In American popular culture, Russians and former Soviets are often seen as bad guys, spies, or hackers. Ivan Drago in the 1985 film Rocky IVthe main characters of the FX series The Americansand the computer technician in the 1995 James Bond film Golden eye come to mind.
A new book written by three Russian studies scholars from Northeastern paints an entirely different picture, shedding light on immigrants from the former Soviet Union who have made significant contributions to the U.S. tech sector.
“We wanted to portray people as they really are, rather than as stereotypes that are often seen,” co-author Daniel Satinsky, who earned his law degree at Northeastern, said at an event on Northeastern's Boston campus earlier this semester .
The book, Hammer and silicon, chronicles the personal and professional experiences of more than 150 highly educated people who immigrated from the former Soviet Union to the United States over the past four decades. It serves not as a statistical study of these immigrants' contributions to the U.S. tech sector, but rather as a vast collection of anecdotes that demonstrate their impact—largely in the immigrants' own words.
“Immigrants from the former Soviet Union have made significant contributions to the U.S. innovation economy, but these contributions have been underdiscovered, underrecognized, and underpublicized,” said Daniel McCarthy, co-author and University Professor Emeritus. “This book is an attempt to bring these contributions to light.”
Who were these immigrants?
The authors interviewed 157 people for the book, the title of which is a reference both to the former symbol of the USSR, the hammer and sickle, and to the silicon chip, which symbolizes the high-tech industry of the United States. Respondents included Russian scientists, engineers and businessmen who settled in either the Boston area or Silicon Valley in the late 20su and early 21stSt centuries. The authors conducted the interviews from January 2015 to March 2016.
Some worked at tech giants Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. Others have opened their own entrepreneurial paths by launching high-tech startups.
Kira Makagon, an entrepreneur from Ukraine, co-founded a software company called Octane, which was acquired for $3.2 billion. David Yang, who is originally from Armenia, founded nine companies, including ABBYY, which provides AI-based technology services for businesses. The book spotlights scientists in the Boston area who have contributed to groundbreaking research and discovery at universities, hospitals, and medical schools, as well as at biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.
Immigrants from the former Soviet Union have made significant contributions to the US innovation economy, but these contributions have gone undiscovered, unrecognized, and unpublicized. This book is an attempt to bring these contributions to light.
Daniel McCarthy, co-author
The book also highlights the experiences and contributions of four Northeastern faculty members: Slava Epstein, Vladimir Torchilin, Dmitri Krioukov, and the late Alexander Gorlov, who died in 2016. Epstein discovered a new antibiotic with the ability to fight drug-resistant pathogens, research that gained international attention. Gorlov invented a damless water turbinewhich won the Thomas A. Edison Patent Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2001 and is it is now used to power more than 500 homes on the Korean island of Jindo.
“We have plenty of evidence in our book about immigrants doing their jobs,” said Sheila Puffer, co-author and University Distinguished Professor, whose sentiment echoed a line from the Broadway play. Hamilton: The Musical.
Three waves of immigration
Russian intellectuals and their families immigrated from the former Soviet Union in three waves after the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. The law abolished a system that set quotas for the number of immigrants based on their countries and introduced a new system that set caps on the number of visas for immigrants based on their hemispheres. The new system favored family reunification and led to the recruitment of many highly skilled professionals from the United States.
The first wave, from 1972 to 1986, included many Jewish immigrants fleeing anti-Semitic sentiments in their homeland. The second wave, from 1987 to 1999, coincided with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the difficult transition from a planned economy to a free market, and involved researchers leaving as government support for research plummeted. The third wave, from 2000 to 2015, came amid the expansion of exchange programs and opportunities for people with technical training from the former Soviet Union to work and study in the United States.
Challenges and triumph
Immigrants interviewed for the book shared the difficulties they faced in adapting to US culture and workplaces, as well as the joy they felt in having more freedom to pursue their personal and professional interests.
How immigrants adapted to the United States differed depending on the wave in which they arrived. For example, the first wave of immigrants included Jewish refugees who could depend on their family members and social service agencies for support when they arrived. Students and researchers in the second wave who immigrated on their own did not have the same support.
Some immigrants who arrived in the first and second waves did not have a good command of the English language or American culture, nor were they familiar with making everyday decisions such as going to the supermarket and opening bank accounts.
“The whole process of making choices and being a consumer has been difficult for a lot of people,” Satinsky said.
Because private enterprise was illegal in the Soviet Union, Russian intellectuals who arrived in the United States before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 had no experience working for such companies. Many worked in large institutions and research laboratories, but most were appointed to these positions, so they did not have much experience in job hunting or promoting themselves to employers. Many adapted quickly to this culture in the United States because they were resourceful and motivated, the co-author said, but it was still new to them when they arrived. Researchers who arrived in the second wave after the fall of the Soviet Union also faced cultural barriers and learned much about US culture from their academic environment.
“For many, the idea of becoming a scientist-entrepreneur was completely new,” Satinsky said.
Many respondents described having to develop communication and teamwork skills to adapt to work in the United States, but acquiring these skills was easier for later immigrants who were more familiar with US business culture and who had worked in their home countries for US and multinational companies.
“This is the most sophisticated work I've seen on the experience of highly educated immigrants making the transition between such different worlds,” AnnaLee Saxenian, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in the book's foreword.
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