Russian flags come down in New York’s Little Odessa: ‘Putin has turned it into a fascist symbol’

For years, the sign for Taste of Russia, a grocery store in Brooklyn's Russian-speaking immigrant community of Brighton Beach, featured the distinctive domes of St Basil's cathedral in Red Square. But soon after Russian troops invaded Ukraine on 24 February, the owners of the shop took the sign down. In the window, they hung a large blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.

"We felt that it was divisive," said co-owner Elena Rakhman, citing feedback from longtime customers who told her they no longer felt comfortable shopping in a store named after Russia. Several of her employees are from Ukraine and have family members there.

Few people in Brighton Beach, home to one of the world's largest concentrations of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, are indifferent to Putin's war on Ukraine. Many were themselves refugees from Soviet Ukraine and are horrified to see Russian artillery shells hit apartment buildings and a new generation torn from their homes by an oppressive regime.

Rakhman said removing Russia from her store's name was not intended to diminish the local Russian community and while some people are angry, others have thanked them for supporting Ukraine. While the store's awning remains bare for now, the owners plan to announce a new name that is "inclusive of our entire immigrant population, rather than just Russia" as soon as their new sign is delivered.

Brighton Beach became known as "Little Odessa" after tens of thousands of Russian-speaking Soviet Jews, many from the Black Sea port in Ukraine, settled there in the 1970s. When Rakhman arrived from Odessa as a toddler with her family in 1974, she said, the community didn't delineate between those from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus or other Soviet republics: "We were all just Soviet refugees trying to find our way and helping each other."

The breakup of the Soviet Union brought another wave of immigrants to Brighton in the 1990s, followed by more recent arrivals from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia and other former Soviet nations, drawn by their shared knowledge of Russian and job opportunities for those who speak it.

On a recent visit to the neighborhood, where Cyrillic signs abound and pensioners descend from their high-rise apartments to gather on the boardwalk and gossip in Russian, there were visible signs of solidarity with Ukraine. Mannequins in the window display of Exclusive Women's Wear on Brighton Beach Avenue sported blue and yellow outfits, and a large Ukrainian flag dangled from a plastic skirt hanger. Flyers in the checkout line at the NetCost supermarket urged people to donate to humanitarian relief efforts and the Ukrainian army. The company, founded by Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, said it will work with its food suppliers abroad to feed displaced Ukrainians and provide jobs for those that make their way to the United States.

Sitting in the office of his daughter's shipping business not far off Brighton's main drag, Vakhtang Tsankashvili, 68, a physicist who came to New York 20 years ago from Georgia, denounced the war and said people in Russia "must come to their senses" and stand up to Putin.

Nearby, the owner of the Magic Door gift shop, who declined to give his name but said he had emigrated from Odessa in 1990, estimated that 90% of people in the neighborhood support Ukraine. The owner placed Ukrainian flags in his store window and said he had sold four Russian flags that day - to Ukrainians who planned to burn them at a protest in Times Square.

Down on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, some anti-war Russians on 6 March rallied around a brand-new flag they have chosen to represent them: a single blue band on a white background.

"We decided we can no longer use the Russian tricolor, because Putin has turned it into a fascist symbol," said Alex Zaporozhtsev, an activist with the group For Freedom in Russia, which has organized protests against the Putin regime for over seven years. "We decided to take away the red stripe - it's the color of blood - and make it white." He said the new flag was conceived in a group chat for Russian opposition activists living around the world and made its debut shortly after the invasion.

Nearby on the boardwalk, Artem Danilchick, 34, stood draped in his own flag, the red-and-white one used by opposition activists in Belarus. He fled his native Minsk after participating in the country's massive protests in 2020, which were brutally suppressed by President Alexander Lukashenko with support from Moscow.

"I'm proud of the fact that I'm from Belarus, but I'm very ashamed of what is going on," he said, referring to Russian missiles launched at Ukraine from Belarus. "Nobody supports this war."

While many other Belarusians are traveling to Ukraine to join the fight against Russia, "Now I'm here and participating in these protests is practically all I can do right now," he said. "Because if I go to Belarus I will not leave in the next five to 10 years."

Sophia Zhukovsky, 22, whose parents fled Russia 30 years ago as the Soviet Union was collapsing, came from Long Island to join the protest on her birthday because "I couldn't think of any place that I'd rather be." She was distraught over the war in Ukraine and worried about her relatives still in Russia as the authorities crack down on dissent and the rouble crashes.

Activists note there is a contingent of Russian speakers in Brighton Beach, particularly older immigrants who watch Russian television, who support Putin and buy the Kremlin's narrative about Ukraine. "I have an impression that's a personal choice, to watch Russian television and to believe it or not," said Alexander Korzun, 36, who came from Moscow five years ago.

There are "absolutely" people in the community who back Putin but are not very vocal, said Yelena Goltsman, who emigrated from Kyiv in 1989 as a young mother. In 2008, Goltsman founded a support network for Russian-speaking LGBTQ+ people that has held pride parades in Brighton Beach. The group's name, RUSA-LGBT, is an abbreviation for Russian-Speaking American LGBT Association and it has members from countries across the former Soviet Union. Since the invasion, they are discussing "changing our name without changing our identity as Russian speakers, LGBT people" in order to remove the association with Russia.

Immigrants from Russia "have nothing to do with those decisions that are based in the Kremlin", said Michael Levitis, who came from Moscow at age 12 in 1987 and hosts a Russian radio show on Radio Freedom FM 104.7. "We still have to be very proud of our culture, of our Russian influence, of our language, our history, our education."

Levitis, who owned a glitzy Russian restaurant in the area before pleading guilty to fraud in 2014, remains well-connected in the community and now runs a Facebook group for Russian speakers with over 17,000 members, where the war currently dominates discussion.

Goltsman and others who have been protesting against Putin for the last decade wish the international community had put more pressure on him and his allies earlier, before it got to this point. "None of us is guilty in what's happening, but everyone is responsible," she said.

RUSA-LGBT members have been raising money for Ukrainians, translating lists of necessary medical supplies, helping people identify routes out of the country and connecting them with volunteers who can assist them. For Goltsman, watching the violence unfold in her native country, where she still has family and friends, is agonizing. "No matter how much I provide help, it's not enough," she said, her voice wavering.

Daniel Price, a 19-year-old sophomore at Brooklyn College born to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants in America, said he was committed to helping a country he's never been to, where his ancestors experienced generations of persecution. His great-great-grandfather was a Jewish leader in western Ukraine who was imprisoned by the Soviet Union for gathering the local religious community. One of his great-grandfathers and both of his grandfathers fought against the Nazis in the Red Army during the second world war.

Price spent his early childhood in Bensonhurst, a south Brooklyn neighborhood with a sizable Russian-speaking population not far from Brighton Beach, and later returned there to volunteer at the Marks Jewish Community House, which serves as a hub for the local Russian-speaking Jewish community. He's collecting headlamps and flashlights for the "partisans" in Ukraine and inviting other teens to come together through anti-war protests and relief efforts.

"I'm sitting here on my phone in New York watching what could have been my neighbors' houses get destroyed," he said. "I have to do something."