(Business Insider) During the last election, many of the 800,000 Russian speakers in the US embraced Trump out of disgust for the socialist values that made them flee the Soviet republics. Particularly among the generation of immigrants who came to the US in the 1980s and '90s, the tendency to decry Putin's policies as undemocratic while heralding Trump for his "revolutionary" promises persists. In the April primary, Trump earned 84% of the Republican vote in Brighton Beach, an enclave of Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn nicknamed "Little Odessa."[…]
Evgeny Finkel, a political-science professor at the Columbia College of Arts and Sciences, said many of the immigrants who came to the US in the 1980s and '90s embrace Republican values of personal and economic freedom because they wanted to escape "anything that smacks of socialism." Putin, he said, still reminds many of the Soviet ideologies, partly because of the government's culture of cronyism and repression of dissenters.
Support for Trump and a hatred of Putin "can go together because support of Trump in this population is not driven by love of Russia and not even driven so much by Trump’s foreign policy," said Finkel, adding that certain Russian-speaking communities voted Republican for years before Trump came along as a presidential candidate. […]
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