Brighton Beach Earns Bad Rap Among New Russians

Want to travel back in time to Soviet Russia? No passport is needed for this trip. Just $2.25 to cover the subway fare.

To begin the journey, catch the B or Q line. Exit at the last stop and head down the never-ending staircase, where you will find the many-colored crowd and glittering shops of a world away from Manhattan. Welcome to Brighton Beach, a grungy Soviet enclave of Brooklyn, where life is seemingly frozen in time.

With roughly 35,000 people living here, the neighborhood once nicknamed “Little Odessa” because of its large Ukrainian population, has gained a new reputation as “a retired poor man’s Miami.” 

The area was once seen as a destination of opportunity, primarily by the first surge of Soviet citizens who arrived in the late 1970s, at the height of the Cold War.  A second wave of migrants moved to Brighton Beach in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

Since then, the neighborhood has developed a more negative reputation. To the latest generation of former Soviets the area represents a Brezhnev-era closed world, a stark contrast to present-day Moscow. 

Alisa Fort, 21, is an aspiring model and student, who moved to the neighborhood two years ago from St. Petersburg. At first, Fort says, she had a hard time acclimating. But she is now slowly adjusting to the small-town feel of Brighton Beach.

“My family was lucky, very lucky,” she says. “But, it is also hard. Young people who come here are always sad when they see how hard it is. The truth is, there is no opportunity for them in Brighton.”

Nearly a decade after the break up of the Soviet Union, Russia’s new breed of capitalists are eager to find work and build careers for themselves in their own country. So it’s become even more disappointing for many who arrive in Brighton and discover it doesn’t offer greater opportunity than back home in Russia.

Nastya Glubskaya, like many new Russians immigrants, journeyed to New York from Moscow in search of work. She is a college student, and took on a summer job as a recruiter for a Russian firm in Brighton. With just a week left in her stay, Glubskaya’s once romanticized version of America has her clamoring to go home.

“At first, I couldn’t believe this was America,” says Glubaskaya in Russian. “It is like a big countryside. I came here from Moscow, where we have class and culture.”

“The streets in Brighton change every month,” says Alla Petrovskaya, who has lived in the same home on Brighton’s 1st Avenue for 35 years. From her modest kitchen window she has quietly watched her neighborhood transform over the years. “Some businesses open, but close the next month,” she says. “Now, it is the people. It seems like everything is always changing.”

Petrovskaya is referring to a new wave of immigrants, predominantly Hispanic and Chinese, who are settling in Brighton Beach. In many cases, this influx of ethnic migrants has deterred young capitalist Russians from settling permanently in the area. Often, these newcomers say they have a hard time identifying with neighbors who do not speak Russian.

That’s not the case, however, for Gleb Kutopov an early settler in the Brighton area. For the last two decades, Kutopov has owned a tiny, yet popular Russian bakery, tucked quietly on the corner of Brighton 11th Avenue. Unlike more recent émigrés, Kutopov is proud to be living in Brighton.

“This is my home, not Russia,” says Kutopov proudly. “I don’t care who is moving to the area. We are all people. I welcome every person to my restaurant, not just Russians and former Soviets.”

But, not all former Soviet émigrés share Kutopov’s fondness for Brighton. Just a few blocks south of Kutopov’s bakery, Albert Ivanov and his wife, Mila, live in what is considered to be a posh residential area of Brighton. The two fled Riga, Latvia in 1979. Thirty years later, the couple still feels leery of associating themselves with the Brighton community.

“I am not your typical immigrant who comes to Brighton Beach from Russia,” says Ivanov. “I don’t know what welfare or Medicare is, thank God. I also didn’t come here illegally. I came here to work.”

The often-grim portrayal of Brighton Beach as a classless, low-income neighborhood developed in the late 1990s when an influx of families moved to Brighton Beach with little or no money. It’s that image that leads newcomers from the former Soviet Union to overlook Brighton as a place to settle.

“If I come back, I will only visit, that is it,” says Glubskaya in broken English. “This place is not Russia. Just pretend.”