Black on Red : my 44 years inside the Soviet Union : an autobiography by Robert Robinson

Review by Edward Brooks

This autobiography (written with the assistance of Jonathan Slevin) is unique because of the subject matter, which covers the author’s experiences as a Black immigrant to the then USSR.

Robinson left the USA, where he was a naturalized citizen from Cuba. His mother remained in Cuba, in need of financial support, which became a continuing issue in Robinson’s life in the USSR. More than once he decided to stay in the USSR when he still had the opportunity to return to the US (in his first few years of expatriation), because he couldn’t earn enough in the US to live and also support his mom in Cuba.

The USSR needed specialists to jump start its industrial production in the 30's. Robinson was a machinist and tool maker. He was also black, which gave the USSR much more bang for its buck, since not only did Robinson have actual skills to offer, but, since the Soviets posited a utopian workers’ society which was completely color-blind, Robinson was evidence that the USSR was such a society (otherwise why would an American Black have immigrated there)?

The book is the story of Robinson’s disillusionment with the USSR. In the early stages Robinson’s presence in Russia was justified by him as the better alternative to the US, which at that time offered the double whammy of virulent racism and economic depression. His dedication to the support of his mother weighed in heavily as well.

Robinson’s story begins in the optimism and idealism of the early days of communism, before about 1930, ironically the year he arrived. But everything goes downhill following his first few years.

He lives through the Great Purge of the 30's into the war years when repressions are relaxed to encourage patriotism. During the Purges he in a sense dances between the raindrops, protected only, as he surmises, by his American passport. The box score regarding the purges is that in his factory 367 persons are in his group at the beginning, and at the end, only two are left, him and one other.

The repression resumes after the war until Stalin’s death in 1953. I personally recall Stalin’s death. I lived in Oakland, California, in 1953, aged 11. I walked the two blocks from my family’s apartment to the news rack where I saw the Oakland Tribune headline, saying that Stalin was dead.

It would be unusual for an 11-year-old to have any comprehension of political events–but it is a measure of the state of the cold war at that time that I not only recognized the significance of the death of Stalin, but the moment made such an impression on me that I remember it to this day.

The book is most interesting to me for the picture it presents of a highly disciplined individual, apolitical, surviving and even prevailing against both a monolithic police state and pervasive racism. ( )