Russian Americans

Russian Americans are primarily Americans who trace their ancestry to Russia. The definition can be applied to recent Russian immigrants to the United States, as well as to settlers of 19th-century Russian settlements in northwestern America which includes today's Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington.

The term "Russian American" may be restricted to people of ethnic Russian descent, but is often applied to any American with ancestors from the multi-national Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, which might include Ukrainian Americans, Belarusian Americans, Jewish Americans, German Americans, Georgian Americans, Azerbaijani Americans, Armenian Americans, and Rusyn Americans.

Demographics

The Russian American population is reported to be 3.13 million.

Many Russian Americans do not speak Russian, having been born in the USA and brought up in English-speaking homes. In 2007, however, Russian was the primary spoken language of 851,174 Americans at home, according to the U.S. Census. According to the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, 750,000 Russian Americans were ethnic Russians in 1990.