The Negro in the Soviet Union: Four Books and an Unfinished Film

I am packing. Anyone who has moved a library knows what this means — not the physical labor, though that is considerable, but the archaeology of it. You open a box, meaning to seal it and find yourself standing still for twenty minutes, holding something you had forgotten you owned, remembering why you acquired it and what it cost you in time and attention.

Eduardo Montes-Bradley

This week, I found a shelf I had set aside years ago. It contains the books I gathered when I was seriously considering a documentary about the African American relationship with the Soviet Union — a project that has never been made, that sits in the back of my mind the way unfinished things do, patient and slightly reproachful.

Before these four volumes go into plastic boxes and then into storage, I want to put them on record. Not as a bibliography. As a testimony to a story that American cinema has almost entirely ignored.

The story is this: from the 1920s through the 1960s, a significant number of African Americans — writers, intellectuals, engineers, artists, musicians, agricultural specialists — chose to travel to, live in, or emigrate to the Soviet Union. They went for different reasons. Some were ideological fellow travelers, drawn by the promise of a society that claimed to have abolished racial hierarchy. Some were professionals recruited for their technical skills. Some were artists in search of an audience that would receive them without the diminishment of Jim Crow. What they found — and what they made of what they found — is one of the great untold chapters of twentieth-century American history.

Four books document it from four different angles, and they are all on my shelf.

Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain (Duke University Press, 2002)

The scholarly foundation. Baldwin focuses on four figures — Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson — each of whom traveled or lived extensively in the Soviet Union and reflected on what they found there. What makes this book essential is its recovery of Soviet sources: articles in Pravda and Ogonek, political cartoons, Russian translations of manuscripts (now lost), and deliberate mistranslations that reveal how each side was using the other for its own narrative purposes. Baldwin calls this material the Soviet archive of Black America. It is an archive that almost nobody in American cultural life has ever examined.

Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander

Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932 as part of a group of African American artists recruited to make a film about American race relations — a film that was never completed, for reasons that are themselves a story worth telling. What he left behind is one of the most vivid and honest accounts of that experience in American literature. Hughes went as a sympathizer and came back more complicated — not disillusioned exactly, but no longer innocent. The book covers his travels through the Soviet Union, Central Asia, Japan, and Spain during the years when the world was remaking itself. It is out of print and largely forgotten. It should not be.

Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (Rutgers University Press, 2010)

The most comprehensive account of the full range of African Americans who went east. Carew covers not just the famous names but the engineers, the agronomists, the ordinary workers who built lives in a country that advertised itself as free of racism and delivered something considerably more ambiguous. She interviewed descendants of figures like Paul Robeson and Oliver Golden, an African American agricultural specialist who went to Uzbekistan and never came back, whose daughter Yelena Khanga became one of the first Black television journalists in post-Soviet Russia. The generational dimension of this story is remarkable and has never been filmed.

Robert Robinson, Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union

This is the book I keep returning to. Robinson was born in Jamaica, grew up in Cuba, trained as a toolmaker, and was working at Ford in Detroit in 1930 when a Russian recruiter offered him two and a half times his salary, free housing, a car, and thirty days of vacation per year — for a one-year contract in Moscow. He was twenty-three years old. He stayed for forty-four years.

What happened to him in those forty-four years is the Soviet century seen from an angle that no American film has ever explored: a Black man trapped inside the Workers' Paradise, decorated with Soviet medals he could not refuse, promoted just enough to keep him useful but never enough to let him go, watching colleagues disappear during the purges and learning not to ask questions, waiting until he finally obtain permission to leave in 1974. He came out through Uganda. He was sixty-seven years old.

Robinson's story contains everything — race, Cold War politics, the gap between ideology and reality, the specific loneliness of a man who could not go home and could not fully belong where he was. It is Black on Red — the title says everything. It is the most important documentary subject I have ever made.

These four books are now going into storage. The story they contain is not. I have been carrying it for twenty years. It will find its moment.