Before We Disappear Into Oblivion

From émigré to white American, the shaping of Russian American identity in the twentieth century.

The October 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War triggered a mass exodus from Russia to the American west coast. Before We Disappear into Oblivion examines the efforts of newly arrived Russians in San Francisco as they built communities and negotiated their acculturation into American society.

The October 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War triggered a mass exodus from Russia. Thousands boarded ships heading for California. Before We Disappear into Oblivion chronicles the struggles of members of the Russian diaspora in San Francisco and northern California as they built communities and negotiated their acculturation into American society.

Nina Bogdan challenges the stereotype of the White Russian émigré as an aristocrat in exile, revealing the diversity within California's Russian communities in terms of social backgrounds, political affiliations, and geographic origins. Bogdan details the historic Russian presence in northern California, particularly Fort Ross, and examines how émigrés incorporated this presence into their strategies and tactics used to establish a foundation for community while developing their Russian American identity. Consulting Russian-language sources generated by the diaspora alongside American public discourse and thousands of government documents, Bogdan traces the divergent paths Russian émigrés took to become, or not become, middle-class white Americans, a century prior to the latest mass exodus of Russians from their homeland in 2022.

Set against a backdrop of national and global events – the Great Depression, World War II, McCarthyism, and the Cold War – Before We Disappear into Oblivion explores the factors that shaped the Americanization of one ethnic group in an environment where cultural affiliation became submerged in favour of a constructed racial identity.