African-American actors Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson are pivotal figures for discussions of attitudes globally that continue to inform contemporary critical approaches to race and representation. This chapter explores their engagements, reception, and appropriation in both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Aldridge and Robeson visited Russia within very different political climates. Aldridge travelled from America to England in 1824, then in the 1850s and 1860s spent several years in Russia. Official discussions around the emancipation of serfs, and connections between the systems of slavery and serfdom, were noted in press reports of Aldridge’s performances. In the 1930s Robeson was drawn to the USSR, regarding it as a place where people of African descent would be treated fairly, unlike the discrimination they faced in the United States. Robeson travelled extensively throughout the Soviet Union from 1934, throughout the 1940s, and returned later after the US reinstated his passport in 1958. Though Robeson was more overtly political than Aldridge, they each were drawn to Russian culture, received warmly by Russian audiences, and utilised by the Russian press as catalysts for political positions that they were seen to represent with their artistry. Robeson’s speeches in support of Soviet workers and of the Communist state led to his harassment by House of Un-American Activities Committee/the US government. Aldridge’s celebration of African ancestry and championing of the repressed in Russia led authorities to fear his advocacy. This heritage of political activism associated with both Aldridge and Robeson as Black American performers in Russia forms the basis of this chapter.
This volume explores the life histories of a wide range of radical figures whose political activity in relation to the black liberation struggle was catalysed or profoundly shaped by the global impact and legacy of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The volume includes new perspectives on the intellectual trajectories of well-known figures such as C.L.R. James, Paul Robeson, Raya Dunayevskaya and Walter Rodney, as well as the important South African trade union leader Clements Kadalie and the poet Amiri Baraka. The volume also brings together new research and scholarship on a number of critical activists who were influenced by ‘black Bolshevism’ such as Henry Hubert Harrison, Wilfred Domingo, Cyril Briggs, Grace P. Campbell and Lamine Senghor. Detailed engagements with the political trajectories of such revolutionary figures opens up a set of diverse perspectives and engagements with different articulations of black internationalisms in the wake of the Russian Revolution. This enables a focus on the different and contested terms on which these relations were shaped, and some of the nuanced situated ways in which these relations were negotiated and lived. The engagement with particular lives and experiences offers a focus on different forms of political agency and solidarity shaped at the intersection of the Russian Revolution and the wider Black Atlantic world. Such a biographical approach brings a vivid and distinctive lens to bear on how racialised social and political worlds were negotiated and experienced, and also on historic black radical engagements with left political movements and organising.