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The Soviet Union's Opposition to America's Racial System
http://journals.cambridge.org/action...ne&aid=1354532
Racism in a “Raceless” Society: The Soviet Press and Representations of American Racial Violence at Stalingrad in 1930
Meredith Romana State University of New York, College at Brockport
In late August 1930, two white American workers from the Ford Motor Company in Detroit were tried for attacking a black American laborer at one of the Soviet Union's prized giants of socialist industry, the Stalingrad Traktorostroi. Soviet trade-union authorities and all-union editors used the near month-long campaign to bring the two assailants to “proletarian justice,” in order to cultivate the image that workers in the USSR valued American technical and industrial knowledge in the construction of the new socialist society, but vehemently rejected American racism. They reinforced this image in publications by juxtaposing visual depictions of Soviet citizens' acceptance of black Americans as equals against those which portrayed the lynching of black workers in the United States.
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Black communist Harry Haywood went to the Soviet Union. He spoke of his experience concerning racism there:
Similarly, the black American actor-singer Paul Robeson had positive things to say of his time spent in the USSR.“In the Soviet Union, remnants of national and racial prejudice from the old society were attacked by education and law. It was a crime to give or receive direct or indirect privileges, or to exercise discrimination because of race or nationality. Any manifestation of racial or national superiority was punishable by law and was regarded as a serious political offense, a social crime.
During my entire stay in the Soviet Union, I encountered only one incident of racial hostility. It was on a Moscow streetcar. Several of us Black students had boarded the car on our way to spend an evening with out friend MacCloud. It was after rush hour and the car was only about half filled with Russian passengers. As usual, we were subjects of friendly curiosity. At one stop, a drunken Russian staggered aboard. Seeing us, he muttered (but loud enough for the whole car to hear) something about ‘Black devils in our country.’
A group of outraged Russian passengers thereupon seized him and ordered the motorman to stop the car. It was a citizen’s arrest, the first I had ever witnessed. ‘How dare you, you scum, insult people who are guests in our country!’…
‘No, citizens,’ said a young man (who had done most of the talking), ‘drunk or not, we don’t allow this sort of thing in our country…’”
- Harry Haywood. Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist
More on Haywood:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Haywood
During his four and half year stay in the Soviet Union (1925–1930), Harry Haywood held dual membership in both the CPUSA and the CPSU. As a member of the CPSU, he traveled extensively in the Soviet Union's autonomous republics, and participated in the struggles against both the Left Opposition headed by Leon Trotsky and the Right Opposition led by Nikolai Bukharin. In these struggles and in others, Haywood was on the side of Joseph Stalin.
With the Comintern, Haywood was assigned to work with the newly created Negro Commission. In his major work Negro Liberation, he argued that the root of the oppression of Blacks was the unsolved agrarian question in the South. He believed that the unfinished bourgeois democratic revolution of Reconstruction had been betrayed in the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. It abandoned African Americans to plantations as tenant farmers and sharecroppers, faced with the Redeemer governments, the system of Jim Crow laws, and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups. According to Haywood, the rise of imperialism left Blacks frozen as "landless, semi-slaves in the South."
He believed that a distinct African-American nation had developed that satisfied the criteria laid out by Stalin in his Marxism and the National Question: a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture. Because African Americans in the South constituted such a nation, Haywood believed the correct response was a demand for self-determination, up to and including the right to separate from the United States. Their "national territory" was historically the Black Belt South, and they deserved full equality everywhere else in the United States. Haywood believed that only with genuine political power, which from a Marxist point of view included control of the productive forces, such as land, could African Americans obtain genuine equality. Their gaining of equality was a prerequisite for broader working class unity.
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Originally Posted by Peasant
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