How were blacks treated in the USSR?
- It depends upon where you where in the USSR. It was a big nation. Due to Ukrainian nationalism there was racism there. The other Eastern Bloc nations had racism. Going to the big cities like Moscow would be different.
- Representatives of African peoples in the Russian language are commonly called negry. The word negr comes from the Spanish: negro through other European languages (German: Neger, French: nègre). Although in the Russian language this word, unlike negro in English, and especially the derogatory nigger, does not carry a negative connotation. —Wikipedia
- The official position of the Soviet Union and its leaders was fiercely anti-racist. The 1936 Soviet Constitution forbid racism. During the 1950’s the Soviet Union played a role in condemning U.S. racism, which was uniquely horrible compared to most other places in the world, except perhaps South Africa, which was about the same.
- An American citizen calls the Soviet radio station and asks:
- Can an ordinary Soviet engineer afford to buy a car?
After a long silent pause the radio station answers:
- Mmm… and what about you lynching Blacks? —Soviet joke - U.S. racism is not surprising considering the history. Blacks were reduced to chattel slaves. They were property to be bought and sold, completely dehumanized. Some of the Founding Fathers of the U.S. were slave owners. The South went to war over the matter. It fought fiercely to maintain Segregation. Blacks were lynched frequently. The KKK terrorized black people. Old attitudes die hard. Many Southerners still believe that black people are inferior.
This 14 year old black boy was innocent of raping and killing a white girl. But he was put on trial and the youngest person in America to face the electric chair.
Racism and capitalism go hand in hand. Communism is opposed to racism, so it is hated, too.
In the 20s and 30s, not only was Russia not racist in relation to black people, but it encouraged migration,” reported New Statesman America, quoting Mark Nash, curator of Things Fall Apart, an exhibition dedicated to the USSR. According to Nash, between 4,000 and 5,000 black people came to the Soviet Union each year during that period. Their impressions, however, were quite varied.
Robert Robinson, a black American engineer who came to the USSR in 1930 for better work opportunities (the Soviets were hiring specialists to help industrialize the country), ended up not very happy with living conditions and Stalin’s purges. Unable to leave the country until 1976, Robinson wrote a book, Black on Red: My 44 years inside the Soviet Union, where he portrayed Soviet Russia as quite a troubled country, where the true attitude towards blacks was not as welcoming as the official one, but still better than the one he had faced at home in the 1930s.
Why did the USSR lecture the U.S. on racial equality?
Many other black people saw the USSR in a more positive way, especially those who didn’t stay for 44 years. The famed African-American singer, Paul Robeson, who visited the USSR in 1934, and later suffered for his pro-Soviet views back home, used to say: “The Soviet Union’s very existence, its example before the world of abolishing all discrimination based on color or nationality… this has given us Negroes the chance of achieving our complete liberation within our own time.” Id.
Paul Robeson just wanted to be treated like a real human being and not judged by the color of his skin. The U.S. rewarded him by forcing him to testify before Congress and demonized him. Even the highest levels of the U.S. government are racist. Calling someone a communist is actually a dog whistle for “n-lover.”
Proles of the Round Table on Paul Robeson
Ali went to the Soviet Union to assist in diplomatic relations. He was impressed by the humanity there.
Fredrick Douglass was born to slave owners. He said that the religious slave masters were the worst because they were the most self-righteously brutal.
Former colonial nations like Vietnam and Angola embraced communism because it taught independence and respected the sovereignty of nations. Capitalism leads to imperialism because capitalism demands access to new sources of raw materials, labor, and new markets. Colonialism provided vast amounts of all of these things. Communism was opposed to colonialism. The Soviet Union gave material assistance to nations like Cuba that threw out brutal dictators that were propped up by the United States. This meant the Cold War was also about independence, autonomy, and freedom. Often the U.S. would overthrow democratically elected socialist regimes and install brutal right wing dictators which were puppets of the U.S., such as Pinochet, Batista, the Shah of Iran, and others.
In fact Castro was instrumental in helping Nelson Mandela free South Africa. The U.S. declared Mandella a terrorist.
Soviet citizens rarely saw foreigners, especially black people, except on posters bashing American racism and calling for Africa to rise; so, they didn’t understand quite how to behave themselves with real black people. Sometimes there were conflicts: once, a Somalian and a Soviet student fought over a girl. But there were more severe cases: in 1963 around 150 students from Ghana organized a demonstration on Red Square following their compatriot’s death. They believed it was murder, but Soviet authorities claimed he just froze to death while drunk.
“If they had admitted that it was a murder and promised to find the guilty… no one would have protested,” said Edward Na from Ghana, a participant of that protest. It was the hypocrisy, however, that enraged the students. Nevertheless, he abruptly said “No” while answering the BBC’s question if the USSR was a racist country. “It was one incident… you should remember most Soviet people always were friendly to us, they invited us to their houses... Some of us even married Soviet women.”
Na’s words seem to mirror the general trend: the USSR had its own cases of racism, but racism and segregation in Soviet Russia never were institutional and backed by the force of law, as they were in the U.S. until the 1960s. This is hardly a surprise because black slavery, the root of American racial conflict, never existed in Russia’s past. Of course, Soviet history had its own multiple shameful pages, but racism just wasn’t one of them. Id.
The Message
The Soviet Union took great efforts to even encourage black people to come to the Soviet Union.
This propaganda poster made by the Soviets depicted the difference between how blacks were treated in America compared to the Soviet Union.
It says “Under capitalism” and “Under socialism!”
A second wave of Africans came to the Soviet Union in the late 50s and early 60s, from the “oppressed colonies”. Again, the continued presence of European colonial powers in postwar Africa played into Soviet propagandist hands. As well as providing military and diplomatic support to countries such as Angola, Mozambique, Egypt and Congo, the Soviet Union brought African students to study at Moscow’s new Patrice Lumumba University.
Racial harmony in a Marxist utopia: how the Soviet Union capitalised on US discrimination
Looking at today’s Russia, that post-racial idealism is difficult to locate – judging by recent reports of football racism and a Duma MP’s comparisons of Barack Obama to a monkey. Could it be that these posters – and the state-enforced anti-racism behind them – papered over the cracks of Russia’s underlying race problems? Or could it be that racism has risen anew as a consequence of the individualist post-Soviet landscape? Maybe it’s capitalism’s fault after all. Id.
An Example
Growing up in the Soviet Union, Emilia Tynes-Mensah did the same things other children did. She read the classics of literary master Alexander Pushkin, listened to the symphonies of Peter Tchaikovsky and heard the propaganda that life here was better than anywhere else.
But in her home, there was American jazz, Thanksgiving celebrations and stories of the struggles facing blacks in the United States. An improvised version of soul food sometimes replaced borscht.
That's because her father, George Tynes, was an African American agronomist from Virginia who moved to Russia in the 1930s.
Tynes was among hundreds of blacks who traveled to the Soviet Union in the two decades after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Some were hard-core Communists. Others were curious adventurers.
"My father didn't know anything about this country. He didn't know what to expect," said Tynes-Mensah, 73, her mind flying back through the decades as she sat in her Moscow apartment, where black-and-white photos of her parents and children shared space on an antique sideboard with color shots of her grandchildren.
"Everybody who would come to the Soviet Union from America, my father would tell them, 'Please don't forget to bring me some records,' " Tynes-Mensah said. "He loved Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson. But he also loved classical music and opera and ballet."
Most of the African Americans who came to Russia were seeking a better life, desperate to flee the social inequality and Depression-era hardships that racked America at the time, said Allison Blakely, professor emeritus of history at Boston University who has written a book on the African American immigrants.
"They were looking for a society where they could escape color prejudice and racism," Blakely said.
Today, fewer than 50 descendants of these African Americans are believed to still live in Russia. In all, their numbers in the former Soviet republics could be between 100 and 200, according to researchers.
They have become footnotes to African American and Russian history, said Yelena Demikovsky, a New York-based Russian film director and researcher who is making a movie, "Black Russians — The Red Experience," about the immigrants to the Soviet Union and their descendants.
Officials actively recruited skilled foreign laborers and professionals, Blakely said. About 18,000 Americans answered the call to work in the 1930s, he said. Among them were several hundred African Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union, including dozens who lived there for "the good part of a decade," Blakely said.
Their ranks included graduates of historically black colleges such as Tuskegee University in Alabama and Virginia's Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, later called the Hampton Institute. They were engineers, educators, entertainers, journalists, lawyers. The actor-activist Paul Robeson and poet Langston Hughes were among those travelers captivated by communism.
The Soviets gave the African Americans red-carpet treatment, including fat paychecks, subsidized housing and free vacations.
"My father felt the U.S.S.R. treated him better than America," said Tynes-Mensah, a former university chemistry instructor who was born in the Russian town of Krasnodar and now lives mainly in the United States, spending summers in Russia. "He was happy here."
A graduate of Wilberforce University in Ohio and a former college football star, Tynes could only find work washing dishes in a restaurant back in America, his daughter recalled. So he jumped at the opportunity to go to Russia, although he never joined the Communist Party, his daughter said.
Tynes was among 11 African American agricultural specialists led by Oliver Golden, an agronomist and Communist from Mississippi, who boarded the German ship Deutschland bound for the Soviet Union in 1931.
Oliver Golden's granddaughter, Yelena Khanga, 52, a Moscow-based talk show host, recalled how American Communist leaders and black dignitaries visiting Russia would make the Golden household their first stop.
The conversation usually centered on the plight of African Americans, the poor and the working class. Khanga — a world traveler with fans from her high-profile TV job, a swank flat near Red Square and a driver — said she considered such talk "so strange."
"I would think, 'Why are we discussing the situation of working-class people in Chicago when we'll never be in Chicago?' " she said.
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The experience of African Americans who traveled to or settled in Russia was overwhelmingly positive, descendants said. In turn, they made valuable contributions to Soviet society, said Blakely, the professor. Agricultural specialists helped devise different uses for materials, such as rope made from hemp. They also helped develop plant species that were cheaper to cultivate. Their contributions provided a boost to the Soviet economy.
Tynes, who was sent to various Soviet republics to teach people how to raise ducks and other waterfowl, became a nationally recognized expert on poultry. Golden helped develop a cotton industry in Uzbekistan. And the African Americans introduced Russians to blues and jazz.
"They had an impact disproportionate to their numbers because they were there precisely because the Soviet leadership was trying to use them as a symbol of what they were trying to build in terms of a truly democratic society," Blakely said. "They were very much in the public eye."
Within years, however, such attention was unwelcome. During the era of Josef Stalin's purges, foreigners were viewed with suspicion and non-Soviet citizens were ordered to leave the country, said Demikovsky, the filmmaker.
Khanga said her grandfather escaped being nabbed by the secret police by a fluke. He was away from home the day they came for him. When Golden dutifully turned himself in, he was informed that the quota of arrests for his area had been fulfilled, Khanga said.
The African Americans were shunned during the Cold War, but it was because they were foreigners, not because they were black, their descendants said. But attitudes toward blacks changed in the1960s with the influx of thousands of students from Africa.
Tynes-Mensah, whose mother was Russian-Ukrainian, said she was keenly aware when she was growing up that she was different.
"I was afraid to go out in public," said the septuagenarian, who has cafe-au-lait skin and a short Afro. "People used to stare. But it was curiosity. They were not angry or aggressive like they are now."
Today, the acceptance of blacks in Russia is far lower compared with what the African American pioneers experienced, said Tynes-Mensah, who runs a nonprofit called Metis that offers support to mixed-race children, the majority of whose fathers came to Russia from Africa.
"Afro-Russians want to feel Russian, but the society doesn't want to recognize them as Russian," she said. "Sometimes [people] will say, 'Go back to Africa.' "
Khanga, a vivacious and charismatic woman who was raised on the gospel songs of Mahalia Jackson and Aretha Franklin, said any obstacles she faced growing up in Russia during the Cold War years were because of her American heritage, not her race.
"I feel comfortable as a black person in Russia," said Khanga, who is married to a white Russian and has a 12-year-old daughter.
Still, in the 1990s she felt compelled to find her roots. She traveled to Africa and the United States, connected with relatives in New York and Mississippi and wrote a book detailing her family's story.
"When I'm in America, I feel that I'm African American because I love going to black churches, I love soul food, I love black music, I love lots of things that unite people of color," Khanga said. "But when I'm in Russia, I feel Russian."
In Russia, early African American migrants found the good life