Little Russia and Beyond: Slavic Communities of the Bay Area

When I first moved through the Richmond District as a kid, I didn’t know it carried the nickname “Little Russia.” To me, it was just another stretch of San Francisco with fog rolling down the streets, buses rumbling past, and people speaking a language I didn’t understand. But over time, I began to notice the details. The way the golden domes of Holy Virgin Cathedral caught the evening light. The sound of older women chatting outside markets on Geary Boulevard. The smell of bread, yeast, and sweet pastry rising from bakeries that never seemed to close.

Then the war in Ukraine began, and those same streets I had known felt different. It was not something you could always see, but something you could feel in the quiet of the shops, in the way people walked quickly without lingering, in the heavy silence that hung outside the cathedral. I thought about my own classrooms, where it seemed like every class had at least one Ukrainian student. Some sat next to Russian students, and while most of us were too young to talk about geopolitics, we could sense the tension. You saw it in who chose to speak up and who stayed quiet. In those moments, it struck me that the war was not some distant thing. It had reached San Francisco, and it lived in the small pauses between people.

But through all of this, one thing that kept everyone united was the food. No matter where someone came from or what language they spoke at home, the tables in the Richmond told a different story. Food didn’t ask you which side you were on. It simply asked you to taste. A loaf of rye bread passed across a table, a plate of vareniki shared at a festival, a bowl of steaming soup on a cold day; these gestures reminded me that culture is strongest when it is shared.

When I ate borscht for the first time, it wasn’t just soup. It was warmth that cut through the fog, both outside and inside. Pelmeni felt like comfort, something you could eat on the hardest of days and still feel whole. Honey cake, with its delicate layers, felt like a celebration, even if you were just sitting in a small café. Eating these foods made me feel closer to the people who had carried them here. It made me see that behind every dish there was a family, a history, and a choice to hold on to tradition even when the world outside was unsteady.

That experience lit a spark in me. I wanted to understand not just the flavors but the people who made them, the kids who grew up speaking two languages at once, the youth who danced in folklore groups or sang in choirs. I wanted to know what tied them together, what gave them a sense of belonging when so much around them was changing. Food showed me that despite politics, despite distance, there was something shared, something that could unite Slavic youth across borders and generations.