Sections of Forest Hills and Rego Park, and to a lesser extent, Kew Gardens and the Rockaways, have evolved into mini-Moscows, with Russian language filling the air, and Cyrillic lettering widely visible on the streets. 

However, it is important to note that all of the immigrants from the former Soviet Union cannot necessarily be called Russian — many hail from other former Soviet republics, including Uzbekistan, Lithuania, Georgia, and Ukraine.  Collectively these Soviet emigres have loaned a distinct and memorable presence to the streets of Queens.

The vast Russian migration to the United States began in the late nineteenth century, when boatloads of Russian Jews landed at Ellis Island, seeking to escape the increasing oppression and pogroms that emerged following the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. 

Russian Jews had always faced an oppressed, outsider status in their homeland, and their journey to America filled them with a hope for the promise of religious freedom.  Many of the people in this first wave of Russian immigration settled in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn — only to later come to Queens.

Settling In Queens

These earliest Russian-Americans generally thought of themselves as ethnically and culturally Jewish — not Russian — speaking Yiddish as their native language.

Russian Jews settled in Middle Village in the early 1900s, and began farming the surrounding land.  During this time, Western Queens was the destination of many immigrant groups, as the area was generally more affordable than other sections of the borough.  These first immigrants founded the Sons of Israel Congregation in 1907, and erected a synagogue at 69-06 75th St. The synagogue and the pastoral, rural environment of Middle Village began to attract many other Russians from the Jewish Ghetto of the Lower East Side.  Sons of Israel functioned until 1972, when it merged with Congregation Ahavath Achim, which maintained a temple at 75-27 67th Drive.

Rego Park stores are adorned with signs in Cyrillic. Tribune Photo by Ira Cohen

Natives of the Baltic state of Lithuania also had a strong presence in the early days of the 20th century.  Queens’ first Lithuanian parish, the Transifiguration Church, was founded in 1908 on 64th St.  The church moved to 64-25 Perry Ave in 1983, where it still exists today.

Russian culture began to emerge in Western Queens throughout the early 20th century —  Socialist Revolutionary Leon Trotsky spoke several times at Urban Hall in 1917, in the area then known as Winfield.  The building, which was located at 41-50 71st St., burned down in a two-alarm fire in 1940.  The address —  in the confines of modern-day Woodside — no longer exists, and is now the home to elevated LIRR tracks.

Although the number of Russian immigrants in Queens increased throughout the 20th century, the explosion of Russian and former-Soviet immigration to the borough did not truly begin until the early 1970s, when hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Communist oppression made the borough their home. 

However, unlike their forefathers, this group of immigrants often viewed themselves culturally, as Russian.  After years of repression under the Communist government, they had forgotten their Jewish heritage and traditions, which they would rediscover in the comparative religious paradise of America.

Religion And Freedom

According to Lali Janash, a caseworker at the Esther Greenblatt Russian Service Center, “You know Communism never believed in religion...that’s why all of the Russians or Jewish immigrants that come to the United States, are not really affiliated with any religious [sect], they don’t know their religion.”

For years, emigration from the Soviet Union was strictly regulated by the central Communist government.  However, in the early 1970s, the Soviets agreed to allow as many as 250,000 citizens to emigrate, in response to a new trade act negotiated with the United States in 1974. 

Although the emigration was theoretically limited to Jews and Armenians, other oppressed and disenfranchised groups (Including political dissidents, human-rights activists, and intellectuals) began to leave the Soviet republics.

Many of these Russians settled in Central Queens, which, over the course of time, had become the prominent area for Slavic and Central Asian immigrants. By the late 1970s, Forest Hills was the second largest Russian population center in the United States, and the neighboring area of Rego Park was not far behind. 

Many Jews from the Soviet republic of Georgia also settled in the area. 

The numbers of Queens residents claiming Russian roots skyrocketed during this time — in the 1970 census 106,874 people in Queens listed Russian or Soviet ancestry, compared to a paltry 21,072 in 1950. 

Over 1,000 Soviet families settled in Forest Hills between 1973-78, and many more were to follow.  These immigrants were able to integrate themselves in American life much quicker than their forebearers, thanks to aid groups like the Service Center for Russian Families (now the Esther Grunblatt Russian Service Center), which helped new Soviet emigres learn English, find apartments, prepare resumes, and search for jobs.

 “Housing, jobs, language barrier, acculturation, adjustment, and schools,” were some of the biggest problems for Russian immigrants from the 70s onwards, according to Janash, who’s been a caseworker at the service center since the mid 1980s.

Soviet immigrants packed into apartments on Queens Boulevard, 108th Street, and Austin Street, sometimes with as many as 10 people living in a tiny space. 

The biggest difficulties lay in adjusting to a distinctly different culture and learning a new language.  Although many immigrants were well educated in Russia, they were forced to take drastic job cuts in order to make their way in Queens.  Former doctors began working as nurses, and former nurses as health aides, as they struggled to attain the different American medical degrees.  Engineers found gainful employment — as janitors — all in hopes of attaining the American dream.

The Bukharan Community

Many of the Soviet emigres settling in Rego Park in the 1980s and ‘90s were actually Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan and other Central Asian states. 

The Bukharan Jews are an offshoot of Middle Eastern and Persian Jewry dating from the 6th Century A.D., and consider themselves socially and culturally different from the other East European Jewish sects. 

During  the 1990s, approximately 30,000 Bukharan Jews found homes in the area of Rego Park, Forest Hills, and Kew Gardens. 

Today, many Bukharan shops and synagogues — most bearing Cyrillic lettering — court residents along the length of 108th St., providing a taste of Uzbek culture to all area residents. 

In 1995 and 1996, 70 percent of New York’s immigrants from the former Soviet republics of Central Asia settled in Queens.

Throughout the 70s, 80s, and early 90s the United States government and Jewish aid groups sponsored the exodus of many oppressed Russian Jews.  According to Janash, anti-Semitism is still a pervasive bias in current Russian thought. “There’s a discrimination against the Jewish...if an employer has a choice between a Russian and a Jewish person, the would rather hire a Russian, non-Jewish person.”

On one monumental day in 1989, a total of  1,750 Soviet refuges — 1,356 of them Jews — landed at John F Kennedy airport in an extraordinary airlift exodus that involved eight different planes.  The cost of resettling each immigrant was split between Jewish aid oganizations and the US government.

The collapse of the Communist government in 1991 brought many new immigrants to the shores of Queens, as Soviet immigration regulations faltered.  However, the country’s civil unrest also brought worries to many Russian-Americans in Queens, who feared for the lives of their friends and relatives.

The Russian Community Today

Today, immigration from the former Soviet countries appears to have slackened.