Let’s Say ‘Spasibo’ (Thanks) to Our Russian-Speaking Neighbors

Another glorious day in sunny West Hollywood. Balls were being thacked across the nets at the tennis courts at Plummer Park. On the lawn nearby, a young mother was sitting on a blanket watching her little boy cautiously toddle away from her. Two shirtless young men were lifting weights.

A few steps away, a movie screened inside Fiesta Hall showed another world, a world of horror that most of us who enjoy the beauty, diversity and freedom that is West Hollywood are too young to remember. Explosions, dead bodies, hungry people searching for food, young soldiers fording a river — it ended with victorious Russians tearing down Nazi emblems that had desecrated their cities. The film that opened the city’s commemoration Saturday of Victory Day, the 68th anniversary of the surrender of Germany to Russia in World Word II, couldn’t have offered a greater contrast to life on the sunny Saturday outside.

Many of the several hundred Russian-speaking men and women gathered in the hall, some wearing WW II uniforms festooned with medals and ribbons, lived in that world some seven decades ago. It was a world they survived, only to continue to struggle for decades against a Communist government that persecuted those who were Jews.

Today, thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end to its emigration restrictions, many of them are our neighbors. Indeed, in a ranking of all U.S. cities by percentage of residents who speak Russian, West Hollywood is 27th, with 13 percent of our residents speaking that language.

Their integration into U.S. culture and West Hollywood itself has not been easy. But the city has helped with the creation of the Russian Advisory Board and its sponsorship of the annual Russian Style Festival. The fact that Mayor Abbe Land and council members John D’Amico, John Heilman and Jeffrey Prang attended Saturday’s event (and that Heilman made the effort to make many of his comments in Russian) is another indicator of West Hollywood’s commendable effort to embrace this other minority community.

The rest of us can work harder at making West Hollywood’s Russian-speaking community feel at home by patronizing the fascinating bakeries and restaurants Russian-speakers operate on the east end of Santa Monica Boulevard. We also can show up at Plummer Park on May 19 for the Russian Style Festival, the schedule for which is available online.