A New Wave of Voters

NEW YORK - Someday soon, perhaps even by the time of the next U. S. presidential election, American candidates for high office may find themselves courting an influential new ethnic lobby group.


In what must be the final irony of the Cold War, Russia's "perestroika" emigrants are poised to emerge as a force on the political landscape of America.


While previous waves of Soviet and Russian emigration lost little time submerging themselves in the melting pot of American culture, the economic and religious refugees who have been streaming into the West since the late 1980s are discovering the power of the special interest group.


The Russian factor abroad has already made itself felt elsewhere. "I think you can say that it was the votes of recent Russian immigrants in Israel which enabled Yitzhak Rabin to win election as prime


minister", says Alex Brand, news editor at Novoye Russkoye Slovo, New York's Russian-language newspaper. "It's a matter of time before it happens in other places".


New York has become one of the key cultural laboratories for Russian America. According to unofficial estimates, there are between 200, 000 and 400, 000 former Soviet citizens living in the city.


They have already transformed entire New York neighborhoods, such as the Brighton Beach and Bensonhurst sections of Brooklyn. If you walk down some streets plastered with Cyrillic signs on shops and foodstores, you could be forgiven for thinking you are in St. Petersburg or Odessa.


Having just returned to New York after five years in Moscow, I seem to hear Russian wherever I turn.


On any day, I will pass by Russian-language books sold by sidewalk vendors on the Upper West Side, or young students casually wearing T-shirts with Russian colors. Store windows of luxury shops in midtown Manhattan are crammed with the cheap Yeltsin and Gorby matryoshka dolls that you can find on the Arbat or at the Izmailovo market.


This may have little to do with politics, but everything to do with the commercial energy of new Russian-American entrepreneurs.


The most interesting sign of muscle inside the Russian immigrant community is Novoye Russkoye Slovo itself. Billed as the oldest Russian-language organ in the world (first published in 1910), the newspaper chugged comfortably along for years with a respectable circulation of about 40, 000.


In the past two years circulation has nearly doubled.


Its pages are a fascinating reflection of the spreading interests of Russian America. Editorials on the U. S. election rub shoulders with wire service reports out of Tallinn and Alma-Ata, and news of crime on the New York "sabvay" (subway). One recent edition had long articles about the state of the Russian communities in Paris and Germany.


Novoye Russkoye Slovo provides a glimpse of the new Russian-American culture in the making-Traditional paeans to the new homeland, such as a letter from a St. Petersburg man who found good medical care ("Thank you, America, for saving my life") coexist with reports of concerts and exhibits made possible by the new freedom of movement between the two countries.


One recent notice advertised appearances by the folksingers Sergei and Tatyana Nikitin, and by Alexander Rosenbaum, former cult figures whom I used to listen to in bootleg tapes in Russian kitchens. Even the New Mysticism back home has its adherents here. "Do you feel fate has treated you badly? Are you depressed? " reads one ad for a faith healer. "I have the secret of how to resolve any of your problems".


But most revealing of all are the ads reflecting the preoccupations of an increasingly sophisticated community. One company offered to ship computers and computer parts to Russia. Nearby was an ad for the Russian Yellow Pages, second edition, 1992-93, with information on Russian-American organizations across the United States and "business opportunities" in the C. I. S. "With more than 1, 000 entries, we serve the whole immigration", it claims.


Brand believes that the widening interests reflected on the pages of his newspaper indicate a movement toward greater political activism in the Russian-American community.


"Most of the Russians who came here at the height of the Cold War, like myself, were right-wing in American terms", explains Brand, 48, who left the Soviet Union in 1987. "Being dissidents in a totalitarian state, we were programmed to react badly to anything that sounded like socialism. Most of us voted Republican, if we voted.


"But most of the people coming now are what you would consider economic refugees", he continued. "When they hear some politician talking about more jobs or changing society, like Clinton or other Democrats, they listen carefully. Right now, they are the silent majority in the community". Why silent? Brand laughs. "Because a lot of them are illegal, and they can't vote", he replies. It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict what will happen when they can.


Stephen Handelman, former Moscow bureau chief of The Toronto Star, is currently a visiting scholar at the Harriman Institute of Soviet Studies at Columbia University in New York.