BRIAN: About the same time that black Americans were discovering opportunities in Europe, other Americans were discovering a very different kind of community that was taking shape further to the east. In the 1920s, the Soviet Union began inviting foreigners to come help build the new communist state from the ground up. They were looking for experts in different sectors of society– scientists, mechanics, agronomists, that sort of thing.
ED: For many who take up the invitation, the Soviet Union was a great experiment, a chance to see if communism might work on a grand scale. But by the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s, lots of people were simply looking for a job, and the Russians paid well. By 1932, as many as 11,000 Americans were working in the Soviet Union.
BRIAN: Yelena Khanga is a journalist in Moscow today. Her grandparents were among those 11,000. Yelena’s grandfather, Oliver, was black, the son of a slave and an early student at Tuskegee. He was also a committed Communist. Her grandmother, Bertha, was white, a Jewish immigrant, and the daughter of a New York City rabbi. After Bertha and Oliver met in New York, they heard about the grand experiment happening in Russia. And they were intrigued.
YELENA KHANGA: And my grandfather thought why only whites had such an opportunity to build the new world. Why won’t black try to do the same thing. So he made a group of, I believe, African-American families, and they all decided to go to Russia. And my grandmother was the only white woman that joined this group.
ED: Most of these men had lived or worked in the rural South at some point. And so they were asked to help establish a cotton industry in Uzbekistan of all places. Yelena says her grandfather’s motivations were not just about finding a job.
YELENA KHANGA: He was a true believer that there should be a world where everybody was equal, where the color of your skin was not a problem to the rest of the community. And being an expert in agriculture just helped him to earn his living. But basically that was a political decision.
BRIAN: And is it fair to say he felt there was no place in America and not even New York, not in the North, where he would be treated as fairly and equally as the Soviet Union.
YELENA KHANGA: Absolutely. Absolutely. And to tell you the truth, Soviet Union was really– there was no place for racism at the time. Because we were the country where everybody was equal and everybody loves to chat and blah, blah, blah. But as foreigners, they were always under the eye of the Big Brother.
BRIAN: That Big Brother, of course, was Joseph Stalin, who came to power in the middle of this project.
YELENA KHANGA: Stalin was very xenophobic. We was very afraid of foreigners.
BRIAN: Yes.
YELENA KHANGA: And he said that all the foreigners should change their citizenship if they wanted to stay in Russia. Or they had to get out of the country. At the time, my mother was born, and if you understand, she was black. And my grandparents thought that being black female, she wouldn’t have a chance to get a good education in the United States. So their choice was either to change their citizenship and stay in Russia and giving my mother the best education they could afford. And that’s why they did that.
BRIAN: They did change their citizenship?
YELENA KHANGA: Exactly. The rest of the group went back to the United States.
BRIAN: What do you think the difference between the rest of the group and your grandparents was?
YELENA KHANGA: Well, we can’t talk about the rest of the group, because each of them has their own agenda. But from what I understand most of the group were just interested in finding a good job. They were not necessarily political oriented. So when the situation got very intense, they just turned away and went back home.
BRIAN: Now your grandfather died in 1940. He must’ve observed a lot of political turmoil during the ’30s in the Soviet Union.
YELENA KHANGA: Yes.
BRIAN: Did his feelings about the Soviet Union ever change before his death?
MAYA JASANOFF: Definitely. In fact, we think that he died not because of his kidney disease, but basically because he was very, very disappointed about what he saw lately. There were lots of Americans that disappeared in jail. There were lots of Russian friends that he had– in fact, Communists like he was– that were murdered.
And once the police came to arrest him, but he just happened not to be home when they came to arrest him. And then he was so shocked to hear that from the neighbors. He went right to the police station to say here I am. You can arrest me, if you think I did something wrong.
And they said oh don’t worry. We have already fulfilled the plan for arrests for this month. So he realized that there was a biggest mistake. So he died, we think, because that was his choice to die, because he didn’t want to fight anymore. And he didn’t see the reason and the purpose to live anymore.
BRIAN: What do you think in retrospect about those thousands of Americans that did come over to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and the 1930s, some for purely economic reasons, some for a combination of economic and ideological reasons, some for purely ideological reasons?
YELENA KHANGA: What do I think about them? See, I think that they were not really Communists. They were utopists. You know this word, utopia?
BRIAN: Utopia.
YELENA KHANGA: People that believed in utopia.
BRIAN: They were Utopians.
YELENA KHANGA: Yeah. They were young. They wanted to make the world better. And they put their lives on that. Unfortunately, most of them saw that that was a mistake. But they wouldn’t admit that this was a mistake. And I think we all have to respect them, because if people won’t try to change the world to the better, well, who will?
My grandmother that had a very difficult life, because it was very hard for her to get a job being American. I remember the day when she was dying, she said still, I made the right decision to come here. And I’m glad that my daughter was born and raised in Russia. She never experienced racism the way she would experience it in America.
ED: Yelena Khanga is a journalist living in Moscow. Her book, co-authored with Susan Jacoby is called “Soul to Soul. A Black Russian American family, 1865 to 1992.” Special thanks to Ms. Jacoby for helping us get in touch with Yelena.