In ‘Santa Barbara,’ Diana Markosian recreates her mother’s journey from post-Soviet Russia to marriage in America

For 20 years, photographer Diana Markosian thought she knew her family’s immigration history — or the gist of it, at least. In 1996, when she was seven, Markosian’s mother, Svetlana, woke her and her older brother, David, in the middle of the night, telling them to pack all of their important things: the three of them were going to see America. The way Markosian remembers it, neither of them asked any questions. That night they boarded a plane in Moscow bound for Los Angeles, without saying goodbye to their father.

When they disembarked at the airport, the family was greeted by Eli, a pudgy, much-older, American friend of their mother’s, who brought them into his home in coastal Santa Barbara. The trip, Markosian was told, was meant to be a holiday. But after Svetlana and Eli married less than a year later (they remained so for nine), Santa Barbara became home.

“When we came to America in the ’90s, it felt like an absolute dream to be here. (My mom) fell in love with being an American, she embraced it,” Markosian recalled in a phone interview. “I am not sure my mom was leaving anything behind. Everything had already been taken.”

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Svetlana, an economist, and her husband Arsen, an engineer — Armenians who emigrated to Moscow to finish their doctorates, and separated before Markosian was born — were living in poverty, amid widespread unemployment and hyperinflation. Arsen hawked Matryoshka dolls in Red Square and sold…