Three Generations of Blacks in Russia

From The Root - 

Black in the USSR: 3 Generations of a Russian Family

Escaping the oppression of a racist America, a black scientist named Oliver Golden took Soviet citizenship in the 1930s and began a legacy for his family that endures in Russia today.

BY: STEVEN J. NIVEN

In 1932, the poet Langston Hughes spent Christmas in the “dusty, coloured, cotton-growing South” of Uzbekistan, then one of the Soviet Union’s Asian republics. Hugheshad been in Moscow, working on a film critical of American race relations, but the project was abandoned, in part because the Soviets were then seeking official diplomatic recognition and improved economic ties with the United States. After an exhausting 2,000-mile journey on frozen, ramshackle Russian trains, he arrived on Christmas Eve in Yangiyul, near Tashkent, “in the middle of a mudcake oasis frosted with snow,” and visited “a neat, white painted cottage,” where “it was jolly and warm.”

His hosts were Oliver Golden, a black Mississippian, and Bertha Bialek, the white New York-born daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants, who had prepared a traditional American meal capped off with pumpkin pie to celebrate the season—washed down, of course, with copious amounts of local cognac and vodka. Most of his fellow guests were black men and women. As he looked out his window on Christmas morning, Hughes saw some tall, brown-skinned Uzbeks on horseback, padding across the snowy fields, and was reminded of images he had seen in Sunday school when he was a boy in Kansas: “In their robes, these Uzbeks looked just like Bible characters, and I imagined in their stable a manger and a child.”

http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2015/12/black_in_the_ussr_3_generations_of_an_african_american_family_in_the_soviet.2.html