When scholars narrate the history of Black people in the USSR, a certain collection of stock characters and set piece stories emerge repeatedly. As typically rendered, many of these stories contain a similar moral: the Soviets simply did not understand blackness. In two often-cited examples, Soviet officials got blackness “wrong” by failing to see light-skinned people as Black. At the Comintern’s Fourth Congress in 1922, officials passed over the US delegation’s selection of Otto Huiswoud to represent the “American Negro” because of his light skin, favoring instead the dark-complected poet Claude McKay.Footnote ¹ Ten years later, a group of Black Americans were invited to the USSR to participate in a much-vaunted film project, Black and White, which promised to depict Black American life with groundbreaking authenticity. But when the American actors arrived in Moscow, the project leads were dismayed: light-skinned Black Americans like the poet Langston Hughes seemed to them like “inauthentic blacks,” ill-suited to make a “creditable film about exploited American Negro workers.”Footnote ² Such stories confirm Soviet “ignorance,” “obtuseness,” and “critical misperception of race.”Footnote ³ Soviet officials, in short, were clueless about blackness.

But this critique itself partakes of a racial way of seeing. There are delicate distinctions to be made here. Soviet officials involved in these incidents may well have been “[unwilling] to grasp the intricacies … of their own implication in the international logics of white supremacy.”Footnote ⁴ They doubtless were ignorant about the specific workings of race in the US. But can we really scold them for giving an incorrect answer to the question, “Who is Black?” That question, after all, brooks no universally correct answer. Every answer put forward is shaped by context—and contest.

Whether historians or historical actors, we all come from somewhere, and all of us are socialized into particular ways of understanding phenotypical difference. We wear a locally-manufactured pair of glasses through which we “see” race—usually without noticing that we are wearing glasses at all. In the US, people have generally internalized the “one drop rule,” the principle that any traceable African ancestry is sufficient to mark a person as Black. Historians have shown how this system of “hypodescent” emerged in the specific conditions of slavery and Jim Crow: among its functions were to protect the property interests of slaveholders and, later, to exclude children of mixed-race parentage from inheriting wealth.Footnote ⁵ Scholars emphasize that “Blackness in the U.S. is an ascribed status, imposed on a spectrum of color shades and descent parentages, rather than a category of nature.”Footnote ⁶ But the insidiousness of racial classifications lies in their capacity to condition the eye to see and the mind to know which people belong to which category—all without conscious thought. Over time, a racial way of seeing comes to feel natural, to be internalized as “common sense.”Footnote ⁷

When we travel somewhere new, we bring our “common sense” with us. In 1932, after Black and White was cancelled, Langston Hughes stayed in the USSR for several months.Footnote ⁸ He claimed to see the Soviet Union through self-consciously “Negro eyes.”Footnote ⁹ Being racialized as Black, he contended, shaped the way he saw Soviet contexts. Literary scholar David Chioni Moore, on the other hand, has suggested that Hughes saw the USSR through less self-consciously American eyes. Being socialized in an American context shaped the distinct way Hughes saw race. And seeing race with American eyes meant defining Blackness according to a stark binary: “black or white—with nothing in between.”Footnote ¹⁰ Though Hughes was light-skinned and of mixed-race descent, in the US, his blackness was self-evident. But people elsewhere did not necessarily read him that way. On a 1923 journey to West Africa, Hughes was surprised and disappointed when the first Africans he met read him as white. “They looked at my copper-brown skin and straight black hair … except a little curly—and they said: “You—white man.”Footnote ¹¹ West African deckhands working alongside Hughes explained that they associated lighter-skinned foreigners with a peculiar sort of civilizing mission, an elevated self-perception in relation to local Africans.Footnote ¹² Outside the US, Hughes’s blackness was not so self-evident.

If historians hope to understand how blackness operated in the USSR, we must find ways to provincialize and denaturalize American racial “common sense.”Footnote ¹³ To do so, this essay adopts a doubly-decentered vantage: it shifts focus from the Global West to the South, and its subjects occupy a position at the fringes of blackness. In South Africa, with its own specific history of settler colonialism and capital accumulation, the one drop rule did not apply. There, an intermediate category emerged between the dominant white minority and the subjugated black majority: Coloured.Footnote ¹⁴ The diverse origins of people labelled “Coloured” reflected histories of slavery, migration, and integration that bound together the fates and bloodlines of indigenous Khoi-San people, enslaved people from southeast Asia, African speakers of Bantu languages, European settlers, and people of mixed descent.Footnote ¹⁵ Coloureds came into contact with the USSR through decades of Soviet involvement with South African liberation struggles. Here, I take a first look at the history of Coloured South Africans in the USSR.Footnote ¹⁶ Observing blackness from its contested margins, I suggest, may allow us to see a seemingly familiar subject anew.

In South Africa, “Coloured” as a distinct identity category cohered in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.Footnote ¹⁷ The term had long been used in the Cape Colony, but in an era of rapid industrialization, some people who were not accepted as white found the label “Coloured” useful in distinguishing themselves from people colonial authorities administered as “Natives.”Footnote ¹⁸ The South African census formalized a distinction between “Coloured” and “Bantu” in 1904.Footnote ¹⁹ (In the US, meanwhile, statutory gradations for mixed-race people were disappearing: in 1920, the US census eliminated the category “mulatto”).Footnote ²⁰ In the emerging South African racial imaginary—and its attendant rights regime—Coloureds were located a notch above Africans by virtue of their proximity to whiteness, phenotypically and culturally. Because they represented both evidence and prospect of dreaded interracial sexual liaisons, Coloureds were also understood to pose a special threat to white purity.Footnote ²¹ In the early twentieth century, as an onslaught of racist laws eroded the rights of all non-white South Africans, being classified as “Coloured” afforded some protection.Footnote ²²

In the early twentieth century, separate organizations representing Africans, Coloureds, and Indians tended to mobilize people around specific issues that affected them. Broadly speaking, Coloured politics focused on the right to be included in European, supposedly “civilized” society, a claim that meant asserting Coloureds’ distance from and superiority to black Africans. From the 1920s onwards, a few Coloured radicals tried to build solidarity across racial lines in opposition to white supremacy, but they faced an uphill battle.Footnote ²³ Coloureds were not easily persuaded to associate their fates with worse-off Africans, and it could be fraught for Coloured activists to locate themselves within African nationalist politics.Footnote ²⁴

With the introduction of apartheid in 1948, racial classification ossified and racial stratification deepened. Under the 1950 Population Registration Act, the South African government officially classified its population into four racial groups: white, black, Indian, and Coloured. “Coloured” was defined residually: people were Coloured if they were not something else. Apartheid policies allocated privileges and targeted abuses differentially according to racial categories, widening the gap between the status of Coloureds and blacks, on the one hand, and Coloureds and whites, on the other.

Rhetorical opposition to the very category “Coloured” became prominent within South African opposition politics in the 1970s. Black Consciousness thinkers proposed a new definition of “Black” that encompassed everyone oppressed under white supremacy—including Coloureds.Footnote ²⁵ Some people classified as Coloured rejected that designation and condemned the quadripartite racial taxonomy as an instrument of white domination, a tool to fracture solidarity among the oppressed. This sort of “rejectionism”—choosing to discard “Coloured” in favor of “Black” as a political identity—became especially popular among young and educated people.Footnote ²⁶ Many used quotation marks to emphasize that “Coloured” was merely an ascribed identification. Referring to “so-called ‘Coloureds’” communicated that no such group really existed; rather, it was a wholly artificial creation of the white state. But for some people, this stance went too far, and being described as “so-called ‘Coloureds’” was plainly insulting. Activist Alex La Guma wrote in 1984 that the phrase “so-called Coloured” made him feel “like a ‘so-called’ human, like a humanoid, those things who have all the characteristics of human beings but are really artificial.”Footnote ²⁷ Even in its heyday in the 1980s, the appeal of “rejectionism” was limited: most people classified as Coloured continued to see themselves as Coloureds.Footnote ²⁸

In the USSR, Coloured South Africans were hypervisible and also invisible, artificial and also real, black and also not black. Though few in number, a handful of Coloured activists and writers played particularly prominent roles representing the plight of oppressed black South Africans to Soviet audiences. James La Guma, a trade union organizer and activist, helped shift Comintern policy to focus on South Africa’s black majority.Footnote ²⁹ Peter Abrahams was the first and most significant non-white South African writer to reach a broad Soviet audience, though he never visited. Abrahams’ novels depicting life under racist rule were taught in English classes, adapted for the stage, and translated into Russian, Latvian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Estonian, Moldovan, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, Georgian, Chuvash, Lithuanian, Tajik, and more.Footnote ³⁰ James La Guma’s son Alex was a leading figure in the Soviet-aligned Afro-Asian Writers Association. In interviews, speeches, and fiction, Alex represented South African realities to Soviet audiences; in essays and a book-length travelogue, he represented Soviet realities to foreign—especially South African—audiences.Footnote ³¹ Though identified as Coloured in South Africa, neither the La Gumas nor Abrahams were specified as Coloured in the USSR.

At first, the Soviets simply were not aware such a distinction might be made. The first South Africans to visit the USSR were white, and the first non-white South African to visit was Coloured. In 1927, James La Guma spoke to Comintern officials about the situation within the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), problematizing the CPSA’s predominantly white leadership and its traditional focus on the white working class. Shortly thereafter, the Comintern issued a directive requiring the CPSA to prioritize liberation for South Africa’s black majority.Footnote ³² This major policy change was shepherded (if not definitively instigated) by La Guma. From an African nationalist perspective, there was potential awkwardness in a situation where a Coloured radical in conversation with a Russian Communist (Nikolai Bukharin) was driving a shift in focus towards African self-determination. Successive drafts of the “Native Republic Thesis” demonstrate the Comintern adjusting its view of South Africa’s racial situation. A version from March 1927 proposed an independent “Negro republic” with “autonomy for the national white minorities.”Footnote ³³ Four months later, the slogan called for an “independent black South African Republic … with full autonomy for all minorities.”Footnote ³⁴ The final version, adopted in September 1928, replaced the last clause with “full rights for all races black, coloured, and white.”Footnote ³⁵ Following the first Soviet exposure to non-white South African perspectives, Coloureds were written into official Soviet understandings, albeit rarely and inconsistently.Footnote ³⁶

Subsequent exposure to a broader range of information through the 1930s, organized through the prism of Soviet ideas about nationality, shifted official Soviet understandings; by the 1950s, the existence of Coloureds had been written out. As many historians have shown, while Marxist-Leninist theory argued that nations were artificial constructs that would wither away under socialism, Soviet practice came to treat ethnically-defined nations as not only real in the present but likely durable into the future.Footnote ³⁷ In contrast, Soviet social scientists came to see “Coloured” identity as distinctly artificial, either a creation or a hallucination of white racists. Decades before South Africans began referring to “so-called ‘Coloureds,’” Soviet Africanists began to enclose “Coloured” in quotation marks. The introduction to the 1951 Soviet edition of Peter Abrahams’ novel Path of Thunder explained that in South Africa, “mulattoes” were known as “Coloured.” Throughout the commentary, “Coloured” mostly appeared in quotation marks, while “mulatto,” “Negro,” and “Native” did not, communicating that while “Coloured” was artificial or illegitimate, the latter identity categories were by contrast authentic and legitimate.Footnote ³⁸

Ivan Potekhin, the doyen of Soviet African Studies, believed “Coloured” was artificial because the people so categorized lacked a distinct language and culture. Potekhin joined the Comintern in the 1930s, where he taught and was taught by South Africans who came to study at the Communist University for Toilers of the East. By the 1950s, Potekhin was the leading Soviet scholar of Africa. In 1955, he published a monograph about modern South African history, The Formation of National Community among the South African Bantu. In it, Potekhin described four population groups: Africans; descendants of Europeans; migrants (pereselentsy) from Asia, mainly India; and “so-called Coloured (tsvetnye), or mixed (smeshannie), consisting mainly of mulattos (mulaty), the leftovers (ostatki) of Bushmen and Hottentots.”Footnote ³⁹ In his analysis, the category “Coloured” was “totally artificial, without any cultural or linguistic basis.” People classified as Coloured had nothing in common culturally with African Bantu-speakers, but they “[did] not differ from Europeans in language, culture, lifestyle”—only skin color, which would be irrelevant in the absence of a racist government.Footnote ⁴⁰ Following the Soviet emphasis on language as the defining characteristic of nationality, Potekhin predicted that Afrikaans-speaking “mulattos” would eventually be absorbed into an Afrikaner nationality.Footnote ⁴¹ In his view, the term “Coloured” was both scientifically incorrect and offensive and should thus be rejected.Footnote ⁴²

Soviet scholarly “rejectionism,” so strong in the 1950s, weakened over time. In the increasingly primordialist mood of the Soviet 1980s, “Coloured” became more accepted as an identity group. By the time South African writer Christopher Van Wyk visited the Africa Institute in 1985, he had come to reject the label “Coloured” and call himself “Black”; without comment, his Soviet interlocutors referred to him as Coloured anyway.Footnote ⁴³ In the introduction to a 1986 edition of Peter Abrahams’ A Night of Their Own, historian Apollon Davidson elected to use Coloured without quotation marks—after a brief explanation to alert Soviet readers that Coloured was the South African term for “metis.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Within a social sciences establishment obsessed with ethnogenesis, no Soviet scholar undertook a book project about Coloured history until L.A. Vialimaa began one in 1987. Called “Children of Good Hope,” it was to show how Coloured identity originated and strengthened over time.Footnote ⁴⁵

Beyond the narrow confines of academia, the Soviet cultural establishment was continually perplexed by the presence of Coloureds in stories that would be simpler to tell in black and white. In Path of Thunder, Abrahams wrote about the hardships of interracial love and the structures and stereotypes underpinning African-Coloured mistrust.Footnote ⁴⁶ While adapting the novel into a ballet, librettist Yuri Slonimsky objected to the “pessimism” of Abrahams’ original ending (“Hate”), replacing it with a more optimistic ending (“Struggle”) that showed “the unification of the blacks and coloureds” in a revolutionary workers’ march.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the 1958 ballet and the 1956 film of Path of Thunder, Russian performers played the famous interracial couple: Lanny, the Coloured schoolteacher, and Sarie, the Afrikaner woman he loved. In different productions, Lanny’s difference from pale, blonde Sarie was marked in more or less subtle ways, ranging from the jet-black hair and striking dark brows of one Russian dancer, to the brown makeup, in varying shades, sported by many others.Footnote ⁴⁸ In a 1959 Ogonek spread, a photo of a white-passing Lanny appeared opposite a blurb describing him as “Negro” (negritianskii) and “black” (chernyi).Footnote ⁴⁹

South African visitors to the USSR surveyed their human surroundings with distinctly South African lenses, noticing and often identifying with Soviet citizens they saw as “Coloured.” When Charles Adams, a Coloured trade unionist from Cape Town, visited Soviet Azerbaijan in 1937, he was surprised to find “dark-skinned people” in high-status positions. Adams wrote that the population of Azerbaijan “consists of 50 per cent Coloured people, who, in facial features and colour, resemble very much our Cape Malays.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Walter Sisulu was born to a white father and a black mother, but, despite being “light in complexion” and often read as Coloured, chose to live as a lower-status African.Footnote ⁵¹ As an African, Sisulu could join the African National Congress (ANC), which did not allow Coloured members until 1969. As an ANC leader, Sisulu toured the Soviet Union in 1953, visiting Moscow and Azerbaijan. Afterwards, he described the “people of the Union” as “Yellow, White, or Coloured,” declaring, “I was treated as one of them.”Footnote ⁵² In the 1960s–70s, James La Guma’s son Alex traveled extensively in the USSR. In Central Asia, especially, the younger La Guma recorded scenes of recognition and belonging. Dressed up in a “quilted traditional robe” and an “embroidered tyubeteika,” pronounced an honorary member of a village, he described a satisfying feeling of homecoming.Footnote ⁵³ Photographs of La Guma wearing traditional Central Asian garb evoke a specific sort of internationalist fraternity, a visual testament that outsiders who appeared a certain way might look and feel at home in the USSR.

In social contexts, Soviet locals differentiated between lighter-skinned foreigners who could blend in amongst the phenotypical variation of Soviet society and darker-skinned foreigners who could not. In Soviet Central Asia, Langston Hughes seems to have found the sense of recognition he craved in West Africa. He remembered meeting one Uzbek man who had no shared language but simply “pointed at my face, then at his: Brown, same color.”Footnote ⁵⁴ George Tynes, an American agricultural specialist with mixed Black/Dakota parentage and light skin, was frequently taken as a local in Uzbekistan. “Down there they thought I was a Uzbek,” he remembered, “a little bigger and a little darker than most, but they tried to talk Uzbek to me.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In Ukraine, an Algerian was assumed to hail from the Caucasus; in Moscow, an Indian South African was assumed to be Roma.Footnote ⁵⁶ No such ambiguity surrounded darker-skinned black people, who, in Apollon Davidson’s words, “looked anything but Soviet.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Anti-black prejudice in the USSR was inflected by local forms of colorism, that is, skin tone stratification marking lighter shades as superior to darker.Footnote ⁵⁸ Dark-skinned people experienced particularly radical forms of othering. Children asked if their skin pigmentation could wash off. Students expressed surprise and confusion to see them dressing in modern, western clothing. Strangers touched their hair and used racial slurs. Locals beat them up for flirting with white women.Footnote ⁵⁹ Soviet racial common sense echoed South African racial categories in regarding Coloureds as not quite white and not quite black.

If the invitation of this essay was to observe blackness in the USSR from its contested margins, the object of observation remains stubbornly elusive. The very word for “black” in Russian, chernyi, is an awkward translation at best: chernyi carries with it complex histories and contradictory meanings that differ dramatically from the English word “black.” In latter decades, some European Soviets used the expansive—and pejorative—term chernyi to describe people of many origins and hues.Footnote ⁶⁰ Among those called chernyi were people from the Caucasus (while in a western racial imagination, Caucasians were prototypical white people).Footnote ⁶¹ Some Soviet citizens who remembered being called chernyi themselves reported in interviews that the term was not used to describe Africans.Footnote ⁶² Nonetheless, some Africans remembered being called chernyi.Footnote ⁶³ A Pakistani alumnus of People’s Friendship University told an interviewer that in the 1970s, “all non-European students” were considered chernyi.Footnote ⁶⁴ Unlike the US or South Africa, the USSR never institutionalized a fixed definition of blackness. The Soviet state did not officially categorize individuals as black. It did not create an elaborate institutional apparatus administering group rights based on skin color. Racial common sense developed in the USSR without direct and pervasive conditioning by state categories. The edges of blackness were especially inconsistent there as a result.

For a long time, admiring observers and historians took the absence of official racial categories and a formal color bar to indicate the absence of racism (or even race consciousness) in the USSR. That time is over. With every passing year, we learn more about the presence of racist ideas and racialized inequalities in Soviet society. The absence of official racial categories in the USSR did not mean what some observers thought (or hoped) it would mean, but we need not conclude that it was meaningless. Indeed, historians of the USSR are perhaps especially well-placed to recognize the power of state categorization. In the 1920s, the Soviet state did create an elaborate institutional apparatus administering group rights based on the category of nationality. Within less than a generation, nationality became highly fixed, bounded, and stereotyped: a way of seeing as rigid as America’s one drop rule. While a certain set of tenacious stereotypes adhered to dark-skinned people of African descent in the USSR, looking at light-skinned people—and Coloured South Africans in particular—reveals different dynamics at play. No racial paradigm succeeds absolutely in stabilizing a system of rigid coordinates for mapping the human landscape, but this situation reflects an unusual degree of categorical instability and flux.