This is a list of notable Russian Americans, including both original immigrants who obtained American citizenship and their American descendants.
To be included in this list, the person must have a Wikipedia article showing they are Russian American or must have references showing they are Russian American and are notable.
Arts
Performance
Paul Abrahamian (born 1993), reality television personality, of Russian and Armenian descent
Odessa Adlon (born 2000), actress, has Russian ancestry through her mother
Dianna Agron (born 1986), actress, father of Russian Jewish ancestry[1]
Monique Alexander (born 1982), pornographic actress, actress and model
Woody Allen (born 1935), actor, writer, director, and musician, mother of Russian Jewish ancestry
Alan Arkin (1934–2023), actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, grandchild of Russian immigrants
René Auberjonois (1940–2019), Tony Award-winning character actor (and grandson of the painter), best known for his early 1980s role as Clayton Endicott III on the television show Benson and his role as Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Ben Harper (born 1969), singer-songwriter, Jewish mother of Russian and Lithuanian ancestry[9]
Barbara Hershey (born 1948), actress, father of partial Russian Jewish descent
Fedor Jeftichew (1868–1904), freak show attraction nicknamed "Jojo the dog-faced man" and a star of the Barnum Circus
Kidada Jones (born 1974), actress, model, and fashion designer, daughter of actress Peggy Lipton and musician Quincy Jones; mother of Russian Jewish descent
Rashida Jones (born 1976),[10] actress, model, and musician, daughter of actress Peggy Lipton, mother of Russian Jewish descent
Milla Jovovich (born 1975), actress and model, born in Kyiv to a Russian mother and a Serbian father
Stacy Kamano (born 1974), actress of German, Russian, Polish and Japanese descent
Princess Superstar (born 1971), musician, father of Russian Jewish descent
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), Russian-born composer who immigrated to the US in 1918 and lived there until his death in 1943; acquired U.S. citizenship in 1943
Sam Raimi (born 1959), Jewish American film, producer, actor and writer, whose parents came from Russia and Hungary
Dmitri Z. Garbuzov (1940–2006), physicist, was one of the pioneers and inventors of room temperature continuous-wave-operating diode lasers and high-power diode lasers
Moses Gomberg (1866–1947), founder of radical chemistry
Simon Kuznets (1901–1985), economist, statistician, demographer, and economic historian, the winner of 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
Anatoly Larkin (1932–2005), physicist, discovered collective pinning of magnetic flux in superconductors, predicted paraconductivity, made essential contributions to the theory of weak localization, as well as developed the concept of the Ehrenfest time and its effect on phenomena of quantum chaos
Gary Tabach (born 1962), retired United States Navy captain, the first Soviet-born citizen to be commissioned an officer in the Armed Forces of the United States
Jim Talent (born 1956), former U.S. Senator, paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia
Economics
Simon Kuznets (1901–1985), contribution to the transformation of economics into an empirical science and to the formation of quantitative economic history
Max Factor Sr. (1877–1938), founder of the cosmetics giant Max Factor & Company, born in Russian Poland; Russian nobility appointed Factor the official cosmetics expert for the royal family and the Imperial Russian Grand Opera
Betty Freeman (1921–2009), art philanthropist, father was a Russian immigrant
Masha Gessen (born 1967), journalist, author, translator and activist; Russian Jewish immigrant
Loren Leman (born 1950), former lieutenant governor of Alaska, one of his ancestors was a Russian settler who married an indigenous Alutiiq woman in Kodiak while Russia claimed and colonized Alaska centuries ago
Janosh Jovan Neumann (born 1979), former "K" department SEB FSB (Russian: Службы экономической безопасности ФСБ) agent who was associated with "shadow finance" and defected to USA in 2008; birth name is Alexy Yurievich Artamonov[46][47][48][49][50]
Boris Perchatkin (born 1 July 1946), the most famous participant in Nakhodka's religious emigration movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, a human rights activist who lobbied in the United States for the adoption of the "Lautenberg's Amendment" in 1989, as a result of which about 1 million people emigrated to the United States from the countries of the former USSR
^"HollyLesson! 'Glee' Star Dianna Agron Tweets How to Pronounce Her Name – Hollywood Life". Archived from the original on 2013-09-22. Retrieved 2012-11-25.
^"Olga Baclanova". Olga Baclanova: The Ultimate Cinemantrap. "They called her the Russian Tigress. Olga Baclanova (pronounced bahk-LAH-no-vah), sultry Russian actress of stage and film..."
^Jack Bettridge (November–December 1997). "Dancing Free". Cigar Aficionado. Archived from the original on 2006-07-08. "One night in June 1974, the Russian dancer stepped from a stage in Toronto where he was appearing as a guest star with the Bolshoi Ballet concert group and literally ran to freedom. He stepped outside, followed by a crowd of confused fans, and sprinted to a waiting car that spirited him away from Soviet agents into a life of independence in the United States."
^www.davidovit.com https://web.archive.org/web/20200710022055/http://www.davidovit.com/articles/Bolton.pdf. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-07-10. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
^"Gavin DeGraw speaks out on life, music". Today Music. December 26, 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-12-26.
^Marx, Arthur (November–December 1997). "Talk with Falk". Cigar Aficionado. Archived from the original on 2010-01-27. Retrieved 2009-02-02.
^"Edward Furlong". TMZ.
^ a bUK Entertainment News - British Film, TV and Music | HuffPost UK
^"Ben Harper |Roots |Part one". 2008-02-03. Archived from the original on 2008-02-03. Retrieved 2023-02-21.
^Palm, Matthew J. (23 January 2017). "Pianist Olga Kern is 'citizen of the world'". Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
^ a bJacobs, Alexandra (2003-12-07). "TELEVISION; When It Comes to TV Angels, He's Batting .500". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-02-21.
^Momsen, Taylor (July 8, 2013). "Twitter: taylormomsen: @Zheka_Kinoman yes, I'm part Russian". Twitter.com. Retrieved July 16, 2013.
^Jacobs, Alexandra (December 7, 2003). "TELEVISION; When It Comes to TV Angels, He's Batting .500". The New York Times.
^McNamara, Daniel I., ed. (1952). The ASCAP Biographical Dictionary of Composers, Authors and Publishers. New York: Crowell. p. 497. LCCN 52-7038. "Terr, Max, composer; b. Odessa, Russia, Nov. 16, 1890; d. Los Angeles, Calif., Aug. 2, 1951. ASGAP 1947. U.S. citizen. Has scored motion pictures in Hollywood since 1943. Songs: 'The Lord Is My Shepherd'; 'Forever Free'; 'Joyful Hour'; also march theme of Metro News."
^http://www.radiofree.com/profiles/michelle_trachtenberg/interview02.shtml RadioFree.com Exclusive Interview with Michelle Trachtenberg
^[1] "Although now an American national, Isaac Asimov was Russian by birth..."
^"Chuck Palahniuk: 'I shy away from non-consensual violence'". The Independent. June 16, 2012.
^Amazon.com: Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical: Books: Chris Matthew Sciabarra
^"E. R. Bevan: The House of Ptolemy • Preface". penelope.uchicago.edu.
^Shteyngart - [2] "Jewish Russian American writer"
^"Lera Boroditsky". Archived from the original on July 15, 2006.
^Vladimir Zworykin – Electronic Television System
^"Adventures in CyberSound: Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma". Archived from the original on June 26, 2006.
^"Interview with Ice Dancers Benjamin Agosto and Tanith Belbin". goldenskate.com. April 28, 2003. Archived from the original on July 5, 2008. Retrieved April 23, 2008.
^ a b"Babashoff, Shirley - Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Thematic Series: Sports Figures". November 5, 2013. Archived from the original on 5 November 2013.
^"Her Party Life Over, She Returned to Bars" Diane Pucin, Los Angeles Times, July 19, 2001
^Sue Bird (2005). "From Russia, With Love..." WNBA. Archived from the original on 2012-08-14. Retrieved 2011-02-12. "Some background - my father's name is Herschel Bird and his family is originally from Russia. In fact, our last name is really "Boorda." My great grandfather brought his family through Ellis Island in the early 1900s and we were soon known simply as Bird. This makes me half-Russian (not Czech!). So in my dad's eyes, this gave him a false sense of belonging. Every time I'd say "Dad, stop acting like an American" he would come back with "No one can tell I am not from here" and then attempt to say one of the three Russian words he remembers from his college days. He truly believed that no one would notice, which makes this story even better."
^"Thunder sign Dyachenko, Costanzo". Archived from the original on 2011-09-18. Retrieved 2011-01-23.
^Paul Farhi, "Goldberg: A David in Goliath's Shoes", Washington Post, December 9, 1999.
^Othello Harris, George Kirsch; Claire Nolte (April 2000). Encyclopedia of Ethnicity and Sports in the United States. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 222. ISBN 0-313-29911-0.
^"Russian-born Kournikova now an American citizen". Tennis.com. Retrieved 2016-12-12.
^Lepchenko Adjusts Well to Life in the U.S. Retrieved September 19, 2007
^Barron, David (August 9, 2008). "Nastia Liukin a gymnast by birth". Houston Chronicle. Retrieved 2008-09-11.
^"No fear for Mir". Torontosun.com. 2010-04-11. Retrieved 2010-04-11.
^O'Neal, Tatum (14 Oct 2004). "Excerpt from 'A Paper Life'". USA Today. Retrieved 2009-05-25.
^"USATODAY.com - U.S. ice dancers keep it in the family". usatoday30.usatoday.com.
^Berger, Ralph. "Andy Seminick Biography at The Baseball Biography Project". Society for American Baseball Research. Retrieved 3 May 2010.
^Bill Nowlin, "The Kid: Ted Williams in San Diego", p. 324
^"Famous Russian Americans". THE RUSSIAN AMERICAN CULTURAL HERITAGE CENTER. Archived from the original on 2011-03-01. Retrieved 2011-03-05.
^Barbara J. Love (2006). Feminists who changed America, 1963-1975. University of Illinois Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-252-03189-2. Retrieved January 4, 2012.
^"Bessie Glassberg". 1876.
^"The Real-Life Dr. McDreamy" (video). The Doctors. October 1, 2015. Archived from the original on March 16, 2017. Retrieved March 15, 2017.
^McGreal, Chris (26 June 2015). "Russian defectors living the dead end of the American dream in distant Oregon". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 August 2023.
^Denson, Bryan (November 10, 2016). "How Two Russian Defectors Helped the FBI Nab European Mobsters Then Wound up Stranded in Oregon". Newsweek. Archived from the original on September 8, 2020. Retrieved June 18, 2024.
^"Управление «К» и финансовый сектор" [Department "K" and the financial sector]. Центр «Досье» (dossier.center) (in Russian). Archived from the original on September 11, 2020. Retrieved June 18, 2024.
^"Дело Фролова, Черкалина и Васильева" [The case of Frolov, Cherkalin and Vasiliev]. Центр «Досье» (dossier.center) (in Russian). Archived from the original on September 11, 2020. Retrieved June 18, 2024.
^"Российские перебежчики из ФСБ пожаловались в Newsweek на предательство американских разведслужб" [Russian defectors from the FSB complained to Newsweek about the betrayal of American intelligence services]. newsru.com (in Russian). November 11, 2016. Archived from the original on June 18, 2024. Retrieved June 18, 2024.