Before We Disappear into Oblivion: San Francisco’s Russian Diaspora from Revolution to Cold War (McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History, 55) (Volume 55) - Softcover

Bogdan, Nina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0228024730 ISBN 13: 9780228024736

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Nina Bogdan is a historian, independent scholar, and consultant. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

From the Back Cover

Series One: Donald Harman Akenson, Editor
Series Two: John Zucchi, Edito

This series was launched in 1987 as a response to the growing field of ethnic and immigration history in Canada in the generation following the rise of multiculturalism. Although the original intent was to publish historical works on ethnicity in Canada, the international nature of ethnic studies has led to the series becoming truly international in its scope and authorship.

The series has therefore gone beyond Canada's borders to examine cultural history in Guyana, racial conflict in New Zealand, West Indian Blacks in Costa Rica, Syrian refugees in Sweden, and Italians in Paris and London. Books in the series have been written mainly from a historical perspective but works by specialists in geography, folklore, sociology, literature, material culture, and Indigenous studies have also been included. We firmly believe that successful and sophisticated studies in all of these fields deserve to be called to the attention of the scholarly community and all those with an interest in ethnicity, immigration, and integration.

With an extensive list of published titles, many of them award-winning, McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History demonstrates what future volumes in the series should be: original, meticulous but accessible scholarly investigations in an exciting field.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0228024730
• ISBN 13: 9780228024736
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 420