About US

In the last 30 years, more than 500,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union came to America. The “Boston Globe” recently published that about 275,000 of them came as Jewish refugees and about 100,000 are religious Christian evangelistic refugees.

Large American cities have large Russian-speaking communities. As any other immigrant community and at least during the first years, they live in the close communities. They have Russian food stores and restaurants where they can buy food that they are accustomed to, they have TV programs in Russian, and regularly concerts of Russian entertainers. They have even local Russian newspapers and magazines.

Smaller Russian-speaking communities with populations of about a couple thousand or less, like the one in Kansas City in the 1980s, have neither Russian stores, nor any other services other than those provided by local resettlement organizations.

In 1998, when our newspaper was founded as a local publication in the Kansas City area, there were about 3,000 immigrants in Kansas City. Only about 1000 were ethnic Jews. The rest of them were of other nationalities. Many of them were in intermarriage families. Now there are about 17,000 immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the Kansas City area (according The Sun Newspapers, August 11, 2005, page C1). If in the recent years almost all immigrants had legal status, in the last years the increase in the Russian immigrant community is contributed to by people who come to the United States with work and tourist visas. Many of them successfully receive resident status, but some finally become undocumented immigrants whom the local population calls “illegals.” The same story is true for any city. For instance, the size of the Boston Russian-speaking community is estimated at about 120,000 people; some estimates are as low as 40,000.

Russian immigrants are highly-educated people. In 3-5 years after arrival to the United States they somehow solve initial economic problems like finding a job, buy a house or car, etc. They want to integrate with the general American community and be active in community life, and they turn to media for information.

While there exist numerous national and local newspapers and magazines in Russian, all of them have very limited coverage of local news or problems. Religion is practically not covered at all if it is a commercial newspaper. If a newspaper in Russian is published by a religious organization, Jewish, Christian, or of other denomination, all materials are covered in accordance with tradition, i.e. centuries-old wisdom and knowledge. There is no place left for any discussions (also in accordance with tradition). Maybe, this is one of the reasons why less than one percent of Russian immigrants are members of religion congregations. Another reason is that in the United States rabbis and pastors are fundraisers and money in the form of membership and donations up to 10% of the family income are the subject of their focus.

If national or local political life in the United States is covered in Russian newspapers, it is a translation from the general American media.

While over 99 percent of Russians are atheists or believe in God existence, but do not accept any traditional religion, they practically do not have a place to read critical religious materials or express their opinions.

Our newspaper was founded to fill the mentioned gap. We now serve about 500,000 Russian-speaking immigrants and about the same number of our American friends through the Internet. We found that an English edition is needed for our American friends because each immigrant family has at list a few of them and our children who were born here or came as young children. They cannot read Russian even if they can speak this language.