ‘Irishmen steal. Irishmen fixed the election. Irishmen spy on us.’ What the fuck!” He continues, “Why are people that came from Russia, or have Russian roots, why are they being picked on? Where’s the fairness? Why don’t we start a campaign against everybody that was ever born in Uganda. ‘You got Ugandan roots? Well, guess what? The president of Uganda is a thug.’”
Buick frames this so-called “witch-hunt” against Russians as just another chapter in a long history of anti-Russian sentiment in the United States. “Just look at the villains in almost all of those movies,” he says of Cold War-era James Bond films. “They basically created all those stereotypes about Russians as evil, cold-hearted, violent people.” Buick continues by explaining the plot line to the 1997 Hollywood movie Air Force One, where Russian terrorists hijack the president’s private airplane. Buick says as bad as these movies were in fanning anti-Russian sentiment, the current American media landscape has done far more damage to alienate Russian-Americans.
Many Russian Americans are politically and socially conservative, a reaction to anti-religious purges in their homeland during the Soviet Union. However, for some Russian Americans like Elena Mironciuc, a “NPR listening, Subaru driving, latte sipping liberal” from Sacramento, even liberal media organizations have gone too far in their generalizations about Russians since the election. Mironciuc believes the Russian meddling in the U.S. election was sponsored by the Kremlin. However, she says, “the way it’s portrayed you’d think that all of the Russian population — grandmas, children, pregnant women — was sitting in front of the computer and trolling on Twitter and Facebook. This kind of attention to Russians reminds me of the Cold War demonization.”
Among Americans of Russian descent, the current hysteria brings up awkward memories of Cold War anti-American propaganda from their homeland. Father Alexander Krassovsky of the Saints Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church in Santa Rosa recalls being told stories of anti-American Soviet propaganda by family members who grew up outside of Moscow in the 1940s and 50s. Krassovsky was born in Santa Rosa and considers himself both Russian and American. “Every single billboard [in the Soviet Union] was ‘Support the party! Unite around the proletariat!’” Krassovsky says. “You were barraged by this constant ideology, and of course the United States was the enemy,” he says.
In the 1970s, Krassovsky and his wife took a trip to the Soviet Union where they encountered people who only knew the world through the eyes of communist propaganda. “I talked to people there and they asked me, ‘Why does your president want to kill us? Why do they want to bomb us?’” Krassovsky recalls. “I replied to them, ‘What are you talking about?’ and they said ‘Well, jeez, that’s all we hear here, that America wants to to destroy us, that America wants to kill us’. That was the way people were raised during the Soviet Union, and the exact same thing is happening here. I flick on the 11 o’clock news and I see Russia-the-enemy again. I go to channel 7, Russia and Trump again. Then to channel 4, Russia again. It’s everywhere you go. It just never ends. No matter where you go, what TV channel you pull up, what newspaper you pick up, what internet site you go to. You can never escape it. The media whips up these frenzy’s and right now the feeding frenzy is Russia. A lot of Russians all together have stopped watching the news, they are fed up with it.”
Americans who have worked with the Russian community for many decades are also wondering what the psychological impact of constant anti-Russia coverage will be on Russians living in the United States. Melissa Prager, an American who has spent two decades organizing international exchanges with environmental leaders in the United States and the countries of the former Soviet Union has been asking herself, “How far is too far?” when it comes to singling out an entire nationality. “It’s the psychological impact of having these tensions between the United States and Russia that Russians living here have to internalize,” Prager says. However, Prager thinks that second- and third-generation Americans of Russian descent have been reacting differently to anti-Russian sentiments than recent Russian immigrants who came after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. “We tend to divide it into two camps — those who don’t know communism and those that do. You are either a Soviet Russian or a post-Soviet Russian.” Prager says those who didn’t know communism tend to either ignore anti-Russian propaganda, are too busy working in Silicon Valley, or actually believe Russia had an active role in meddling in the 2016 election. Those that did live under communism tend to be more supportive of leaders like Trump and Putin, and tend to be more offended by anti-Russian accusations in the media. “If you grew up in a society where religion and faith were actively suppressed,” Prager says of the religious purges during the Soviet Union, “you are naturally going to be inclined to embrace religion more, meaning the Orthodox faith.”
According to Birnbaum, the first generation Russians living in Silicon Valley are mostly highly educated, non-religious computer programmers. The more established group are second and third generation Russians who are more likely to be religious, Trump supporters, and tend to live in more suburban areas such as the North Bay or Sacramento. Birnbaum says that both sides need to de-escalate and realize the similarities between the United States and Russia. “We need to keep in mind all the commonalities of just being human,” Birnbaum says quietly. “That is more important than being Russian or American.”
