Immigrants Quickly Adapt They’re Skilled Professionals, Rather Than Refugees, From Russia

Tens of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union have come to Washington in the past 10 years, some at the express invitation of their Northwest employers.

Almost 17,000 refugees from the region - many fleeing religious persecution - have sought assistance from the state Department of Social and Health Services, says program supervisor Jeff Kibler at the state Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance. They account for 18 percent of the total and are the second-largest group of immigrants, behind Southeast Asians.

But thousands more have arrived without official refugee status - skilled professionals who readily adapt to the West.

The total likely exceeds 40,000, said Vladimir Kigel, editor of the West Coast Russian-language newspaper Da Plus.

“They have come in three groups,” he said.

The first, arriving in the 1970s or ‘80s, “now are well-established as doctors, lawyers, engineers, owners of businesses.”

The religious refugees - Baptists, Pentecostal Christian and historically oppressed Jews - came next, many from Ukraine, Kigel said.

“Now, since the end of the 1980s, there are about 10,000 Russian technicians, artists and other professionals who are most willing to mingle with Americans and to try to organize trade with Russia,” he said.

Many of them left as the Soviet Union dissolved into chaos in 1991.

“They are very informed and capable of contributing much,” Kigel said.

Here are four cases in point:

Nina Danilova, who accepted a teaching post at the Pacific Northwest Ballet in 1991, has 25 years experience with the Kirov and other Russian ballet companies plus experience teaching in Poland and Italy.

“My passion is ballet,” Danilova said.

She was helping develop a new ballet company and academy in Provenza, Italy, when the PNB’s co-artistic director, Francia Russell, offered her a full-time position here. Danilova and her husband, a retired TV director, live in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood.

“This is a good life. … It is like a dream for me,” she said.

Yuri Starikov of Siberia now works at Microsoft Corp., where he leads development of online support applications for Microsoft Works. He is one of 40 former Soviets at Microsoft. Starikov said he’s at Microsoft to “be fulfilled in constructive work” because “there is no other company anywhere in the world with this huge infrastructure to create software.”

Viachaslav “Slavic” Popovsky, former Russian Olympic coach, has a doctoral degree in physical education and worked at a sports institute in the former Leningrad, now once again called St. Petersburg. He trained coaches in all sports, but mainly volleyball, and wrote textbooks and manuals for coaches and parents of athletes.

His coaching helped the Soviet women’s volleyball team win a gold medal at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

He came to the United State less than a month after the collapse of the Soviet Union and has coached girls volleyball at Lake Washington and Vashon high schools, and at Kirkland and Evergreen junior highs.

Irina Krouglova Cayward arrived from St. Petersburg in 1990, speaking fluent English.

“I wanted to be where the system wouldn’t control me, but I would control my own life,” she said.

Cayward works at Harris Group International, a division of the Seattle-based engineering-services company Harris Group, helping coordinate projects to provide U.S. engineering equipment and services to Russian pulp and paper factories. She and her American husband, Tim, a Boeing engineer, live on Mercer Island.

“I am Americanized but I am Russian, too,” Cayward said. “I try to combine the best of both worlds.”

While these four came to compete in the free market, Ludmilla Milkin and her family came as refugees from Ukraine to practice their Pentecostal Christian religion in peace. As a child, she was teased by others for not joining the official Communist Party youth organization. One night, a fire was set behind the family home.

Today, she helps other refugees, working at the Seattle office of World Relief. Her husband, Nick, and son Alix, 20, buy old houses, fix them up and resell them.

“Americans are so open to help us,” Milkin said. “They are so open and kind to us.”