Immigrants came to the United States from Russia and the Soviet Union in several waves during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evading the Russian draft, 5,000 pacifist sectarians emigrated to California between 1904 and 1912. A much larger surge of approximately 90,000, composed mainly of poor Jewish agriculturalists, fleeing pogroms and famine in Tsarist Russia, fled between 1890 and 1910 and particularly after the Russian Revolution of 1905. They settled mostly in large northeastern cities and in nearby industrial settlements. Many Russians were involved in socialist political parties before 1920, and the Red scare particularly targeted the Russian American community in search of revolutionaries. Thousands of arrests ensued. The stereotyping of Russians as communists, anarchists, or otherwise un-American blossomed in this period.

Another large immigration flowed out of Soviet Russia in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and subsequent Civil War (1918–21). These people were mostly deeply anti-Soviet former members of the nobility, merchants, academics and members of the professions. The majority settled in European capitals such as Prague, Berlin and Paris, but approximately 20,000 continued on to the United States. Many of them ended up in American universities, establishing some of the first courses in Russian language, literature, culture and history in the United States.

Post-Second World War refugees comprised the second post-revolutionary wave. A mish-mash of national and social groups, they settled in many cities, often after lengthy stays in displaced-persons camps in Europe and South America. After a period of pride among Russian Americans during the Second World War alliance between the US and the Soviet Union, the McCarthyism of the late 1940s and 1950s again encouraged many Russians to keep a low profile.

The third wave of immigrants from the Soviet Union mainly comprised Jews who were allowed to join family members in Israel and the United States. About 300,000 Jews left the USSR between 1970 and 1989, most of them going to Israel. Jewish immigration was subject to the vicissitudes of Cold War antagonisms and was interrupted periodically.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, for example, Jewish immigration was temporarily suspended. In 1977, approximately 500,000 first-generation Russian immigrants and their descendants were living in the United States, though that figure has since jumped higher.

The latest wave of immigration is ongoing and very large, beginning after the collapse of the Soviet communist government in 1991 and intensifying with the subsequent economic and political instability in Russia. Tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities have left the territory of the former Soviet Union and settled in the United States. They have settled primarily in Southern California, Baltimore, MD, Philadelphia, PA, New York City, NY and Boston, MA. Many were highly educated in the USSR and have applied their skills in several areas of American life, including academics, engineering, music and theater, and the computer industry Russians face stereotyping by a mass media fascinated with notions of immigrant illegality. A new villain has appeared in films and television—the leather-jacketed and ruthless Russian Mafioso, involved in gun-running, prostitution and illegal gambling.

Extensive reports of pervasive organized crime in post-Soviet Russia have reinforced this stereotype.