Russian War Brides in Interwar San Francisco

• In Event: Russian Émigré Communities, Identities, and Belonging in the Interwar and Postwar Periods

Abstract

The first American Expeditionary Force troops, consisting of 3000 soldiers, arrived in Vladivostok in August of 1918, and, in 1920, these soldiers began returning to the United States on U.S. Army transports with their Russian wives, whom they had met and married in the midst of the carnage of Russia’s Civil War. The port of arrival was San Francisco and many of these couples settled in that city. Many of the women were under twenty years old, did not speak English, and had no family in the United States apart from their spouses. They had made critical life decisions amidst the chaos of war, taking a leap of faith that their choices offered them better options than what awaited them in their homeland. Though they were not immigrants in the strictest sense of the word, since they entered as the wives of U.S. servicemen, they faced enormous obstacles as they sought to build their lives. They were also a vanguard for the large wave of Russian émigrés who began arriving in San Francisco in the interwar period as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War. This paper examines the experiences of these women as a distinctive group in the Russian diasporic community that formed in the interwar period in San Francisco.

Author

• Nina Bogdan, U of Arizona