Russian Emigre Creates Detente at the Local Level : Culture: A Moscow advertising man in the United States to learn PR techniques is helping city officials and immigrants understand each other better.

Evgueny Fominykh is one of Russia’s newest perestroika pioneers--the PR man. His boot camp is West Hollywood’s City Hall.

Public relations is a largely untried concept back home, where company promotions typically depend on souvenir calendars, and where service with a smile has never been what you would call a national credo.

So the 43-year-old Moscow advertising manager and five other Russian PR students came to the United States under a novel program to train his nation’s first generation of private-sector spin doctors. Fominykh, the only member of the group posted in California, is finishing a four-month internship in West Hollywood’s public information office.

His main laboratory has been the city’s large Soviet emigre community, an insular and enigmatic group whose ways many longtime residents have viewed as rude or outright mean. In peeling back the layers of the misunderstood group, he has been teaching city officials as much as learning.

“The problem is to find a better way of communication between the city and the Russian community,” Fominykh said. “It’s a must.”

The emigre community is usually lumped as “Russian” though many of its members come from other republics of the former Soviet Union. In West Hollywood, Russians have been the subject of complaints over everything from gay-bashing to double parking to cutting in front of people in store lines. The immigrants often do not speak English, Fominykh said, either because they are newcomers or arrived too late in life to learn a new language easily.

The result is a culture gap that has frustrated the city’s well-intentioned efforts to help out. Without Russian speakers regularly on staff, officials are forced to rely on community leaders to get a sense of the problems of the broader immigrant community, and they are not always a reliable gauge, said City Manager Paul Brotzman. When Fominykh set out to do a dual survey in English and Russian, he found that the city had no listing of its Russian-speaking residents and he was able to come up with only a skimpy mailing list from social service agencies. The survey is not yet completed.

Among other things, Fominykh is proposing that the city publish more of its frequent bulletins and newsletters in Russian, now that City Hall has computer software to write in the Cyrillic alphabet. Officials are already considering how to get Russian programming on the city’s cable channel.

“Evgueny has been real helpful in terms of providing direct linkages” to the Russian-speaking population, Brotzman said. The research has highlighted the need to have Russian-speaking personnel in each city department, Brotzman said. He said the survey also will help identify which programs need to be tailored to the emigre community.

“They don’t access services as much as they perhaps should. One area is law enforcement,” Brotzman said.

The Russian community numbers 3,500 to 4,000--or roughly 10% of the city’s 36,000 residents. The East End for decades has long been a magnet for Soviet emigres, particularly Jewish refugees, with an estimated 50 to 60 new arrivals each month. The city provides most of the funding for the West Hollywood Russian Community Center, which offers free medical and social services to new immigrants.

The East End neighborhood has a distinctly Russian flavor. There is a growing number of stores and delis with signs in Russian. Produce vendors sell to Russian customers straight out of their trucks and vans--a practice that has survived a new city law against street sales of fresh produce. Plummer Park becomes a Little Moscow on warm days, with tables and benches crowded with domino-playing men and chatting women.

But that same neighborhood has seen friction between the emigres and other residents, especially the gays and lesbians who make up as much as a third of the city’s population. Gays have complained that young Russian immigrants have verbally harassed them. Russians have said it will simply take time for newcomers who grew up under laws banning homosexuality to learn tolerance toward gays.

The misunderstanding flows both ways. To many longtime residents, Russians are seen as standoffish because they do not greet neighbors as effusively as Americans do. They are viewed as rude for cutting in line, though in queue-plagued Russia shoppers save spots in several lines at once and move from one to the other. They tend to talk louder than Americans, and Russian drivers are less yielding to pedestrians.

“When they are here, they just don’t know the rules,” Fominykh said. “It’s not a rudeness. It’s just a different code.”

Not all of Fominykh’s PR work on behalf of his former countrymen has taken place in West Hollywood.

Watching television in his West Hollywood apartment one night, he was offended by a commercial for the California Lottery that depicted two Ukrainians slapping each other repeatedly in the face during an hours-long contest. The televised scene was based on an actual match in the 1930s taken from the Guinness Book of World Records, lottery officials said, but Fominykh found it inaccurate, misleading and insulting. His calls to a Northern California Russian-American group helped fuel a formal protest, and lottery officials pulled the commercial a few days later, saying it was ineffective anyway.

“The image of Russians is barbaric and simple and incorrect. It’s a public relations problem of the Russian community here,” Fominykh said.

He is less sure what lessons from American public relations to take back to a country stumbling toward privatization. The country’s young public relations association has adopted a code of ethics based on its U.S. counterpart, and members have agreed not to spread false information.

But splashy, U.S.-style image-making campaigns might backfire with Russians beset by a creaky economy and grave shortages, Fominykh said.

One of the Russian companies he works for offers group therapy, for which there is plenty of demand these days without a whole lot of hype.

“People are frustrated, so we provide treatment for those who suffer stress and depression due to poor economic conditions,” Fominykh said. “When people lack food and don’t have money, when you make a show or a party, it’s not that good. . . . Being too noisy is a bad idea.”