In the spring of 2010, I taught a college course on the watershed moments in the American struggle for racial equality, from Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that enshrined segregation, to the election of the nation’s first black President, a hundred and twelve years later. Called African American History from Plessy to Obama, it was similar to a number of courses taught on campuses across the country that had spun off from the historic 2008 election. The one distinction lay in the fact that I was not teaching it in the United States; I offered it to students at Moscow State University, as part of a Fulbright fellowship in Russia.
I was immediately impressed by the students’ baseline knowledge of black history. They knew about the brutally repressive aftermath of Reconstruction; they were conversant in the social and economic forces that inspired the Great Migration; and they could speak to the history of black exclusion from labor unions in the first half of the twentieth century. One student noted that Russia abolished serfdom in 1861, the same year that the war which ended slavery in the United States began. They were easily more knowledgeable on these matters than were most white students and many black students I had encountered at American colleges. Their erudition was not entirely surprising, however. It was a testament to a typically neglected aspect of the long, complicated history between the United States and Russia: the latter’s enduring interest in matters relating to African-Americans.
During the Cold War, Soviet school curricula highlighted the exploitation of black people as a prime example of both American hypocrisy and of the rapacious nature of the capitalist system. During the Great Depression, African-Americans were invited to live and work in the Soviet Union, as a means of escaping the privations of Jim Crow. A few hundred accepted the offer, and some of their descendants still live in Russia. Yelena Khanga, a black Russian television personality and a granddaughter of one of the black “sojourners,” an agronomist from Mississippi named Oliver Golden, noted in a memoir that the Soviets, while legitimately interested in the knowledge of these African-Americans (they were skilled workers and professionals), were not unaware of the value of appearing to upstage the United States on matters of race. In 1932, the Soviets invited a group of black American artists, including the poet Langston Hughes, to Russia to make a (never-completed) film about American racism called “Black and White.” Communist publications in the United States hired black writers and advocated for racial equality. Many, if not most, of the black civil-rights leadership of that era had at least glancing contact with the Communist Party of the United States. In the Soviet Union, the relationship was, however, as vexed as any other between an exploited community and the state. In 1937, when Lovett Fort-Whiteman, one of the first black recruits to the American Communist Party, ran afoul of the party bureaucracy in the U.S.S.R, where he had been living, he was arrested and was eventually sent to the gulag, where, two years later, he died from malnutrition. The novelist Richard Wright, who was closely aligned with the American Communist Party early in his career, rejected it bitterly during the Second World War, convinced that it was merely using black people to its own ends. Yet so intertwined were Communist and Soviet interests in matters of racial discrimination in the United States that the subject has spawned an entire subfield of African-American and Cold War history.
That propaganda tradition of the old Soviet Union came back into view this week, after the Senate Intelligence Committee released two reports on attempted Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, which highlighted how those efforts targeted African-Americans. According to one of the reports, produced by experts at the social-media research firm New Knowledge, in conjunction with researchers at Columbia University and Canfield Research, the Internet Research Agency, a company based in St. Petersburg, “created an expansive cross-platform media mirage targeting the Black community, which shared and cross-promoted authentic Black media to create an immersive influence ecosystem.” The I.R.A., which is owned by an ally of Vladimir Putin, posted more than a thousand YouTube videos relating to Black Lives Matter and police violence. It created thirty Facebook pages directed at African-Americans that attracted more than a million followers. It created knockoff accounts, such as Black Matters, and outright false ones, such as Blacktivist, to amplify content that was primarily intended to sow dissension. Communist ideology, of course, was no longer part of the equation, but attempting to undermine American authority was: one objective appeared to be planting concerns about Hillary Clinton and racism as a means of depressing the black vote. Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, told me that activists had noted an uptick in fake content on social media but assumed that it was just standard Internet nuisance. “My suspicion was spamming, and not ‘Holy shit, another government is trying to influence the results of the elections in the United States,’ ” she told me.
Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican Presidential nominee, once observed that foreign policy is what a nation does at home and domestic policy is what it does abroad. This was essentially the message of civil-rights activists in the middle third of the twentieth century. Racism, they argued, may have succeeded in maintaining a racial hierarchy in the United States, but it was also a tremendous liability in international affairs. In 1931, Walter White, who had just been named the national president of the N.A.A.C.P., wrote an article for Harper’s magazine about the intervention of the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of American Communist Party, in the Scottsboro trial, in which nine young black men were falsely accused of raping two young white women on a rail car in Alabama. Racial show trials were commonplace in the South, and each of them, he suggested, offered the party a bounty of propaganda opportunities. Later civil-rights figures, such as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr., pointed to the ways that racism undermined American authority to the benefit of the Soviet Union. As the historian Mary Dudziak writes in “Cold War Civil Rights,” the Supreme Court Justices who decided Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, did so with the full knowledge that the audience for their ruling would be not only in Mississippi but in Moscow.
The paradox of wars, even cold ones, is that the victors often indulge in the luxury of forgetting, while the vanquished ruminate over every mistake and missed opportunity, in some corners for generations after. In this regard, Russia’s relationship to the Cold War is not completely dissimilar to the South’s relationship to the Civil War. Most Americans have moved on from the longest global conflict of the twentieth century, but for many Russians it still influences a great deal of how the nation sees its place in the world. This is certainly true of Vladimir Putin, a former K.G.B. agent, who, though no ideologue, was steeped in the Cold War, and is now the President of Russia. The United States is led by Donald Trump, a man who displays no awareness of either these geopolitical dynamics or the history that undergirds them. It is a mismatch whose implications are only now becoming entirely visible. Russian manipulation of racism in 2016 aimed to benefit Trump to the detriment of African-Americans and, ultimately, of the American Republic—a phenomenon entirely consistent with the Trump Presidency itself.
