Elizabeth Malozemoff was a teacher in St. Petersburg, Russia and in the mining communities of Siberia who later became a professor of Russian at the University of California, Berkeley. She was born Elizabeth Goolaiev in St. Petersburg in 1881, and after she married mining engineer Alexander Malozemoff in 1908, the couple moved to Siberia during the same year. In order to escape the growing power of the communists in Siberia, she fled with her two young sons across Mongolia and the Gobi Desert. Joining her husband in Japan, the family immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1920. In the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, she received her bachelor’s degree in 1922, her master’s degree in 1929, and her PhD in 1938. In this interview, Malozemoff discusses her life in Tsarist Russia, the Russian educational system, her experiences of the Russian and American cultures in the San Francisco Bay Area, and her time as a student and professor at UC Berkeley. This interview is part of a group of interviews documenting Russian émigrés in California.