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The Story of a Jamaican-American in Stalin’s Soviet Russia.

 
Casper 2019-04-28 05:34:02 

Robert Robinson (1906-1994)

Robert Robinson was an engineer who became one of the most prominent Americans to live in the Soviet Union. Because of his presence in the U.S.S.R in the 1930s, Robinson became an international celebrity, meeting often with many famous African Americans who lived in and traveled to the Soviet Union. He personally experienced Stalinism and its various political purges, as many of his co-workers “disappeared” without a trace. He also experienced the paradox of Soviet internationalist discourse, which touted racial equality against the reality of the Russian people’s virulent racism against all non-Russian people, especially those of African origin.


Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1906, Robinson and his Dominican mother, Octavia, lived in Cuba, where she worked for physician. Robinson trained in Cuba as a mechanical engineer before immigrating to the United States in 1930. He settled in Dearborn, Michigan, where he worked as one of a handful of black machinists at the Ford Motor Plant in the city.



On Christmas Eve 1934, Time Magazine ran a story about Robert Robinson, a black man who had once been a machinist in the Ford plant in Detroit, but who had just been elected to the Moscow City Soviet.

Robinson had moved to Stalingrad in 1930 to work alongside three hundred other Americans in the Red October tractor factory. He had left his homeland after his wages had been halved due to the Depression. He was worried that he might be laid off completely. The Soviet authorities offered him twice the pay that he was getting in Detroit, plus a maid, a car and month’s paid leave every year. Life was rosy - at least until he was assaulted for being black.


His attackers were two of his fellow Americans, who objected having to eat their meals at the same table as a “nigger”. A Russian witnessed the fight and reported it. The Stalingrad district court found Robinson’s assailants guilty, but spared them ten years in Soviet jails because, in mitigation, it allowed that they had been “inoculated with racial enmity by the capitalistic system of exploitation of the lower races.” Instead they were expelled from the USSR.


What happened after the two Americans were sent home is also interesting. One of them, Herbert Lewis from Alabama, gave an interview to the Chicago Tribune in which he said that his fellow workers had emigrated only for the money and not out of any love for communism, and that they were being “held captive by the Reds”. Unable to leave the country, they were paid miserable wages in worthless roubles, were overworked in dangerous, inefficiently-run factories, and often fell victim to serious diseases resulting from the unsanitary living conditions


On these points at least, the nigger-hating Lewis was right. Even Robinson was not able to get out of the Soviet Union, despite desperate pleas to Paul Robeson, the Soviet-loving negro singer who was lionised in Moscow when he visited in the late 1930s. It was not until the 1970s that Robinson finally managed to escape. In 1988 he published a memoir in which he warned that the Soviet Union would never become a western-style democracy, and saying he thought Russians were incurable racists and chauvinists.


The Book: Robert Robinson - A Jamaican in the U.S.S.R.


On the December 10th., 1934 Robinson, who had put forward 50 proposals to rationalise tool production in the ball bearing plant, went to a factory meeting which had to elect a representative to the Moscow Soviet. Speeches were made in support of various nominees and then a man stood up and nominated Robinson. The crowd roared with enthusiasm and he was elected to a 4-year term on the council. The completely astounded Robinson said shortly afterwards 'I am not a member of the Communist Party. I am not interested in politics. In fact I have no idea what my duties will be as a Delegate in the Moscow Soviet.'

 
bravos 2019-04-28 17:25:01 

In reply to Casper

Very interesting and intriguing.

Here's a modern day version.. cool

Brave brothers!

 
Casper 2019-04-28 20:31:08 

Being Black in Russia.