[4] The American Community Survey of the US census shows the total number of people in the US age 5 and over speaking Russian at home to be slightly over 900,000, as of 2020.

However, as Russian Americans have climbed in socioeconomic status, the diaspora from Russia and other former Soviet-bloc states has moved toward more affluent parts of the New York metropolitan area, notably Bergen County, New Jersey.

[citation needed] Today, most of this group has become assimilated into the local society, with ethnic traditions continuing to survive primarily around the church.

The southernmost such post of the Russian-American Company was Fort Ross, established in 1812 by Ivan Kuskov, some 50 miles (80 km) north of San Francisco, as an agricultural supply base for Russian America.

These included Russian Jews, escaping the 1881–1882 pogroms, who moved to New York City and other coastal cities; the Spiritual Christians, treated as heretics at home, who settled largely in the Western United States in the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco,[11][12] and Portland, Oregon;[13] two large groups of Shtundists who moved to Virginia and the Dakotas,[11] and mostly between 1874 and 1880 German-speaking Anabaptists, Russian Mennonites and Hutterites, who left the Russian Empire and settled mainly in Kansas (Mennonites), the Dakota Territory, and Montana (Hutterites).

Finally in 1908–1910, the Old Believers, persecuted as schismatics, arrived and settled in small groups in California, Oregon (particularly the Willamette Valley region),[13] Pennsylvania, and New York.

[11] Immigrants of this wave include Irving Berlin, legend of American songwriting and André Tchelistcheff, influential Californian winemaker.

But after the war, hundreds of thousands of Jews began leaving Europe and Russia again for the US, modern-day Israel and other countries where they hoped to start a new life.

The US military benefited greatly with the arrival of such inventors as Igor Sikorsky (who invented the practical Helicopter), Vladimir Yourkevitch, and Alexander Procofieff de Seversky.

During the Soviet era, emigration was prohibited, and limited to very few defectors and dissidents who immigrated to the United States of America and other Western Bloc countries for political reasons.

The chaos and depression that plagued Europe following the conclusion of World War II drove many native Europeans to immigrate to the United States.

[18] Following the war, tensions between the United States and the then Soviet Union began to rise to lead to the USSR placing an immigration ban on its citizens in 1952.

After the immigration ban was placed into effect, any Russian citizen that attempted to or planned to leave Russia was stripped of citizenship, barred from having any contact with any remaining relatives in the USSR, and would even make it illegal for that individual's name to be spoken.

Emigrants included the family of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, which moved to the US in 1979, citing the impossibility of an advanced scientific career for a Jew.

The amendment stipulated that the United States would review the record of human rights before permitting any special trade agreements with countries with non-market economies.

[23] The Jackson-Vanik amendment made it possible for the religious minorities of the USSR such as Roman-Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Jews to emigrate to the United States.

[22][24] The slow Brezhnev stagnation of the 1970s and Mikhail Gorbachev's following political reforms since the mid-1980s prompted an increase of economic immigration to the United States, where artists and athletes defected or legally emigrated to the US to further their careers: ballet stars Mikhail Baryshnikov in 1974 and Alexander Godunov in 1979, composer Maxim Shostakovich in 1981, hockey star Alexander Mogilny in 1989 and the entire Russian Five later, gymnast Vladimir Artemov in 1990, glam metal band Gorky Park in 1987, and many others.

The numbers grew very sharply, leading to the United States forbidding entry to those emigrating from the USSR on Israeli visa, starting October 1, 1989.

However, the conditions for Soviet refugees belonging to several religious minorities - including Jews, Baptists, Pentecostalists, and Greek Catholics - were eased by the Lautenberg Amendment passed in 1989 and renewed annually.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent transition to free market economy came hyperinflation and a series of political and economic crises of the 1990s, culminating in the financial crash of 1998.

[32] This instability and bleak outcome prompted a large new wave of both political and economic emigration from Russia, and one of the major targets became the United States, which was experiencing an unprecedented stock market boom in 1995–2001.

[37] The Soviet Union was a sports empire, and many prominent Russian sportspeople found great acclaim and rewards for their skills in the United States.

On 27 September 2022, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre encouraged Russian men fleeing their home country to avoid being drafted to apply for asylum in the United States.

[41] In July 2024, Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was sentenced to 6.5 years in prison for spreading "false information" about Russia's military operations in Ukraine.

[42] Communities with high percentages of people of Russian ancestry The top US communities with the highest percentage of people claiming Russian ancestry are:[43] US communities with the most residents born in Russia Top US communities with the most residents born in Russia are:[47] Apart from such settlements as Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, concentrations of Russian Americans can be found in Bergen County, New Jersey; Queens; Staten Island; Anchorage, Alaska; Baltimore; Boston; The Bronx; other parts of Brooklyn; Chicago; Cleveland; Detroit; Los Angeles; Beverly Hills; Miami; Milwaukee; Minneapolis; Palm Beach; Houston; Dallas; Orlando; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Portland, Oregon;[48] Sacramento; San Francisco; Raleigh and Research Triangle Region North Carolina, and Seattle.