Proximity of Russia to Black Africa. Prepared by Department of Geography Cartographic Services Laboratory, University of Maryland
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Proximity of Russia to black Africa. Prepared by Department of Geography Cartographic Services Laboratory, University of Maryland. RUSSIA AND THE NEGRO Arab, an alphabet card from nineteenth-century Russia. As in other European societies, early Russian conceptions of blacks often fused disparate racial and cultural types. (Courtesy fames L. Rice) ALLISON BLAKELY RUSSIA AND THE NEGRO BLACKS IN RUSSIAN HISTORY AND THOUGHT jilt HOWARD UNIVERSITY PRESS WASHINGTON, D.C. 1 986 Copyright © 1986 by Allison Blakely All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Howard University Press, 2900 Van Ness Street, N. W., Washington, D. C. 20008. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Blakely, Allison, 1940- Russia and the Negro. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Blacks—Soviet Union—History. I. Title. DK34.B53B55 1986 947'.00496 85-5251 ISBN 0-88258-146-5 TO MY MOTHER, ALICE CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Foreword xi Preface xiii Part One: IMPERIAL RUSSIA 1 1. Negroes of the Black Sea Region 5 2. Negro Servants in Imperial Russia 13 3. Russia and Black Africa 26 4. Negro Immigrants and Visitors and the Russian Response 39 5. The Negro in Russian Art 50 Part Two: SOVIET RUSSIA 71 6. Black Sea Negroes in Soviet Society 75 7. The Black "Pilgrims" 81 8. The Soviet Perception of the American "Negro Question" 105 9. The USSR and Black Africa 123 10. The Negro in Soviet Art 144 Conclusion 153 Notes 158 Selected Bibliography 182 Index 191 v ii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Arab—Alphabet card from nineteenth century Russia frontispiece Rosim Ababikov of Batumi Oblast (1913) 6 A Negro Adzhar, Adzhi-Abdul-Ogly, of Batumi Oblast (1912) 7 Engraving of Peter the Great with a Negro servant by A. Schoonebeeck 14 Engraving of Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaia with a Negro servant 14 Engraving depicting tsar Paul I's prison visit to the rebellious General T. Kosciuszko (1801) 15 General Abram Hannibal 23 Ira Aldridge in formal dress 41 Richard T. Greener 45 Portrait of Alexander Pushkin by Orest Kiprenskii 51 Countess Samoilova and Her Foster Daughter by Karl Briullov (c. 1832) 58 Detail from The Sisters A. A. and O. A. Shishmareva (1839) 60 Bathsheba by Karl Briullov (1832) 61 Negro Boy by K. E. Makovskii 62 Ira Aldridge as Mungo in Isaac Bickerstaff's opera The Padlock 67 Ira Aldridge drawn by Taras Shevchenko (1858) 70 IX X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Claude McKay portrait by Carl Van Vechten 83 Claude McKay with the Red Army in 1923 85 Langston Hughes portrait by Carl Van Vechten 94 Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois with U.S. Congressman Vito Marcantonio 103 James Ford 110 Richard Wright portrait by Carl Van Vechten 114 Soviet cartoon accusing the United States of hypocrisy on social justice 117 Soviet cartoon criticizing white resistance to school desegregation in the United States 118 Kwame Nkrumah 129 Soviet cartoon condemning European colonialism in Africa 130 Soviet cartoon celebrating the end of European colonialism in Africa 131 Soviet cartoon opposing the United States' attitude toward the United Nations 132 Soviet cartoon treating the Congolese Civil War 133 Scene from a Soviet student social 136 Wayland Rudd 145 Paul Robeson in stage garb 148 A Negro Concert by Aleksandr Deineka (1935) 156 A Negro Youth by Aleksandr Deineka (1935) 157 FOREWORD Here is a long-awaited book, a pioneer narrative of skill and substance, but above all a work showing profound feeling for the subject, backed by thorough, painstaking research in well-known but mostly obscure sources of both Russian and Western origin. The wonder is that no one before Dr. Blakely has come forth gathering and telling this meaningful story. Since the early eighteenth century, the world's academics, and also some curious laymen, knew that there were Negroes in Russia, even if only a few. They knew that Alexander Pushkin, Slavdom's greatest poet, was a descendant of a dark Ethiopian lad brought to those snowy plains to become a favorite of Tsar Peter the Great; that this Abram Hannibal, as he was called by the sovereign, had a distinguished career and left many notable descendants to serve and glorify the Russian Empire. Among them was Pushkin, that celebrated Russian bard who, in the early nineteenth century, proudly spoke of himself as an arap—a Negro. Later in the last century, word came from Russia's Caucasus mountains of a Negro settlement on the northeastern shores of the Black Sea. Its dwellers were quite likely descendants of black slaves who were bought by local Abkhazian princes in Turkey, once a major slave market where African captives were taken by Arab traders. Until 1861 and the liberation of Russia's serfs by Alexander II, the Romanov court and certain of its nobles sought to add blacks purchased in xi XII FOREWORD foreign lands to their human property as a kind of whimsical yet picturesque oddity. It was the era's chic for an artist to include in the royal portraits a black boy in Oriental attire, standing discreetly in the background near his exalted owner. But increasingly, Negroes also came to tsarist Russia as free persons, of their own choice. These were primarily males from the United States and the West Indies, who were attracted by job opportunities in the aristocratic households or at large. Some were in restaurant or other catering services, sometimes becoming owners of such enter prises. Further, there were Negro jockeys and horse trainers; a few achieved nationwide (and even West European) renown. Among the musicians, singers, and actors who arrived, the most prominent was the celebrated Shakespearean tragedian Ira Aldridge. The attraction was mutual; so was the accommodation. Russians viewed these black-skinned men and women as rare and exotic, yet useful as well as ornamental. In turn, blacks who went to Russia— especially those who made the journey of their own volition—regarded the land of the tsars (and later of the commissars) as a land of unique people and fascinating customs. Yet, from a more practical perspective, Russia offered them a chance to gain a good and prosperous life that was singularly devoid of discrimination and humiliation because of their color. During the Soviet era, however, the image of social justice, of brotherhood, and complete equality with whites was the magnet. Dr. Blakely tells this part of his narrative with particularly keen under standing, without censure of the black pilgrims' naivete, and yet with no praise for their illusions. For example, the epic of Paul Robeson as a folk hero in the Soviet Union is presented with a fine balance. Dr. Blakely recounts Robeson's intense and unswerving loyalty to an ideal of racial equality that was not at all a reality in Robeson's native land. Most enlightening are Dr. Blakely's chapters on Red Moscow's early involvement in the problems of the American Negro. His detailed and thoughtful treatment of the Kremlin's ignorance and ineptness at dealing with this critical and complex phenomenon fully deserves our admiration. Equally searching and dispassionate is Dr. Blakely's dis cussion of more sophisticated efforts by Soviet communists to right the wrongs toward—and to profit from the woes of—the African Negro. This work fills a void and opens the field of Soviet scholarship to further investigations, fresh insights, and interpretations by those scholars who see the Negro's role in world affairs as a theme of unheralded significance. Dr. Blakely's classic study has given such researchers and writers a remarkable beginning. Albert Parry Colgate University PREFACE When Peter Chaadaev observed in his famous first "Philosophical Letter" in 1836 that Russia was "without a past or a future, in the midst of a flat calm," the authorities promptly declared him insane. By insisting that Russia was neither Asian nor European, and himself having been enamored of Roman Catholicism and Western civilization, Chaadaev had challenged the very essence of Russian autocracy and Orthodoxy. Still incensed by that portrayal, the government probably missed the full significance of Chaadaev's later "Apology of a Mad man," in which he made one of the earliest and most perceptive statements of an idea that has been central to the Russian intellectual tradition from the pre-Revolution era to the present. Chaadaev said that owing to Russia's retarded acquisition of European civilization, she was "called upon to resolve most of the ideas which have come up in the old societies, and to decide most of the weighty questions concerning the human race." This concept of a unique, messianic role for Russian society can also be discerned in such diverse schools of thought as the Slavophile, Westernizer, populist, and Soviet commu nist. Even in the 1980s, the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn continues to argue the case for "Old Russia" in his controversial philosophical views. A great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to the signifi cance of Russia's late start in economic, political, and intellectual XIII XIV PREFACE development in comparison with Western states. Thus far, however, little has been done in the areas of Russian social and cultural history. As one of its main concerns, the present study poses the question of whether the Negro experience of Russian society can be instructive for a better understanding of the Negro experience within the major Western societies. At the same time, the Negro experience in Russia may be suggestive of broader comparisons which might be made with other societies regarding, for example, the experience of non-Europeans in Russian society, and Russian views of foreigners, of the Soviet treatment of minorities, and of Soviet racial attitudes.