Authors

Discussion

TIME magazine reported in 1934 that “last week that coal-black protégé of Joseph Stalin, Robert Robinson, was elected, somewhat to his surprise, to the Moscow Soviet.” Robinson, however, was no follower of Stalin. A skilled Ford auto worker, he travelled to the Stalingrad tractor factory as a guest worker in 1930 to escape the Depression and US racism. As a devout Christian with no interest in Bolshevism, he still acknowledged the anti-racist sincerity of Soviet friends and colleagues, and benefitted from Soviet institutions, earning an advanced engineering degree. The American journalist’s disdain for Robinson’s experience of racial egalitarianism in the USSR is symptomatic of a general Western skepticism toward Soviet anti-racism, then and now. 

This paper challenges this skepticism through two instances of Robinson’s appearance in Soviet visual culture: his fictional materialization in the little-known silent film Black Skin (Chernaia kozha) of 1931, and a 1935 newsreel showing an interview with him in his Moscow apartment and his induction into the Moscow Soviet. Both films can be dismissed, in the spirit of the American journalist, as self-serving Soviet propaganda. Yet they also exceed propaganda in their affective dramatization of difference and egalitarianism under socialism; Black Skin’s embodied salute to blackness is a riposte to the easy racist slur “coal-black.”