I wish to thank the National Institute of Mental Health, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Michigan for funding my ethnographic field research in New York City (January 1984 through September 1985 and return visits through July 1987), and the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of the Hebrew University, which made possible my field work in Israel. My thanks go to the two anonymous Slavic Review readers whose comments added to this paper. Most of all, my gratitude goes to my znakomie, priiateli, and especially my druz'ia for welcoming me into their homes, including me in their lives, and thereby allowing me to experience and understand russkaia druzhba.

1. The immigrants discussed in this paper all, with one exception, left the Soviet Union between 1972 and 1983, during the Leonid Brezhnev years. During field work in New York City I developed relationships of greater or lesser intensity with approximately two hundred individuals. In Israel I split my time between Jerusalem and Netanya where I associated with a core group of ten to twenty olim in each city, and their friends and relatives, amounting to around two hundred. It is important to note that all references to Soviet life are specifically to the preglasnost Soviet Union. This article makes no claims about sociopolitical changes as a result of glasnost and perestroika in the last few years.

2. Bourdieu, Pierre, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 35–36 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis in the original. Uhl, Sarah, “Forbidden Friends: Cultural Veils of Female Friendship in Andalusia,” American Ethnologist 18 (February 1991): 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, derives a definition of friendship from a review of the anthropological literature, “Friendships are differentiated from other ritualized personal relationships … by the fact that friendships are initiated and ended on a personal and voluntary basis and develop in contractual terms rather than being motivated by social structural factors.” See also Brain, Robert, Friends and Lovers (New York: Basic, 1976 Google Scholar and Paine, Robert, “Anthropological Approaches to Friendship,” in The Compact, ed. Robert Paine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) , 1–15 Google Scholar. For a powerful analysis of the instrumental side of friendship, see Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974).

3. Fisher, Claude S., To Dwell among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 Google Scholar; Jacobson, David, Itinerant Townsmen: Friendship and Social Order in Urban Uganda (Menlo Park, Calif.: Cummings, 1973)Google Scholar. In his classic essay, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” Louis Wirth (1938) suggests that participation in voluntary organizations mitigates narcissistic atomization (see Simmel, Georg, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of George Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff [Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1950], 402–408 Google Scholar) and for anomie see Durkheim, Emile, Suicide (New York: Free Press, 1951 Google ScholarPubMed. Along with these classic interpreters of urban life, see also Berger, Peter, Berger, Brigette and Kellner, Hansfried, The Homeless Mind, (New York: Vintage, 1974 Google Scholar, and Nisbet, Robert, The Quest for Community, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.Google Scholar

4. See Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Love, Marriage and Friendship in the Soviet Union: Ideals and Practices (New York: Praeger, 1984 Google Scholar.

5. One woman, a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in Jerusalem, originally from Leningrad, referred me to Taras Bulba's speech to the Cossacks: “No ties are holier than those of comradeship. The father loves his child, the mother loves her child, and the child loves its father and mother, but that is something else: the wild beast also loves its young. But man alone knows kinship of the soul and not of blood.” Gogol, Nikolai, Taras Bulba, trans, and ed. Andrew Gregorovich (Toronto: Acropolis, 1962), 121–122 Google Scholar. See Anna Wierzbicka, “Soul and Mind,” American Anthropologist 9\ (March 1989): 41-58, for analysis of the meaning of soul in Russian ethnopsychology.

6. For one of the most poignant descriptions, see Brodsky, Joseph, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986), 3–33 Google Scholar; see also Shlapentokh, Vladimir, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 Google Scholar; Smith, Hedrick, The Russians (New York: Ballantine, 1976 Google Scholar; Shipler, David K., Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams (New York: Penguin, 1984 Google Scholar; and several of the oral histories in Catalogue: Oral Histories of Recent Soviet Emigres in America, prepared by David A. Harris (New York: William E. Weiner Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee, 1981). Alex Inkeles and Bauer, Raymond A., The Soviet Citizen (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1959)Google Scholar, describe the situation for an earlier period in Soviet history (see esp. 202-295).

7. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. Ian Connison (New York: Norton, 1967), 1.

8. See Myerhoff, Barbara G., “Organization and Ecstasy: Deliberate and Accidental Communitas among Huichol Indians and American Youth,” in Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology, ed. Sally Falk Moore and Barbara G. Myerhoff (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 33–35 Google Scholar; Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969.Google Scholar

9. Structure-antistructure shifts occur in virtually all societies. Often, however, they are built into the very fabric of the social structure and become institutionalized in public displays. Many cultures include ritual inversions of social life in their repertoires, for example, carnival in Roman Catholic countries, men's enactment of pregnancy in rituals of male solidarity among some South American and Oceanian peoples, and workers’ strikes and political demonstrations in much of the contemporary world. What is intriguing about the structure-antistructure opposition in the preglasnost Soviet Union is its almost pure dichotomization into public and private spheres.

10. The Hebrew word, olim, means immigrants only to Israel. Its literal translation is “those who ascend. “

11. Earlier studies of Emigres from the Soviet Union reveal the same difference in friendship patterns, especially the contrast between Russians’ “mutual dependence” and Americans’ “stress upon autonomy.” See Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System Works (New York: Vintage, 1960), 127-128; 158-162.

12. Several surveys among Soviet Jewish immigrants in the United States and Israel confirm this statement. Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, Jewish Identification and Affiliation among Soviet Jewish Immigrants in New York: A Needs Assessment and Planning Study (New York: Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, 1985), 33, reports that 79 percent of the surveyed immigrants’ three closest friends were fellow Russian-Jewish immigrants and that only 3 percent claimed no Soviet Jewish immigrants among their closest friends. Gitelman, Zvi. “Soviet-Jewish Immigrants to the United States: Profile. Problems. Prospects.” in Soviet Jewry in the Decisive Decade, 1971-80. ed. Robert O. Freedman (Durham. N.C.: Duke University Press. 1984), 96 Google Scholar, reports similar findings for Soviet Jewish immigrants in eight American cities, “The friends of 84 percent of the Jews in the sample (95 percent in New York) are other ‘Russian Jews, ’ and few claim to have made American friends.” See also Rita J. Simon and Melanie Brooks, “Soviet Jewish Immigrants in Four United States Cities,” Journal of Jewish Communal Services (Fall 1983): 62, and Rita J. Simon and Simon, Julian R., The Soviet Jews’ Adjustment to the United States (New York: Council of Jewish Federations, 1982), 70 Google Scholar. My summer 1988 survey of 105 Russian olim in five Israeli cities found that all three best friends of 62 percent of the respondents are also Russian olim. Of the sample 10 percent claimed to have no fellow immigrants among their three closest friends. Earlier studies, for example, Shuval, Judith, Markus, Elliot J., and Dotan, Judith, Patterns of Integration over Time: Soviet Immigrants in Israel, No. Js/521/E (Jerusalem: Israel Institute of Applied Social Research Publication, 1975)Google Scholar; Ministry of Absorption, Research and Planning Division, Immigrants From the USSR: The First Five Years in Israel, Special Public Series No. 682 (Jerusalem: Ministry of Absorption, 1982), and Shuval, Judith T., Newcomers and Colleagues: Soviet Immigrant Physicians in Israel (Houston: Cap and Gown Press. 1983)Google Scholar reveal similar findings.

13. See Fran Markowitz, “Jewish in the USSR, Russian in the U.S.A.,” in Persistence and Flexibility: Anthropological Perspectives on the American Jewish Experience, ed. Walter P. Zenner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 79-95.

14. Simmel, Georg, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969 Google Scholar, and Marx, Karl, “Capital,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 415–522.Google Scholar