Blackness the Color of Red: Negotiating Race at the US Legation in Riga,Latvia,1922–33

As the Department is well aware, this Legation is charged with the special task of accumulating material relative to Russia, and the views to which I give expression are based on continuous and careful consideration of data which have passed under my eyes

wrote Robert P. Skinner, the US minister at the US Legation in Riga, Latvia, in a 1929 dispatch to the State Department. ¹ In the years preceding the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USA and the Soviet Union (1933), this minor diplomatic outpost on the edge of Europe would come to play a role disproportionate to its modest size in the relations between Washington and Moscow. Less than 200 miles from the Soviet border, the Riga legation served as one of the primary pre-1933 layover stations for the US citizens traveling to and from Soviet Russia, its consular service busy renewing US passports and issuing visas. The legation’s ‘Russian section’ also acted as a de-facto listening post, regularly reporting on Soviet affairs and the experiences of US and other Western visitors in the USSR. What by dint of its size and location seemed destined to function as a diplomatic backwater assumed, in fact, the status of a major point of contact between the West and the East.

For the young foreign-service officials, the Riga legation was an important assignment, a place where in the late-1920s to early-1930s two future US ambassadors in the Soviet Union – George F. Kennan and Charles E. Bohlen – cut their diplomatic teeth. ² Another prominent US diplomat (and Kennan’s friend), and the future US ambassador to Finland and US chief of mission in East Berlin, Bernard Gufler, was also stationed in Riga during these years. ³ And in the summer of 1939, on the very eve of the Second World War, a 22-year old Harvard junior, John F. Kennedy, stayed at the embassy while on a brief visit to Latvia. ⁴

How peculiar indeed that a tiny foreign legation housed at various times several prominent personages of the coming Cold War. Many years later, in 1987, George F. Kennan, now a venerated elder statesman, returned to Riga and, while touring the city of his youth, reminisced about the ‘odd cast of characters’ at the old legation:

We constituted the United States government’s listening post for the Soviet Union, with which, at that time, our country had no official relations; and while we accepted and enjoyed as well as we could the amenities of the small but cosmopolitan city of Riga, our thoughts, our speculations, and our discussions late into the night all related to the great war-torn and revolution-torn country whose borders lay only some two hundred miles to the east of us, with its defiantly hostile government, its still greatly suffering population, and its uncertain future – to us a spectacle of drama, horror, and inexhaustible fascination. ⁵

The legation became a site where consulate officials and some of their visitors struggled to comprehend and articulate the meaning of the Soviet ‘experiment’ as well as its relevance for the US society. As evidenced by Kennan, this was a place whose physical proximity to the Soviet Union, a staff of ambitious foreign-service intellectuals and its function as a transfer point for those traveling to or leaving Soviet Russia necessitated ongoing conversations – both about the nature of Russia’s ‘new society’ and the challenges it presented to the USA’s exceptionalism and the alleged moral superiority. The records of the legation make it clear that the State Department officials remained acutely aware of the contest of narratives between the young Soviet Union and its Western opponents. In view of the stated Soviet commitments to antiracism and colorblind proletarian internationalism, and because of the USA’s torturous history of racism and racial discrimination, no other issue, it seems, evoked more intense interrogation and scrutiny by the consular officials than the views and experiences of black Americans sojourning in the Soviet Union. For it was not just the white American patricians and the budding stars of US diplomacy who graced with their presence the premises of the consulate. These Jim Crow era encounters between the privileged, often Ivy League-educated, white Americans and their black compatriots lay bare the racial and class fissures that, in many cases, the USA has not been able to successfully negotiate and heal up to this very day. The records of these 80-year old interviews and conversations, as well the subsequent reports to the State Department, convey an abiding tension between the American ideals of freedom and equality and the reality of American racism. The interviewing officials clearly recognized the fact that their African American interlocutors were likely to harbor racial grievances. They also articulated the awareness of the massive propaganda effort by the Soviet Union to highlight the ills of Western racism and to contrast it with the Soviet adherence to the Marxist-Leninist principles of racial emancipation and inclusion. ⁶

Importantly, these interactions between white US diplomats and black American travelers often revealed a degree of mutual suspicion and even antagonisms that seemed unusual for the routine encounters between US citizens and consular officials abroad. In his memoir, a prominent black American communist, Harry Haywood (also known as Haywood Hall), minced no words, describing Riga as a ‘notorious spy center’ and a ‘lie factory,’ populated by anti-Soviet ‘experts’ bent on distorting the image of the Soviet Union. In 1932, Haywood stopped by the Riga legation on his way from the Soviet Union, and while there he attempted (ultimately unsuccessfully) to secure entrance into the United States for his new Russian wife:

At the embassy I was subjected to a quiz; the ambassador himself took part in the questioning. I could tell by his accent that he was a polite southern gentleman. Behind the mask, I could sense the hostility toward me. I told them I was a writer and had spent time in the Soviet Union a couple of years before …. They asked me all sorts of questions about the Soviet Union – how I liked it, what it was like. I gave general answers. It was clear they knew all along who I was. ⁷

For a memoir penned decades after the event Haywood’s account of his ‘debriefing’ is remarkably accurate. Unbeknown to his interlocutor, the interviewing official promptly reported his conversation with Harry Haywood (identified in the dispatch as Haywood Hall) back to the State Department. The report emphasizes the race of the applicant (‘Negro’ and ‘colored’) and makes it clear that the diplomat had serious doubts about Haywood’s claim to be an accredited journalist for the ‘colored newspaper’ Amsterdam News. He also suspected him of receiving preferential treatment from the Soviets, who apparently financed the junket and even allowed him into the country without a proper visa:

He [Haywood] asserted that he financed the trip himself but it appears that he was treated with special consideration by the Russian authorities. He was allowed to remain in Russia for nearly two months and to travel widely throughout the resort region at practically no cost to himself [Italics mine] except for incidental expenses.

The official made a point of noting the consideration with which Soviet authorities had apparently treated his interviewee, a conduct ordinarily not extended to US citizens traveling in the USSR. ⁸ This exchange between a ‘Southern gentleman’ and diplomat and a young black radical, an Omaha-born son of former slaves, powerfully captured the exasperating dilemmas of the USA’s race relations and class inequities. The physical proximity of the site of these encounters to the Soviet Union, the only country at the time that had turned antiracism and proletarian internationalism into the central tenets of its official ideology and foreign policy, provided a general context and, frequently, an inescapable point of reference. Whether implicitly or explicitly, it was in reference to the Soviet egalitarian experiment under way across the nearby Russian border that white consular officials and their black compatriots put forth and debated their competing visions of fairness and freedom.

Since the publication, in 1986, of Allison Blakely’s Russia and the Negro, a growing number of historians and literary scholars have begun to pay attention both to the history of Soviet efforts to attract non-white sympathizers and fellow travelers and to the responses these outreach campaigns elicited from African and African American radicals and intellectuals. ⁹ While conventional histories of black modernity and black internationalism tended to focus on the Atlantic as the focal point where the black moderns asserted their agency and articulated their visions of emancipation, a new generation of scholars have significantly expanded the boundaries of what Paul Gilroy has famously termed the ‘Black Atlantic’ to include Russia and the Soviet Union. ¹⁰ Following the 1991 Soviet collapse, a wealth of newly available archival sources, especially those relevant to the Communist International (Comintern), have informed new scholarship on the ties and engagements between the antiracist Soviet Union and the West’s racial minorities and colonial populations. These works appear to converge on the importance of Soviet antiracist and anticolonial agitation in the emerging consciousness of black liberation. ¹¹

One did not have to be a communist to appreciate the message of colorblind egalitarianism and racial solidarity honed at Moscow’s Comintern schools and beamed across the Western world by Soviet propaganda outlets and their local sympathizers. ¹² Poet Claude McKay, one of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, arrived in the post-Civil War Soviet Russia in the fall of 1922 – a ‘magic pilgrimage’ that he had come to see as a veritable triumph for his race:

Never in my life did I feel prouder of being an African, a black, and no mistake about it …. From Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow I went triumphantly from surprise to surprise, extravagantly fêted on every side. I was carried along on a crest of sweet excitement. I was like a black icon in the flesh …. Yes, that was exactly what it was. I was like a black icon. ¹³

After a memorable 1926 trip to the Soviet Union, the great pan-Africanist W.E.B. Du Bois enthused about his Soviet travels:

I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me. I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik. ¹⁴

Similar sentiments, if less eloquently expressed, are found in the transcripts of interviews with black Americans and consular dispatches generated by the Riga legation. A review of such documents points to an early association of black with red on the part of State Department officers based in Riga; their reports demonstrated a fairly clear understanding of the antiracist thrust of Soviet propaganda and its potential appeal to segments of the African-American community.

Public debates and officially expressed apprehensions about possible connections between Russian Bolsheviks and black radicals predated African American ‘pilgrimages’ to the Soviet Union and the opening of the US consulate in Latvia in 1922. During the so-called Red Summer of 1919, the young and still unknown J. Edgar Hoover attributed an upsurge of racial violence in Chicago to the activities of ‘Communistic’ blacks, the rumors of urban-based African Americans ‘turning Red’ swirled around the country, particularly in the South. ¹⁵ In reality, very few African Americans took much interest in Communism at the time. There seems to be no record of any African American participation in the founding of the CPUSA in 1919. By the time of McKay’s Russian voyage, only two African Americans had joined the party. One of them, a Dutch Guayana native Otto F. Huiswould, accompanied McKay to Petrograd and Moscow to attend a Comintern Congress. The other, a Dallas-born Lovett Fort-Whiteman, would follow soon in their footsteps and move to the Soviet Union, where he would undergo ideological training and eventually settle permanently. Fort-Whiteman would perish during the purges. ¹⁶

The numbers of black communists may have been modest but the interest in Soviet Russia and its efforts to emancipate its racial and ethnic minorities continued to rise within the African-American community – the parallels between US racism and the predicament of Russia’s minority populations under the tsars were too obvious to ignore. Soon after the return from his first stint in Moscow, Fort-Whiteman questioned in print the utility of remaining loyal to the institutions that oppressed black US citizens. ‘The Negro is admonished to be loyal and support American institutions,’ he wrote. ‘Loyalty has no virtue within itself; it all depends on that to which one is loyal. Is there any virtue in the slave being loyal to his master?’ The despised and disenfranchised Jews and Muslims of the former Russian empire had found emancipation in the course of the Bolshevik revolution, they gained equality precisely because the Bolsheviks dismantled the institutions that had oppressed them. ¹⁷ Not surprisingly, Fort-Whiteman’s sizable FBI file opened with a report tellingly titled ‘Radical Negro Activities,’ which was apparently occasioned by Fort-Whiteman’s stated desire to travel to Russia and his expressed admiration for the Bolshevik revolution (a contemporary observer described him as the ‘reddest Red of the Negro race’ ¹⁸ ). There was ‘nothing for the negro’ in the USA, Fort-Whiteman confided to an undercover FBI informer. And nothing would change unless there was a revolution ‘like they have in other countries.’ ¹⁹ His eventual trip to Soviet Russia only served to strengthen this certainty: he was struck by the ‘absence of racial hostility under the Soviets’ and had grown convinced that the only way to solve the ‘Negro problem’ in the USA was through the ‘revolutionizing of the American social order.’ ²⁰

Notably, similar sentiments were aired in the African American press by travelers far less radical than the card-carrying Communist Fort-Whiteman. James H. Hubert of the New York Urban League concluded upon his return from the Soviet Union that no other country offered better opportunities to the young and politically engaged educated blacks. ²¹ A prominent educator William Pickens came back from Russia overwhelmed by the Soviets’ hospitality, impressed by his interactions with his hosts (including a conversation about race with the soon-to-be-exiled Leon Trotsky), and claiming to have been handled on his trip with ‘almost embarrassing courtesy.’ ²² Another traveling educator, Thomas L. Dabney, found no evidence of discrimination ‘on account of race’ – the African Americans he encountered in Moscow reported being treated well by the Russians and ‘accorded absolute equality and freedom everywhere.’ His own experiences seemed to bear out these claims and led him to conclude that the Soviets had succeeded in eliminating racial conflicts and granted ‘every race and minority group’ a complete freedom to ‘develop its own culture and worship it as it pleases.’ ²³ Lillian Lynch, a Pittsburgh-based board member of the National Miners’ Union, similarly enthused about her Soviet travels: ‘Never before … I have been made to feel so completely welcomed. Something in the soil [sic] made me know that I was wanted the moment I set foot on it. There I had no fear of discrimination anywhere.’ ²⁴

Such favorable accounts by black American travelers in the early Soviet Union proliferated in the black press and stoked sympathetic curiosity, particularly on the part of the educated and urban-based black elites. ²⁵ Reports on Soviet journeys by black Americans featured prominently on the pages of African American newspapers and often focused on the alleged absence of racial discrimination and color prejudice in the Soviet Union. ²⁶ After two white American workers were terminated from their contract and expelled from the Soviet Union for assaulting a black American toolmaker at a Stalingrad tractor factory the African American press presented the incident as a case study in glaring contrast between US racism and Soviet egalitarianism, arguing that the Communist appeal for the black community in the USA lay not so much in the precepts of Soviet ideology but rather in the rhetoric and practice of antiracism:

How can Communism fail to make progress among Colored people in the face of such a situation, when Negro newspapers broadcast the recent expulsion from Russia of two Americans, not for lynching, but for beating a Negro worker? How can Negroes in America, denied the equality guaranteed them by the Constitution, fail to think when they learn that the Soviet government officially protects their rights in Russia against prejudiced white Americans. ²⁷

This mounting, and often vocal, fascination with the Soviet Union was not lost on the mainstream US press and, ostensibly, US officials, including those employed by the State Department. As early as mid-1920s, moderate and conservative black leaders began to sound warnings of the Soviet Union’s budding appeal, which they connected to the growing frustration with the realities of Jim Crowism and the exclusionary labor practices. To keep blacks at a safe distance from Communism, argued W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘the white people of America’ would have to treat them better. In the meantime, Moscow-based and Comintern-affiliated communists were exerting considerable efforts in radicalizing US blacks and stimulating their participation in the labor movement. ²⁸

The Riga legation dutifully monitored such activities and reported their findings back to the State Department. These reports clearly indicate that the general suspicion in regards to the loyalty of black Americans, particularly those traveling abroad, and especially those journeying in the Soviet Union, was widely shared among the State Department rank and file. Legation officers kept tabs not only on the specific travelers but also on the Soviet-based bodies responsible for propaganda campaigns among Western and colonial non-white populations, cataloging relevant English-language publications and translating Russian-language works. ²⁹ Riga-generated reports found their way into the mainstream American press and were at least partially responsible for raising the specter of the ‘Negro unrest’ as a product of the alleged red-black collusion. ³⁰ When reporting on the activities of Americans in Russia, consular officials usually identified their race in case the persons in question happened to be black. And they tended to draw implicit (and on occasion explicit) connections between their race and suspected radicalism. A memorandum on American delegates to the 6th Comintern Congress in Moscow (1928) submitted by the legation to the State Department highlighted the race (‘Negro’) of each African American delegate. ³¹ A legation report on a US workers’ delegation visiting the USSR to celebrate the 14th anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution (1931) singled out two black delegates (the above-mentioned Pittsburgh steel worker Lillian Lynch and one Langworth) who were explicitly identified by their race. Lillian Lynch was reported to have delivered a denunciation of race relations in the USA and expressed admiration for Soviet workers. Langworth arguably had gone even further when he stated his readiness ‘to fight, in case of war, for the defense of the Soviet Union.’ ³² Generally speaking, legation reports and memoranda acknowledge the centrality of US race relations to the Soviet critique of capitalism and the USA; they also testify to the interest that the State Department had in this issue as well as in the role of individual African Americans in showcasing US racism and submitting it to international scrutiny and condemnation. ³³

In 1932, the Soviets initiated a propaganda film project to expose once again the fraught state of U.S. race relations and the predicament of African Americans, particularly those residing in the American South. ³⁴ To this purpose, the Soviets hired 22 young African American actors (most of whom had very little to do with acting) and brought them to the Soviet Union. Among the most famous members of the troupe was one of black America’s preeminent poets, Langston Hughes. ³⁵ The project, provisionally (and not all that imaginatively) titled Black and White, generated a lot of excitement among black American intellectuals and radicals, its progress followed closely in the black American press. ³⁶ But the film never got made and ended up in a controversy when the Soviet side suddenly abandoned it, apparently for reasons of political expediency at the time when Moscow was seeking diplomatic ties with Washington. Some of the participants left Russia in a huff, others stayed on to explore other possibilities in the ‘racism-free’ Soviet Union. Langston Hughes, favorably impressed by the warm reception and his apparent popularity with Soviet readers, embarked on a months-long journey across the Soviet Union that he later memorably recounted in his memoir. ³⁷ The failed film project exposed both the ambitions and the limitations of the Soviets’ African-American outreach and became a symbolic milestone in the history of contacts between the Soviet Union and black America. ³⁸

Not surprisingly, from the moment the rumors of the project first began to swirl through its subsequent demise, the officers at the legation in Riga followed the developments with great attention, as reflected in a series of detailed memoranda on the subject. The actors’ arrival in Russia and the eventual implosion of the project and the ensuing scandal were monitored closely from Riga, a task made easier by the fact that some of the participants in these events made their appearance at the legation and were promptly debriefed there. The reports of two such debriefings – of Haywood Hall (Harry Haywood) and Langston Hughes – leave little doubt that US diplomats understood the significance of Soviet propaganda effort directed at the black community back in the USA; they also recognized the unique US vulnerabilities to such campaigns resulting from the history of racial injustice in the USA. The loyalty of the two African American interviewees was almost immediately suspect, particularly in the case of Haywood Hall, who styled himself as a journalist for the New York Amsterdam News and whose Russian sojourn evoked instant suspicions in the interviewing consular official. The officer doubts the interviewee’s claim to have self-financed the trip, questions the easiness with which he had gained entry into the Soviet Union, his ability to crisscross the length of the enormous country and even his shotgun marriage to a Russian translator. ³⁹

Probably due to his celebrity, Langston Hughes was subject to a more thorough examination at the legation, where he stopped by on 11 March 1933, to renew his passport. In a confidential report Hughes is identified as ‘Mr. A, an American negro novelist and poet’ and a leader of the Black and White film group. What transpired at the Riga legation that day was a wide-ranging colloquy about race and identity between two young Americans (Bernard Gufler and Langston Hughes were of almost exactly the same age), one white and the other black. Later in life and, especially, in his memoir I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes remembered his Russian sojourn with great fondness. In the consular interview, however, he comes across as measured in his assessment of Russia and at times even sarcastic. The Russians, he confided in his interlocutor, had not properly prepared for the film project and thoroughly mismanaged it. The cast was selected without any proper consideration for acting ability or age of the actors – ‘the usual hit or miss Russian method.’ It is likely that Hughes was equivocating, conscious of the possible political pitfalls, even though he did admit to the financial and social benefits attendant to his stay in Russia (generous royalties for publications, hotel stays, travel opportunities, access to stores reserved for foreigners). The conversation, however, became more substantive (and illuminating) once it veered towards the condition of blacks in the USA. Hughes envisioned few prospects for African Americans turning towards Communism en masse, especially in the North where, he argued, ‘negro doesn’t feel at any particularly great disadvantage as compared with the white man.’ However, the pervasive racism in the American South could make African Americans susceptible to communist propaganda. In a word of warning to his white American peer but also possibly trying to appeal to his class sensibilities, Hughes volunteered that the educated whites could prevent the radicalization of African Americans by working to alleviate the conditions ‘under which the negroes live.’ Surprisingly, he found the root of anti-black prejudice among the ‘large masses of poor and backward white people’ in the South. Americans, in his view, could learn from the Soviet feats of social engineering in Central Asia, where the Soviets succeeded in emancipating the previously oppressed local populations, who used to be ‘as ignorant as Mississippi negroes.’ ⁴⁰

Not all encounters between consular officials and African American visitors to the legation remained that civil though. Mutual suspicions and even open antagonisms between some African American interviewees and white US diplomats sometimes were palpable and, on occasion, boiled over. The race of the interviewee seems to have been an immediate cause for alarm and an indication of possible Communist sympathies. In August 1930, explaining his decision to interview Maude White, who was seeking return passage back to the USA after a lengthy stay in the Soviet Union (where, unbeknown to consular officers, she had been a student at the University of the Toilers of the East ⁴¹ ), a legation officer reported to his superiors in Washington:

I have an honor to submit herewith passport application, Form no. 176, of Miss Maude Mae White, an American negress and to report the following information thereto as of possible interest in view of the increasing communist agitation in the United States … Being a negress [sic] and having resided in Soviet Russia since December 11, 1927, she was carefully questioned by myself and Mr. Kirley, the passport clerk of this office. ⁴²

Race of another passport applicant, Norval Harrison Allen, interviewed by the legation just a few weeks earlier, also raised ‘red flags’ in the minds of diligent consular bureaucrats. The title of the special dispatch to the Secretary of State, containing the transcript of the questioning session, inadvertently reveals the depth of racial divide in the USA at the time. For the reporting officer, the racial categorization of his fellow American Norval Allen, to whom he refers as ‘a negro and [sic] an American’ and ‘an American negro suspected of being a Communist,’ eclipses Allen’s national identity. ⁴³

It appears that at least for some African Americans their interview at the legation became a ‘back-to-reality’ experience, a point of transition on their return journey to the racially divided and race-obsessed America. Yet they were returning home from their Soviet sojourn with an enhanced sense of self-worth, less docile, and less prepared to reassume without questioning the status of second-class citizens. ⁴⁴ The humiliation of the grilling at the legation served as a prompt reminder of the racial inequality they faced back in the USA, and stood in stark contrast to the respect and official pampering accorded to them during their stay in the Soviet Union. A natural response to the penetrating questions by the suspicious and often openly hostile officials was to assume an evasive posture. But on occasion, evasiveness gave way to a thinly disguised irritation and even anger. Marie Houston, ‘a negress, born in Nashville,’ having spent two-and-a-half years in the USSR, taxed her interviewers’ patience by giving only the vaguest of answers to their probing questions. Refusing to divulge any particulars of her life in Russia she claimed that she had ‘just been visiting’ and had lived on her own money. ⁴⁵ Norval Allen similarly exasperated legation officials by his ‘evasive and shifty attitude,’ making them ever more suspicious of his possible Communist affiliation. ⁴⁶

Other visitors proved to be more open about their politics and less emotionally restrained. Maude White in her legation interview was anything but vague. In fact, she directly challenged the interviewing officers by praising in strong terms the country where ‘negroes are afforded every possible opportunity for study and may live as social equals to the Russians.’ She spoke warmly of the Soviets, who, she insisted, always treated her with respect and kindness and were well informed about the USA and ‘the lynchings there.’ In the course of her interview White grew progressively agitated and eventually, having lost ‘all control of herself,’ startled the interviewing bureaucrats by decrying God, refusing to give an oath of allegiance, and (the worst of all sins) declaring her commitment to ‘social equality.’ Upon hearing such apostasy, the examining legation clerk summed up his opinion of Miss White in unambiguous and somber terms: ‘She is a type of American negress that has become embittered by racial discrimination in the United States and is of a communist turn of mind.’ ⁴⁷ An earlier State Department memorandum dispatched to the legation and alerting it to the ‘activities of American negroes in Soviet Russia’ provides a useful context for Maude White’s outburst. Even though the document focused on the activities of a particular black radical (Otto Hall, brother of Harry Haywood) it also brought up the specter of a massive propaganda effort undertaken jointly by the Soviets and their African-American allies, some of them educated at Moscow’s ideological schools. ⁴⁸ According to the information available at the time to the State Department, such radicals ‘were sent to Russia and partially maintained there by American communist organizations.’ The document leaves little doubt that its authors fully expected disaffected African Americans to be ‘[susceptible] to communist propaganda of world revolution,’ as they expected the Soviets to ‘make a good deal of them [visiting American blacks] for political reasons.’ ⁴⁹

In view of the above, it is hardly surprising that legation reports capture vividly the tensions underlying the interactions between consular officials and African American callers. The US diplomats remained attuned to the racial dynamics and hierarchies at work back home, and readily reproduced them at their post in Riga. Debriefings of white passport applicants (many of them technical experts (or spetsialisty) working on a contract in the Soviet Union) usually contained none of the drama or mutual suspicion often permeating the encounters with African American visitors. ⁵⁰ Even the legation interview with an Indian-American engineer, one Nilkanth Ram Chavre of Detroit, employed by a Soviet automobile plant, stands in stark contrast with the frequently contentious quizzing of black visitors. In a report to the State Department, the interviewing official communicates his high regard for this particular applicant, whose expertise and poise he readily attributes to the interviewee’s high-class upbringing: ‘… His father was a judge in India and … his family belonged to the Brahmin caste and his appearance and general demeanor bear out his statements as to his high caste.’ The diplomat cites approvingly the engineer’s opinions of his Soviet employers, whom Chavre infantilizes by comparing them to a ‘group of children who are playing with their first mechanical toys … and generally making a mess of things …’ Chavre further impresses his interlocutor by evoking the dangers of Bolshevism (he does recognize some Soviet achievements though, especially in providing free healthcare to sick workers) and drawing parallels between the alleged British efforts to sow mistrust between the lower and upper castes in India and the Soviet tactics of pitting social classes against each other. As a self-identified Brahmin, he was clearly concerned about hegemonic actors stirring up class conflict, a sentiment admittedly shared by some of the Russia watchers in Riga. ⁵¹

The itineraries and activities of African Americans traveling or residing in the Soviet Union were the source of great attention and ongoing commentary on the part of the Riga legation, up until the opening of the US embassy in Moscow in late 1933. Throughout this period consular officials in Riga consistently displayed their awareness of the Soviet Union’s appeal to black Americans; in fact, they assumed these travelers to have been embittered by their experience of race relations back in the USA. A black American traveler crossing the Soviet border was viewed by the consulate (and by the State Department) as both a potential target and a tool of Soviet propaganda. ⁵² The legation paid particular attention to individuals known or suspected of radical activities (for example, Harry Haywood or his brother Otto Hall) but also to groups of travelers (such as the Black and White film troupe) whose presence in the Soviet Union was bound to attract media coverage and thus be of benefit to the Soviets. ⁵³

In the 1920s and 1930s thousands of American experts traveled to the Soviet Union to take part in the implementation of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32). Some of them were drawn by a desire to participate in a grand socio-economic experiment, others (likely the majority) by fairly generous contracts, which seemed even more lucrative as the Great Depression continued to ravage the US economy. The ‘romance of Russian development’ (in the words of historian David Engerman) gripped thousands of Americans, sometimes irrespective of their personal politics. ⁵⁴ However, as recently observed by Maya Peterson in her study of US agricultural experts in Soviet Central Asia, ‘development work is inherently political.’ ⁵⁵ Consular officials in Riga apparently shared this view, but it gained in certainty whenever they had to deal with black American experts. As a result, African-American spetsialisty in the Soviet Union, and particularly their real or imagined involvement in Soviet propaganda efforts targeting the US and global capitalism, drew the attention of and commentary by the legation. The so-called ‘Robinson affair’ (briefly referenced above) presented a case in point. In 1930, Robert Robinson, a young toolmaker of Jamaican origin employed at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, became the victim of a racially-motivated assault by two of his white American co-workers. The scandal was a gift to Soviet propaganda and received wall-to-wall coverage in Soviet newspapers. ⁵⁶ The two white workers (Brown and Lewis) emerged out of the fracas as poster boys for the depravity of American racism, their ill-starred fight with a black compatriot presented to Soviet and international audiences as representative of US racism. Brown and Lewis were put on a highly publicized trial and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union. The trial and the subsequent expulsion were covered extensively in the African-American press and generated unflattering comparisons for the USA. Even the generally anti-Communist National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was impressed:

How can Communism fail to make progress among Colored people in the face of such a situation, when Negro newspapers broadcast the recent expulsion from Russia of two Americans, not for lynching, but for beating a Negro worker? How can Negroes in America, denied the equality guaranteed them by the Constitution, fail to think when they learn that the Soviet government officially protects their rights in Russia against prejudiced white Americans? ⁵⁷

Riga, too, was paying attention. The consulate prepared a detailed report on the Stalingrad trial, complete with an overview and analysis of its coverage in the Soviet press, which the report revealingly described as ‘Bolshevik activities’ and ‘Soviet revolutionary propaganda.’ The report steers clear of passing any value judgements on the incident itself, the document’s main focus is not the behavior of the white American workers, but rather its ‘value for revolutionary propaganda among the Negroes of the United States.’ ⁵⁸ The incident marked Robert Robinson as a ‘person of interest’ and over the next few years the legation would file a series of dispatches on Robinson’s growing engagement with the Soviet political system, which culminated, in 1934, in his election to the Moscow City Council. Even though in newspaper interviews Robinson, while expressing his gratitude to the Soviets, insisted that he was ‘no Red,’ US consular officials in Riga seemed to be of a different opinion – Robert Robinson was black and the victim of a widely publicized racist assault by other white Americans, which is to say, he was possibly red. ⁵⁹

The 1931 arrival in Uzbekistan of a dozen African-American agricultural specialists attracted even more scrutiny from the State Department and its Riga outpost. The group had been assembled by Oliver Golden, a Moscow-trained Comintern operative and a Tuskegee-educated former student of the famed African American botanist, George Washington Carver. It was Golden’s ambition to help the Soviet Union develop its cotton industry, but there was also a symbolic importance attached to his mission to bring black American specialists to the USSR.

It meant something special to him for a black to help other people of color … It would mean more for an Uzbek … to see an educated, skilled black American than to see only white specialists. It would show what was possible when people pulled themselves out of oppression,

reminisced Golden’s Jewish American wife, Bertha Golden. ⁶⁰ The group’s departure from New York, in October 1931, generated some excitement in the African-American community and the travelers were even given a warm send-off party at Cooper Union. ⁶¹ Soviet Central Asia held special fascination for a number of Soviet-bound African American radicals and intellectuals, who recognized a historical similarity between the fate of the dark-skinned native populations in the cotton-producing regions of the empire of the tsars and the plight of black Americans in the American South. ⁶² The stories of radical racial emancipation in the backward Central Asia under the Soviets inspired a generation of American leftists to look with fascination and hope towards the Soviet Union’s Muslim republics, to such an extent, in fact, that one of them (Joshua Kunitz) dedicated his 1935 book on Central Asia ‘To the Negro People of the United States.’ ⁶³

From the moment of their departure from the USA, the Riga consulate regularly reported on the whereabouts and activities of these black specialists. The consulate remained concerned with the coverage they were receiving in the Soviet press and assessed the chances for ‘the employment of additional Negro specialists from the cotton belt of the United States.’ The officials also monitored closely the statements made by the experts as they were reported in Soviet newspapers. ⁶⁴ When in 1933, two of the group’s members, Oliver Golden and Anthony Overton (repeatedly referred to in the report as ‘two negroes’), called at the consulate to renew their passports, both found themselves subjected to detailed debriefings. Golden and, especially, Overton were questioned at length about the details of their employment, including the location of the cotton fields and gins and the types of technical equipment in use at Soviet cotton farms. Overton revealed that at least some work in the fields and at the gins was performed by convicts but admitted to not knowing the exact proportion of convict to free labor. It’s a sober reminder that slave labor represented yet another commonality between the histories of cotton production in the American South and Soviet Central Asia. ⁶⁵

Golden and Overton would have been less puzzled by the scrutiny that their appearance in Riga attracted from the legation staff had they known that over the previous two years legation officials had been keeping close tabs on their group’s activities, particularly those seemingly unrelated to their duties as agricultural experts. At the height of the Scottsboro case, which galvanized both domestic and international public opinion against the inequities of US race relations, the 11 experts penned an open letter protesting the convictions (death sentences) of eight black teenagers falsely accused of assaulting two white women on a train in Alabama. Soviet propaganda outlets made full use of the Scottsboro travesty, the campaign to free the ‘Scottsboro Boys’ swept across the Soviet Union producing a slew of indignant editorials, mass appeals and organized protest demonstrations. ⁶⁶ An impassioned statement by a group of black American experts residing in the Soviet Union and assisting in its modernization efforts provided an extra weight to the Soviets’ propaganda punch. And that was certainly the conclusion of the US diplomats in Riga who, in February 1932, dutifully transmitted to the State Department both the Russian original and its English translation of the protest letter by ‘eleven American Negroes working in cotton fields of Central Asia.’ The language of the letter in question was intemperate in tone and its phraseology suspiciously Marxist-Leninist:

… American capitalism in the clutches of the severest economic crisis seeks every possible means to draw the attention of the impoverished proletariat, the many-million army of unemployed from revolutionary struggle … The history of the American Negro is a bloody history of American capitalism … Long live the solidarity of the white and Negro workmen in the struggle against the terror of capitalists and lynching! ⁶⁷

One of the more revealing features of the report on the affair is the matter-of-fact way in which consular officials informed the State Department about the apparent politicization of a relatively large group of black American citizens in the employ of the Soviet Union. It is quite clear that such radicalization did not come as a surprise; if anything it was anticipated. Black Americans crossing the Soviet border were assumed to be susceptible to Soviet mystique. And one can imagine that the white US diplomats experienced no particular shock when, early in 1933, they received the paperwork from Uzbekistan to register the birth of a child born to one of the African American agricultural experts stationed there. Joseph Roane of Kremlin [sic], Virginia, and his wife Sadie Roane had a baby boy, whose birth certificate was issued by the administrative office of Tashkent’s Lenin district. The boy had an unusual name for an American citizen: Joseph Stalin. ⁶⁸

In February 1946, George F. Kennan, while serving at the US embassy in Moscow, composed one of the most famous documents in US diplomatic history – the so-called ‘Long Telegram.’ The telegram articulated Kennan’s learned but highly idiosyncratic understanding of Russian national character and history, it also offered a number of recipes for an effective containment of the Soviet Union. In fact, the telegram became the blueprint for the policy of containment that would shape the conduct of US–Soviet relations through much of the Cold War. In his analysis of Western vulnerabilities, Kennan paid special attention to the obvious deficiencies of liberal democracies that lent themselves to being exploited by the Soviets: ‘All persons with grievances, whether economic or racial, will be urged to seek redress … Here poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents, etc …. Resentment among dependent peoples will be stimulated.’ ⁶⁹ Kennan’s previous tour of duty at the Riga legation must have provided him with an insight into some of those ‘racial grievances,’ which had motivated some of his black fellow citizens to ‘seek redress’ in the land of the Bolsheviks.

The US consular records from Riga shed new light on a peculiar chapter in the complicated story of a contest for moral superiority between the young Soviet state and its Western adversaries. During much of the 1920s and early-1930s the modest building housing the US legation in Riga became the site where white State Department officers periodically came into contact with their black compatriots traveling to or from the Soviet Union. The tensions and mutual suspicions underlying these encounters are palpably evident in the legation reports and dispatches to the State Department, they provide an instructive commentary on the state of race relations in Jim Crow America. They also supply ample evidence of the attraction that the early Soviet Union held for many African Americans, an attraction that often had little to do with Marxism-Leninism per se but quite a bit with the Soviets’ ostensible commitment to antiracism. In these records, one finds unmistakable signs of race functioning as a political category – the travelers’ skin color rendered them politically and ideologically suspect. This automatic conflation of black with red, this association of racial difference with leftist politics, would emerge as a prominent feature of the coming ideological battles during the Cold War and, one is tempted to add, would persist to this very day.