Religion and Migration: The Molokan Experience

The close relationship between religion and migration is explored in this humanistic analysis of a little-studied North American immigrant group, Russian Molokans. This ethnoreligious group migrated to San Francisco and Los Angeles in the early twentieth century seeking religious freedom. Molokans who settled in the American West had been exiled from their homeland in central Russia to the Transcaucasus by the Russian Czar Nicholas I in 1839. Pacifists, they had been promised fifty years exemption from the draft if they resettled in this remote, mountainous region. When their exemption expired, Molokan leaders petitioned the government for permission to emigrate. Over five thousand had resettled in East Los Angeles and approximately one thousand came to Potrero Hill in San Francisco by 1911. By the 1920s, other groups of Molokans had relocated to Hawaii, Baja California, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, and California’s Central Valley, seeking economic stability and spiritual isolation.