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Transnational Blackness: Re-reading Louise Thompson Patterson’s Encounter with the Soviet Union in 1932

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2026

Tatsiana Shchurko
Tatsiana Shchurko*
Affiliation:
University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA
*
Email: shchurkot@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article examines African American intellectual Louise Thompson Patterson’s 1932 journey to the Soviet Union as a lens through which to explore the complexities of transnational racial identity across ideological borders. It argues that Patterson’s experiences reveal both her political commitments and the contradictions of Soviet internationalism for Black women seeking alternatives to racial capitalism and gender oppression. Rather than viewing her engagement as naïve or disillusioned, the article situates it within a historically rooted, politically intentional search for liberation. The paper further contends that Soviet reactions to Patterson’s identity illuminate a rigid understanding of blackness, complicating claims of anti-racism and revealing internal hierarchies. By analyzing Patterson’s unpublished writings alongside broader historical currents, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of Black women’s transnational activism, the racial politics of the USSR, and the ongoing challenges of forging solidarity across different conceptions of race and justice.

Keywords

blacknessEurasiaBlack InternationalismLouise Thompson Pattersonrace

Information

Type
Critical Forum: Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 84 , Issue 3 , Fall 2025 , pp. 474 - 486
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

This article examines the engagements of African American women intellectuals and activists with the USSR during the interwar years, focusing—through the case of Louise Thompson Patterson—on the paradoxes and strategic alliances they navigated in pursuit of racial and gender justice. Rather than portraying Patterson as either naïve or disillusioned, I argue that her investments in the Soviet project was a complex and historically situated response to a violently racialized American context, as well as part of a global search for models of equality. Additionally, I suggest that her encounters in the USSR revealed alternative—and at times unsettling—conceptions of blackness, complicating transnational understandings of race, though she herself might not have framed them this way.Footnote 1 I write as someone from the Eurasian borderlands, a standpoint that brings a different analytic lens and perception—at times aligning with Patterson’s vision, and at other times diverging from it. Footnote 2

Patterson’s 1932 trip to the USSR offered a glimpse of a society that officially outlawed racism and championed women’s emancipation. Yet she was keenly aware that these official policies did not fully eradicate the deeply ingrained racial and gender biases that still permeated everyday life, reflecting the ongoing struggle toward true equality. Her impressions, shaped as much by hope as by analysis, reflect both her personal convictions and the broader aspirations of the global Black radical tradition, where she saw real steps toward emancipation despite the system’s limitations. Rather than reading her travel writings as either empirical validation of Soviet egalitarianism or straightforward evidence of its failures, I interpret them as political narratives rooted in a revolutionary desire for a more just world—one in which Patterson remained committed to the ideals of socialism, even as she critiqued Soviet limitations. She was deeply attuned to the historical legacies of white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism and saw the Soviet experiment as an imperfect yet vital attempt to challenge those systems. However, I aim to situate her experiences within a historical conjuncture where revolutionary hope collided with structural contradiction; where Black women forged transnational solidarities while also grappling with shifting meanings of blackness. Thus, this paper’s central argument is twofold. First, African American women’s engagements with the USSR—particularly Patterson’s—should be understood as historically rooted, politically intentional responses to racialized oppression at home and abroad. Second, I suggest that these experiences were marked by profound ambivalence, as encounters with the Soviet system exposed tensions within transnational racial imaginaries and conceptions of blackness, that, reading today through the lens of critical race and Black feminist studies, might not have been obvious at the time.

Louise Thompson Patterson: Navigating Revolutionary Paths

The opportunity for Patterson’s transformative journey to the USSR arose when James W. Ford, who had recently returned from the USSR and Germany, brought a letter from Mezhrabpom Film proposing to make Black and White, a film about African American life, and extended the invitation to Patterson.Footnote 3 She eagerly accepted, recruiting twenty-two participants and raising funds for the trip, not merely to make a film but to explore alternative models of social and racial justice that the Soviet context appeared to promise.Footnote 4

Patterson’s leadership in organizing the trip reflected her deepening involvement with leftist and communist circles and her commitment to confronting the root causes of racial and gender oppression in the US.Footnote 5 By 1928, she had relocated to New York City, studied at the Workers School, and co-founded a Vanguard Club with Harlem Renaissance artist Augusta Savage, immersing herself in a vibrant community of artists and intellectuals.Footnote 6 Her apartment became a hub for discussions among Black artists and intellectuals around Marxism, Internationalism, and the Soviet experiment.Footnote 7 By 1931, Patterson had helped establish a branch of the American-Soviet Friendship Organization, setting the stage for her first trip to the USSR.Footnote 8

Although Black and White film was never completed, the journey proved transformative. In her unpublished memoirs and letters, she reflected on how the trip reshaped her views on race, class, and gender.Footnote 9 She sought an alternative to the US system dominated by capitalist elites, which excluded Black and working-class communities from basic rights.Footnote 10 The Soviet model, with its declared commitment to collective ownership and legal guarantees of racial and gender equality, captivated her.Footnote 11 Over six months, Patterson and fellow cast members, including Langston Hughes and Dorothy West, traveled through Crimea, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, witnessing Soviet efforts to improve literacy, advance women’s rights, and promote ethnic equality, particularly in regions historically marginalized under tsarist rule.Footnote 12 Patterson saw these efforts as real, substantive steps toward dismantling racial and ethnic hierarchies.

These encounters deepened Patterson’s political commitments and influenced her evolving analysis of racial and gender injustice, later crystallizing in writings such as her unpublished essay, “What Makes One an American Negro.”Footnote 13 Likely written in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement, the essay addresses multifaceted questions of US blackness, reflecting a continuing dialogue with ideas first sparked in 1932.Footnote 14 It was also likely influenced by the impact of, and discussions initiated by, the Civil Rights Movement in the US, which politicized and expanded conceptions of US blackness, linking it to empowerment, self-determination, and anti-colonial struggle. In this context, blackness was redefined as a diasporic, transnational concept grounded in shared histories of oppression and collective resistance. While the essay addresses a Soviet audience’s confusion about why she identified as “Negro” despite her light skin, Patterson framed this as a US-specific cultural and political matter.Footnote 15 My reading sees this moment as revealing tensions between Soviet internationalist ideals and enduring assumptions about race and ethnicity, yet Patterson continued to engage with and support the Soviet project, returning multiple times and maintaining faith in its foundational goals. In this section, I place her 1932 trip within the broader trajectory of her evolving activism, arguing that her experiences in both the US and USSR led to an increasingly intersectional understanding of Black identity and global racial politics, which she later revised under the influence of the Civil Rights Movement.

Since the late 1920s, Patterson’s activism in the US foregrounded the systemic nature of racial segregation, economic exploitation, and gendered violence, particularly as they affected African-descended women. Her Soviet encounters in 1932 complicated this framework. Witnessing politics of women’s emancipation in Central Asia, she became attuned to how race, class, and gender intersected, insights that foreshadowed later feminist understanding of “triple oppression.”Footnote 16 Specifically in Uzbekistan, she saw parallels between the position of Central Asian peoples under tsarist rule and that of African Americans in the US, and she was struck by the visibility of women of color in public life: an image that sharply contrasted with the limited opportunities available to Black women in the US, where they were largely confined to domestic work and exposed to persistent racial and sexual violence.Footnote 17 These impressions expanded her understanding of the forms that emancipation could take. Her 1936 essay, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” written four years after returning from the USSR, strongly critiqued the US system while implicitly affirming her belief in internationalist, anti-capitalist solutions.Footnote 18

Impressed by her experiences in the USSR, Patterson returned to the US, joined the Communist Party as well as many other organizations and initiatives, and became a Party organizer.Footnote 19 For instance, she also joined the International Workers Order, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, and helped found the National Scottsboro Action Committee, where she organized rallies, managed outreach, and led fundraising efforts for falsely accused Black youth.Footnote 20 In 1937, she supported anti-fascist causes in Paris and Spain. By 1951, she co-founded Sojourners for Truth and Justice alongside Eslanda Robeson and Shirley Graham Du Bois, among others, mobilizing Black women against Jim Crow laws, Cold War repression, and colonialism.Footnote 21 All those efforts demonstrated her unwavering belief in socialism as a vehicle for liberation.

Patterson returned to the USSR in 1960, 1962, and 1969, while also visiting Cuba, Mexico, China, and Czechoslovakia, linking anti-Black violence to global systems of oppression. Though no longer at the center of the Civil Rights Movement, she remained politically engaged. She contributed to Freedomways magazine, writing about conditions in the American south, and in 1968, published a reflective piece on her 1932 visit to the USSR to commemorate Langston Hughes.Footnote 22 She also collaborated with the American Institute of Marxist Studies, worked with the CPUSA’s Black Liberation Committee, and hosted Black Panther leaders at her New York home. Her activism continued into the 1970s, including a 1974 trip to Cuba and Mexico, where she highlighted the global dimensions of racial hierarchy and the persistent marginalization of Black people.Footnote 23

Against this historical background of Patterson’s intellectual and political journey, I suggest that her moment of being questioned as a “real Negro” in 1932 reflected an encounter with a different, and at times limited, racial framework. Writing for a Soviet audience in “What Makes One an American Negro,” she conveyed a US-based understanding of blackness shaped by historical struggles and lived experiences, which I explore in the next section.Footnote 24 I suggest, however, that in the USSR the questioning of her identity by those who equated “Negro” with “dark-skinned” revealed a limited, phenotypic definition of blackness. Soviet frameworks tended to externalize race as a western, black-and-white binary, overlooking their own internal racial and ethnic hierarchies. My reading goes beyond Patterson’s vision of the Soviet project, informed by my own perspective as someone from a region often racialized as Slavic or ethnically white and concerned with enduring racism and colonial legacies in the region. I argue that Patterson’s discomfort reflects a broader pattern: the USSR’s strategic use of the “Negro condition” to critique western racism while deflecting attention from its own racial dynamics, a theme I examine in the final section. My reading does not necessarily align with Patterson’s vision of the Soviet project or interpretation of the situation. Rather, she grappled with them in her own way, always within the context of a broader commitment to revolutionary change.

“American Negro”

In her essay “What Makes One an American Negro,” Patterson reflected on the confusion her light complexion caused among Soviet organizers of Black and White film and Soviet audiences.Footnote 25 This confusion, I argue, revealed a limited Soviet understanding of US racial dynamics, in which “Negro” was interpreted in strictly phenotypic terms: equated solely with dark skin. Soviet organizers, expecting African American actors to match this visual expectation, were unsettled by the cast’s diversity of appearances.Footnote 26 This disconnect, along with weaknesses in the film’s script, contributed to the project’s eventual cancellation.

In her unpublished memoirs, Patterson described how Russians, like many Europeans, interpreted “Negro” in a strictly literal and visual sense, equating it solely with dark skin.Footnote 27 She recounted how the cast had to repeatedly explain that, despite their lighter skin tones, they were all African Americans and that complex social and historical factors shaped racial identity in the US.Footnote 28 Patterson ironically noted that their presence in the USSR was likely a valuable lesson for many people they encountered.Footnote 29

Across her writings, Patterson articulated a political and historical understanding of US blackness shaped by systemic dehumanization and rooted in the legacies of slavery and capitalism. The original Black and White script traced US anti-Black violence from slavery through emancipation, illustrating how blackness became central to US capitalism—a perspective Patterson largely supported.Footnote 30 However, the project’s failure highlighted the difficulty of fully understanding this history. She also noted its superficial portrayal of racial oppression and its failure to address the complexities of US racial structures. Specifically, she emphasized the centrality of violence against Black women in understanding racial capitalism, a perspective deepened by her Soviet experience. In Central Asia, she observed how gendered liberation was understood as integral to struggles against racial/ ethnic, economic, and colonial oppression. Although the Soviet Union had not fully realized this vision, its socialist project imagined these struggles as necessarily intertwined, a view also echoed by local activists who envisioned class, race, ethnicity, and gender as entangled.

In her essays “Toward a Brighter Dawn” and “What Makes One an American Negro,” Patterson described US blackness as a social and historical construct shaped by centuries of labor exploitation, systemic violence, and collective struggle. She highlighted the diversity within the Black community in the US, pointing to varying skin tones, features, hair textures, and ancestral backgrounds. She argued that this diverse group had emerged as the nation’s most vital minority force in the ongoing fight for equality and human rights.Footnote 31 For her, Black identity in the US was forged through a shared legacy of slavery and shaped by the convergence of African, European, and Indigenous lineages under conditions of dehumanization, forced labor, and exploitation.Footnote 32

Patterson powerfully described the brutality of slavery, noting how African people were violently uprooted from their homelands, forced onto slave ships, and systematically dehumanized. Families were intentionally separated during auctions, and their languages and cultural practices were erased, reducing people to their capacity for physical labor.Footnote 33 This racial system relied on the deliberate construction of African inferiority, a myth reinforced by religious institutions that framed slavery as divinely sanctioned.Footnote 34 Patterson also discussed how physical features associated with African descent, such as dark skin, tightly coiled hair, and broad facial features, were used to justify and sustain racial hierarchies.Footnote 35

Her analysis resonated with that of W. E. B. Du Bois, who called anti-blackness a “disdain for everything black,” and Frantz Fanon, who identified it as a “historico-racial schema.”Footnote 36 Du Bois analyzed how this “disdain” shaped the “problem of the color-line,” defining relations between “the darker and lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”Footnote 37 Patterson argued that this schema produced the “American Negro,” whom Fanon described as “not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro!”Footnote 38 Patterson echoed this idea, arguing that the “American Negro” identity was formed through the violent system of racial capitalism that relied on unpaid labor and white domination.Footnote 39 Patterson emphasized that centuries of forced, unpaid labor by enslaved Africans were foundational to the US economy, particularly through the cultivation of cotton, tobacco, and sugar.Footnote 40 Enslaved people also sustained the daily lives and households of the wealthy planter class, taking care of their homes and children. According to Patterson, it was the exploited labor of Black bodies that built the southern economy and fueled northern capitalism by generating the wealth necessary to develop infrastructure.Footnote 41

Patterson maintained that Black women were the most exploited segment of the American working class, a view later echoed by thinkers like Claudia Jones.Footnote 42 Patterson highlighted the multiple burdens Black women carried: juggling economic hardship, caregiving, and compounded racial, gendered, and class-based oppression. This layered oppression, often referred to as “triple oppression” in the US context of the time, largely restricted Black women to domestic labor, upholding racial and economic hierarchies and the cultural ideal of white, middle-class womanhood.

Patterson traced these conditions back to slavery, where Black women were subjected to sexual violence, denied autonomy, and separated from their children.Footnote 43 She connected the lighter skin found among African Americans to this legacy of sexual exploitation.Footnote 44 According to Patterson, despite features not typically associated with African ancestry, children born from such violent encounters were still part of the African American community and identity and had every right to claim this ancestry.Footnote 45 At the same, she also emphasized that under slavery, children inherited the status of their mothers, which maintained the enslaved labor force and protected slaveholder wealth.Footnote 46 Even after emancipation, racial classification systems persisted, with the “one-drop” rule continuing to define US blackness.Footnote 47 For Patterson, the “American Negro” identity emerged from this violent and forced convergence of African peoples under slavery, an identity rooted in African heritage but shaped by American racial capitalism.Footnote 48

Thus, Patterson viewed US blackness as a dynamic social and political identity shaped by histories of racial violence, exploitation, and resistance. She showed how slavery and systemic racism blurred and destabilized phenotypic definitions of blackness. By centering Black women’s experiences and exposing intersecting oppressions, Patterson’s framing pointed toward an understanding of US blackness as a historically contingent identity shaped by the violent foundations of racial capitalism. Furthermore, it is important to note that her Soviet experiences contributed to the solidification of her intersectional analysis. Yet I suggest that there is more to be added to this account. While she never explicitly critiqued Soviet racial discourse in this essay, I suggest that her attempt to explain US blackness to a Soviet audience underscores both the specificity of American racial formations and the challenges of translating those concepts across ideological and cultural boundaries.

Eurasian Borderlands

As I previously mentioned, Patterson observed that many Soviets reacted with confusion or disbelief when she identified as African American, as her appearance did not match their expectations of what a “Negro” should look like.Footnote 49 This moment stood out to me for two reasons: Soviet solidarity with Black activists abroad coexisted with rigid, phenotypic definitions of race (in other words, the warm reception Black sojourners often received in the USSR for their “Blackness”) and the tension between the USSR’s proclaimed anti-racist stance and its own racialized and ethnic hierarchies. This context, I suggest, adds nuance to the reactions Patterson encountered.

Historically, Soviet engagement with US Black liberation movements projected ideological solidarity. At the 1922 Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow, US Black communist Otto Huiswoud (originally from Dutch Guiana) and Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay helped form the Negro Commission, drafting the “Thesis on the Negro Question,” which linked Black liberation in the Americas and Africa to the global struggle against capitalism and imperialism.Footnote 50 Similarly, the 1928 “Black Belt Thesis,” co-authored by US Black communist Harry Haywood and Siberian communist Charles Nasanov, framed African American oppression as a “national question,” advocating for Black self-determination in the US south and emphasizing the central role of Black women in the movement.Footnote 51

In this context, Patterson’s visit to the USSR might appear a natural extension of the USSR’s professed anti-racist internationalism. Yet upon arrival, she and her castmates were both warmly welcomed and subtly scrutinized for whether they represented an “authentic Negro experience”—a dynamic that reflected broader Soviet approaches to understanding American blackness. As Gary Edward Holcomb notes, drawing on McKay, “unpredictably, the Russians responded to the Black diaspora revolutionary far more demonstrably and favorably than they reacted to Otto Huiswoud, the unnamed ‘mulatto delegate’ (Long Way 173), in part because McKay was darker in complexion.”Footnote 52 Placing Patterson alongside McKay reveals a consistent pattern: Soviet enthusiasm for Black visitors was mediated through phenotypic assumptions about race. This suggests a gap between Soviet ideological commitments and everyday perceptions, what I interpret as a biologically rooted understanding of race and blackness, shaped by European racial thought and selectively adapted to Soviet frameworks. Despite engaging with US Black activists who viewed race as socially and politically constructed, Soviet conceptions often remained tied to Africanness and dark skin, reinforcing racial essentialism and drawing from African frameworks that also equated blackness with darker phenotypes.Footnote 53 Thus, this tension is not unique to the USSR, but in the Eurasian context it raises specific questions. Puzzlingly, this rigid view of blackness coexisted with the USSR’s own ethnic diversity and practices of racialization. Publicly, blackness was linked to African features, while informally, the label “black” extended to a wide range of non-Slavic, non-European peoples.Footnote 54 Madina Tlostanova describes this as “a paradoxical dimension of being white yet black,” where “black” became a shorthand for backwardness or primitiveness, applied to those excluded from ideals of Europeanness and modernity.Footnote 55 These contradictions in how race was imagined did not only affect Black visitors like Patterson and McKay but also shaped or was used to hide Soviet approaches to its own diverse populations.

I argue that this Soviet racial imaginary—reifying race while denouncing racism and equating blackness with Africanness—allowed the state to maintain internal hierarchies while projecting external solidarity. In doing so, it perpetuated many of tsarist Russia’s racial and colonial logics, even as it officially condemned them.Footnote 56 Early policies on the “national question” promoted inclusion but gradually by the 1930s gave way to Russification, violence, deportations, and repression of non-Russian groups.Footnote 57 The 1935 “friendship of the peoples” policy outwardly celebrated unity but reinforced Russian dominance.Footnote 58 This dual operation—denouncing internal racial hierarchies while promoting anti-racism abroad—allowed the Soviet state to mask persistent racialized inequalities.Footnote 59 For instance, while the Black Belt Thesis drew inspiration from Soviet discourse on the “national question” and US Black activists engaged Soviet discourse with optimism, the USSR’s internal dynamics remained largely exempt from racial critique. This contradiction was not confined to state policy but also appeared in cultural and intellectual production, where official messaging coexisted with more expansive, often marginalized visions of solidarity.

For instance, this tension between ideology and practice makes the 1958 republication of Anbar Otin’s “Treatise on the Philosophy of Blackness” for Afro-Asian solidarity events particularly striking.Footnote 60 Originally written around 1910 by the Uzbek intellectual, the piece reframed blackness as a metaphor for resilience and shared suffering, addressing the racialized hierarchies that existed under tsarist Russia. Otin connected blackness to marginalized identities—African, Central Asian, female, disabled, or poor—highlighting the interwoven structures of oppression under tsarist rule. Its republication reflected both official Soviet efforts to promote anti-racist messaging abroad and local attempts to articulate more expansive visions of solidarity, reveling how the constructions of blackness find their way in different contexts. These alternative framings may have resonated with Patterson, who also had a nuanced understanding of American blackness and was attentive not only to state discourse but also to grassroots movements genuinely committed to anti-racism and socialism. She admired the Soviet commitment to self-determination and ethnic cultural revival, recognizing the threat it posed to US interests, especially in exposing anti-Black violence.Footnote 61 In contrast, rising anti-communist sentiment in the US targeted Black radicals, with pro-white supremacy forces, as Patterson observed, seeking to prevent Black workers from learning about Soviet approaches to racial, gender, and economic justice.Footnote 62 Therefore, she considered the questioning she experienced in the USSR as merely reflecting limits in understanding the US context. Yet the very elasticity of blackness that Otin imagined was foreclosed in official discourse, which strategically tethered blackness to Africanness. This move not only misframed Patterson’s identity but also erased how blackness operated as a category of othering within the USSR itself.

Indeed, this strategic essentialism was also visible in Soviet approaches to Central Asia, where blackness was informally applied to non-Slavic peoples and tied to gendered colonial hierarchies. Patterson admired Soviet commitments to women’s emancipation, especially in Central Asia, but her understanding of Soviet ethnic and gender politics was limited by language barriers and state censorship. Official campaigns often portrayed Central Asian women as uneducated, dark-skinned, uncivilized, and in need of rescue, reinforcing colonial narratives as they mobilized women’s labor for the Soviet economy.Footnote 63 Scholars such as Negar Elodie Behzadi and Lucia Direnberger have shown how these gendered labor policies marginalized Central Asian women, confining them to the lowest tiers of the Soviet economy.Footnote 64 Furthermore, Patterson’s encounter with the story of Nurkhon Yuldashkhojayeva—a young Uzbek actress murdered for defying traditional gendered norms—exemplified the limits of Soviet modernity, though Patterson would not interpret it that way.Footnote 65 Though celebrated as a martyr, Yuldashkhojayeva’s story also revealed how Soviet interventions could deepen rather than dismantle systemic inequalities.Footnote 66

Similarly, the repression of Central Asian women’s rights activists in the 1930s revealed the state’s growing intolerance for dissent.Footnote 67 Many of these women, whose work likely resonated with or even inspired Black sojourners like Patterson, were later persecuted. During her visit to the Women’s Club in Baku—founded by Azerbaijani activist Jeyran Bayramova—Patterson praised its efforts, unaware that the club would be shut down in 1937 and Bayramova imprisoned as a “traitor” due to her husband’s political ties. She was not acquitted until 1955. Similarly, Central Asian women activists and writers of the 1920s–30s, such as Sobira Kholdorova and Tadzhikhan Shadyeva used platforms like the Uzbek-language journal Yangi Yoʹl (New Way) to critique colonialism, gender inequality, and economic injustice themes that closely align with Patterson’s later concept of “triple oppression.”Footnote 68 By the end of the 1930s, however, many of these voices had been silenced through imprisonment or execution.Footnote 69

In this light, Patterson’s affirmation of her Black identity carried more than personal weight; it implicitly challenged Soviet claims of racial harmony. By tethering of blackness to Africanness, the USSR obscured how blackness could also name the processes of othering and racialization applied to its own diverse populations. The selective recognition of blackness—welcoming African-descended visitors while marginalizing internal minorities—produced a form of racial exceptionalism. This dynamic enabled the USSR to project an image of anti-racism internationally while preserving internal hierarchies.Footnote 70 Historian Meredith Roman also has noted that Soviet internationalism often prioritized showcasing achievements over engaging radical critiques from Black activists.Footnote 71 As a result, Patterson’s 1936 essay, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” remained largely unread in the USSR, and her piece, “What Makes One an American Negro,” likely failed to reach its intended audience. Many of the people she met in 1932 were later purged—silencing the very conversations she hoped to inspire.

In this article, I have argued that the questions directed at Patterson and her fellow cast members exposed the contested meanings of blackness, meanings shaped by history, place, and politics. Patterson responded by articulating the US construction of Black identity, grounded in slavery, capitalism, and systemic oppression. At the same time, her questioning revealed certain essentialist attachments that also served its purpose in hiding the Soviet Union’s own racializing mechanisms, as I argue. Rather than reading her travel writings as evidence of Soviet success or failure, I propose we approach them as political texts animated by revolutionary hope and an aspiration for justice in an unequal world. Equally important is the Eurasian usage of blackness, which carried its own symbolic and political meanings. I suggest that both the Soviet and US invocations of blackness were strategic: used by states with competing, often contradictory goals. This tension remains relevant today: as racial and colonial violence continues across the post-Soviet space, Soviet legacies are often invoked to deny it, and US Black movements have yet to forge deeper connections with Eurasian struggles. The absence of mutual solidarity—seen in the silence around the 2020 BLM protests in Eurasia and in the limited support for Ukraine or other colonized peoples among some US Black leftists—points to unresolved fractures. Revisiting these historical encounters, I argue, can help plant new seeds for more expansive transnational solidarities.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback, and to the editors of this special issue, Nana Osei-Opare and Sunnie T. Rucker-Chang, for their careful guidance throughout the process. I would also like to thank Lesia Pahulich for her generous and valuable readings across multiple versions of this work, and MaryLouise Patterson for critical comments that pushed me to reflect more deeply on my relations and recollections of history. This project was made possible with the support of an ACLS Fellowship, which provided the time necessary to pursue and complete this research.

Tatsiana Shchurko is Assistant Professor of Instruction, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of South Florida. She is a queer feminist researcher from Belarus specializing in transnational feminist theorizing. She holds a PhD from The Ohio State University, where she also held a postdoctoral ACLS Fellowship. Her book project investigates the relationship between US Black feminist Internationalism and Eurasian knowledge production.

References

1 I use capitalized “Black” to recognize how blackness has become a political category in the context of the Americas, Africa, and western Europe. In all other cases, I use “black” in lowercase to emphasize the diverse meanings of blackness beyond that context.

2 I use the term “Eurasian borderlands” to describe territories formerly under Soviet rule, including eastern Europe, the Baltics, Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Far East, and the north. Building on Madina Tlostanova’s work, I also employ it to highlight peripheral spaces and communities shaped by overlapping imperial influences, particularly Russian and Soviet. Historically, “Eurasia” carried political implications, serving as a tool for European and Russian empires to assert dominance over Asian territories. Today, right-wing and fascist groups in Russia invoke the term to justify territorial claims over formerly colonized regions. My cautious use of “Eurasian borderlands” emphasizes areas affected by Russian imperialism alongside other empires. More than a geographical label, the concept represents a coalition of diverse yet interconnected subaltern experiences across vast regions. See Marlène Laruelle, Sergei Glebov, and Mark Bassin, eds., Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism (Pittsburgh, 2015); Erica Marat and Botakoz Kassymbekova, “Reclaiming the Narrative: Decolonizing Central Asian Studies for a More Inclusive Understanding,” Comparative Politics Newsletter XXXIII, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 9–11; Madina Tlostanova, Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands (New York, 2010).

3 Keith Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson: A Life of Struggle for Justice (Durham, 2017), 76–77.

James W. Ford (1893–1957) was a prominent African American communist of Jamaican origin and the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party in 1932, 1936, and 1940. In 1928, he was a delegate to the Profintern Congress in Moscow. Two years later, he organized the first International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg, Germany, and became the editor of the Negro Worker, published by the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, established at the Conference.

Mezhrabpom Film was a German-Russian Workers International Aid Film Studio, active from 1928 to 1936.

4 Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson, 78–80.

5 Born in 1901 in Chicago and raised in impoverished West Coast neighborhoods, Patterson later moved with her mother to Oakland. After graduating from the University of California in 1923, she taught in Arkansas and Virginia, where firsthand exposure to Jim Crow racism further radicalized her. Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson; Mark Solomon, “Rediscovering a Lost Legacy: Black Women Radicals Maude White and Louise Thompson Patterson,” Abafazi (Fall/Winter 1995): 6–13.

6 Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson, 61, 73–80; Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, 2011), 66.

7 Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson, 98; McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 66.

8 Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson, 76.

9 Louise Thompson Patterson Memoirs. Trip to Russia—1932, Oct/Nov 1994, box 20, folder 2, Louise Thompson Patterson Papers (henceforth LTPP), Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

10 Louise Thompson Patterson, “Chapter 4: Trip to Russia,” n.d., pages 7–8, box 20, folder 1, LTPP.

11 Ibid., 7–8.

12 Black & White Film Project, Correspondence, 1932, box 1, folder 22, LTPP.

13 For example, Louise Thompson Patterson, “What Makes (One) an American Negro,” typescript with holograph revisions, n.d., box 20, folder 22, LTPP; Louise Thompson, “And So We Marched,” The Working Woman (June 1933): 6; Louise Thompson, “Negro Women in Our Party,” Party Organizer (August 1937): 25–27; Louise Thompson, “Southern Terror,” Crisis 41, no. 11 (November 1934): 327–28.

14 The delay in its composition and its unpublished status remains unexplained, but shifting personal and political currents likely prompted Patterson to revisit these issues.

15 The term “Negro” was widely used in the English language to describe people of African descent from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It was considered a neutral term for a long time and was even used by prominent African American leaders and organizations. Over time, the term began to carry negative connotations due to its association with the history of racism, discrimination, and segregation. By the mid-twentieth century, it was increasingly seen as outdated and inappropriate. During the 1960s and 70s, in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movement, the term “Black” gained prominence as a more empowering and self-affirming descriptor for people of African descent. For more on the debates over the term, see Lerone Bennett, Jr., “WHAT’S IN A NAME? Negro vs. Afro-American vs. Black,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 26, no. 4 (December 1969): 399–412; Richard B. Moore, The Name “Negro:” Its Origin and Evil Use (Baltimore, 1992).

16 Denise Lynn, “Socialist Feminism and Triple Oppression: Claudia Jones and African American Women in American Communism,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 8, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 1–20.

17 Patterson, “Chapter 4: Trip to Russia,” n.d., p. 52, box 20, folder 1, LTPP. I use “women of color” to describe how Patterson perceived diverse, non-European, non-white, and Indigenous communities in the USSR. This term does not reflect the forms of self-identification used by Soviet women but rather how Patterson viewed their oppression as being similar to the experiences of women of color in the Americas.

18 Louise Thompson, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” The Woman Today (April 1936): 14, 30.

19 Louise Thompson Patterson, “NYC, 1933,” interview, March 18, 1990, page 9, box 28, folder 13, LTPP.

20 The International Workers Order (IWO), founded in 1930, provided social and financial support to working-class immigrants and their families through health insurance, cultural activities, and education programs. Affiliated with left-wing politics and linked to the Communist Party USA, it advocated for labor rights, civil rights, and social justice. See, Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson, 101, 129–44; Louise Thompson Patterson, “NYC, 1933,” interview, March 18, 1990, page 9, box 28, folder 13, LTPP; “Oral History—Louise Patterson” by Mary Lecht, n.d., page 11, box 28, folder 16, LTPP.

21 Sojourners advocated for the freedom of Rosa Lee Ingram, a Georgia sharecropper and mother of fourteen, who faced death along with her two sons after defending herself against a white man’s attempted rape. They also demanded the release of individuals persecuted for communist or left-wing affiliations, such as W. Alphaeus Hunton, leader of the Council on African Affairs, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Claudia Jones. Moreover, the group was vocal in opposing US hegemony and called for an end to the Korean War. Sojourners also established transnational connections with South African female anti-apartheid activists, Indian women trade unionists, and communist women globally, revealing how racist systems of control operated similarly across geographic boundaries with devastating effects for people of color. See McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 161–79.

22 Patterson, Louise Thompson, “With Langston Hughes in the USSR,” Freedomways 8, no. 2 (Spring 1968): 152–58. Freedomways was a prominent African American political and cultural magazine that ran from 1961 to 1985. It was founded by Louis Burnham, Edward Strong, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and edited by Shirley Graham Du Bois and Esther Cooper Jackson. It was built on the legacy of the earlier Freedom magazine (1951–55), a joint venture by Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Freedomways provided a platform for discussions on civil rights, social justice, the arts, labor movements, and international issues. It featured contributions from notable figures such as Lorraine Hansberry, Eslanda Goode Robeson, and Shirley Graham Du Bois. The magazine played a key role in shaping political and cultural discourse during its time.

23 Gilyard, Louise Thompson Patterson, 129–44; McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 201; “Oral History—Louise Patterson” by Mary Lecht, n.d., page 11, box 28, folder 16, LTPP.

24 “Negro condition” is a historical term referring to the social, economic, and political circumstances, challenges, and experiences of African Americans in the US. For example, Langston Hughes said: “I explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America. This applies to 90 percent of my work.” Langston Hughes, I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (New York, 1964), 5.

25 Patterson, “What Makes (One) an American Negro,” 1.

26 There were multiple reasons for the project’s failure; one of the main ones was the poor-quality script, which Langston Hughes attempted to edit without success. In Patterson’s archive and correspondence, she emphasized this factor as the primary cause, along with the Soviets’ poor preparedness and limited awareness of racial issues in the US. She complained that they had a very narrow understanding of blackness.

27 Louise Thompson Patterson, “Chapter 4: Trip to Russia.” n.d., page 22, box 20, folder 1, LTPP.

28 Ibid., 22.

29 Ibid.

30 Scenario for the film Black and White, 1932, box 23, folder 23, Matt N. and Evelyn Graves Crawford papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

31 Patterson, “What Makes (One) an American Negro,” 1.

32 Ibid., 1–2.

33 Ibid., 2.

34 Ibid., 3.

35 Ibid.

36 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York, 1989), 7, 45; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, 2008), 84.

37 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 10.

38 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87.

39 Patterson, “What Makes (One) an American Negro,” 2.

40 Ibid., 2.

41 Ibid.

42 Claudia Jones, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! Reprinted from Political Affairs (New York, 1949). Claudia Jones (1915–1964) was a prominent Black communist, feminist, journalist, and activist. Born in Trinidad and later living in the US and the UK, she is best known for her contributions to anti-racist, anti-imperialist, feminist struggles. In the US, Jones became a leading figure in the Communist Party USA, where she focused on the intersection of race, class, and gender, advocating particularly for Black women’s rights. Her most famous essay, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!, is considered foundational in Black feminist thought, highlighting how the triple oppression of race, class, and gender uniquely affects Black women. Due to her political activities, she was targeted during the Red Scare and eventually deported from the US in 1955. She resettled in the UK, where she continued her activism, founding the West Indian Gazette and playing a key role in organizing London’s first Caribbean Carnival. Her work consistently connected local struggles against racism and sexism to global anti-colonial and socialist movements.

43 Patterson, “What Makes (One) an American Negro,” 2.

44 Ibid., 3–4.

45 Ibid., 4.

46 Ibid., 3–4.

47 Ibid., 4. The “one-drop” rule was a social and legal principle used in the US, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to define racial identity. According to this rule, any person with even a single ancestor of African descent (referred to as “one drop” of Black blood) was considered Black, regardless of their appearance or how much of their heritage was European or from other ethnic backgrounds. This rule reinforced racial segregation and discrimination, affecting social status, legal rights, and personal identity. It was used to maintain racial hierarchy and to categorize individuals into a strict binary of “Black” or “White,” ignoring the complexity of racial identity and heritage.

48 Ibid., 4.

49 Patterson, “What Makes (One) an American Negro,” 1.

50 Hakim Adi, “The Negro Question: The Communist International and Black Liberation in the Interwar Years,” in Michael O. West, William G. Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins, eds., From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2009), 158–59.

51 McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 44.

52 Gary Edward Holcomb, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance (Gainesville 2007), 49.

53 The idea that “black” equates to “dark-skinned” has been discussed by various scholars, especially those analyzing race and identity in African contexts. For instance, Ali Mazrui discussed how, in certain African contexts, blackness was often associated with darker skin, especially when contrasting South Africans with lighter-skinned populations in North Africa. See Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston, 1986). Soviet scholars, who interacted with African liberation leaders, often conceptualized African identities based on physical traits that symbolized resistance to western imperialism. See Kesha Fikes, and Alaina Lemon, “African Presence in Former Soviet Spaces,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31, no.1 (June 2002): 497–524; Maxim Matusevich, ed., Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (Trenton, 2007).

54 Anikó Imre, “Whiteness in Post-Socialist Eastern Europe: The Time of the Gypsies, the End of Race,” in Alfred J. Lopez, ed., Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire (Albany, 2005), 79–102; Anastasia Kayiatos, “Pantomimes of Power and Race: Can the Socialist Subaltern Speak?” Ulbandus Review 16 (2014): 24–44; Alaina Lemon, “‘What are they Writing about us Blacks?’ Roma and ‘Race’ in Russia,” The Anthropology of East Europe Review 13, no. 2 (Autumn 1995): 34–40; Hilary Lynd and Thom Loyd, “Histories of Color: Blackness and Africanness in the Soviet Union,” Slavic Review 81, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 394–417; Lesia Pahulich, “Postsocialist Queer Critique: Anti-Roma Violence and the Reconfigurations of the Commons in Ukraine” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2023); Meredith L. Roman, “Making Caucasians Black: Moscow Since the Fall of Communism and the Racialization of Non-Russians,” The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 18, no. 2 (2002): 1–27; Jeff Sahadeo, “Soviet ‘Blacks’ and Place Making in Leningrad and Moscow,” Slavic Review 71, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 331–58; Madina Tlostanova, “Why the Postsocialist Cannot Speak: On Caucasians Blacks, Imperial Difference, and Decolonial Horizons,” in Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker, eds., Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures (Frankfurt, 2014), 159–74.

55 Madina Tlostanova, “The South of the Poor North: Caucasus Subjectivity and the Complex of Secondary ‘Australism,’” The Global South 5, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 67.

56 Daniel Brower and Edward J. Lazzerini, eds., Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 (Bloomington, 1997); Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford, 2011).

57 Under this policy, about 172,000 Koreans from the Soviet Far East were forcibly relocated to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. From 1943 to 1944, several ethnic groups, including the Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Balkars, Karachays, and Crimean Tatars, were deported to Central Asia. For more on Soviet deportations, see Nikolai Bugai, The Deportation of Peoples in the Soviet Union (New York, 1996); Aurélie Campana, “The Chechen Memory of Deportation: From Recalling a Silenced Past to the Political Use of Public Memory,” in Philip Lee and Pradip Ninan Thomas, eds., Public Memory, Public Media, and the Politics of Justice (London, 2012), 141–62; Jon K. Chang, Burnt by the Sun: The Koreans of the Russian Far East (Honolulu, 2016). Walter Comins-Richmond, “The Deportation of the Karachays,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 3 (2002): 431–39; Elza-Bair Guchinova, “Deportation of the Kalmyks (1943–1956): Stigmatized Ethnicity,” in Uyama Tomohiko, ed., Empire, Islam, and politics in Central Eurasia (Sapporo, 2007), 187–220; J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949 (Westport, Conn., 1999); J. Otto Pohl, “The Deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the Context of Settler Colonialism,” International Crimes and History 16 (2015): 45–69. This period also saw state-driven famines in Ukraine and Kazakhstan (1930–33) caused by forced collectivization and grain requisitions. Millions of Ukrainians and Kazakhs perished from starvation and related causes during this time. Botakoz Kassymbekova and Aminat Chokobaeva, “On Writing Soviet History of Central Asia: Frameworks, Challenges, Prospects,” Central Asian Survey 40, no. 4 (2021): 483–503.

58 Korenizatsiia, roughly translated as indigenization, was an early Soviet policy of the 1920s that aimed to incorporate non-Russian populations into leading positions in the party, the government, and the trade unions. The USSR also adopted special politics for the development of national cultures and the elimination of Russian domination in the Soviet region. In the 1930s, however, Stalin slowed down and started to reverse the process of korenizatsiia while promoting re-Russification. Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, 2005); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, 2001).

59 Francine Hirsch, “Race without the Practice of Racial Politics,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 30–43; Eric D. Weitz, “Racial Politics without the Concept of Race: Reevaluating Soviet Ethnic and National Purges,” Slavic Review 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1–29

60 Anbar Otin, “Treatise on the Philosophy of Blackness, 1910,” trans. Donohon Abdugafurova, in Gabriel McGuire, Christopher Fort, Naomi Caffee, Emily Laskin, Samuel Hodgkin, and Ali F. Igmen, eds., Tulips in Bloom: An Anthology of Modern Central Asian Literature, (Singapore, 2024), 131–34.

61 Letter from Louise Thompson to W. E. B. Du Bois, December 29, 1932, 1, box 1, folder 22, LTPP.

62 Ibid., 1. For more on anti-communist purges see, Charisse Burden-Stelly, Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (Chicago, 2023).

63 The Soviet approach to the “woman question” promoted gender equality, political mobilization, education, and state-supported social services like childcare and maternity leave, intended to relieve women from traditional domestic responsibilities. Yet conventional gender expectations and disparities persisted, requiring women to balance family and work roles. The situation was harder for women from such regions as Central Asia as they had to navigate the complex environment of societal and state pressures while mobilizing for the most arduous labor like cotton picking and being considered not progressive or lagging behind in comparison to their Russian or other Slavic compatriots. Dilarom Alimova and Nodira Azimova, “Women’s Position in Uzbekistan Before and After Independence,” in Feride Acar and Ayse Günes-Ayata, eds., Gender and Identity Construction: Women of Central Asia, the Caucasus and Turkey (Leiden, 2000), 293–304; Elena Gapova, “The Russian Revolution and Women’s Liberation: Rethinking the Legacy of the Socialist Emancipation Project,” in Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson, and Mara Lazda, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (London, 2022), 115–22.

64 Negar Elodie Behzadi and Lucia Direnberger, “Gender and Ethnicity in the Soviet Muslim Peripheries: A Feminist Postcolonial Geography of Women’s Work in the Tajik SSR (1950–1991),” Central Asian Survey 39, no. 2 (2020): 202–19. See also, Beatrice Farnsworth, “The Rural Batrachka (Hired Agricultural Laborer) and the Soviet Campaign to Unionize Her,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 64–93; Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Politics of Gender and the Soviet Paradox: Neither Colonized, nor Modern?” Central Asian Survey 26, no. 4 (December 2007): 601–23. Even in Soviet-era official account from the region, it is possible to see the statistics that reveals this aspect of labor injustice. For instance, in 1932, only 166 of 1,151 female workers at the Tashkent textile factory were Uzbek. Bibi Palʹvanova, Docheri Sovetskogo Vostoka (Moskva, 1961), 113. By 1933, local women comprised just ten percent of women in universities and professional colleges and only 2.4 percent of all students in Uzbekistan. Yet, during the 1927–31 cotton-picking seasons, Uzbek women made up 75–80 percent of all laborers. Khudzhuma Shukurova, Sotsializm i zhenshchina Uzbekistana: Istoricheskii opyt Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza v raskreposhchenii zhenshchin Sovetskogo Vostoka, na primere Uzbekistana 1917–1937 (Tashkent, 1970), 256, 299. This dynamic stayed the same for the whole duration of the USSR: by the mid-1970s, women represented about 46 percent of industrial workers, but they were largely confined to textile, clothing, and food sectors while constituting 99 percent among cotton pickers. Nancy Lubin, “Women in Soviet Central Asia: Progress and Contradictions,” Soviet Studies 33, no. 2 (April 1981): 190. Gregory Massell introduces the concept of the “surrogate proletariat” to illuminate how the Soviet state envisioned Central Asian women as the primary reservoir of labor for the cultivation of cotton, the production of silk, and the expansion of the textile, clothing, and food industries. Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton, 1974).

65 Patterson, “Chapter 4 Trip to Russia,” n.d., p. 53, box 20, folder 1, LTPP.

66 Dilarom Alimova reports from Uzbek archives that over 2,500 women were killed between 1926 and 1928 for participating in these efforts, while approximately 200 women resorted to self-immolation under state and community pressures. Dilarom A. Alimova, “A Historian’s Vision of ‘Khudjum,’” Central Asian Survey 17, no. 1 (1998): 147–55. See also Nilufar D. Djuraeva, “History of Women’s Division in Uzbekistan,” International Journal of Health Sciences 6, no. S2 (2022): 3176–198; Danielle Kane and Ksenia Gorbenko, “Colonial Legacy and Gender Inequality in Uzbekistan,” Current Sociology 64, no. 5 (September 2016): 718–35; Kh. O. Khushkadamova, “Women’s Self-Immolation as a Social Phenomenon,” Sociological Research 49, no. 1 (January-February 2009): 75–91.

67 This crackdown paralleled the 1930 closure of the Zhenotdel, the Communist Party’s women’s department dedicated to gender equality, which was dissolved after the official declaration that “women’s issues” had been resolved. This marked a shift toward more conservative policies. Elizabeth A. Wood, “Paradoxes of Gender in Soviet Communist Party Women’s Sections (the Zhenotdel), 1918–1930,” in Katalin Fábián, Janet Elise Johnson, and Mara Lazda, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (London, 2021), 219–26.

68 Marianne Kamp, “Pilgrimage and Performance: Uzbek Women and the Imagining of Uzbekistan in the 1920s,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 34, no. 2 (2002): 263–78.

69 Aziza Akhrorova, “Repression of Uzbek Women Journalists,” The American Journal of Social Science and Education Innovations 3, no. 11–13 (2021): 83–84.

70 David Rainbow, ed., Ideologies of Race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in Global Context (Montreal, 2019).

71 Meredith L. Roman, Opposing Jim Crow: African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928–1937 (Lincoln, 2012).