Microsoft and other tech companies were also a big draw, says Alexander Goykhman, a Jewish immigrant from Moldova who runs russianseattle.com, a social networking site for Puget Sound–area Russian speakers. Goykhman worked as a computer programmer for area hotels for 15 years before his site became popular enough to provide a full-time job.
As the new immigrants founded churches, many of which are celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, the members pitched in to sponsor even more immigrants. Estimates vary as to how many Russian-speaking immigrants live in Washington, but the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce puts it at over 100,000. Uomoto says that about 90 percent of the immigrants who have come since 1989 are Christians and Jews who arrived under the Lautenberg Amendment.
Ryan Bubnis
James Eugene Frank
R-71 opponents playing the kid card.
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The community gets little notice, "but it's the second-largest ethnic group, in terms of language, after Spanish," says Anna Cherkasov, whose Kirkland company publishes the newspaper Russian World, circulated from Portland, Ore., to Vancouver, B.C.
At the University of Washington Medical Center, Russian translators are the most requested after Spanish, and they are among the top-requested translators at other UW facilities like Harborview, says UW Medicine spokesperson Leila Gray.
The ever-growing presence of Russian-speaking immigrants attracted little controversy until the summer of 2004.
That June, a man named Micah Painter was celebrating Pride Week at the now-defunct downtown gay bar the Timberline. According to court records, he was walking, shirtless, to his car from the bar one night when three men started yelling at him from a truck stopped at a nearby traffic light. Hearing shouts of "faggot," Painter turned and flipped off the men and the two women with them in the truck, according to court records.
The men in the truck continued to yell, a witness said. Painter turned again toward the truck, imitated masturbating, then walked off. One of the men in the truck, Vadim Samusenko, later told police that Painter was "...trying to, you know, I don't know how to say this right, but he was trying to put that on us, you know, and we aren't gay."
Samusenko, then 20, leapt out of the truck with a vodka bottle in his hand that the group had emptied earlier. "Hey," he shouted at Painter, according to records. Painter turned back toward Samusenko. "I have one question for you: Are you gay?"
"Hell, yes," Painter replied.
Samusenko hit the bottle against a nearby wall, leaving a jagged edge at the bottom, then he slashed Painter with it. Two other men in the car, David Kravchenko, 19, and Yevgeniy Savchak, 17, jumped out of the truck as well. As a crowd gathered, the three ran back to the truck and drove off. Painter attempted to walk to a friend's car, but realizing he needed help, he headed back for the Timberline, where he collapsed in the entrance. At Harborview, emergency-room doctors removed glass from deep gashes in Painter's back and sewed shut a 10-centimeter gash across his face.
A King County jury convicted all three attackers of malicious assault under a state hate-crime law.
The three were all active in Bellingham's Slavic Baptist Church, and 49 members of the church signed a letter asking the judge for leniency in sentencing the three men. "They are part of our youth group," the letter reads. "Together we sang, prayed, and worshipped God at church."
Another letter from Samusenko's father addresses Painter specifically: "I believe that [it] is within God's power to heal that man and my deepest wish [is] that he Micah Painter would find God as his saver," he wrote.
Naumchik says the Painter attack gives an unfair picture of the Slavic immigrant community. "I don't know anyone who preaches hate toward homosexuals," he insists, though he acknowledges that his own church prohibits gay sex. His church also demands that congregants reject other Biblically forbidden practices like cohabitation, which falls under the rubric of adultery, and divorce, which Jesus says in the book of Matthew is allowable only in the case of unfaithfulness.
Naumchik worries that as gays and lesbians are given more rights, churches will be forbidden from condemning it in the pulpit. "We do not want government accusing churches for preaching against lifestyles that are prohibited in the Bible," he says.
But the Bible isn't the only factor influencing Slavic-immigrant attitudes towards gays, says Lana Polinger, a Bellevue psychologist who serves as a consultant to King County on the Slavic-immigrant population. Polinger, who herself emigrated from Moldova in 1992, says there are virtually no openly gay people in their home countries. "Homosexuality was a criminal thing in the Soviet Union, people got in jail for that," Polinger explains. "So the general level of acceptance of homosexual lifestyles in this community is lower than in the United States in general."
Goykhman, who runs russianseattle.com, is among those Slavs who opposed R-71, but not on religious grounds. "I don't think it's natural for people to have that kind of relationship," he says. Indeed, the fact that more than 800,000 people in one of the most "unchurched" states in the country voted no on R-71 suggests that some, at least, did so for reasons other than religion.
