Sacramento city, California became quite known in the former Soviet Union due to a third wave of immigration
Back in the time when we still lived in the Soviet Union, we never dwelled on the idea of “immigration”. What’s the point? Because of the “Iron Curtain” it was much easier to get to the “other side”, to the Kingdom of Heaven than to move to a capitalist country.
In the 70s and 80s only a few desperate daredevil German and Jewish families, by some miracle, managed to flee “over the hill”. The rest of the proletariat was more likely to face the taiga and barbed wire of Southern Kolyma than the palm trees and warm sand of northern Florida.
That’s why, when in the late 1980s Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to release Christians from the Soviet Union on Israeli visas and the Americans had generous quotas for immigration, a significant stream of Christian immigrants poured into America. At that time nearly everyone could easily get the coveted refugee status. It was enough to say that you had once seen a person wearing a police hat in your church’s yard and the desired status was guaranteed. However, a lot of Christians were seriously “run over by the atheistic truck of Soviet justice”.
At the end of 1989, we were already in Italy, waiting for our turn to enter the States, while my uncle Misha Serin was still serving his five years in prison for keeping and distributing Bibles that they found at his home. He was a member of the Autonomous Baptists (a group of Baptist churches that seceded from the Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the 1970s-1980s and registered autonomously), and during a search, they confiscated several hundred copies of Bibles and Christian literature, that were printed in an underground printing company. In this regard, the Autonomous Baptist Church members were a constant problem for KGB officers. When, after a considerable amount of pressure, the authorities did not manage to crack Uncle Misha and get a lead on the location of the printing company, they pinned some unrelated charge on him and sentenced him to five years in prison.
In Italy, where we spent just two month (a record, in terms of short time, usually it took three to six months) we wrote letters calling for Uncle Misha’s release. Gorbachev had already been claiming to the whole world that there were no political prisoners in the Soviet Union. “And what about Uncle Misha?” – we wrote to Caritas and somewhere else. Of course, it’s possible that Gorbachev didn’t have any idea about his namesake, being so far away in Tashkent. However, be that as it may, at the end of 1989 Uncle Misha was suddenly released on parole. Perhaps our effort, made at the right time and the right place, finally paid off. For us the reason was not nearly as important as the result: he came back to his family.
But the interesting thing is that no matter how hard all the relatives tried to persuade Uncle Misha and Aunt Tasya to move to the States, they decided to stay in Uzbekistan in order to preach the Gospel.
The third wave of immigration was mostly made up of simple people from small towns and villages, and I don’t mean Jewish people. Many of them also came to the US in the 90s. A little later many more people started immigrating and the situation changed, especially when the Green Card lottery started.
As is known, the history of immigration to the US from Russia includes three main waves. They all have their own characteristics. The first wave began en masse after the revolution in 1917. Many of those who could flee from Russia and the Bolsheviks were lucky to move to the US. In the 90s we often met their grandchildren and great-grandchildren there, who already couldn’t be distinguished from other Americans. Only when they found out that we were also “from there”, they recollected that their grandparents once ran away “from there” as well. Almost everyone of them (with rare exceptions) no longer knew Russian and only a few with difficulty and a thick accent could say two or three words, such as “babushka” (grandmother), “pirozhki” (pies) incorrectly putting the stress on the second syllable. Just imagine, some 70 or 80 years, and there was nothing Slavic left in the Slavs. They completely melted into the environment they found themselves in. Actually, it concerned other nationalities to the same extent.
(In this respect, the history of the Israeli people is amazing. For two thousand years they were scattered all over the face of the earth, in different countries, continents, cultures, speaking different languages, living around different people, having different customs and traditions etc. For two thousand years! And only in 1948 the state of Israel was founded, but nothing had been lost! The language, culture, religion, customs and traditions remained the same as they were two thousand years before. In fact, demographically, it was the miracle of miracles. It cannot be explained other than by the direct participation of Divine Providence in their fate and the clear fulfillment of the biblical prophecy that at the end of the centuries God will gather His dispersed people.)
The second wave of immigration took place immediately after the Second World War. As we found out upon arrival, this wave came from two directions. One stream came from Europe, mainly from Germany, and consisted of captured soldiers and civilians who survived in Nazi camps and young people driven to work in Germany. But there were also those who were not drafted into the Red Army on health grounds, or those who for some reasons couldn’t (or didn’t want to) evacuate to deep within the country (as we know, at the beginning of the war, the Germans advanced very quickly) and remained in the occupied territory.
There was an old man Kuzma Romanovich at our church in Bryte (a part of West Sacramento). He was born in Ukraine and at that time had already approached middle age, but wasn’t drafted into the army due to congenital limb defect. He had six little children and worked as a cobbler. When the Germans arrived, he just kept working in his shop. Like it or not, but the man had to feed his family. The Germans didn’t hurt him and naturally, some Wehrmacht soldiers used to drop by his shop. When the German army started “rolling back”, he said goodbye to his wife and kids and left for Germany, clearly understanding what would await him for “cooperating” with the Germans by mending their boots. Then he somehow managed to get from Germany to the US. For about 30 years he lived alone, hoping for some changes that would allow him to go back to his family. Only having lost all hope, he married a widow there, also an immigrant. He died in the 90-s and never saw his family again.
Another old man, Timofey, had a similar fate: war, injury, captivity, Nazi concentration camps and the US. Unlike Kuzma Romanovich, Timofey was single till he died. We remembered him for always praying out loud for the President, Congress and Senate, asking God to give them wisdom and blessing. Also, he never forgot to thank God for being able to walk and not having a need for somebody to “turn him over”. He lived in a very small house not far from the church. He didn’t have a car and walked everywhere with a shopping cart taken from some supermarket. Therefore, the ability to walk was crucial for Timofey, because he had no one who would take care of him. It’s interesting that either thanks to his prayers, or it just happened so, but Timofey could walk till the day he died.
Another part of the second wave poured into the US from China. Living in the Soviet Union, we had no idea that in the 30-s tens of thousands of Slavs fled to China through Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan from hunger and repressions. The Soviet Union’s border at that time was not protected by a barrier but guarded by Red Army soldiers, who patrolled it several times a night. During the time between their patrols refugees managed to get to China.
This way was not for the faint of heart. The refugees put themselves in mortal danger. But the fear of starvation made them take risks, because dying of hunger didn’t seem much better than death from the Red Army’s bullets. As you understand, there was no GPS during those difficult times, and God only knows how people exchanged information and found their way. Having gone a long way along the border to some villages, they needed to find a guide, a Kazakh or Kyrgyz, who for a certain fee would risk their life and agree to lead a group to the neighboring country. Sometimes they had to hide in the steppe near the border for several days, waiting for the right moment.
In 1989, upon arrival in Bryte, we stayed for two weeks at an elderly single woman’s home, who had immigrated through China. Her name was Shura Lokteva. She was a young girl when her family managed to cross the border. “We couldn’t cross it immediately” – she said, – “The border guards were being unusually active, and we had to stay in the steppe for another day. The next day the story repeated, and we had to stay for one more day. We were scared to death…
It happened in late fall. Our group consisted of fourteen people, including little children. The youngest girl was around ten months old. It was more difficult with children. We couldn’t make any sound, or start a fire. All we did was try to lie quietly in the shallow ditches.
We weren’t prepared to wait so long, we had almost no water supply left, and were saving it for the children. Some adults couldn’t bear thirst and drank their own urine. It’s hard to describe what we went through. This time waiting could mean the difference between life and death. Finally, on the third night the guide said we could go. He brought two horses, we put our things on them and wrapped the horses’ hooves with pieces of felt. We gave children kuknar so that they would sleep and not expose us by crying. (Kuknar is poppy seed pods that were dried after the opium was taken out. In the East, they make tea out of such seed pods, which still works very much like a drug.)
The border went along a shallow river, which we waded through. Then, along the bed of a small stream, we began to move deeper into China. The stream was very small, the water in it was about ankle-deep. We walked about another kilometer through the water, fearing that they might chase us with dogs. It was a necessary precaution, because on the Chinese side nobody guarded the border. In some cases, border guards just entered the territory of China and arrested refugees. We walked for a long long time, until finally the guard said we were in a safe place and could stop and get some rest. But life prepared another challenge for us. When dawn had already begun to break, we started taking our things from the horses and suddenly… Oh God! We realized that we had lost our baby sister Valya. She was just ten months old. As we did with the other kids, we had given her opium, wrapped her up and put her in the khurjum (similar to a saddlebag) on the horse with our things. So, she must have fallen out of the khurjum in the dark, while, with bated breath, we were crossing the border, or when we were going up that stream. Nobody noticed where and how it happened.
Mom was crying and everyone had tears in their eyes. After all we had been through, when we finally had gotten our desired freedom, after three days of balancing between life and death, such a tragic event had happened. Worn out by all this, exhausted with unbearable pressure, we could barely stand and didn’t know what to do next. Going back and looking for the baby almost certainly meant being caught by border guards and never returning. The forest, that was reliably sheltering us from prying eyes, was scarce closer to the border and could be very well seen through from the other side.
Another problem was that we didn’t know exactly where the baby slipped out of the khurjum: it could have happened when we were sneaking to the border, or when we were wading through the river or when we walked through the stream on the Chinese side.
What could we do? We felt so bad about our baby girl it brought tears to our eyes. Everyone blamed themselves for not watching her well enough, not checking the khurjums on the way, most of all mom and dad beat themselves up. We all understood that with every second our little Valya was less and less likely to survive. So, dad told us: “Get some rest and I will run through the stream and look for her. I think we lost her somewhere on this side. When we were crossing the border I was looking at the horses and I don’t think something fell off in the water. I’ll very carefully check the stream to the border and try not to be seen by border guards.”
Our guide tried to talk dad out of it, saying that he could get all of us killed.
– Even if guards don’t come here, what will your family do in a different country without you, if you get arrested? – he said. – If you don’t come back, you’ll sentence the rest of your family to death, besides, you won’t bring the baby back if she fell in the water.
This was the choice our dad faced. Mom and all of us, a dozen pairs of eyes, were looking at him, and our hearts bled from pity and love for the baby. However, the reality was as follows: we could lose our dad as well. It was a terrible choice.
But dad never hesitated.
– I believe, – he said, – if the Lord heard our prayers and saved us and led us to this place, He won’t let me die here. But if I don’t try to find her, I won’t be able to forgive myself till the day I die, for the fact that my cowardice didn’t let me do everything I could to save our baby girl. Pray for me and may the Lord help me. With these words, he hastily went into the stream and disappeared into the thick brush.
It would be a massive understatement to say that we bowed down in prayer. We fell down on the ground: somebody kneeled, somebody fell face first, some sitting, some lying down, we started to cry out to God asking to save Valya and our dad. Having put his mat on the ground, our guide began praying in his language as well. We couldn’t talk loudly, but our hearts were filled with prayer. I don’t think that church walls hear such fervent prayers every day.
Someone said well: “Train stations see more sincere kisses than registry offices, and the walls of hospital rooms hear more sincere prayers than church walls.” That was the case we found ourselves in: the trouble looming over us, at its peak, had us praying with such heart, that I think that I have never prayed like that again, in my whole life. I was lying on the ground and it felt like our Lord’s feet were right beside my head. In such cases, all ostentatious husk falls from our hearts and we are left one to one with God. With all our being, hearts and minds we clung to the One Who could save us, our dad, and baby sister.
When Valya was with us, we didn’t appreciate her enough. She was just our lovely sister, we watched her grow up, so yesterday, today, or tomorrow – we thought she would be with us. We took her for granted. But that day, when we understood that she would either be saved or we would never see her again, our souls, all together, cried for help from above with a prayer.
The light snow that started to fall when we were crossing the border, to the great joy of our guide, turned into a heavy snowfall. It meant that even if we had left some trace behind, it couldn’t be seen. It wasn’t freezing, maybe one or two degrees below zero (28-30oF) and large snowflakes softly landed on the ground. We liked it also because it was no longer possible for strangers to notice dad from afar.
Every minute dragged on like eternity. It was hard to tell how long it had been since dad left down the stream. We didn’t have a watch; it was already light, since the day dawned and the snow covered everything. The younger children, exhausted by the journey, fell asleep on their mats and the snow covered them like a blanket.
At that moment a miracle happened! Through the falling snow we could see dad walking in the bed of the stream and holding a bundle with our little Valya. I wouldn’t be able to describe the feelings, the joy we experienced at that moment. I’ll just say that we have never been so happy in our lives, as we were then. I can’t express even a hundredth part of it. We wanted to shout out loud, so that the whole universe would hear us, but we could only whisper about our happiness. The border was just a mile away, and dogs have very sensitive hearing.
Meanwhile, dad, breathless with happiness, told us that he found Valya somewhere halfway to the border. The stream was very shallow, slow and rather winding. Apparently, when the horse turned following the winding path, the khurjum snagged on a branch and Valya fell out. Being still under the influence of opium, she didn’t cry and kept sleeping. (When our family came to California in 1989, this very Valya, saved from the stream, had been a cashier in our church in Bryte for many years. – the author’s note).
That was the end of our torment on the border, and a couple of days later we already were in Gudja. This city was one of the centers of Slavic refugees in China. Tens of thousands of people, running from Stalin’s repressions and hunger, once settled there. If China hadn’t “turned red” after the Second World War and hadn’t become communist, this large Slavic colony would probably still be there.
For a little over ten years, things started to look up for Russian people there. They set up a lot of businesses, mills, bakeries, small industries, farms, schools, churches, etc. But everything changed when the communists rose to power, and we once again had to look for salvation in immigration. It was a long and dangerous journey across China to the port city, Shanghai.
From that place people could leave for many other countries. The most coveted place was the US, but very few managed to get there directly from Shanghai. That’s why most Slavs went to South America: Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil and other countries.
The Philippines also accepted refugees. There was a rumor that it was easier to get to the US from the Philippines, so our family and a group of about seventy people decided to try this way. Besides, the last ships were already leaving Shanghai, and, fleeing from the Chinese Red Army, we were ready to go anywhere, rather than stay under communist control. Thus, we had very little time to contemplate and make a choice. Nobody could say for sure that immigrants would be safe when Mao Zedong’s army took over Shanghai.
Time showed that we had made the right choice. After a year and a half in the Philippines, with the help of a Russian pastor, who was lucky to have gotten to America directly from Shanghai a few years before, we received permission to enter the US. The name of this pastor is Pyotr Amegin-Shelokhvostov.”
I can say with certainty that nearly everyone, who took part in the second wave of immigration, went through tremendous hardships. They can tell a thousand heartbreaking stories, somewhat similar and somewhat different, about suffering, fear, and pain.
Even having come to the US, these people had to work incredibly hard to make a living. Many of them could describe their torment for hours. Seeing that we, as refugees, got nice benefits, they hid envy, telling us about the hard work they had to do to get their daily bread. At that time they didn’t get any benefits and needed to earn money to pay for everything. However, they mentioned that they got a lot of food for free and could buy a full cart of groceries in the supermarket just for five dollars (which was a typical daily pay in the 1950s). In the 90s it was much more expensive.
The third wave, that peaked in the 90s, is still going on. Till the end of the 1990s, people went to the US through Vienna and Rome. Austria and Italy provided state support for those who went to the US on Israeli visas. The US paid for food and accommodations. But this only applied to the people who went to the States or Israel. If you wanted to go to Canada, Australia or some other place, you had to pay for everything yourself.
After the mid-1990s you could go to the US directly and with your passport. Until then, the USSR authorities made immigrants renounce their citizenship (it cost 700 rubles, which was big money back then). They were forced to hand over their passports, diplomas, military cards, employment record books, in exchange for only one tiny, palm-sized piece of paper – an Israeli visa. Those who received this visa were informed, that by crossing the Soviet border, they would automatically lose the USSR citizenship.
California attracted immigrants with generous benefits, numerous assistance programs and relatively inexpensive housing. Living in oceanfront cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, or San Diego was far more expensive. That’s why in the early 90s, Sacramento was a perfect city for newcomers.
Being one and a half hour drive to San Francisco on one side, and a two hour drive to Lake Tahoe and Nevada on the other, Sacramento appealed to immigrants with inexpensive housing and tons of different benefits for those who came with a refugee status (which at that time most immigrants did). California provided great opportunities for studying: schools, colleges, and universities. If you studied full time, all units, books, parking cards and food were paid for by the government. If you had kids, daycare was free as well. So, they supplied you with everything you could imagine. They could do more only if they drove you to and from the university.
At first, many things there were surprising. I remember that, looking around, we couldn’t help saying: “Good job! That’s how things should be done!” Another amazing thing was that they believed what you said. Even in serious institutions like schools and other offices, when filling out documents, questionnaires, or applications for benefits, nobody asked you to show your passport or any other form of identification. A lot of things were recorded simply from your words. The only thing was that almost everywhere you needed to say your social security number, but people promptly learned it by heart and showing the actual card wasn’t necessary.
Upon arrival, we were also surprised that Sacramento was the capital of California. Even though, it’s not the biggest city in the state. Los Angeles, San Francisco and some other cities are much bigger than Sacramento. We knew well that in the Soviet Union the capitals were normally the biggest and most developed cities. Moscow, Kiev, Tashkent, Minsk were million-plus cities. That’s how we thought the capital should be. However, we gradually found out that in many states the capital is by far not the most populated place.
Sacramento owes much of its history to the gold rush. When gold was found in El Dorado on the American River, California was flooded with a stream of gold diggers from all over America and other countries. More and more people arrived in San Francisco and sailed along the Sacramento River to the city of the same name. Then, on horseback, they went up the American River to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the gold mines were located.
At that time, Sacramento became a transit place. The lucky ones brought freshly unearthed gold to the city and sold it to banks that had sprung up like mushrooms. It’s interesting that for an ounce of gold they could get between 18 and 20 dollars, whereas now it’s worth at least 1200-1300 dollars. Here is inflation-devaluation for you.
Today Sacramento is a large developed city with a population of over a million people, including suburbs that tightly merged with the urban area. Such a fusion can be frequently observed in the US. For instance, in Lake Tahoe the California-Nevada border goes along the city street. One side of the street is California and the other one is Nevada, so to take a picture in Nevada, tourists from California can just cross the street.
There is another important factor that significantly influenced the development of the city. The thing is that Sacramento is a place of intersection of two transcontinental routes. Interstate 80 crosses the US from East to West. It starts in San Francisco and ends in New York. Interstate 5 runs perpendicular to it. It starts in San Diego next to the Mexican border and crosses all the three Western states, reaching Canada.
Thus, moving to Sacramento had a lot of advantages for immigrants of the third wave. One of them is the climate with just three distinguished seasons: spring, summer, and fall (winter in Sacramento exists only in calendars), as well as inexpensive housing, plenty of work, various benefits and many other nice things.
Besides, it already had two Russian Orthodox churches and two Russian Baptist churches. All of this, taken together, produced a “snowball effect”. While in the mid-1980s there were about two hundred Russian Baptists and Orthodox Christians, today Sacramento and the surrounding area are home to, according to different estimates, between 200 and 250 thousand Russian speakers from the former Soviet Union.
There are currently 104 Slavic churches in Sacramento, and some of them are quite large even for the US (up to five thousand members). The Slavic Diaspora is well organized. They have their radio, television, newspapers, magazines, stores, agencies, schools, daycare facilities, a lot of businesses, some of which are quite big with a turnover of tens of millions of dollars.
The Slavic population of Sacramento keeps growing. I recently heard a funny joke on this subject: “Sacramento. The year 2050. A police car is patrolling the neighborhood. Suddenly they see a drunk person lying on the sidewalk. The officers stop, come up to him, check his pockets, look into his wallet, and one officer says to the other in Ukrainian: “Look, Petro, what a weird last name – Johnson!”
A large flow of third wave immigrants have come through Sacramento, later they dispersed to other cities. A lot of Slavs went to Washington, Oregon, or Nevada. That’s why Sacramento is rightfully referred to as “the capital of the third wave of immigration”.
California is known as “a Mecca for tourists”: Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Giant Sequoia Park. (Some trees in this park are older than King Solomon and more than 330 feet tall. This is the only place on earth where they survived.) Other splendors of California include the world famous Napa vine valley, that is situated next to San Francisco, as well as Los Angeles, Hollywood, Disneyland, the best aquariums in San Diego and Monterey, Glendale Memorial Park with the largest painting in the world, El Dorado, Los Angeles Crystal Cathedral and many more.
It will take a long time to list all these places, and to visit them all, you will need to live in California for a couple of years. We found out about the existence of one such place only when we came to this blessed land. It should be mentioned that planning to go to the US, we had very little information about this country. And there’s nothing strange about it. The scant information on the Western world, that you could get in the pre-perestroika USSR, was mostly negative. I remember reading a heartbreaking story called “Red shoes”, printed in one magazine. The story was about “evil capitalists” who wanted to hurt a little, poor and kind black girl. We also knew names of some cities; knew that the US was divided into states and a few other things.
We left for the US from Uzbekistan, and it was easier for us to do so, since we started to feel danger. We observed bloody clashes between Meskhetian Turks and Uzbeks that started to break out. All doubts were dispelled when the unrest spilled over into Tadzhikistan. Nobody knew what would come next. Even though the Afghan war was over, the quality of life kept sinking. In Tashkent many kinds of food were only given out in exchange for food ration coupons.
However, for us Christians, it was more important that our fellow believers were still being put in jail. We were discriminated against in school and at work. If you hadn’t been a member of the Komsomol, you had a zero percent chance of entering a university. For believers, the road to higher education was closed. Even if you did get a diploma of higher education (you could study and graduate from some institutions part-time) the peak of your career would have been the head of a boiler house.
So, having arrived in the new world, we started discovering new horizons. It’s interesting that when I was going to run to the West, to the country located on the other side of the planet, I started wondering: what kind of soil do they have? I had never done farming, except for having to spend a long time at the apiary with my grandpa Grisha every summer. All our relatives kept bees. It was a good legal side job. But I was asking myself this strange question till my very arrival in the US: what kind of soil do they have?
Our plane landed in Sacramento at about ten o’clock in the evening. We were met by the believers from Bryte church and stayed for two weeks at Shura Lokteva’s who told us a lot about her immigration.
I remember my first morning in the US thanks to a situation, that is quite characteristic in this country. There were a lot of walnut trees in Bryte. We came in late November, and it was the ripening season for walnuts. Shura, her neighbors and many Bryte residents had walnut trees in their yards. It was 8 or 9 in the morning and I, for the first time, went out to an American street. Looking around, I saw that literally 60 feet away from her yard, the sidewalk and the roadside were strewn with walnuts.
There wasn’t a living soul on the street. I came closer, picked up a walnut from the sidewalk, crushed it with my hands and had a taste. It tasted good – fresh and ripe. I thought that the owner of the house must be very happy about such a bountiful harvest. I had hardly swallowed my found treasure, when a man with a broom and a scoop came out of the yard. We said hello and he started sweeping his bountiful harvest into one heap along with leaves and small tree branches. I thought he would first put everything together and then sort the nuts from the leaves. But that wasn’t the case.
The first shock was awaiting me right there. Having gathered everything in a big heap, he rolled over a trash can and, to my horror, started loading all this “wealth” into it with a wide scoop. There was at least ten pounds of nuts, or even more. They were not rotten, I had just tried them. But they all were flying right into the garbage. However hard I tried, I couldn’t explain it to myself, so I just stood there dumbfounded and watched the last portion of nuts disappearing into the can. I think if somebody had taken a photo of me there, that pic would be hard to forget.
That was the first time we saw America as a land of abundance. Later, one American acquaintance told me that the US produced and imported seven times more goods than American people needed. Subsequently, we more than once made sure that he was right. When I came into the house, open-mouthed and told Shura what I had just beheld, she laughed and said: “Everybody does it here.” People don’t have the time or the willingness to crack and open the nuts, because you can buy them in a store, with shells removed, packaged and cheap. Why hit your fingers with a hammer, and mess with the shells, if you can have them on your table anytime with ease?
Listening to Shura, I involuntarily remembered a funny story about the US. A Russian and an American are talking about strawberries. The Russian says: “When in mid-May strawberries start showing up in our markets, we immediately put them into jars to preserve them for the whole year.” Then he asks the American: “When do strawberries appear in your country?” The American says: “At six in the morning.” Of course, after food rations and half-empty shelves in stores, what we saw in the US, despite being expected, was really shocking, the same as with those walnuts.
So, day after day, we got to know the country. Almost everything we came in contact with was new to us: the language, culture, laws, customs… We felt like newborns again having to learn how to live on earth. It was a great joy that Americans were very friendly to new immigrants. Apparently, it’s because everybody in the US (except American Indians) are also immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.
Now it’s time to go back to the story about one very significant place for Slavs, that we found out about only when in California. We knew from history that the Russians once owned Alaska, but the fact that the Russians owned quite a lot of territory in California, for several decades, was new to us. This place is called Fort Ross, or the Russian Fortress. Now it’s a part of the California National Park system.
This story began in 1812, when after a long search, Russian-American company bought a big piece of land on the Pacific coast 50 miles north of San Francisco from the Kashaya Pomo Indians. According to some records, Indians got three blankets, three pairs of pants, two axes, three hand hoes and several strings of beads for it.
This is how the southernmost Russian colony in North America was originated. It was created as an agricultural settlement in order to supply Alaska with food. Till this day, the surrounding places still bear names that have remained from those times. Bodega Bay was once called Rumyantsev Bay. There is a river flowing nearby that the settlers called “Slavyanka” (a Slavic girl), now it is referred to as the Russian River. Nearby, there is a small American town called Sebastopol. And certainly the main tourist attraction is the fortress itself. It was carefully restored, preserving the original architecture and design. The only building that survived from those times is the house of the last Russian commandant Rotchev.
Fort Ross very soon became a full-fledged settlement. Russian craftsmen built windmills, warehouses, bakeries, forges, baths, and a wine cellar. They made furniture, doors, frames, carts, wheels, barrels, they processed iron and copper, planted orchards and vineyards, built ships and sold them to the Spanish people. A port where goods were loaded onto ships was built in Rumyantsev Bay. They also established three farms (ranches) to raise cattle.
In 1841, the settlement ceased to be profitable, and it was sold to the American businessman John Sutter.
Every year Fort Ross is visited by about 150 000 people. It hosts various cultural events, the most significant of which is called Cultural Heritage Day. This holiday is organized annually on the last Saturday of July by the Russian community of California. The program includes the Orthodox liturgy, shooting ancient shotguns and cannons, performances by musical and folklore groups. They cook borscht, make Russian pancakes, women and men dress in traditional Russian clothing and teach kids and adults how to knit, embroider and cross-stitch, weave baskets and braid bast shoes. Anyway, after participating in this holiday, people remember it for a long time.
As new California residents, we visited numerous parks in our state with great interest. We fell in love with Fort Ross right away. It takes around four hours to get there from Sacramento. You need to go past Santa Rosa, then Sebastopol, then go down the Russian River to Bodega Bay and from there it’s only a stone’s throw to the fortress itself. The third wave of immigration significantly increased the turnout at the Cultural Heritage Day, so you had to come early to get a comfortable parking spot.
It happened on the last Saturday of July, 1997. Our group of five cars, which altogether fit about twenty five people, came to this celebration. We didn’t have any problems getting there and soon blended into a diverse crowd of participants and tourists.
Among us was the patriarch of the Mysin family– Sergey Alexandrovich. He was already in his eighties, but along with young people, he never missed a chance to go to the countryside. He especially liked mountains, any mountains. Despite his age, in the mountains he could handle all kinds of routes. Ten or twelve mile distances were within his norm. Thin and fit, Sergey Alexandrovich hadn’t had meat for more than forty years, but preferred fish.
Thanks to Sergey Alexandrovich, all those present at that Cultural Heritage Day remembered it for a long time afterwards. Fort Ross hadn’t seen anything like that before or after that day. Located on the Pacific coast, the fortress is fenced on all sides by 13-feet vertical sequoia beams. There’s quite a big field between the fortress and the ocean, and around 270 yards away it starts precipitously sloping down to the water. You can’t say that the slope is awfully steep, but an inexperienced person can easily fall down and get injured.
The party was in full swing. Having walked around the fortress, listened to music, and tried Russian cabbage soup, Sergey Alexandrovich decided to get some fresh air. He leisurely went to the field, stood on the edge of it and then carefully walked down to the ocean. Having spent some time there, he leisurely started climbing the slope. All of a sudden, halfway up, he heard some voices loudly speaking English above his head.
Unfortunately, Sergey Alexandrovich still hadn’t managed to learn English. So he was just looking in bewilderment at a group of alarmed Americans, shouting and gesturing something to him from above. Apparently, they also came out to breathe the fresh ocean air. And having reached the shore, they saw a seemingly helpless elderly man in the middle of the slope, who they thought had probably accidentally fallen down and was trying to get out.
Sergey Alexandrovich thought that he must have broken some rules. Maybe it was forbidden to go down there without asking permission. Hesitantly, he tried to continue ascending, but as soon as he took a few more steps, the Americans started vehemently shouting something and waving their hands. Sergey Alexandrovich went back down to where he was before, and the shouts subsided. He tried to climb up several times, but the shouts and gestures made him go back down.
Meanwhile, word about this incident got back to the fortress. They stopped the music and performances and people rushed to the edge of the field, thinking that something terrible had happened. Our group also ran to the slope, hearing some bits of conversations on the way: “Yes, fell from the edge… No, I think, he’s still breathing…”
Having pushed our way through the crowd, we were dumbfounded: it was our grandfather, standing there, and looking around in fright, not understanding what people wanted from him. Every minute the crowd got bigger, and more and more people were waving their arms and shouting in English: “Don’t move! Don’t move!”
Then Sergey Alexandrovich, totally frightened and embarrassed, saw his daughters and sons-in-law and started asking them what he should do. The girls started shouting to him in Russian: “Papa, don’t move! Papa, don’t move!” The Americans picked it up and also started shouting: “Papa, don’t move!” So, the stir he caused was rather serious.
Seeing that grandpa was seriously scared, our son-in-law Vasiliy carefully came down to Sergey Alexandrovich in order to support him and help him get out. When he started descending, the crowd froze, and when he reached grandpa, the whole shore burst into applause for Valiliy’s heroism. But as soon as Vasiliy and Sergey Alexandrovich started going up, the shore exploded again, shouting “Papa, don’t move!”. Now even Vasiliy couldn’t understand what the people wanted.
It turned out that the compassionate Americans had already called the rescue team and in any minute a helicopter was supposed to come and save our grandpa. In fact, literally a couple of minutes later everyone heard a characteristic chirping and a helicopter started circling around over our heads, with the figures of rescuers showing in the open door.
Then the police officers arrived, pushed the people to the sides and the helicopter, terribly roaring, landed in the middle of the field. Rescuers dressed in vests shining with buckles and latches fixed to them, rushed out of the cabin, came up to the edge of the slope, assessed the situation, and having returned to the helicopter, started preparing for the operation. One of them latched himself to a strong rope that was attached to the helicopter, the helicopter took off and then started slowly lowering him to our frightened grandpa. Having come close, the rescuer put a vest on Sergey Alexandrovich, strapped it to himself, put his arms around him and, to the thunderous applause and triumphant shouts of the crowd, our grandpa was safely on land in the middle of the field. The same procedure was done to Vasiliy.
Noise, congratulations, applause, hugging and taking pictures – the whole field was bubbling with excitement that this drama had ended as does an Indian Bollywood movie. Laughing, Vasiliy said that it was the first time he had flown in a helicopter. When the jubilant crowd returned to the fortress and the fun continued, Sergey Alexandrovich, after waiting a little, went back down to where the rescue had occurred just moments before and continued down to the shore. He spent some time there and when it was time to go, simply climbed back up the slope, muttering under his breath: “What was all the fuss about? That was a piece of cake!”
