Drive the suburban arc north of downtown, past the strip malls of Citrus Heights and the new tracts of North Natomas, and you will hear it before you see it: a cashier switching from English to Ukrainian, a radio in a parked car carrying a sermon in Russian, the bells of an Orthodox church on a Sunday morning. The Ukrainians in Sacramento are not a single street or a single block. They are a whole quadrant of a region, woven into its churches, its delis and its working-class neighbourhoods so thoroughly that people here have a nickname for the place: Little Kyiv.
The Place
Sacramento is California’s capital, a flat river city where the American and Sacramento rivers meet, built on the wealth of the Gold Rush and the railroads that followed. It is not glamorous in the way of San Francisco or Los Angeles, and that is part of the point. Housing has long been cheaper here, the climate is hot and dry, and the land is workable.
The Slavic story does not sit in the polished downtown grid. It lives in the northern half of Sacramento County, in places like Citrus Heights, North Highlands, Antelope, Fair Oaks, Arden-Arcade, Carmichael and across the river in West Sacramento. These are the neighbourhoods of bungalows and apartment complexes, of large families and larger churches, where affordable rent and a welcoming congregation could anchor a newcomer.
How It Became Ukrainian
Sacramento’s Slavic presence is old, but the community that defines it today arrived in a single, concentrated rush at the end of the Cold War. To understand it you have to follow three waves, each pushed by a different upheaval in the old country.
The early arrivals
Russians, Ukrainians and other peoples of the empire began trickling into northern California as far back as the late 1800s. A larger movement followed the Russian Revolution: from 1917 onward, families fleeing the new Soviet order made their way west, and after the Holodomor, the man-made famine that killed millions in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933, another group of Slavic immigrants reached the area.
These early communities were small and scattered. They built the first churches and laid down the names and the language, but they did not yet make Sacramento a Slavic capital. That would take the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
The third wave and the religious refugees
The transformation came at the very end of the 1980s and through the 1990s, and it was driven above all by faith. Across the Soviet Union, evangelical Protestants, Baptists, Pentecostals and others outside the official church had been harassed, watched and punished for decades. When the Iron Curtain fell, they were among the first to seek a way out.
The legal door was the Lautenberg Amendment, passed by Congress in 1990. It allowed members of persecuted religious minorities from the former Soviet Union, including evangelical Christians, Ukrainian Catholics and Ukrainian Orthodox believers, to apply for refugee status without having to prove individual persecution. For families who had spent a lifetime hiding their worship, it was a key that finally turned.
They did not arrive at random. Resettlement agencies, among them World Relief in North Highlands and Lutheran Social Services, helped place the new refugees, and once the first families landed near a Russian-speaking pastor, the rest followed. Chain migration did the rest. A brother sponsored a brother, a congregation wrote to cousins still in Ukraine, and a single parish could pull a whole village across the world.
The scale was extraordinary. By a widely cited regional estimate, roughly 75,000 evangelical Christians and Jews from the former Soviet Union settled in metropolitan Sacramento in these years, the great majority of them the Protestant refugees locals simply call “the third wave.” Community leaders put the total Slavic population of greater Sacramento, Russians and Ukrainians together, as high as 100,000.
Building a world around the church
Faith was not only the reason they came. It became the architecture of the community they built. Churches were the first institutions, and they grew at a pace that astonished outside observers. The Sacramento Bee reported in May 1991 that around 1,800 Russian and Ukrainian immigrants were already attending Sunday services at the main evangelical church, a congregation that had swelled from a single family parish.
The First Slavic Baptist Church of Sacramento traced a similar arc, growing to about 1,500 members by the year 2000. Ukrainian families founded their own congregations too, including the First Ukrainian Baptist Church established by recent arrivals in 1992. To meet the practical needs of a community arriving faster than any single agency could manage, the Slavic Community Center of Sacramento was founded in 1992, offering language help, job placement and a bridge to American bureaucracy.
Within a decade, a refugee population had become a settled society with its own grocers, newspapers, radio broadcasts and a dense network of parishes across the northern suburbs. The story echoes the older Ukrainian enclaves of the East: the Ukrainians who built a community in Parma, Ohio followed a comparable path from refugee waves to suburban permanence.
The newest wave
Then came the war. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Sacramento’s existing community made it a natural landing point for those fleeing the fighting, and tens of thousands arrived in California within months. The Biden administration’s Uniting for Ukraine programme, announced in April 2022, allowed displaced Ukrainians with a US sponsor to enter on humanitarian parole, and Sacramento’s churches and sponsors absorbed a large share. By 2022, around 18,000 Ukrainians were estimated to be living in the Sacramento region, a figure that the newest arrivals pushed higher still.
The Landmarks
Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Church, 2531 Rio Linda Boulevard. One of the oldest Ukrainian Orthodox parishes in the city, its presence on Rio Linda Boulevard marks the historic Slavic corridor north of downtown. For Orthodox families it is a touchstone of the older, pre-1990 community, the keeper of the liturgy and the calendar that the third wave would later flood with new voices.
St. Andrew Ukrainian Catholic Church, 7001 Florin Road. Serving Sacramento’s Ukrainian Greek Catholic faithful, St. Andrew anchors the eastern side of the community. Ukrainian Catholics, with their own rite and their own painful history of suppression under Soviet rule, found in the Lautenberg pathway a route to a parish where they could finally worship openly.
Slavic Community Center of Sacramento, 4811 Chippendale Drive. Founded in 1992 at the height of the refugee influx, the centre has long been a practical lifeline: English classes, employment help, translation and advice for families learning to navigate a new country. It sits in the Arden-Arcade area, in the thick of the community it serves.
Gastronom Kiev Market, 4900 Madison Avenue. A Sacramento institution for the Eastern European table, this market off Madison Avenue carries the imported foods that keep the old kitchen alive: kielbasa and smoked fish, buckwheat and farmer’s cheese, the jars and tins that read like a map of home. It is open late, every day.
Pacific Food. Billed as the largest Eastern European supermarket in Sacramento, Pacific Food has been in business since 2012, packing some 30,000 square feet with goods from Ukraine, Russia, Armenia, Poland and across the region. It is the kind of full-scale grocery that only a community of this size can sustain, a sign that the diaspora had grown far past the corner deli.
European Deli Store Odessa, 8008 Walerga Road, Antelope. Out in Antelope, on the northern edge of the Slavic belt, this Ukrainian and Russian grocer named for the Black Sea port serves the families who settled in North Highlands, Antelope and Citrus Heights. The naming is its own small act of memory, a piece of Odesa carried into the Sacramento suburbs.
MRIYAFEST. Held in Sacramento and billed as one of the largest Ukrainian music festivals in the region, MRIYAFEST brings together top Ukrainian artists, a children’s zone, food and workshops. Its name comes from the Ukrainian word for “dream,” and it has become a yearly gathering point for a community that now spans four generations of arrivals.
Where They Came From
The third wave was, above all, a movement of religious dissenters rather than people from one province. Its members came from across the former Soviet Union: from Ukraine, from Russia, from Belarus, from the Caucasus and the southern republics. What bound them was not a single hometown but a shared experience of being Baptist, Pentecostal or evangelical in a state that treated faith as subversion.
Because the migration moved through congregations rather than regions, families from many corners of Ukraine ended up as neighbours in Sacramento simply because they shared a church back home or a sponsor here. The result is a community that is unmistakably Ukrainian and Slavic in language and worship, yet woven from threads of many provinces.
The newest arrivals since 2022 are different again. They come straight from a country at war, from Kyiv and Kharkiv and the towns of the east and south, many of them not refugees of faith but refugees of artillery. They are joining a community their predecessors built four decades ago, the way Ukrainian newcomers once joined the established enclave of Ukrainian Village in Chicago or the long-rooted Ukrainian quarter of the East Village in Manhattan.
Sacramento Today
Today the Ukrainians in Sacramento are not a curiosity but a fixture, one of the largest Russian-speaking and Ukrainian populations in the United States. The community is spread across a broad suburban geography rather than concentrated in one historic block, which is why a visitor can miss it entirely while a local knows exactly which strip mall has the good market and which church holds the Christmas concert.
It is also a community in transition. The children and grandchildren of the 1990s refugees are now thoroughly Sacramentan, building careers in trucking, construction, health care and tech, sometimes drifting from the strict evangelical world their parents built. Many have spread out across the Sacramento Valley, much as later generations of California’s immigrant communities did, from the Vietnamese who reshaped San Jose to the Filipinos of Carson in the south.
The war has changed the mood. The 2022 invasion drew a sharp line between Sacramento’s Ukrainian and Russian residents, who had long shared churches and grocers and a common language, and it gave the established community a new and urgent purpose. Churches that had spent thirty years settling refugees became relief hubs again, raising money, sponsoring families and welcoming the newest wave off the plane. For more on the city itself, the history of Sacramento sets the wider stage; for the legal mechanism that opened the door in 1990, the Lautenberg Program remains the key.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Ukrainians live in Sacramento?
Estimates vary because figures often combine Ukrainians with the wider Russian-speaking population. Community leaders have put the total Slavic population of greater Sacramento as high as 100,000, while around 18,000 Ukrainians specifically were estimated to be living in the region as of 2022, a number that has risen with arrivals since the war.
Why did so many Ukrainians settle in Sacramento?
The Ukrainians in Sacramento arrived largely as religious refugees after 1990, when the Lautenberg Amendment let persecuted evangelical Christians and others from the former Soviet Union resettle in the United States. Resettlement agencies placed families near Russian-speaking churches, affordable housing drew more, and chain migration through congregations did the rest.
Where is Sacramento’s Ukrainian community located?
It is spread across the northern half of Sacramento County rather than a single neighbourhood, with strong concentrations in Citrus Heights, North Highlands, Antelope, Fair Oaks, Arden-Arcade and Carmichael, plus West Sacramento across the river. The churches, markets and community centres that serve the population are clustered through these suburbs.
Why is Sacramento called Little Kyiv?
The nickname reflects the size and visibility of the Ukrainian and wider Slavic population, one of the largest in the country. With dozens of Slavic churches, multiple Eastern European supermarkets and a dense network of community organisations, Sacramento has earned the informal title of Little Kyiv among residents.
What role did churches play in the community?
Churches were the foundation of the community, not just its spiritual life. The First Slavic Baptist Church grew to about 1,500 members by 2000, and the Slavic Community Center of Sacramento was founded in 1992 to help refugees with language, work and resettlement. After the 2022 invasion, these same churches became relief hubs for new Ukrainian arrivals.
How did the war in Ukraine affect Sacramento?
The 2022 Russian invasion brought a new wave of Ukrainian refugees, many through the Uniting for Ukraine humanitarian parole programme, who were sponsored and welcomed by the established community. It also sharpened the distinction between Ukrainian and Russian residents who had long lived side by side, and turned local churches into centres of fundraising and resettlement.
If your family’s story passed through Sacramento, or any of the places Ukrainians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hidden congregation in the old Soviet Union to a church on Rio Linda Boulevard, to wherever you are now.