History paper

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Chapter 7

‘Like Another Planet to the Darker Americans’: Black Cultural Work in

1930s Moscow

S. Ani Mukherji

By the late 1920s, the Soviet Union and the Communist International had identified culture as a major battleground in the struggle for Bolshevik dominance at home and proletarian revolution abroad. One facet of this effort was the development of anti-colonial cultural work that spoke to audi- ences around the globe. Soviet playwright Sergei Tretiakov’s indictment of Western indifference to colonial suffering, Roar, China! (1926), was staged to great acclaim in Moscow, Berlin and New York. The classic dramatis- ation of anti-imperial revolt in Central Asia, Storm over Asia (1928), was an international sensation; among its many screenings across the globe, Indian students at Oxford University showed the film as a prelude to a debate on the importance of the Soviet experiment for colonial revolutionaries. When the anti-fascist Soviet documentary Abyssinia (1936) – a protest film that took aim at Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia – came to play in Shanghai, Italian seamen rioted in the theatre to object to the criticism of their homeland, much to the amusement of colonial comrades.1 These works, along with dozens of similar productions, linked the problems of capitalism, colonialism and racism, positing Communist revolution as their solution.

1 On cultural politics in the early Soviet Union, see Joseph Freeman, Joshua Kunitz and Louis Lozowick, Voices of October; Fitzpatrick (ed.), The Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931; Gleason, Kenez and Stites (eds.), Bolshevik Culture; Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front. Tretiakov’s Roar, China! is discussed in detail in Steven Lee, ‘Cold War Multiculturalism’. The Oxford Majlis discussion of Storm over Asia was summarised in ‘Oxford Letter’, Bharat (January 1931), p. 38. The US State Department noted the reception of Abyssinia in a memorandum dated 9 March 1937 in 861.4061/106, RG 59 NARA. See also ‘Chinese Protest Wrecking of Theatre by Fascist Who “Just Can’t Take It”’, Pittsburgh Courier (10 April 1937).

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Soviet screenwriter G. E. Grebner contributed to this international cultural front in 1930, when he drafted Black and White (Chernyi i belyi), an ‘anti-Ku- Klux-Klan’ story based on the author’s autodidactic study of American race relations. According to the script’s preface, Grebner hoped not only to produce a broadside against racial terror in the United States, but also to counter anti-black stereotypes rampant in American and European film, presenting, he said, ‘Negroes on screen as humans, for the first time’.2 After the author successfully pitched the work to the major production house for international films, Mezhrabpomfil’m, calls to recruit black actors ran in the Chicago Defender and New York Amsterdam News.3 By May 1932, twenty-two young African Americans – headed by Langston Hughes as script consultant and Louise Thompson as project organiser – had enlisted to travel to the Soviet Union for the film shoot.4 Eager to measure the reality of life in the red capital against the promise of a new egalitarian society, the group made its way to Moscow in June. At first, the players were favourably impressed with their hosts, as they were treated to the finest food, arts and culture that the Soviets could offer. But, after months of banquets, recitals and vacations, the group wondered when shooting for Black and White would begin. Hughes reported that the delays were caused by an unwieldy script rife with misconceptions about African American life, despite the revisions made by long-time black Muscovite Lovett Fort Whiteman.5 By September, however, rumours were circulating that the film had been scrapped due to the objection of a white American businessman involved in a major Soviet development project. Feeling betrayed, a handful of cast members dropped out of Black and White, cabling to black newspapers in New York that the Communist commitment to fighting racism had been an illusion.6 But those who remained committed to anti-racist struggle within the Communist Party worried that abandoning Black and White would be ‘disastrous’, if not ‘fatal’ to future Party work among African Americans.7

Contrary to these fears, the influx of African Americans that Black and White had brought to Moscow accelerated and deepened the Soviet engage- ment with black arts and culture.8 Langston Hughes stayed on in the Soviet

2 Grebner, ‘Chernye i belye’, RGALI 2014/1/61. Translations from Russian are mine. 3 Ibid.; ‘Soviet Seeks Negroes to Make Film of Conditions Here’, New York Amsterdam

News (9 March 1932); ‘Russia to Produce Film of Race Like in America Soon’, Chicago Defender (19 March 1932); ‘“Black and White”, New Film, Illustrates the Class Struggle in USA’, Moscow Daily News (28 June 1932).

4 For administrative details, see LTPP, boxes 1–2; ‘Announce Players for Soviet Picture’, New York Amsterdam News (8 June 1932).

5 See the manuscript for ‘Black and White’, LTPP, box 2, folder 4. 6 American businessman Colonel Hugh Cooper did, in fact, complain to Soviet officials

about the Black and White project. See ‘Memorandum by American Consulate General in Berlin’, 30 August 1932, in NARA, RG 59, 861.5017 – Living Conditions/519 State. That said, there were clearly multiple reasons for the collapse of the Black and White film project.

7 W. A. Domingo to Louise Thompson, 6 October 1932, LTPP, box 1, folder 22. 8 For an overview, see Maxim Matusevich, ‘An Exotic Subversive’.

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Union for several months to study race relations in Soviet Central Asia, composing a series of essays on his research and travels.9 Writer Dorothy West, along with her friend, aspiring painter Mildred Jones, prolonged their visits to explore the cultural scene in Moscow; Jones was taken on as a pupil by leading Soviet artist Alexander Deineka while West worked on short stories.10 Journalist Loren Miller wrote the foreword to a Russian-language anthol- ogy of African American poetry.11 Recent Hampton Institute graduate Lloyd Patterson found a position as a set designer. His mother, Margaret Glescoe, followed her son to Moscow where she became a worker-correspondent, recording her impressions of life and labour from the perspective of a black woman.12 This growing colony of black cultural workers circulated among the committed anti-colonialist activists who were in Moscow for political work, a coterie that included West Indians, Africans and Asians who introduced the visiting Americans to revolutionary struggles across the globe. When the poet Countee Cullen tried to lure Dorothy West away to Paris, she refused. Cullen ruefully admitted that she was right to remain in Moscow, replying: ‘It would be a spiritual catastrophe to come to Europe twice and not to see Paris. But I suppose in these times it is far more important to have seen Russia.’13 This sense of the Soviet experiment and of Moscow as particularly significant for African Americans increased over the course of the 1930s, as black recruits swelled the Communist Party during the Great Depression.14

As Cullen’s comment indicates, Moscow belonged to a broader global network of black diasporic locales, including capitals and port cities such as New York, London, Liverpool, Paris, Marseilles, Berlin and Hamburg. In and across these locations, migratory black subjects sought to define a political and cultural space for the articulation of individual and collective identities; among these locations, Moscow was unique. Soviet commitments to anti-racist and anti-colonial imperatives promoted state sponsorship of black foreign artists, offering these cultural workers training and patronage unavailable elsewhere. Just as important as this material support, however, was the material for the imagination that Moscow offered. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution

9 Langston Hughes, A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia; Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution; David Chioni Moore, ‘Local Color, Global Color’; Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain, pp. 86–148.

10 See West’s letters to her family, DWP, box 1, folder 1. 11 Iulian Anisimov, Afrika v Amerike. This work added to the proliferation of anthol-

ogies of black literature in the interwar period, indicative of the contestations of the meaning of ‘blackness’. See Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, esp. pp. 16–68.

12 ‘New Jersey Youth Abroad Takes Russian Bride’, Baltimore Afro-American (25 February 1933); Margaret Glescoe, ‘Negro Mother, Now a Shock Worker’; Dzhems Patterson, Dykhanie listvennitsy.

13 Countee Cullen to Dorothy West, 10 August 1932, DWP, box 1, folder 6; emphasis added.

14 Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Great Depression; Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe; Mark Solomon, The Cry was Unity.

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and ensuing Civil War, Soviet society had remained in flux throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s as the country reordered social relations and sought to define itself as a new type of civilisation.15 Burgeoning Moscow, in par- ticular, proved both alluring and instructive to black artists and intellectuals com mitted to the intertwined modern projects of social transformation and personal expression. Here, the ‘New Negro’ could enact novel identities on stage, on paper and on the streets, while at the same time criticising racial injustice, labour exploitation, colonial rule and women’s oppression.

This chapter examines the creative participation of three black cultural workers – journalist Homer Smith, dancer Sylvia Chen and actor Wayland Rudd – in Soviet-sponsored projects that helped transform 1930s Moscow into a dynamic cosmopolitan crucible of anti-colonialism and anti-racism watched from around the world. Each of these figures demonstrates a unique facet of black cultural activism and its articulation in Moscow. Homer Smith’s work as the Moscow correspondent for black newspapers underscores the role of the press in disseminating a global vision of blackness and the location of Moscow in this black world.16 Furthermore, his dispatches contrasting black freedom under Soviet racial equality with the injustices of American racism prefigured the interplay of Cold War tensions and civil rights reform that fol- lowed the Second World War in the United States.17 Afro-Chinese Trinidadian Sylvia Chen took up the mission of forging a new type of anti-colonial dance that fused elements of Chinese folk dance, modern choreography inspired by Isadora Duncan, and popular jazz steps. Chen’s performances highlight the importance of dance as a form for women’s political expression in the interwar period, while the reception of her work calls attention to the ways in which raced and gendered readings of bodily expression limned the potential for anti-colonial and feminist choreographies. Wayland Rudd was a member of the Black and White cast who remained in the Soviet Union in hopes that he would find more sympathetic roles and that he might eventually be able to develop his skills as a playwright and director, an avenue closed off to African American actors in the United States. His career in the 1930s exemplifies the remarkable access given to foreign artists in the Soviet Union and the mixed results of one man’s attempt to exploit these resources. The focus on artists who made Moscow their home for extended periods – rather than the more famous black ‘pilgrims’, such as Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois or Paul Robeson – calls attention to the everyday activism of imagining and inhabit- ing the city that sustained it as a site of black internationalism.18

15 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. 16 Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire, pp. 7–21. 17 Gerald Horne, ‘Who Lost the Cold War?’; Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights;

Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line; Carol Anderson, ‘Bleached Souls and Red Negroes’.

18 The growing literature on African presences in the Soviet Union has been dominated by the most famous visiting artists, rather than on the more quotidian experiences of

124 S. Ani Mukherji

These culture workers did not, however, undertake this work without constraint. Alongside Soviet citizens, black foreign artists faced the strictures of Party discipline, if not always as acutely as their neighbours. The state sponsorship that fostered the work of black artists in the 1930s also shrank the range of available expressive options. By the height of the Purges in 1937, this sphere essentially imploded for foreign artists. As historian Michael David-Fox has noted, between the 1920s and the late 1930s, ‘foreign cultural resources’ had transformed in the eyes of the State ‘from prized assets to fatal sources of contagion’.19 By the final stage of this process, black Moscow – that is, the Soviet capital as imagined and inhabited as a site of the African diaspora – disappeared along with the larger complex of institutions and figures that comprised the anti-colonial cosmopolitan metropole. But none of these artists would have predicted such an outcome when they arrived.

Homer Smith Reports from Black Moscow

For readers of the black press, Homer Smith (Figure 6) was their man in Moscow. Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s, Smith contributed regular columns to the Chicago Defender and Baltimore’s Afro-American, with occasional pieces appearing in the Pittsburgh Courier.20 Born in 1899 just outside Natchez, a sixteen-year-old Smith took up work as a deckhand on a Mississippi River steamer before eventually settling in Minneapolis, where he found a position sorting mail.21 The stable income afforded the young migrant the means to enrol in journalism courses at the University of Minnesota and by the early 1930s Smith was writing occasional columns for the local black newspaper, the Twin City Herald. These accomplishments stirred both pride and frustration; at the end of his third decade of life, Homer Smith felt that he had already reached the apex of achievement for a black journal- ist in Minneapolis.22 Unwilling to rest on his laurels, Smith enthusiastically volunteered to participate in Black and White after he read the call for actors to participate in a film project in Moscow, though his friends warned him that the Soviet Union was ‘a land of slaves, morons, and poverty’.23 Writing to

long-time residents. See Allison Blakely, Russia and the Negro; Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain; Maxim Matusevich, ‘Black in the USSR’. For an at- tentive study that places black life in the Soviet Union in the broader currents of Soviet policy and culture, see Meredith Roman, ‘Another Kind of Freedom’.

19 Michael David-Fox, ‘From Illusory “Society” to Intellectual “Public”’, p. 9. See also William J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates?

20 According to Smith’s Comintern file, his reports also appeared occasionally in news- papers in South Africa, the Gold Coast, and the Gambia:‘Autobiography’, 27 July 1936, RGASPI 495/261/5147.

21 Ibid. 22 Homer Smith, Black Man in Red Russia, pp. 1–2. 23 Homer Smith to Louise Thompson (n.d.), LTPP, box 16, folder 19.

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the film’s organisers in New York, Smith declared that he intended to correct such falsehoods and that he hoped to stay in Moscow, sustaining himself with work at the post office while arranging to have a regular column on Russian life appear in black periodicals.24

Regular dispatches from Moscow correspondent Chatwood Hall (Smith’s nom de plume) commenced a month after the arrival of the Black and White cast. The inaugural report recorded crowds of thousands greeting the small group of black literati at an anti-lynching demonstration. Smith summarised the group’s impression: ‘All of this was new, like a pleasant dream, like waking from a nightmare, like another planet to the darker Americans. … Although

24 Louise Thompson to Homer Smith, 18 May 1932, LTPP, box 16, folder 19.

Fig. 6 Homer Smith © Emory University Archives

126 S. Ani Mukherji

they were on the same planet, it did not take these Colored Americans long to realize that they were in another world.’25 This juxtaposition of worlds – one dream, the other nightmare – became the dominant trope of Smith’s journalism. A week later, Smith submitted ‘Negroes Find Selves Whiter than Russians’, a collection of anecdotes about the exploits of Moscow’s new black inhabitants at a workers’ resort on the outskirts of Moscow. Meeting a crowd of curious locals, the cast faced a barrage of questions: Do they speak both English and ‘the Negro language’? Why were they of such diverse skin tones? How is it possible that some of the group were lighter than the Russians but still considered ‘black’? The questions elicited a ‘galaxy of broad smiles’ from the Americans, who tripped over themselves trying to explain the intricacies and contradictions of US racialism. Bewildered by these strange answers, the Russians put the matter out of their minds and decided to go skinny-dipping with the group in a nearby river.26 The convoluted racial ideology of Smith’s nightmare world simply could not be made sense of in this uncomplicated egalitarian dreamworld.27 The juxtaposition tidily revealed the social con- struction of the ostensibly natural racial order in the United States while simultaneously offering a compelling image of liberated existence in the idyllic commingling of nude black and white bodies.

As a regular columnist, Smith was not always able to meet the literary standard set by this early piece. But he repeatedly returned to the practice of pairing Soviet progress with American (and occasionally European) back- wardness to address a variety of concerns. Smith’s favourite hobby horse, however, was the near obsessive recounting of interracial romances between black men and Russian women. After noting that a number of local women had become particularly enamoured with the ‘sheiks from Harlem’, Smith quipped, ‘Is it the good or is it the evil which men do that lives after them?’28 In an article detailing the diverse populations found on Moscow streets, the reporter noted, ‘a Russian woman citizen may freely select or go any place with any man of her choice, be he red, yellow, black or brown’.29 Should anyone interfere with her pursuits, they would meet ‘the heavy hand of the government’.30 In these utopian stories, Smith left implied the juxtaposed

25 ‘Where Bands of Music Welcomed 22 Black Americans to Russia’, Baltimore Afro- American (6 August 1932).

26 ‘Negroes Find Selves Whiter than Russians’, Baltimore Afro-American (13 August 1932).

27 On the related industrial dreamworlds of capitalism and communism, see Buck- Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe. Buck-Morss pays only passing attention to the importance of racial progress as a benchmark of modernity.

28 ‘Race Prejudice Finds No Sanctuary’. 29 ‘Red Russia Wouldn’t Permit Jim Crow’, Baltimore Afro-American (23 September 1933).

See also ‘When a Black Man Calls on a Russian Girl’, Baltimore Afro-American (17 June 1933); ‘Red Soldier, Brown Woman in Russia – Matter of Course’, Baltimore Afro- American (19 August 1933); ‘Soviet Reds Rebuke Snooty Ofay Woman in Moscow’, Baltimore Afro-American (25 August 1934).

30 ‘A Column from Moscow’, Chicago Defender (12 May 1934).

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American reality. Black readers in the era of lynching needed no reminder of the nightmare world that corresponded to the dream of interracial romance.

While these columns portrayed a Moscow in which African Americans lived unencumbered by the legacies of racism, Smith also detailed Russia’s black history to foster a sense of belonging. His readers learned of the small colony of black Abkhazians descended from Ottoman slaves and of the great poet Aleksandr Pushkin’s African heritage.31 When reporting on the thespian achievements of Wayland Rudd or Paul Robeson in Moscow, Smith reminded his audience of the great nineteenth-century Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge, the first African American to play Othello in Russia.32 The bustling contemporary scene was presented as more history in the making, as Smith chronicled the visits of black scholars, writers, concert singers, classical musicians, wrestlers and circus performers. Lest working-class readers sense that the proletarian capital welcomed only the cultural elite, dispatches on black life in the factory and in the field were sporadically sprin- kled into the mix of reportage. Weaving tales of these few dozen African diasporics among stories of Central Asian, Caucasian, Chinese, Indian and Slavic Muscovites, Smith drove home his point that together they formed ‘a human tapestry not to be even closely approached anywhere in the world, and least of all in New York’.33

After three years in Moscow, Homer Smith could rightly declare that he had won his gamble on the Soviet Union. Having made a name for himself as a foreign correspondent, Smith decided not to renew his contract with the post office when it expired in 1935. Instead, he committed himself to research and writing full time. On the recommendation of William L. Patterson, then leader of the American branch of the International Labor Defense (ILD), Smith was assigned to a research position in the African Studies (Afrikanistika) section of the Communist University of Toilers of the East (KUTV), a school established by the Communist International to provide cadre training to colonial students.34 This appointment provided Smith with material to report on a widening gamut of global concerns, including British imperial policy, the native question in South Africa and the actions of American businesses in

31 ‘Races Can Walk Together on Streets of Moscow’, Baltimore Afro-American (2 June 1934); ‘Race Families Not Rare Even in Soviet Russia’, Chicago Defender (1 September 1934); ‘Defender’s Moscow Correspondent Gets Interview with Pushkin’s Descendant’, Chicago Defender, 2 May 1936.

32 ‘Defender Foreign Correspondent Greets Robeson on his Arrival in Soviet Russia’, Chicago Defender, 12 January 1935; ‘American Prepares to Follow in the Footsteps of Ira Aldridge’, Chicago Defender, 23 February 1935.

33 ‘When a Black Man Calls on a Russian Girl’, Baltimore Afro-American (17 June 1933); emphasis added. Smith was not alone in the journalistic effort to construct a black Moscow. See Hughes, ‘Negroes in Moscow’; Mary Christopher (Dorothy West), ‘Room in Red Square’; Mary Christopher (Dorothy West), ‘Russian Correspondence’.

34 William Patterson to Cadre Section, 23 April 1935, RGASPI 495/261/5147.

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Liberia.35 Anti-colonialists within the Comintern were undoubtedly pleased by this turn in Smith’s reporting, as their platforms and positions now received regular airing in the leading black newspapers of the day. After his first year at KUTV, the Comintern’s Cadre Department was effusive in its praise for Smith’s efforts: ‘Politically developed and trained in Marxism, [Smith] differs greatly from other Negroes in Moscow (and in the USA) in that he is modest, affable, and businesslike.’36 In the summer of 1936, Smith was transferred from the Africanist section of KUTV to NIANKP (Research Association for the Study of National and Colonial Problems), an advisory body in the Eastern Section of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (IKKI). In addition to fulfilling his duties as a foreign correspondent for black newspapers, Smith was called upon to give his opinions on colonial propaganda and to compose internal reports on the conditions of African Americans for Party work.37

Between his political connections with anti-colonial activists in the Comintern and working the beat of ethnic cultural life in Moscow, the am- bitious journalist had effectively positioned himself at the centre of black Moscow. Unfortunately, the real-life Smith did not inhabit the idealised metropo lis that journalistic persona Chatwood Hall had created on the sheets of the Chicago Defender and Baltimore Afro-American. In February 1937, Smith was reprimanded by the Comintern for unspecified personal indiscretions unbecoming a writer with his high profile.38 Later that year he was taught a more severe lesson in the perils of power. As the Stalinist Purges intensified, foreign elements were increasingly perceived as security threats and the Soviet government began to push foreign visitors out of the country, including a group of black engineers whose residency permits were abruptly confiscated. Unsure of what to do, these men turned to Smith for help negotiating the Soviet bureaucracy. Smith took up their case but badly overplayed his hand with Comintern superiors when he threatened that failure to issue new residency permits would be taken as racial discrimination and that word of these cases had already leaked to outside sources – the London- based former Communist George Padmore – who would use it against the Soviets. The leadership snapped back that these comrades should be happy to take up work in their own country, that criticism of the socialist fatherland

35 For a sample of Smith’s coverage of colonial questions, see ‘Status of Africa Discussed’, Chicago Defender (9 March 1935); ‘James Crow Bars S. Africans from Streets at Night’, Baltimore Afro-American (10 August 1935); ‘Natives Drawn Into Industry’, Chicago Defender (16 November 1935); ‘Italy’s Use of Natives as Shock Troops Not New in African Wars’, Chicago Defender (23 November 1935); ‘Australia’s Aboriginals Dying’, Chicago Defender (6 June 1936).

36 ‘Gomer Smit – Biograficheskaia spravka’. 37 See Endre Sik to Cadre Department, 5 June 1936, RGASPI 495/261/5147; ‘Kharakteristika

[Character Evaluation]’, 9 June 1943, RGASPI 495/261/5147; ‘Review of Work’, c.1936, RGASPI 534/3/1103.

38 Homer Smith to William L. Patterson, 13 February 1937, RGASPI 495/261/5147.

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was ‘vicious counter-revolutionary propaganda’, and that if Padmore had been informed, then someone was informing him. Smith was criticised for not immediately correcting these deviations and asked to provide character assess ments and political profiles for each engineer. Smith was careful not to address the charge of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda, but he did label two of the specialists ‘anti-Soviet’ and opportunistic.39 They both returned to the United States, a propitious fate, in retrospect, for ostensible anti-Soviet opportunists during the Purges.

Smith could not follow them. In 1935, he had married a Soviet citizen, Maria Kotik, and it was unlikely that the Soviet government would grant her emigration. Even if Smith were willing to abandon her – other black Muscovites had deserted their families – he most likely understood that he would not be allowed to leave. He knew too much and could inflict too much damage outside the country.40 Accepting Soviet citizenship in 1939 (and thereby renouncing his US citizenship), Smith continued his work as a foreign correspondent in a subdued tone. With fewer foreigners and cultural events to cover, his columns turned to anti-Japanese and anti-German propaganda. When he drafted a longer piece on African American literature and arts, the essay was declared ‘absolutely incorrect’ and based on ‘an array of empty and harmful ideas’. Foremost among his supposed errors was the failure to appreciate the proletarian origins of Richard Wright, a fellow native son of Natchez who had taken up work sorting mail before launching into his career as a writer.41 Smith was in no position to note the irony of this judgement.

Sylvia Chen Dances Out Revolution

Among the many foreign cultural workers in the Soviet capital, Sylvia Chen cut a particularly striking figure. Born in Trinidad to an Afro-French creole mother and a Chinese father, Chen had experienced a privileged childhood, moving among the colonial elite in Port of Spain and London. Chen entered the Soviet Union in 1927 after a year-long residence in Wuhan, China, where her father had played an important role in the left wing of the Kuomintang

39 Sidney Bloomfield to Comrade Ryan, 12 Dec 1937, RGASPI 495/261/1380; Homer Smith to Comrade Ryan, 16 December 1937, RGASPI 495/261/1632.

40 This was precisely the reason given for the arrest of the only known African-American victim of the Purges, Lovett Fort Whiteman. Whiteman was accused of spreading counter-revolutionary propaganda among black Muscovites; possibly communicating criticisms of the Soviet Union to Padmore in London and to Grace Campbell in New York; and smuggling anti-Communist writings to the editor at the Chicago Defender. See Patterson to Randolph, 17 January 1936, RGASPI 495/261/1476; memorandum by William Patterson, 30 April 1936, RGASPI 495/261/1476. All of these suspicions could have easily been transferred onto Smith.

41 ‘Kriticheskii otzyv o stat’e tov. Gomera Smita [Critical Review of Comrade Homer Smith’s Article]’, RGASPI 495/261/5147.

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government. Upon arrival in Moscow, the Chen family – father, two daughters and two sons – checked in at the Hotel Metropol, a luxurious pre-revolutionary hotel near Red Square that had been converted into a lodge for important dignitaries and visiting artists. Young, attractive and outgoing, Sylvia was immediately drawn into the cultural centre of the city, socialising with foreign journalists and native intelligentsia at the hotel by day, while attending dance recitals, plays and musical performances at night. It was a charmed, if not particularly radical, life.

Two performances changed the trajectory of Chen’s life: the ballet Red Poppy, a Bolshevik interpretation of the Chinese Revolution, and the dance performances at an anniversary celebration of the Isadora Duncan School of Dance in Moscow. In both cases, Chen was impressed not by the overt politi- cal messages woven into the performances, but rather by the arresting female protagonists. In Red Poppy, the fifty-one-year-old Ekaterina Geltzer starred as the ballet’s lead, playing a selfless Chinese girl who gave her life for the greater cause of the workers. Geltzer, one of the few ballerinas who remained at the famed Bolshoi Theatre after the October Revolution, was a crowd favourite; no longer in her prime, Geltzer’s emotive power and connection with her audience was still electrifying. At the Duncan recital, Chen was taken in by the recreation of Isadora’s most famous dances by her Russian pupils. For the first time, she realised that dance could be empowering and free, and also that it need not be ‘soft’.42 This combination of ‘hardness’ and the feminine form came to define Chen’s emergent vision of her own style of dance (Figure 7).

Leveraging her father’s connections, Chen wangled her way into lessons at the Bolshoi, though she found their disciplined approach unsuitable to her desire for self-expression. On the suggestion of friends, Chen tried Vera Maya’s studio of plastic dance – a more liberated form of movement that flourished briefly in the 1920s.43 Maya’s school was heavily influenced by Isadora Duncan in its style and vocabulary of movements, but rather than emphasising individual expression, it cultivated a form of satiric social sketches.44 In the early summer of 1928, Chen had her Moscow debut with Maya’s troupe in a show that ended with boisterous applause and cheers for the young Trinidadian dancer. Established Soviet dance critic Viktor Iving observed that, ‘of the number of participants, Sylvia Chen aroused the greatest interest’. The remainder of his review, however, shed a more troubling light on the reception of the evening’s entertainment and on the Soviet Union’s claim to be a land free of racial prejudice. Iving lingered at length on descriptions of Chen’s body and features, followed by praise for the unmediated joy expressed in her free movements. Lest an obtuse reader miss the racial coding of this primitivist interpretation, the author declared, ‘The manner of Sylvia Chen’s

42 Si-Lan Chen Leyda, Footnote to History, pp. 99 –102. 43 Selma Jeanne Cohen, ‘New Dance in Russia, 1910–1930’. 44 Elizabeth Souritz, Soviet Choreographers in the 1920s, p. 166.

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dance reminds one of mulatto dances, which clearly exhibit a strong influence on her stage manner. Her appearance is even reminiscent of a mulatto … And like a mulatto, she flirted with her choice of men in the audience.’45 This dismissive racialist reading was typical of dance critics’ approaches to black modern dance, from the suggestive vaudeville of Josephine Baker to the ethnographic choreography of Katherine Dunham. In his perceptive history of early modern dance, Ramsay Burt has described the ways in which the racialised body of the modern dancer occupied an uneasy liminal space, moving in a highly charged field between high and low culture, art and

45 Viktor Iving, ‘Spektakli V. Maiia’. It is not clear from the text whether Iving knew that Chen was, in fact, Afro-Chinese.

Fig. 7 Chen Si-lan barefoot in pants holding a sword and striking a pose © Museum of Performance and Design, San Francisco

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entertainment, ballet and jazz, white and black.46 These dynamics surely held some allure for the mixed-race Sylvia Chen; but for Iving, and many other dance critics of the time, such hybrid performances were passing curiosities, temporary titillations not to be taken seriously.

Following this review, Chen distanced herself from Maya’s studio. Over the next year, she went through several different directors until she finally won the attention of Kasian Goleizovsky, an established impresario of Russian dance. For Golly, as Chen affectionately called her new mentor, dance was about rhythm, and the two were especially happy to work on complicated synco- pated pieces that invoked exotic locales from Spain to Tahiti.47 Performing under the auspices of VOKS, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, a new set of dances was presented in February 1930 as the work of ‘Chinese dancer’ Sylvia Chen (despite the lack of any identifiable elements from China in the programme).48 The timing, unfortunately, could not have been worse for a debut. The ongoing cultural revolution had for the previous two years placed increasing demands on artists to demonstrate fealty to the Party and to proletarian ideals in their works. Now critics set their sights on Goleizovsky’s decidedly non-proletarian productions, accusing him and his dancer of decadence and counter-revolution.49 This rebuke started Chen down a new path. In the week after the show, she worked with her brother Jack to arrive at a fresh conception of modern dance that would better suit present political demands. Working in tandem, the siblings discussed politics and art while Sylvia proposed dance ideas and Jack – a budding artist himself – de- signed accompanying costumes. Just two months after the debacle with Golly, Sylvia unveiled ‘The Militarist’, a satirical offering that ridiculed the aggress- ive warlords of China, with the provocative gender-inverting irony of the warrior’s embodiment in Chen’s petite female form. The piece evinced what would soon become Chen’s signature style, a hybrid of Chinese folk elements and modern forms intended to evoke a particular figure or political situation. After winning the approval of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), Chen embarked on a tour of Caucasian summer resorts with the Workers’ Youth Theatre (TRAM) as part of the Komsomol’s cultural front.50

After the disappointment of her experience with Goleizovsky, Chen re- mained uncertain of her artistic vision. Her father encouraged her attempts to remove ‘dance from the sphere of art and put it in the world of practical life’.51 Similarly, Jack counselled his sister to ignore the reviews and listen to the people: ‘Your audience will create you, pull you up so that soon you will be able to address yourself to the more backward stratas [sic] of our soviet

46 Ramsey Burt, Alien Bodies. 47 Chen Leyda, Footnote to History, p. 113. 48 ‘Vecher VOKS [VOKS Evening]’, 27 February 1930, GARF 5283/8/76. 49 ‘Sil’viia Chen’, Krasnaia gazeta, 5 June 1932. 50 GARF 5283/8/76, passim. 51 Eugene Chen to Sylvia Chen, 17 November 1931, SCLP, box 28, folder 10.

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and world public.’52 In an article in the journal New Theatre, he elaborated on his distrust of critics in a defence of innovators in the Soviet dance world, including his sister:

[The dancers] are developing a technique that enables them to approach really significant themes. Characteristically, it is the general public rather than the critics (either old balletomanes, or writers who have somewhat biological ideas on dancing) who give them encouragement and understanding, and rather the public less exposed to ballet than the more ‘cultured public’.53

Still Sylvia sought to improve her work. Returning from tour in late 1931, she began to draft an entirely new dance programme, to be based both on her experiences dancing for Soviet workers and on a proper understanding of Marxism-Leninism.

To this end, Chen enrolled as an auditor in the American section of the Communist University of Toilers of East.54 At KUTV, Chen diligently plodded through the classic texts of Marxism.55 Beyond KUTV’s lessons in historical materialism, Soviet nationality policy and colonial geography, Chen came to experience proletarian internationalism in practice as she became part of a community of students and activists from Africa, Asia and the Americas. Having grown up as an outsider in Port-of-Spain, London and Wuhan, Sylvia finally found a circle of kindred spirits in the anti-colonial students and artists in Moscow. Among these exiles, many of whom had followed similarly disparate paths, a romantic sense of internationalism developed, in which all liberation struggles were seen as interconnected. Chen’s work flourished in this milieu. She quickly developed a new programme to celebrate the diversity of national forms of dance, to dramatise colonial injustices around the world and to criticise the bourgeois West. As her touring took her to Soviet Central Asia, the Caucasus and China, the range of her dance numbers expanded. By the mid-1930s, her repertoire included a protest of the Jim Crow American South entitled ‘Lynch’, a piece dedicated to the persecuted Chinese writer Ding Ling and a dance celebrating the newly emancipated women of Uzbekistan.56 The last composition – a favourite that she regularly performed well into the 1950s – exemplified the ways in which Chen continued to find in dance a means for women’s self-fulfilment after the decline of Duncan- inspired dance in the Soviet Union; by rendering the liberation of woman not as a matter of personal expression, but as a collective achievement, Chen

52 Jack Chen to Sylvia Chen, 10 July 1931, SCLP, box 28, folder 12. 53 Chen-I-Wan (Jack Chen), ‘American Dancers in Moscow’, p. 21. 54 RGASPI 495/225/1185. 55 Nathalie Roslavleva (Rene) to Sylvia Chen, 11 March 1950, SCLP, box 30, folder 2. 56 These dances should be placed in the context of the great international defence cam-

paigns of the time: Sacco and Vanzetti, Scottsboro, Meerut, Ding Ling, and Tom Mooney, among others. See Lisa McGirr, ‘The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti’; Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich; Richard Jean So, ‘Coolie Democracy’.

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re-scripted feminist modern dance in a socialist vernacular. Her new pieces also derided exaggerated expressions of masculinity in numbers like ‘Sport- Grotesque’, a parody of the fascist obsession with physical culture. Despite the moral retrenchment in Stalinist times, Sylvia refused to abandon the idea of the Soviet Union as the homeland of both racial and sexual freedom.57

This belief was also embodied in Chen’s personal life, which she considered another channel for the expression of her politics. After meeting the cast of Black and White, Chen was immediately smitten by Langston Hughes and the two entered into a curious romance. Like Homer Smith, Chen and Hughes – both self-identified multiracial subjects – believed that cosmopolitan Moscow was an ideal place for different races to mix freely; in each other, they found the opportunity to act out this supposition. Following Hughes’ departure from the Soviet Union, this romance was explicitly thematised in love letters that testified to a depth of feeling, if not for each other, then for the idea of their relationship as a progressive interracial union.58 Writing to Hughes in the summer of 1934, Sylvia mapped out her ethnic ambiguity: ‘Convenient isn’t it to be able to change one’s nationality so easily, Chinese, Japanese, West Indian, Negro, you like me best as the latter, don’t you? But my politics don’t change, am always for the oppressed races in the fight against imperialism.’59 Hughes responded in kind, ‘What nationality would our baby be anyhow? Just so he or she is anti-Facist [sic]!’60 For both Sylvia and Langston, this epistolary amalgamationist fantasy allowed the authors to thwart the logics of myths of racial purity and the injunction against miscegenation that maligned their biracial existences. In their love letters, they were no longer tragic figures, but anticipations of a future interracial internationalist world.61

Such fantasies, however, proved a poor adhesive for a lived relationship. Despite his promises, Hughes never returned to Moscow after 1933. Chen continued to dance across the Soviet Union and Europe until the curtain of Stalin’s Purges descended on the stage of cosmopolitan Moscow in the late 1930s. At this point, Chen’s husband, an American student of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, prepared to leave Moscow. Sylvia resolved to follow him

57 Chen’s work in the mid-1930s is richly described in Viktor Iving’s unsympathetic review notes. See RGALI 2694/57/1, passim. On Soviet sexual mores, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, pp. 65–90, 216–37; Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution.

58 On this relationship and the question of Hughes’ sexuality, compare Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes; Faith Berry, Langston Hughes.

59 Sylvia Chen to Langston Hughes, 29 August 1934, LMCLH, HM 64089. 60 Langston Hughes to Sylvia Chen, 18 October 1934, SCLP, box 29, folder 4. 61 Historian Christina Simmons discusses the idealisation of interracial relationships

among sex radicals in ‘Women’s Power in Sex Radical Challenges to Marriage’. The valorisation of amalgamationist approaches to the race problem in the context of the Harlem Renaissance is also discussed in George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (esp. pp. 289–312). For contemporaneous programmes of amal- gamationist anticolonialism, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess; Cedric Dover, Half-Caste.

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to America where she thought she could help African Americans and Asian Americans become more internationalist and less bourgeois. Unfortunately, when Chen arrived in New York, she was curtly informed that she was subject to the Chinese Exclusion Act, her spouse’s citizenship notwithstanding. This moment marked the beginning of a two-decade repressive campaign on the part of the US Departments of State and Justice to keep Chen out of the country. Never again did Sylvia Chen find the thriving atmosphere for the creative dance, politics and romance that marked her time in Moscow, as the collective internationalist, anti-colonial dreams of the interwar period disappeared into the reality of the emergent Cold War.62

Wayland Rudd Makes a Career on the Soviet Stage

Wayland Rudd’s career as an actor took off just as black performers were beginning to find work in serious theatre in the 1920s.63 While working in amateur productions in Philadelphia, the Howard University graduate had been spotted by Jasper Deeter, a veteran director of the Provincetown Players and Workers’ Drama League. Deeter had recently founded Hedgerow Theatre, an independent actors’ commune run on mutualist principles. Among Deeter’s egalitarian commitments was the belief that black actors should be given significant roles in American drama.64 He recruited Rudd, leading the young actor to consider the possibility of a professional career on the stage. Under Deeter’s tutelage, Rudd landed a number of major roles, and by the early 1930s he was regularly securing parts on and off Broadway, winning over New York’s theatre critics.65

When Rudd learned of the Black and White shoot in 1932, he faced a difficult choice between the promise of an ambitious new project and the risk of leaving a developing career behind. His decision was dictated as much by attraction to the Soviet script as it was by his awareness of the limited prospects for black actors in the United States. With relatively few oppor- tunities available in mainstream theatre, the socially conscious work of the black Little Theatre movement offered an appealing prospect. But, as scholar Cedric Robinson has observed, these productions were restricted to the ‘small stages of Black colleges, universities, and amateurs’, as Broadway ‘had no

62 See Chen’s immigration file in NARA, RG 59, 151.547; Federal Bureau of Investigations File #100–30551, SCLP, box 28, folder 1.

63 Alain Locke, ‘The Negro and the American Stage’, pp. 112–20; Errol Hill and James Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, pp. 214–54.

64 Gwendolyn Bennett, ‘The Emperors Jones’, Opportunity (September 1930), pp. 270–1; Henry Miller, Remember to Remember, pp. 109–25; Hill and Hatch, A History of African American Theatre, p. 229.

65 ‘Laura Bowman and Wayland Rudd “Steal” Show in White Play’, Pittsburgh Courier (2 January 1932); ‘For Negro Performers’, New York Times (3 February 1932); ‘Prison Drama’, Wall Street Journal (2 April 1932); Bennett, ‘The Emperors Jones’.

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interest in Black playwrights who might exceed the strictures of melodrama by replacing personal demons with themes of racial oppression’.66 Black and White potentially offered the best of both worlds – a progressive treatment of social themes in a major production for a world audience. Moreover, Rudd must have felt attracted to the possibility of performing under leading lights of theatre and film including Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Eisenstein.

Once in Moscow, the cast of Black and White waited for script revisions for four months. By the fall, as many members of the film group had grown weary, Rudd was ecstatically taking in the new theatre season, reporting to readers of the Crisis: ‘I confess that there has never been anything in my histrionic experiences so thrilling and absorbing as the moments the theatre afforded me there’.67 Rudd decided that, despite the failure of Black and White, he intended to find a place on the Soviet stage. Drawn to the Meyerhold Theatre and its international reputation for bold productions, Rudd enrolled as a student in its acting school in October. He explained his choice:

I wanted to make a career. I wanted to prove to all the European swine that any man, even if he’s black or yellow, can act. … I wanted to work with Meyerhold. Millions of Negroes watched to see what a Negro could do. They watched each of us who came [to the Soviet Union]. A figure like Meyerhold is of interest everywhere – in Europe, in America, and in Africa.68

By the time that Langston Hughes returned from a tour of Soviet Central Asia in early 1933, Rudd was in rehearsals for Yuri German’s play Prelude. German, a young Soviet writer who cut his teeth as the reporter for a factory newspaper in Moscow, envisaged Prelude as an indictment of labour exploita- tion and violence across the globe wrapped in the story of one engineer’s path from bourgeois ignorance to communist consciousness. Rudd played the part of a touring singer in transit from Hamburg to Shanghai; his role demanded only a few lines in Russian and the performance of a popular song in English. Reviewing the play for readers of Baltimore’s Afro-American, Hughes was effusive in his praise for the play and for Rudd’s execution of his role. Soviet critics, in contrast, barely mentioned the new black actor, instead emphasising defects in the script.69 Like Sylvia Chen before him, Rudd had been tossed into the whirlwinds of Soviet cultural politics. Just as the actor joined the Meyerhold Theatre, his chosen stage was targeted for its excessive concern with form over proletarian content.

Rudd refused to be discouraged, instead immersing himself in the study of Russian so that he might find more prominent roles in the future. This work

66 Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, p. 178. See also ‘Race Actors Find Broadway Hard Road to Travel’, Chicago Defender (26 November 1932).

67 Wayland Rudd, ‘Russian and American Theatre’, The Crisis (September 1934), p. 270. 68 RGALI 963/1/70. 69 ‘Mixes Russian and Jazz on Soviet Stage’, Baltimore Afro-American (25 February 1933).

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paid off when legendary director Lev Kuleshov – a film theorist who had fallen out of favour in the late 1920s for his alleged detachment from Soviet realities – recruited Rudd to work on The Great Consoler, a loose interpreta- tion of two short stories by the American writer O. Henry. The film depicted the life of an imprisoned writer who was called to his craft by the injustices he witnessed in jail. Luckily, for Kuleshov and for Rudd, the implied criticism of the strictures of Soviet artistic expression was masked by a confusing plot line and unremarkable acting. According to Peter Kenez, those critics who understood Kuleshov’s film were silent for fear that they might be associated with anti-Soviet views if they were the first to point them out.70 Rudd’s work in the film was limited to recurrent close-up shots of his distressed face, a handful of over-saturated lines stammered in badly accented Russian, and a few musical numbers. When the protagonist Bill Porter tells his fellow inmates that, as an artist, one has only two prerogatives, ‘You may talk of your dreams; and you may tell what you heard a parrot say’, Rudd’s character responds by repeating the word ‘parrot’ [papugai] with a confused look. The overall effect was not flattering.

Despite the setbacks of his first year in Moscow Rudd had reason for hope, if not for celebration. In just ten months, he had worked with two world-renowned directors. His roles were not the transformative enactments of black humanity that he dreamed of, but they also were not the demeaning parts of the plantation and jungle genres popular in the United States.71 After a brief trip to the United States in 1934, Rudd returned to his career in Moscow, explaining:

Two years with the Russian theatre has taught me above all the real significance of theatre in its influence upon the culture of a people. Watching theatre, with a definite purpose given it by government censorship, and an unlimited artistic scope because of government subsidy, inject healthful and constructive ideas into the minds of a society, makes one shudder to think what theatre has been doing to the minds of American society.72

Back in Moscow, Rudd immersed himself in language classes and began work to play Othello under director Sergei Radlov, whose wife Anna Radlova had recently finished a controversial translation of Shakespeare’s play into con- temporary Russian. For Rudd, the study of Othello in Russian was particularly revelatory as the new language, associated with a new society, defamiliarised the interracial romance between Othello and Desdemona, allowing the actor to understand their relationship, for the first time, outside of an American frame of miscegenation:

70 Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953, p. 118. 71 Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, pp. 272–380. 72 Wayland Rudd, ‘Russian and American Theatre’, The Crisis (September 1934), p. 270.

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[T]he beautiful white heroine Desdemona becomes [in Russian] a living element in the life of Othello and as an apparition, as she is in America because of a dif- ferent ideology there which is opposed to as natural, wholesome, and intimate love as possible between the Blackamoor and the beautiful Venetian lady.73

As Kate Baldwin has noted of African American writers and artists who travelled to Soviet Russia, crossing linguistic and territorial borders enabled these racialised subjects to re-imagine their identities and to reconsider the naturalised assumptions of white supremacy.74 Yet, while Rudd surely benefited from studying Othello in Russian, his mastery of the language was not yet clear. When Radlov’s Othello opened, Aleksandr Ostuzhov, an accomplished actor on the Soviet scene, took the leading role. Later the same year, Rudd was excluded from a revival of Prelude; the head of Meyerhold’s acting school sarcastically explained that ‘he does not have a good command of Rash’n speech [ne vladeiushchii khorosho rasskoi rech’iu]’.75 In fact, Rudd’s language skills were most likely a severe impediment at a moment in Soviet history marked by an emphasis on Russian as the language of assimilation and internationalism.76 Having returned to Moscow for purposive work on the stage, Rudd seemed locked out of the world of serious theatre.

After a year of working on a children’s film adaptation of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Rudd tired of waiting for Meyerhold to find a role for him and announced his intention to write and direct his own material.77 His first script, An’ David Played His Harp, exhibited the flaws typical of artistic debuts, compounded by the necessity of bending the plot to ideological prescriptions. Bearing a dedication to ‘The Green Pastures’ – a possible double entendre referring both to Rudd’s new homeland and to Marc Connelly’s popular play – the drama asserts the futility of black religion in the face of racial injustice in the American South. Black characters speak in a poorly rendered vernacular with a peculiar tendency to explicate the points demonstrated by the action of the play. After a white store owner cheats black workers, picker Mose laments, ‘Evah year hits de same! We works hahdah ’n gits fudder in debt!’ ‘Maybe we oughtta listen to dat new white fohman,’ replies Mose’s friend Sam moments later, ‘He keep tellin’ us we won’t gonna git nowheahs till we o’ganizes an’ fights foh our rights.’78 The play quickly works to a climax in which Sam is falsely accused of rape, and lynched, his murder

73 ‘Wayland Rudd “Makes Good” as Actor in Soviet Country’, Chicago Defender (23 February 1935).

74 Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line (esp. pp. 1–24). 75 It is possible that the replacement of the ‘u’ with an ‘a’ in ‘rasskoi rech’iu’ is simply a

typographical error. But given the context it seems more likely that the author was mocking Rudd’s mispronunciations. RGALI 963/1/90.

76 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, pp. 394–431. 77 ‘Complete Soviet Film of “Huckleberry Finn”’, New York Amsterdam News (17 April

1937). 78 Wayland Rudd, An’ David Played His Harp, RGALI 962/1/406.

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transformed into martyrdom when the black workers realise that they must organise to protect themselves because the church affords them no sanctuary from white racism. The play was never approved for performance, despite adherence to the conventions of socialist realism and incorporation of ‘folk’ elements then popular in Soviet art.

Rudd’s next effort as a playwright was Andy Jones, a script loosely based on Let Me Live, the autobiography of black communist Angelo Herndon.79 Though the work was self-evident agit-prop, Rudd had curbed many of the excesses of An’ David Played His Harp. The awkward attempt to render a folksy southern accent was eliminated and a relaxed pacing allowed the plot to develop more naturally. Combining details from the Herndon case with elements of the international Scottsboro defence campaign, the plot follows Andy as he evolves from a dissatisfied worker to a whistleblower, and, finally, into an avowed Communist, persecuted for his beliefs but defended by the international working class. The spectacle of the finale is worthy of Meyerhold’s imaginative stagings. In quick succession, a writer appeals to the governor to protect Andy from a lynch mob; Paul Robeson headlines a benefit concert; ‘Bojangles’ Robinson dances to drum up a collection; and Andy is freed. The play was published in English, translated into Russian, and approved for performance.

But it was never staged. The year was 1937 and the drama of Stalin’s Purges took precedence. For better or worse, Rudd found a role in this political theatre when the State turned its attention to Meyerhold for his alleged trans- gressions. Addressing fellow members of the company, Rudd denounced his director: ‘I saw Meyerhold’s errors. … I may mangle your language, but my eyes see well and my ears hear well. … I love our collective, but there is something higher than theatre. There is the world revolution that we aspire to.’80 Applause followed this declaration, giving Rudd a moment to pause before finishing his denunciation. Having waited five years for the director to cast him in a meaningful role, Rudd turned on Meyerhold, portraying the failure to utilise his talents as evidence of the director’s lack of commitment to ‘world revolution’. Perhaps Rudd hoped that this attack would curry favour with officials and pave the way to future productions of his work. Instead, the Purges paralysed the Soviet intelligentsia and drove foreign artists out of the country. There was little opportunity to stage, much less cast, a play like Andy Jones.

79 The first draft of the play was entitled ‘The Walls Come Tumblin’ Down’. The manu- script can be found in RGALI 962/1/406. The Russian translation of Andy Jones [Endi Dzhons] can be found in RGALI 652/5/419. See also Rudd, ‘Andy Jones’, International Literature. Herndon was a Communist Party member who was arrested and charged with inciting insurrection under a nineteenth-century law prohibiting slave revolts; he was eventually released following a popular campaign on behalf of his legal campaign.

80 RGALI 963/1/70.

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Conclusion

For two decades, activists had laboured to establish Moscow as an exilic space for the production of anti-racist and anti-colonial politics and culture.81 Universities had been built, libraries accumulated and foreign specialists developed. Artists and writers like Smith, Chen and Rudd promoted the image and the reality of the city as a place of cosmopolitan mixing, interracial harmony and black achievement. By the mid-1930s, VOKS, the organisation charged with organising cultural exchanges, was inundated with correspon- dence from black social workers, educators, writers and artists who wished to witness, if not to participate in, the Soviet experiment. Just at this moment, when the labours of Moscow’s black internationalists looked ready to reap their rewards, cosmopolitan Moscow vanished. The Comintern effectively ceased to operate following the Seventh World Congress in 1935.82 A year later, VOKS refused the request of W. E. B. Du Bois to make a study of Soviet minorities and, under orders from the secret police, destroyed large parts of its foreign library.83 KUTV closed its doors in 1938, stemming the stream of Asian and African students that had helped animate cosmopolitan Moscow since 1921.84 Those who had worked to build black Moscow must have felt that they had ‘ploughed the sea’.

A small group of devout and stranded black Muscovites remained. Smith stayed through the Second World War, sending home occasional dispatches criticising German racism and applauding the colour-blind Soviet Union. In 1946, he emigrated to Ethiopia and eventually returned to the United States, though he never regained his citizenship. Rudd finished his studies to become a director in 1940. Throughout the war, he toured the front lines, performing concerts for the Red Army.85 Black and White cast member Lloyd Patterson worked alongside veteran black Communist Williana Burroughs as an announcer for Inoradio, the foreign-language radio station. Both remained stalwart champions of the Soviet Union, despite the dissolution of black Moscow, diminishing material conditions and baseless criticisms from superiors at Inoradio that they spoke English with an incomprehensible accent.86

After the war, Soviet xenophobia increased and with the onset of the Cold War Americans were especially suspect. African Americans who had

81 S. Ani Mukherji, ‘The Anticolonial Imagination’. 82 E. H. Carr, The Twilight of the Comintern, 1930–1935. 83 David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 405–6; GARF 5283/1a/321; Michael David-

Fox, ‘From Illusory “Society”’, p. 32. 84 N. N. Timofeeva, ‘Kommunisticheskii universitet trudiashchikhsia Vostoka’, pp.

30–42. 85 ‘Rudd Doesn’t Think Huns Like his Trench-Singing’, Baltimore Afro-American (25

December 1943). 86 RGASPI 495/261/3497.

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travelled to Moscow in the 1930s were subject to anti-communist harassment in the United States that consequently denied or obfuscated their interwar experiences and commitments.87 Those dreams expressed by hybrid anti- colonial modern dances, amalgamationist love letters, scripts for anti-racist plays and decade-old news columns were suddenly forgotten or obscured, both in the United States and in the Soviet Union. What once appeared to Homer Smith as ‘a different planet for darker Americans’ was, it seemed, only a passing comet.

87 Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander; Smith, Black Man in Red Russia. Later memoirs were more forthcoming, e.g., William L. Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide; Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik; Chen Leyda, Footnote to History; Robert Robinson, Black on Red.