BLACK ON RED
My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union
Robert Robinson with Jonathan Slevin
Acropolis books, 1988
448 pp., $19.95
The twentieth century has produced an often brutal history and an abundance of innocent victims. Armenians in Turkey, Jews in Germany, Ibos in Nigeria, Muslims in India, Hindus in Pakistan--the list of those who have suffered only because of their religion, their race, or their ethnic background is a long one. If we add to this the "class enemies" who have been slaughtered by Stalin in the Ukraine, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Mao in China--indeed by communist regimes wherever they have taken hold--we have an army of the dead, maimed, and persecuted.
Yet, in the end, history may be understood best through the lives of individuals rather than through the grand sweep of events. One man who found himself swept up in tides over which he had no control and who has lived to tell his story is Robert Robinson.
Born in 1906 in Jamaica, Robinson, who is black, grew up in Cuba, where he was trained to operate machine tools. He moved to the United States, became an American citizen, and in the 1920s was one of the few black machinists working for the Ford Motor Company in Detroit.
While he was working at Ford, a visiting Russian delegation "spotted his black face" and recruited Robinson to go to Stalingrad to work and teach his skills at a tractor factory for one year. With the Depression worsening in the United States and with opportunities for trained black workers at a minimum, a Soviet contract promised job security and a good salary. He decided to take the job.
This important book is a record of Robinson's forty-four years in the Soviet Union, most of them spent as a virtual prisoner. We learn what the communist "paradise" was really like and learn, in addition, how Soviet communism--which dedicated itself to the creation of a nonracial, proletarian society--really treated its nonwhite residents.
U.S. Communist Party
Interestingly, Robinson was never a communist but has remained a committed Christian throughout his life. In order to place his story in perspective, it is important to remember the efforts the Soviet Union and the U.S. Communist Party embarked upon to recruit black American--at Moscow's direction.
To the Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s, the black American was the prototype of the oppressed, exploited worker. During a 1925 meeting in Moscow, Joseph Stalin asked why blacks were not better represented in the U.S. Communist Party. To improve their standing with blacks, the communists adopted a policy calling for self-determination for those areas of the American South where blacks lived in large numbers. Blacks were called an "oppressed nation," who had the right to separate form the untied States.
The response to this effort to attract black membership was a dismal failure. Blacks wanted to be free and equal
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