NASDROVIYA, TOVARICH! Russian Los Angeles
Russia is in the news again, replaying it's role as America's Bad Guy, launching yet another in a long series of attempts at empire, looming as a threat to the security of the United States. Russia has been the Bad Guy to Watch since Catherine the Great sent her navy to expand her empire across Siberia and the Pacific Ocean. In 1769, the United States wasn't worried about securing it's Pacific Coast in America against the would-be invaders. Britain, in the northwest Pacific and Spain, from what is now California to the tip of South America, undertook huge projects to protect their lands from a Russian Navy invasion.
Catherine the Great of Russia, Creator of California's First Property Boom
Spanish sightings of Russian naval ships in the Pacific Ocean, Spain's private ocean in the 18th Century, spurred King Charles III to overturn, overnight, almost two centuries of neglect and oblivion by Spain of it's Pacific North America territories. Charles worried that a Russian invasion of Pacific North America would trigger the takeover of Spanish America with it's gold and silver mines, coffee and sugar plantations, all of which kept Charles and the Spanish nobility in the furs, jewels, and castles to which they'd become accustomed. Charles appointed Belgian, Felipe de Neve, to create an Alta California colony that would defend the Spanish Empire from those presumptive, barbaric Russians. Beginning with the arrival of soldiers, colonists, and Catholic clergy to found and develop San Diego as fort, mission, and community in 1769, Alta California was born, morphing into today's State of California, home to more people than any other state of the United States of America. Russians were there at the creation of California and still play a noticeable part in California, with Los Angeles having the largest and oldest Russian-speaking community in the continental United States.
Although Russia did establish a colony called Ft. Ross in sparsely-defended northern California, it proved short-lived and ended any threat the Russian Empire had for Spain and the two countries that succeeded Spain in owning Pacific North America: Mexico and the United States.. Russian grape and apple growers were a known, if not common, sight in California's Central Valley by 1900. It was in Los Angeles, however, that the Russian presence in California (and in the United States!) has been at it's strongest and longest.
The economic Panic of 1893 not only brought economic recession to Americans, it brought a halt to the hopes and dreams of people around the world. Russia in 1893 was already ripe for the revolution that changed it 25 years later. Newly freed serfs both stayed in the countryside where they had been enslaved for centuries, working on newly-bought farms, and migrated to the large cities for factory work. Jewish and Christian Molokan Russians were experiencing pogroms almost as commonly as the United States now experiences mass shootings. The Panic of 1893 brought unemployment, hunger, and more misery for these Russians. Often migrating on foot, thousands of Russians made their way to other countries, seeking jobs and a happier way of life. While Germany, Austria-Hungary, and France absorbed most of the Russian immigrants, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, and the United States also received sizeable numbers of Russians. At first and, overall, the largest group of Russians to emigrate were Russian Jews. New York received millions of Jewish Russian immigrants over a 40-year period, ostensibly, making New York the largest Russian community in the world outside of Russia but, even in the 1890's, Russian Jews were relocating to other cities in the United States, with a skyrocketing increase in both the Russian and Jewish populations of Los Angeles. Whereas Los Angeles had a population of 15 Jews when it became an American city in 1850, by 1905, the Jewish population of Los Angeles was almost 6,000, 90% of them Russians. At the time, Los Angeles had an overall population of approximatly 200,000. Even in New York, Jews never represented more than 15% of the city's population, even during the height of Jewish immigration. So, for Los Angeles to have grown it's Jewish and Russian populations by 5,000% in 50 years, at a time when travel to there from Europe was long, tedious, and prohibitively expensive, is astounding yet overlooked and unknown to most Americans. 
After Russian Jews immigrated to Los Angeles, Russian Orthodox Christians came. The third-largest group of Russians to Los Angeles was smaller than the number of Jewish and Orthodox Russians but their identity left a large imprint in both Los Angeles and in Mexico:
the Molokans.
If this is the first time you've heard of the Molokans, that's because they achieved their desire to keep invisible to the general population. There was a reason for it. In the mid-16th Century, as the Protestant Reformation swept through much of Europe, reforming Christianity and breaking away from the social and legal domination by the Catholic Church, a similar reformation of the Russian Orthodox Church was occurring. Many farmers and rural villagers in the Transcaucasus (from eastern Ukraine east to Georgia and the Caspian Sea), overall, saw injustices done to them in the name of the Czar by the Russian Orthodox Church. Many of them rejected the pomp and rituals of the Russian Orthodox service for more spontaneous, grassroots, simpler expressions of their Christianity. The reformed Russian Christians did away with clergy, religious objects, even churches themselves. Anybody's home could be a house of worship. At services, individuals could speak on spiritual or personal matters at will, without clergy officiating, just as in Quaker services. These reformers also quit following Orthodox religious rituals, such as fasting from milk and other dairy items during certain Orthodox holidays. By far the most radical break with the Russian Orthodox Church was the refusal of these un-Orthodox Russians to swear allegiance to religious and political leaders. Neither the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church nor, much less, the Czar were to be considered one's rulers. These Christians swore allegiance to God. Therefore, they chose not to hold political office nor serve in the Russian military. Surprisingly, the Russian Czars did not retaliate against these renegades other than to mock them by calling them "molokans", after their refusal to fast from "molokh" (milk) and other dairy products. As long as the Molokans did not proselytize nor openly plot against the Czar, the military and other government officials did not persecute them.
Starting with Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 but reaching a "point of no return" with the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, persecution, arrest, and execution became almost normal daily occurrences for Russian ethnic and religious minorities. Pogroms were not only directed at Russian Jews, the Molokans were also targeted for torture and death due to their refusal to swear allegiance to the Czar and serve in the Russian military. When World War I broke out and, later, the Russian Revolution erupted in 1917, life became unthinkable in Russia. Molokans were rounded up by Czarist troops and tortured, if not killed, if they didn't swear alliegance to the Czar and fight in his name. The Molokans crossed borders on foot until they arrived in Germany and Italy. From there, they worked and boarded ships for the United States. Even in the unsettled, anxious lives they led in Russia, the Molokans were drawn by the campaigns of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads to hire workers on their California railroads, offering high wages. Because of the open-air nature of railroad work and the comparatively smaller, more spread-out layout of Los Angeles, the Molokans felt safe coming to Los Angeles and live together, keeping a low profile with the larger society, lest they suffer the same perscution they suffered in Russia. The Aliso Flats neighborhood, situated between Little Tokyo and Boyle Heights, was a tucked-away corner of Los Angeles that, for all of it's proximity to the railroads, warehouses that employed the Molokans, and Downtown Los Angeles, was quiet, unassuming, in which Mexican, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Croatian immigrants lived harmoniously with each other. Into this environment settled the Molokans. While aspects of their culture remained low-key, under wraps, it was amazing how quickly most of the Molokans integrated into the neighborhood: making friends with their neighbors, celebrating Russian and non-Russian holidays, opening shops, and availing themselves of public institutions (schools, libraries, hospitals, etc.) that would've been unthinkable in Russia. Although some Molokans settled in more rural East Los Angeles, Downey, and Montebello, to develop farms, Aliso Flats became the Molokan capital of the world until just before World War Two.
Molokan Elders in Aliso Flats, ca. 1920
Molokans in Aliso Flats, World War One-era
Map of Aliso Flats and Extent of Molokan Community in Los Angeles, ca. 1925
Clarence Street, Aliso Flats, Multiethnic Street that included Molokan Russians, ca. 1929
The degree to which the Molokans interrelated with members of other ethnic groups was so swift and great, especially among Mexican immigrants, that fully 1/5 of the Molokan community was so attracted to Mexico and Mexican culture that they were given permission to settle in the Valle de Guadalupe, outside of Ensenada, Mexico, in 1917, to create agricultural colonies. The Molokans who settled there created and developed the Valle de Guadalupe into an internationally-celebrated winemaking region. By the outbreak of World War Two, so much communication existed between the Aliso Flats Molokans and the Mexican Molokans that, fully, a significant segment of the Aliso Flats Molokans became Mexicanized in culture, even learning Spanish as a second or third language, blending with their ancestral Russian culture and American culture to create a very Angeleno Russian community.
How Angeleno did the Molokans become? During the 1920's, many Molokans regularly found extra income, literally, being extras in silent films. 1920's Hollywood already had it's share of high-profile Russians (Max Factor, Erte, Maria Ouspenskaya, Ayn Rand, etc.) working in the film industry. The Russian Revoultion was fodder for many Hollywood films of the decade. The Hollywood Russians were aware of the Russian Jewish and Molokan communities of Los Angeles, sending location scouts out to Aliso Flats and neighboring Boyle Heights to recruit Russians as extras to lend these Russian Revolution films authenticity. Many Russian families engaged in extra work enough to supplement their families' incomes and live comfortably better than they had imagined when they first arrived in the United States. Work outside their neighborhoods and the labor organizations that occupied many Russian Jews exposed the Molokans to the way the world worked, especially, relations between workers and their bosses. They were sensitive to and quick to pick up on any sense of injustice done to them. By 1928, Molokans working as film extras knew how unethical, short-shrifting, penny-pinching, and dangerous film work and the film industry could be. After years of witnessing unsafe working conditions, illegal hiring practices, and, many times, suffering ethnic slurs by film crews, a mass explosion of tempers led to what the Los Angeles Times called "The Russian Revolt" on March 28, 1928.
One of the many films of the 1920's using the Russian Revolution as setting and using Russians of
Los Angeles as Extras
The Los Angeles Times account of "The Russian Revolt"
Emil Jannings, first Best Actor Oscar winner and best known as the humiliated, emasculated love slave of Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel" (1930), was a big star, filming "High Treason" (1928) at Paramount Pictures in Hollywood, set during the Russian Revolution. As per custom, the Russian extras were registered and called by Central Casting (in the years before labor unions) whenever they were needed for work. For "High Treason", the film's technical adviser, Nicholas Kobilansky, convinced Paramount Pictures to bypass Central Casting and let him go to Aliso Flats and Boyle Heights, himself, meet with two contacts there, and arrange for 258 extras to report to Paramount, with brass checks as proof of being hired to work on the film. Paramount executives gave him the go-ahead. He met with local grocer, John Nasiedkin and Walter Creger, a local real estate agent. Even though both men knew that Paramount only needed 258 extras, Creger took it upon himself to tell an extra 250 Molokans in the area that they would be hired as extras and to report to Paramount. They did but not with the brass checks. Creger promised them that they would be hired. That didn't happen. When the people Creger had sent didn't get work, many of them tried to crash the studio gates and get in, erupting into a riot. The following day, a hearing and investigation by the U. S. Labor Commission began but, ultimately, proved inconclusive and responsibility and damages were not assigned. With the coming of sound and the Great Depression, the Russian Revolution-themed films fell out of favor and film extra income dried up for Los Angeles' Russians.
With the chilly relations between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the Soviet Union) and the United States, the super strict immigration laws of the era, and American suspicion of anyone deemed "alien", Russian immigration came to a halt to Los Angeles...for a time! No more Molokans. By World War Two, the American children of the Molokans moved out of Aliso Flats to outlying areas of southern California, forever ending a physical center of the Molokan Russian community. Numerous Molokans and their descendants live in southern California today but, largely, live lives indistinguishable from most Americans. The Molokans of Mexico have, likewise, culturally and genetically assimilated with their non-Russian Mexican neighbors, even as their wines have helped make Mexico a major player in the international wine industry.
The Russian Jews of Boyle Heights
The earliest Jewish residents of Los Angeles were, largely, Sephardic Jews and a much smaller number of German and Austrian Jews. Speaking Ladino, a language derived from 15th Century Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Turkish, Sephardic Jews felt a cultural kinship with the Californios, the Spanish-speaking descendants of the Hispanic colonists brought by Spain to colonize Alta California. For almost 30 years after Los Angeles became an American city, most business transaction were still conducted in Spanish. Non-Californios learned Spanish and served the needs of the Californios. The Sephardic Jews integrated easily and quickly into Californio Los Angeles, not necessarily through marriage but through friendships that bordered on the familial and business relationships. Several of the Sephardic and German-speaking Jews became wealthy landowners and lived the lifestyles of the Sepulvedas, Verdugos, Picos, and other leading Californio families.
The arrival of the first Russian Jews in the 1890's occurred in a much different Los Angeles than only a decade before. The 1880's saw a seismic shift in the demographics, power structure, and race relations with the arrival of tens of thousands of transplants from the East, South, and Midwest. The land boom of the mid-1880's led to the establishment of over 50 communities in the Los Angeles Basin, transforming Los Angeles from a small cattle town of 11,183 people in 1880 to a sizeable city of 102,479 in 1900. The arrivals from other parts of the United States forever changed Los Angeles into a city where wealth, politics, power, finance, and commerce were led by Anglo-Americans and conducted in English. The Californios had lost their lands, positions, and influence. Many intermarried with the Anglo-Americans. Even the center of commerce and power moved from the Los Angeles Plaza a mile southward to today's Downtown Los Angeles.
Along with the arrival of Anglo-Americans to Los Angeles came Anglo-American attitudes towards racial/ethnic relations, including racial prejudice and segregation. The new arrivals, unlike earlier migrants to Los Angeles, did not want to live with Californios and others that were not English-speaking Protestants, as most of them were. Many new arrivals quickly entered city amd county politics. Many bought vast tracts of land and made fortunes selling that land for commercial and housing projects. They became the political lords of Los Angeles. Men, with names like Chandler, Lankershim, Doheny (although a Catholic), and Huntington were among those powerful Angelenos who wished to replicate the quiet towns and suburbs in the Midwest and Northeast that they came from. They were also totally white and, largely, Protestant Christian. They controlled Los Angeles city and county governments. They saw to it that no non-Protestants lived among them in what were considered the "best" neighborhoods of Los Angeles, to mar the quiet, beautiful village atmosphere that these titans of Los Angeles power wanted to recreate in the Los Angeles Basin. Houses in these new neighborhoods came with covenants that forbade selling homes to anyone not white and Protestant, especially, blacks. Where were these unwanted people to live in Los Angeles in 1900? In very few neighborhoods, Boyle Heights being one of them.
Boyle Heights
Russian Jews made Boyle Heights their home. It was also home to large numbers of Mexican, Italian, Japanese, Croatian immigrants and African-Americans arriving from the South and Midwest. By 1920, the number of Russian Jews was so large that Los Angeles had the third-largest Jewish community in the United States. Streets named after cities and states where many of these Jews had lived before arriving in Los Angeles are still major, well-known streets today (Chicago, St; Louis, Indiana, Michigan, etc.). Owing to the largest contingent of Russian Jews having lived in New York before arriving in Los Angeles, generations knew the main thoroughfare of Boyle Heights as Brooklyn Avenue (today's no-less aptly named Cesar Chavez Ave.). Along Brooklyn Avenue sprang up Jewish bakeries, kosher restaurants, clothing stores, radio repair shops, movie theaters, and music shops, among many other Jewish-owned businesses. One of Los Angeles' iconic restaurants, Canter's Deli, started life on Brooklyn Avenue in 1931 before moving to it's current location on Fairfax Avenue in 1948, Literally, three generations of Boyle Heights residents of all ethnicities bought their haberdashery from Zellman's Men's Store, also on Brooklyn Avenue. While there were Jewish residents of Polish, Hungarian, and other Eastern European ancestry living in Boyle Heights, by far the greatest cultural significance was Russian culture, especially, in food. While Yiddish was the lingua franca among Boyle Heights Jews, that Yiddish was liberally influenced by Russian words. Borscht, blintzes (from the Russian, "blini"), schmalz (much like Russian sour cream), smoked salmon (lox), cherry danish, among many other foods, were Russian in origin. Many Russian Jews were fluent in Russian as well as in Yiddish. Samovars for brewing tea were as prevalent in Boyle Heights as they were in Russia. Russian-language periodicals were as eagerly consumed by Russian Jews as their Molokan compatriots. Because many Russian Jews left families behind in Russia, news from the U.S.S.R. was always anticipated and sought after, keeping Russian culture and language alive among the Russian Jews of Boyle Heights. Further extending Russian language and culture among Russian Jews was the relationship between Russian Jews and their Molokan neighbors. Although not necessarily best buddies, relations between the two groups were cordial and frequent, with Russian being the glue that united these two different groups.
Canter's Deli, Brooklyn Avenue, Boyle Heights, 1945
All Ethnicities
Ayn Rand, Mother of Modern American Conservative Movement, Scriptwriting in Hollywood
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Written in Russian Hollywood
Revolutionary Designer, Erte
Legendary Director of Stage and Screen
Russian Nightclub in West Hollywood, CA
Russian Chebureki and Ponchiks Found at Pink Orchid and Numerous Other Armenian Bakeries
Chicken Blini (Blintzes) at Kalinka Restaurant, Glendale, CA
Russian Sausages, Voskevaz Market, Glendale, CA
Breed Street Shul, Boyle Heights' oldest synagogue (now cultural center), originally catering to a significantly Russian Jewish congregation
Both from the Jewish tradition of "tikkun olam" (giving time and effort to help those less fortunate than oneself) and the various labor and political movements that swept through Russia in the 50 years leading to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Jews of Boyle Heights were at the forefront of social justice in the United States. Many Russian Jews fought for civil rights in Russia and for the Russian Revolution. They brought that spirit to Boyle Heights. Zionist, Communist, Socialist organizations abounded in Boyle Heights, protesting and campaigning for Jewish civil liberties and those of other ethnic groups. Condemning the immigration bans of the 1920's and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Boyle Heights chapters of social justice movements protested and wrote letters to the editors of the local newspapers. When Nazism seemed to be an attractive ideology to many Angelenos in the 1930s, the social justice organizations publicized the reign of terror in Nazi Germany and called for an economic boycott of Germany. Although fervently patriotic in the war effort, Jewish organizations in Boyle Heights protested the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II. The rounding up of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and deporting them to Mexico in the 1930s met with vehement calls to action by Russian Jews. Closer to home, Russian Jews fought their exclusion from Angeleno hotels, restaurants, country clubs, and other public spaces where they were either segregated or banned.
As with African-American communities, houses of worship played crucial roles in providing education, food relief, and other community services. One of the few remaining synagogues in Boyle Heights is Congregation Talmud Torah, aka the Breed Street Shul. In 1945, Ukrainian-born Rabbi Osher Zilberstein opened the first Jewish parochial elementary school in Los Angeles. Many years earlier, Mount Sinai Clinic was founded and operated out of the synagogue. Eventually, Mount Sinai became today's Cedar-Sinai Medical Center, one of the leading hospitals for coronary care in the world. Immigration services and English classes for all in the community were offered from the Breed Street Shul. Two Jewish Community Centers in Boyle Heights offered after-school and summer enrichment programs for all of the area's children. Relationships between Boyle Heights Jews and their Gentile neighbors were cordial and, very often, warm and familial. Although not encouraged, often openly disparaged but accepted as a fact of life, were the romances, even marriages, that occurred between Boyle Heights Jews and their Gentile neighbors, especially, those of Italian or Mexican descent. By 1950, 50,000 Jews, most of them Russian Jews or their American-born children lived in Boyle Heights, 40% of the community's population. By 1960, 75% of that Jewish population no longer lived there. What happened to them?
Red Scare, Red Hill
1948 was a watershed year for people of color and for Jews in California. In that year, the California Supreme Court ruled that the housing covenants, which developed in the 1880s and were designed to exclude people of color from living in the "best" neighborhoods, were found unconstitutional. For the first time in 60 years, people of color and non-Christians could live in any Los Angeles neighborhood they wanted. This caused a seismic fear among many whites who, for generations, had been conditioned to fear and disdain those unlike them. Almost immediately, "white flight" took place, emptying many once-WASP neighborhoods, allowing for blacks, Mexican-Americans, and others to take the homes vacated by WASPs, no longer legally consigned to only certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
Boyle Heights went through a massive demographic shift that saw it's Jewish community and other ethnic communities exit, never to return. Mexican-Americans began moving to new suburbs in Downey, Commerce, Pico-Rivera, El Monte, Monterey Park. Italian-Americans moved to San Gabriel, Arcadia, Culver City, and Burbank. Japanese-Americans fanned out to Gardena, Mar Vista, and West Los Angeles, generally. The Molokan Russians followed Mexican-Americans to Downey and the South Bay. Russian Jews and the Boyle Heights Jewish community, generally, settled in West Los Angeles, especially, in the Fairfax District, Beverly Hills, and Westwood. Large numbers also settled the new suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, especially, Sherman Oaks, Encino, and Van Nuys. As the pre-1948 communities left Boyle Heights, immigrant Mexicans established their first foothold in America by renting or buying the homes of the departing ethnic groups.
Prior to 1948, Pico Blvd., from approximately Alvarado St. on the east to La Brea Ave. on the west, was home to a large Jewish community, mainly of Russian Jewish descent. Pre- and post-1948, a small but noteworthy Jewish community grew around the hills of Echo Park. The notoriety of this community was to give it it's salacious but most popular nickname: Red Hill.
Red Hill in the 1950's and 1960's was a community of government workers, poets, writers, social critics, later, beatniks and hippies, that grew organically and harmoniously due to the overall liberal social and political progressivism that these different groups shared. Although highly Jewish in demographics, Red Hill was home to other ethnic groups who adapted well to the "live and let live" atmosphere of the area. A beatnik painter could live next door to a postal worker and his "Leave It to Beaver"-type family, living next door to Mexican faith healers. Few would consider such a scene unusual in Red Hill. It was just "the neighborhood". Although very 1950's American in thought, manners, and dress, the Jews of Red Hill proudly carried on the tradition of their Russian forbears of joining social justice, political, and labor organizations to ensure a more equitable American life for themselves and other historically discriminated groups. This is where Red Hill gained it's notoriety.
In a 1950's where social comformity was strictly enforced in media and government; where Communism and the Soviet Union (Russia) were demonized in the U. S. as the annihilators of "the free world"; and where criticism and dissent labeled one as "anti-American", "traitor"; where one could lose one's career through rumors, the social and political activism by the citizens of Red Hill made the community a natural lightning rod for those that saw that activism as subversive to the American way of life and sought to snuff it out any way they could. Starting with the protests against the execution of convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 through nuclear disarmament treaties, anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement support, the Los Angeles Police Department conducted illegal surveillance of many Red Hill families, illegal searches of many people's homes, arrests on dubious charges, and subtle/not-so-subtle actions that tried to intimidate Red Hill citizens to quit their "anti-Americanism" during the era called "the Red Scare", aided and abetted by anti-Communist, antisemtic political actors, such as Senator Joesph McCarthy, of Wisconsin, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), under J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI piggybacked LAPD's illegal surveillance of Red Hill citizens, arrested many on dubious charges that resulted in the traumatic splitting up of families as well as the ruining of reputations, as the arrests, especially of postal clerks, courts personnel, and other public/governmental employees, garnered media attention, naming and photographing the people arrested, causing them to lose their careers and livelihoods in front of millions. Many Red Hill families received death threats as a result, surviving as best as they could. Only the more relaxed social norms of the late 1960's ended this reign of terror on Red Hill and what many in that neighborhood viewed as an antisemitic attack on them by their own government.
The end of the 1960's saw the metamorphosis of Los Angeles' Russian Jewish community from Russian immigrant community to Jewish Americans, behaving and living as mainstream middle-class American life as had been possible until then. Any Russian identity among them appeared ancestral, not anything modern that they related to. In 1980, one could, understandably, believe that the day of Russian Jews in Los Angeles, as an ethnic community with strong Russian cultural characteristics, as it had been in the 1920's in Boyle Heights, was as dead as the dinosaur. But, time had surprises in store for Los Angeles and it's relationship with things and people Russian.
St. Petersburg-By-the-Sea: Russian Hollywood
As long as film has threaded through a camera, there have been Russians involved in the creation, production, and growth of the film industry in Los Angeles. Many have been nameless craftsmen, building sets, gardens, costumes for decades in the film studios. More on them a lttle later. Many Molokan Russians made comfortable livings as film extras in silent films. Many Russians who worked in films were stars in their own fields but their work in the film industry made them world-renowned and legendary. Movie makeup was invented, patented, and made "ground zero" grooming for women the world over by a Russian wigmaker named Max Faktor (later, Max Factor). After conquering the London and New York stages, Russian actress, Alla Nazimova, was brought to Hollywood by pioneer producer Lewis J. Selznick (of Russian Jewish parentage) in 1916 to embark on a very successful but troubled film career. Nazimova's image as diva was so grandiose, in an era in which being a grandiose diva was standard, everyday film stardom, she bought a mansion, added 16 other mini-mansions so that her friends could stay over as long as they wanted. In later years, those 16 became 25 mini-mansions and the entire facility became the Garden of Allah, one of the Golden Age of Hollywood's legendary hotels and nightspots, with the leading actors, writers, and musicians of the 20th Century staying and living there, with Nazimova presiding over it all as an unofficial social director until her death in 1945. Ayn Rand came directly to write screenplays for film studios when she immigrated to the United States in 1925 from Russia. Until the publication of her first bestselling novel, "The Fountainhead", Rand wrote screenplays and produced two plays, one of which, "The Night of January 16th", was not only a Broadway success, she adapted it for a screenplay of the 1941 film version. Her controversial philosophy, Objectivism, in which human desire is the motivator for all human interactions and must be satisfied and, later, developed a following among latter-day neoliberal American politicians, especially Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, developed while Rand lived in Los Angeles. Maria Ouspenskaya, unfairly remembered as a Gypsy werewolf's mother in the classic horror film, "The Wolf Man" (1941), could be called the Mother of Modern Acting. A noted actress with the Moscow Art Theater, she, almost by herself, occasioned a seismic shift in acting among a generation of American actors. A student of Moscow Art Theater founder, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Ouspenskaya came to Hollywood in the mid-1920's, established herself as a dramatic coach, in which she taught Stanislavsky's acting method to a generation of actors who, then, enshrined Stanislavsky's method as Method acting, out of which today's acting theories, teachings, and acting arose. Romain de Tirtoff, known by the pronunciation of his inititals in Russian, Erte, was as seminal to fashion, set design, and advertising as Maria Ouspenskaya was to acting. Also known as the Father of Art Deco, Erte, designed the clean, fluid, limber look that came to epitomize Art Deco on magazine covers, Ziegfeld stage sets, furniture, and automobiles. Erte embraced later styles in design and remained a trendsetter in set and furniture design until his death in 1990. In the mid-1920's, Erte was hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to design the sets for "Ben-Hur" (1925). He remained in Los Angeles designing film sets and costumes until 1930 and returned periodically to consult on set designs. Rouben Mamoulian and Lewis Milestone, two Russians, established legendary careers as film directors at the end of the 1920's. Mamoulian studied under Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater and was as revolutionary in directing for the stage and screen as Erte had been in set design.
These Russian notables, often, brought with them craftsmen from their homeland whom they could trust to carry out their projects. Throughout the 1930's, studios employed more and more Russians as carpenters, upholsterers, stonecutters, and furniture restorers. In order to be near the studios, a Russian community developed in Hollywood, along Fountain Avenue, between Virgil and Western Avenues. In 1950, after the Soviet Union conquered and annexed eastern European nations into it, Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, allowed a brief window of emigration for those who wished to escape the Soviet Union. Many of these emigrants found their way to the Russian community in Hollywood and the neighboring community of Los Feliz. In later years, as defectors from the Soviet Union arrived in Los Angeles, they, too, added to the Russian community in Hollywood. Interestingly enough, while Lithuanians, Poles, Romanians, and other eastern Europeans couldn't wait to leave the Soviet Union, they had little animosity towards the Russian people themselves. Also, because many of these nations had once been part of the Russian Empire, there was a heavy Russian influence in eastern European cultures. Living with the Russians of Hollywood was not a hardship on the eastern Europeans. Romanian and Hungarian restaurants abounded in that community, offering many Russian menu items. I remember eating many times in the 1980's at Mignon, Orza's, Brashov Deli, and at Sabine's, all Romanian restaurants but with several Russian food items and a large Russian-speaking clientele. Ukrainian Orthodox churches appeared in the Russian community of Hollywood, in addition to nearby Russian Orthodox churches. Fountain Avenue became the main thoroughfare for Russian Hollywood from the late 1920's until the early 1990's. I had friends at John Marshall High School who were from Russian Hollywood, although some of them were from Ukrainian and Armenian backgrounds but they all had a working knowledge of Russian. My closest friend, Jeannie, taught me how to say her real name, Ivgenia Vyacheslavna Ordynsky, in both Ukrainian and Russian. Jeannie would return to school on Mondays telling me of the hours-long get-togethers that the Russian Hollywood community would have every Sunday at the home of the undisputed leader of Russian Hollywood, a woman whose father, Grigori Rasputin, once led the Russian royal family. Maria Rasputin escaped Russia in the mid-1920's, with jewels, photos of her father, and other items sewn into her garments and found her way to Russian Hollywood by the 1940's, even working at a shipyard in San Pedro. She continued working in Los Angeles' areospace industry until her retirement in 1955 . This living symbol of Czarist Russia received visitors to her home as if SHE were royalty. She was the glue that held the Russified Eastern European immigrants of Los Angeles into a strong, cohesive community, always keeping her father's and the Russian royal family's memories alive. She worked in local hospitals and was regarded and thought of by Russian Hollywood as the Russian version of The Godfather, someone to turn to in time of need. With her death in 1977 started the gradual disintegration of Russian Hollywood, as many of the eastern European immigrants that settled there died off and their American children moved elsewhere.
Maria Rasputin, in her Silver Lake home, leading the Russian-speaking community of Los
Angeles and keeping the memory of her father, Grigori Rasputin, and the Russian Royal Family alive
Maria Rasputin in the mid-1920's, symbol of Czarist Russia
Max Factor, One-Time Wigmaker to the Russian Royal Family, the King of Modern Makeup
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Written in Russian Hollywood
Revolutionary Designer, Erte
One of Erte's Iconic Graphic and Costume Designs
The Mother of Modern Acting, Maria Ouspenskaya, in Her Most Famous Film Role
in "The Wolf Man" (1941)
When Maria Ouspenskaya and Konstantin Stanislavsky Changed Acting Forever,
Moscow Art Theater
Legendary Director of Stage and Screen
Lewis Milestone, with His 2nd Best Director Oscar for "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930)
Moscow-by-the-Pacific: The Russians of West Hollywood
Remember the Russian Jews of Los Angeles? Living in Boyle Heights, Pico-Union and Red Hill from the 1910's-1970's? A community seemingly gone and assimilated into the larger mainstream American society? In 1970, an Angeleno who knew about the community would've believed that Russian Jews were a community of the past, never to see their likes again. That Angeleno would've lost money, if he or she had bet on that community re-emerging. Beginning in the late 1970's, a new wave of Russians, largely Jewish, arrived in Los Angeles, extending throughout the 1980's and settling, primarily, in West Hollywood. This is where the current Russian community in Los Angeles exists. As part of the politics of "detente" between the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the Soviet Union) that ushered in a closer relationship between the two countries than had existed since World War II, the Soviet government inaugurated a limited amount of political dissidents leaving the Soviet Union. At the time (mid-late 1970's), this allowance for the emigration of politically-persecuted Soviet citizens was seen as a major step for international civil rights and as proof that the Soviet Union was moving away from having an autocratic government to one more democratic and pluralistic than it ever had been before. Soviet Jews, Poles, Armenians, and other discriminated-against ethnic groups in the Soviet Union got exit visas to leave forever. Many of these refugees found their way to the Los Angeles area. For Soviet Armenians, Los Angeles and, California, as a whole, had been a second homeland since the early 20th Century. Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Romanians had a long history with Los Angeles. Soviet Jews had a deeper yet more mystical connection to Los Angeles.
Many Russian Jews in the Soviet Union underwent a religious and cultural renaissance in the 1970's. Having been forbidden to practice Judaism, establish Jewish institutions, and speaking Hebrew and Yiddish, a new generation of Soviet Jews embraced Judaism and practiced it openly, arousing the condemnation of , persecution, and arrest by Soviet authorities. When Soviet Jews were allowed to leave the Soviet Union, Israel became their preferred destination. Not far behind, however, were New York and Los Angeles. Los Angeles became especially desirable due to the fame it's Jewish institutions had in the Soviet Union; it's proximity to Beverly Hills and the entertainment industry, both of which were well-known in the Soviet Union for it's proportion of Jews within each; and the warm, mild weather, that reminded many of the Black Sea resorts they had either lived in or had visited. West Hollywood, a long-forgotten, semi-industrial, blue collar part of Los Angeles County, became the new homeland for Los Angeles' Russians.
While New York might hold the largest community of ethnic Russians in the United States, West Hollywood, CA has the largest community of Russian speakers, as Uzbeks, Romanians, Ukrainians and other ethnic groups that were once a part of the Soviet Union settled in West Hollywood, along with Russian Jews and Othodox Christians. Almost overnight, Santa Monica Blvd. looked more like the main street of St. Petersburg, with markets, pharmacies, medical offices, synagogues, nightclubs, and restaurants displaying Russian signs seemingly everywhere. Russian-language newspapers and magazines began publishing in West Hollywood. Cable tv providers and streaming services offer ATRN, the Armenian-Russian Television Network. There are Russian-language schools and social organizations that hold concerts and festivals, such as the Miss Russian Los Angeles Contest, to bring the Russian community together and to contribute to charitable organizations. Plummer Park is home to Russian festivals and social programs serving what is an aging population. Although West Hollywood is home to the single largest LGBTQ+ community in the United States, that community and the Russian community get along well and have served as each other's allies in getting the West Hollywood municipal government and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to respond to their unique and shared needs. As with other Russian groups that have made Los Angeles their home, the American-born children of the West Hollywood Russians are moving to other areas of Los Angeles, assimilating into mainstream American society. Yet, with that occurring, West Hollywood is still Russia in America, providing the link to Russian culture and identity for the descendants of those who left Russia for freedom of being but who remain Russian in their bones, their hearts, and their souls.
Amazing, Those Armenians
For those Americans even vaguely aware of them, Armenians are a Middle Eastern nation who suffered for centuries under Turkish rule and practice a decidedly Middle Eastern culture. All true but what most Americans don't know is that, since the Middle Ages, Armenian culture has a Russian cast to it. Going back to the days of Ivan the Terrible, Russia exacted loyalty and tribute from the peoples of the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan). In exchange for having a high degree of governmental autonomy and preservation of their cultures, Armenians, Georgians, and Azeris, gradually, adopted many Russian foods (especially, vodka), some dress, and cultural practices. What had once been the Kingdom of Armenia had been overtaken by the Ottoman Empire but chunks of ancestral Armenia, including the capital city, Yerevan, were incorporated into Tsarist Russia. Although conquerors, many Armenians saw Russia as protector of their Christianity against the frequent attempts by Ottoman Turks to Islamize Armenians and strip them of their culture. Generations of Armenian and Georgian men went to Russian universities, made careers in Russian arts, and integrated themselves into Russian society, even into Czarist nobility. That Russification led to the emergence of Armenian and Georgian leaders in the Russian Communist Party and the eventual rule of the Soviet Union for 30 years by one it's most famous (and infamous) leaders, Georgian Josef Stalin. The ancestral Armenian heartland became the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1923 and remained such until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992. Russian was the second language (and, in later years, was, for many, the first language) for Armenians. Today, an estimated two million Russian citizens are of Armenian descent and upwards of one million Armenians have immigrated to Russia in the years since Armenia became independent of Russian domination.
They were among the various minority ethnic groups who were allowed to leave the Soviet Union during the years of Russian-American detente. Although Fresno, California had become the largest Armenian community in the United States when Armenians first arrived in the United States in the early 20th Century, it was Glendale, California that emerged as having the largest Armenian community in the United States of America. This was in no small part due to the arrival of Soviet Armenian refugees. Waves of ethnic Armenians fleeing war-torn Lebanon and Islamic revolutionary Iran further increased the Armenian presence in Glendale and throughout the United States. While a drive through Glendale reveals abundant signage in Armenian, there are numerous signs in Farsi (as befits the huge number of Iranian Armenian refugees) and smaller number though no less significant number of signs in...RUSSIAN! Few Armenian restaurants don't carry borscht, piroshkis, or blinis. Throughout Armenian bakeries, one finds imported Russian chocolates, cherry and other fruit tarts, Russian sodas and ice cream and many Armenian delis carry the largest assortment of Russian cured meats in the Los Angeles area. Don't tell an Armenian that their beloved donut, the ponchik, is a Russian pastry. Samovars are common in the homes of older Armenians. The legendary Hollywood Forever Cemetery has close to 1/4 of it's area entombed with many Soviet Armenians, with grave markers often written in both Armenian and in Russian.
Under the noses of Los Angeles' 5 million inhabitants lives a vibrant Russian and Russian-speaking community that, for 130 years, has contributed enormously not only to the cultural and economic life of Los Angeles, many members of this community leaving an international artistic and political imprint that continues to inspire and influence people the world over. Until now, their history and considerable contributions to Los Angeles have gone inexplicably unreported but this will not continue. No less than the Spanish who created it; the Anglo-Americans and various East Asian nations who economically developed it; the Latin Americans who have commercially and culturally stamped it as a world capital; the Russians of Los Angeles have forever helped shape this city into what it is today in no small way.
To them, one could say "Nasdroviyah, Tovarich!"---------"Here's to you, My Friend!"
One of Two Ukrainian Orthodox Churches Still Remaining in Russian Hollywood
St. Vladimir's Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Russian Hollywood
Local West Hollywood Russian Model
Memorial Honoring Soviet Army Veterans from World War II, West Hollywood, CA
Russian Nightclub in West Hollywood, CA
. Glendale, California---Home to the Largest Armenian Community in the United States
A Significant Number are Soviet (Russian) Armenians
Russian Chebureki and Ponchiks Found at Pink Orchid and Numerous Other Armenian Bakeries
Russian Smoked Salmon---Labeling in Armenian and Russian, Voskevaz Market, Glendale, CA
Beef Stroganoff, Glendale Style, Old Gyumri Restaurant
Chicken Blini (Blintzes) at Kalinka Restaurant, Glendale, CA
Russian Sausages, Voskevaz Market, Glendale, CA
