Trucking in the U.S.A.: Where the Accent Is Russian

No one quite knows how many of them there are out on the roads. But you can usually hear who they are when they talk, when they’ve taken a break from hours and hours of driving on America’s highways.

Take the two guys who are resting in Red Lodge, Mont., about 60 miles from Billings, after hauling bottles from Oklahoma to a mountain microbrewery in this city. They are agonizing over what to eat from the menu, asking me questions in halting English as they express a longing for the Russian black bread, pan-fried with garlic in oil, of the old country. Or this other Russian, who has just driven a double-deck trailer loaded with a motley assortment of autos out of Philly. He’s just brought a Pizza Hut order into the lounge, downed a couple of shots of Canadian whiskey and picked up four bottles of Bud Light to take to his room to watch TV. Then there’s Phillip Dmitriev, 50, who has driven into Billings bound for Indiana with a load of electrical coils. It’s the middle of a thunderstorm, and he has only enough time to fuel up and head back onto Interstate 90. But on the cab door of his Freightliner truck is the imperial crest of old Russia, the double-headed eagle, glistening with raindrops. It is the proud insignia of Mikhail Trucking, a transport company in Spokane, Wash., founded in 2006 by brothers from Russia.

(See TIME’s photo-essay “Pimp My Truck: The World of Custom Big Rigs.”)

Every working day at my job at the postal-processing center in Billings, there are drivers speaking Slavic languages — for the most part, Russian — making drop shipments of pallets loaded with bulk mail. They haven’t taken over the business of cross-country freight trucking by any means. But at least anecdotally, they are a distinct and growing presence.

(From TIME’s archives: The political battle to deregulate the trucking industry.)

As such, the former denizens of the moribund Soviet bloc seem to be an example of how some immigrant groups tend to cluster around professions and locations, forming cultural and economic ghettos — for instance, Chinatowns, or the Filipino medical workers who fill the labor needs of many hospitals. The Russians are a bit different because the niche they are filling takes them across the face of the U.S. They are both transient and ubiquitous as they help transport America’s material goods to the far-flung corners of the country. At least 80% of the nation’s communities receive their goods exclusively by truck, according to the American Trucking Associations.

The Russians come to trucking with some tradition — it is very much the way their huge ancestral nation, with its system of badly maintained roads, takes delivery of its necessities. Indeed, many may have emigrated to join relatives in the U.S. after the global financial crisis in the fall of 2008 depressed the Russian trucking industry: of the more than 10,000 companies that operated in Russia before the crisis, only about 8,000 survived. “This did cause something of an exodus among Russian truckers,” says Antonina Kamchatova, spokeswoman for ASMAP, a Russian truck drivers’ association. “So anyone who could, through the help of relatives or whatever, went across the Atlantic in the last couple of years to look for work.”

As with all immigrant groups trying to make it in America, there are problems to address with regards to acculturation and, more serious, the law. Many drivers demonstrate limited English-speaking and -comprehension skills; some have trouble reading Latin script. A few whom I have talked to admit they are much more used to reading Cyrillic. To work as a trucker in the U.S., an individual must have a commercial driver’s license (CDL), which requires that the driver “read and speak the English langauge sufficiently to converse with the general public, to understand highway traffic signs and signals in the English language, to respond to official inquiries, and to make entries on reports and records.”

Nicolay Karpov, the manager of Mikhail Trucking, says his brother Mikhail “studied night and day for six months to pass his CDL test. His English might not be so good, but he can understand and read and write O.K.” The Karpov brothers now own a company of seven trucks that haul dry freight through the 48 contiguous states and western Canada. Nicolay does office work, eschewing the road. His brother, though, “is passionate about trucking.”

See the post-Soviet search for Russia’s destiny.

See 10 ways your job will change in the coming decade.

There have been licensing scams. Many states do not administer CDL exams, instead outsourcing them to private companies. Some tests have been seriously compromised. In St. Louis in 2008, for example, Mustafa Redzic, owner of the Bosnia Truck Driving School, was convicted of bribery, conspiracy and fraud and sentenced to 75 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Prosecutors charged that Redzic’s students were given short CDL tests or no tests at all after Redzic bribed the manager of a testing facility, resulting in at least 469 ill-gotten CDLs. The manager of the testing facility received a sentence of a year and a day in jail. Missouri has since halted third-party testing, handing the process over to the Highway Patrol.

A 2010 legislative audit of Utah’s driver’s-license division found incidences of fraud and minimal oversight of the state’s 300 CDL testers and alleged that some immigrant applicants were found using electronic translation devices to take the test. It declared, “There is a great risk that those drivers do not properly know how to drive a commercial vehicle. This poses a risk to everyone.” Nicolay Karpov scoffs at the idea of any kind of interpreting help during CDL exams. “The interpreter will not be with you on the road, helping you drive after the test.”

In late August, federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania indicted nine people for allegedly running a scheme to sell state CDLs to ill-prepared drivers. Vitaliy and Tatyana Kroshnev allegedly billed hundreds of students coming from 26 states — many of whom were Russian speakers — up to $2,200 each at their International Training Academy to successfully pass their CDL tests, and according to the FBI, they are accused of enlisting “foreign-language interpreters who gave applicants the answers to the written commercial driver’s license permit test.” “It places the entire public at risk if persons receiving fraudulent CDLs are driving large vehicles,” says Michele Morgan-Kelly, assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. “You have the biggest things on the road that can do a lot of damage, and safety standards are being violated.”

(See what happens when adopted kids from Russia can’t adapt to life in the U.S.)

The kind of damage that can be done was demonstrated in December 2008 on I-90, 400 miles west of Billings, when a semi out of New Jersey pulling two trailers, traveling at a high rate of speed, jackknifed on the icy highway and slammed into a local emergency vehicle, killing fireman Jerry J. Parrick, 51. After a long investigation, the driver of the semi, Sergey Buslayev, 56, was extradited from New Jersey to Montana in late July to face charges of second-degree homicide and criminal endangerment. At the initial arraignment hearing, the judge discontinued proceedings until the court could find an interpreter. “Sometimes I understand good and sometimes not,” Buslayev told the judge. Last week, Buslayev pleaded not guilty to both charges and remains in custody, unable to post bond.

It’s enough to make you wonder why immigrants want to be long-haul drivers in the first place. The conventional wisdom is that truckers make a dollar per mile they drive (a 10-hour nonstop workday being worth $600 or more), but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median wage for truckers in 2009 was just $37,730 — much less than the median U.S. family income of about $45,000. Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which has 154,000 members, believes that many foreign-born drivers are exploited by the industry. “People in trucking are kind of predatory in terms of capitalism. These drivers are being exploited because of loopholes in the regulations and lack of enforcement.” He adds, “The attractiveness of these folks is simply cheap labor. There are 500,000 CDLs issued every year. But many new drivers go right out of the business. The dollars, the hours — they don’t compute.”

Some Russians get into the business out of desperation. ASMAP’s Kamchatova says the truckers who remain in her country “are just barely breaking even. They have just enough to pay for fuel and basic necessities, bread and shelter. So a lot of them are going abroad. Here in Russia, there’s just nothing left for many of them.” But, says Nicolay Karpov, “for most of the guys who immigrated here, this is the best way to make enough money to take care of their families. If they come here, and they have no diploma, can’t speak English and are over 35, trucking is the easiest way to make some good money.” He insists, however, that getting a grasp on English is a must. “If you can’t read and understand basic English,” he says, “you should not be driving a commercial vehicle on the road 24/7. It would be bad for everyone.”

In America, the trucker’s life is not an easy one. Karpov says his drivers usually spend two weeks on the road and two weeks at home so “they have some time with family.” And he adds, “You don’t make all the money in the world.” But compared with Russia, America is a dream, even if his drivers face sporadic discrimination or hostility from state inspectors at weigh stations. “Sometimes,” he says, “the inspectors laugh at us like we’re stupid or something. [Our drivers] do sometimes feel they are discriminated against because they talk with the accents.” But he says that for the most part, the inspectors simply do their job. “For me,” he continues, “this is the nicest country. I saw more discrimination against foreigners in Russia than I do here.”

— With reporting by Simon Shuster / Moscow

See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.

See the Cartoons of the Week.