Black, White and Red

...A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Black White and Red By Abraham Brumberg Reading about the recent demonstrations of African students in the Soviet Union, I recalled an incident that had taken place barely three months ago...

...Without Mr...

...What better way of cushioning the effects of such reactions, the Soviet authorities must have reasoned, than by isolating the students, and in their isolation offering them a few crumbs of freedom which would be denied them in the ordinary Soviet university...

...But, as has already been pointed out by numerous observers, had the purpose been indeed that of catering to the needs of the underdeveloped countries, surely it could have been accomplished much more efficiently by instituting special courses at the existing Soviet universities, courses tailored to the specific problems of African as distinguished from, say, Latin American countries...

...The restrictions, then, within Friendship University are less severe than in regular Soviet institutions of learning...

...Listen to their songs—how rotten they are...

...The atmosphere was much the same as in almost all restaurants all over modern Russia: crowded tables, food and drinks sloppily strewn over floors and tablecloths, broken bottles, cheap red velvet, a wretched "jazz" band...

...Which brings us to the last and perhaps most intriguing question of all: What of racial discrimination in the Soviet Union...

...As the mournful songs welled up in front of us, a fellow to my right, a mustachioed Georgian, began muttering to me, quite oblivious, it seemed, of my clearly American clothes: "What a bunch of thieves, these Armenians...

...I had heard many stories about the difficulties experienced by Africans in their attempts to date Russian girls, stories of actual fist-fights between African and Russian students...

...Is it not possible that some of these manifestations of hostility stem from either ignorance or the general lack of good taste and good manners, rather than from actual anti-black prejudice...

...Okonkwo in 1960 could be described in a few words, but perhaps the best way to relate it is to quote the "Open Letter to African Governments" published by several African students who had left the USSR in the autumn of 1960: There are many cases we could cite of Communist deceitful exploitation of African students without their knowledge or consent...

...One of the main reasons the University was founded, he told me, was to spare the foreign student the long hours of Marxism-Leninism and history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which are compulsory for every Soviet student...

...I recall another incident, in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, where with a friend one evening I attended a concert of Armenian songs...

...But they promised to keep their readers posted, since they were in touch with the counsellor of the Soviet Embassy in the unnamed country, who had actually spoken to Larissa (how and under what circumstances was not made clear...

...Theophilus Okonko was exercising in the Moscow University gym, and a Russian student took a picture of him in a boxing pose...

...The young Russians arc said to be bitterly jealous of the favors enjoyed by their guests from the Dark Continent (the myth of the Negro's sexual potency may be waning in the States, but it is still blooming in the USSR), and I concluded that I was in on another case of schadenfreude...

...In early July [1960], Mr...

...Y's passionate outburst...

...by the ban on independent student organizations...

...And there has been ample evidence of scuffles between whites and blacks sparked, as I noted earlier, by dating between Russian girls and African students...

...Because you're a dirty Jew...

...Because it's not Russian...

...Why Jewish?," I inquired, with some amusement...

...Apart from the obvious fact that most Russians have no way of coping with foreigners at all, and that they are therefore prone to treat Africans as some kind of exotic refugees from snake-infested jungles...

...But restrictions there still are, as African students in Moscow relearned last spring when they tried to assert themselves as an organized body regarding a particularly obnoxious piece of reportage in the Soviet press...

...Across from me sat two young Russians, one of whom was getting progressively more intoxicated...

...They would sell their own mother for a hundred rubles...

...Furthermore, he continued, the students at Friendship University were permitted to get whatever newspapers and magazines they wanted from their homelands...

...Kwame Nkrumah...

...At that time, I chatted for more than an hour with a gentleman who introduced himself as the head of the University's public relations department...

...It was a bit difficult for me to learn the precise reasons for Mr...

...Nor are Soviet Africanists any longer so coldly contemptuous of endemic African institutions such as tribalism—an institution, incidentally, which to some African Socialists is to be the nucleus of the future society...

...The editors refused to recognize the credentials of the delegation, but assured the Arab students that the country in question was not one of "their" countries, and permitted them to publish a statement to this effect, signed "Representatives of the Arab Students Studying in the USSR...

...To be sure, he was as vague on this subject as on any other, but one could easily guess what he meant...

...Finally, it must be emphasized, too, that the Soviet authorities obviously have no interest in either inspiring or encouraging antiblack sentiments...

...Okonkwo's knowledge or consent, the Communists had spread this propaganda construction in a number of Communist magazines through the world...

...The African, it turned out, was an engineering student from the Cameroons studying at Moscow University, and the shy Russian girl was his wife...

...And is there not perhaps a tendency on the part of African students to confuse totalitarian with anti-black measures...

...Nor should one dismiss the coarse remarks of an occasional official simply because Khrushchev would disallow them...

...Okonkwo in the boxing pose...

...Is is any wonder, then, that African students in Moscow, many of them influenced by these very theories of "African Socialism," are affronted by Soviet propaganda and resent being lectured on the fallacy of their belief that "all Africans are brothers...

...The experience of the Nigerian student Theophilus Okonkwo, while perhaps extreme, must still be fresh in their minds...

...And I remember the remark of a Russian at a public park in Leningrad: "Can't stand these Georgians...

...There, in a full-page picture, was Mr...

...As might have been expected, this clarification was considered somewhat inadequate to the African students in Moscow, who in turn appointed their own delegation to find out whether the country in question was an African Moslem country...

...anti-black sentiment is clearly a political liability to the Soviet leadership...

...The real purpose, of course, was altogether different...

...He was, after all, somewhat in his cups, and his way with the English language, especially at that time, made communication between us rather difficult...

...A student from, say, France or England, someone with more sophisticated intellectual baggage, might be able to rationalize the numerous Soviet "shortcomings" by invoking Logos, History, the hallowed principle of "You Cannot Make an Omelette without Breaking Eggs...

...Officially, the stated purpose of gathering all these students under one roof was to "help other countries in training highly qualified specialists" (Khrushchev), and to permit "training with a view to the [special] needs of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America" (S...

...Would that include explicity anti-Communist publications, too?, I inquired...

...The African delegation was received by the editors and assured that the country in question was not in Africa (which left precious little to chose from), though they refused to print a statement to this effect...

...In 1960, the Friendship—or, as it was renamed a year later, the Lumumba —University opened its doors to several hundred students from about 50 Asian, African and Latin American countries...

...But a relatively unsophisticated African, who had come to the Soviet Union expecting to find a paradise on earth would be much more prone to disappointment, anger, and shock...

...Although it is obviously difficult to answer these questions fully, it is true that the understandable sensitivity on the part of the Africans does play a certain role...

...On the contrary, get more and more African students to study here...

...The trouble with all you Americans, British and French," he said heatedly, wagging his finger, "is that you try to make too much anti-Communist propaganda in Africa...

...But now, the Soviet propagandists had blatantly dubbed in broken chains on his wrists and a white man with a whip falling back in terror...

...Indeed, scholarly studies on Africa and Soviet strategy for Africa have become considerably more sophisticated in recent years...

...This quality is the fruit of tension, suspicion, jealousy and, consequently, of an attempt to seek one's own in a brutal and hostile world...

...These incidents do not make Russia another Alabama, as some of the protesting African students' signs last month would have it, but it does place the vaunted Soviet policy of "friendship among peoples" in a rather curious light...

...He literally seized my watch and tried to pull it off my wrist...

...I was visiting an American journalist in Moscow one afternoon, when the bell rang and a minute later a most incongruous couple appeared at the threshhold: a short, pitchblack African, slightly inebriated, and a fair-skinned, petite Russian blonde...

...He assured me that this was the case and I believed him—especially when he admitted that the average Soviet student would not have access to similar publications, not even the New York Times...

...Perfectly innocent so far...

...Larissa, it seemed, fell in love with a foreign student by the name of Mahamud, and was persuaded by him to return to his own country (which was unnamed in the article...

...and which Komsomolskaya Pravda denied on grounds that "there aren't any students from Ghana at Kiev University...

...For this reason, every report of alleged discrimination should be treated with caution...

...How essentially hostile is Moscow's attitude to those African political leaders with whom it now seeks to forge a "broad progressive front" for the purpose of attaining an "independent national-democratic state" is evidenced by the following words written by Y. Popov, another prominent Soviet Africanist: "These pro-imperialist circles, hiding behind talk about 'real African Socialism,' are attempting to castrate the class content of the proletarian struggle and to force the African working class to betray the principles of proletarian internationalism as well as to drag into the African working-class movement the narrow nationalist slogan that "all Africans are brothers...

...But he would not let go...

...Yes, yes, this is my wife, my wife," he repeated several times...

...Whereupon the Africans went to the Ministry of Higher Education, and received just as little satisfaction there...

...But as one begins to comprehend the quality of Soviet life, the problem becomes somewhat less inexplicable...

...V. Rumiantsev, Rector of the University...

...Yet much of the old attitude, so irritating to African nationalists, still persists...

...Whereupon he exclaimed: "Ah, well, there is a Jewish attitude for you...

...The theories of 'socialism of the national type,' " I. I. Potekhin, the leading African specialist in the Soviet Union, recently wrote, "mislead the popular masses, hamper the development of the national-liberation movement," and, of course, "hinder the spread of scientific Socialism...

...Look at their faces, all gangsters and petty thieves, every single one of them...

...He wanted me to know that, although he had already spent three years in the Soviet Union and was prepared to stick it out for another two in order to obtain his degree, he would have no truck with the Soviet system or with Communism in general...

...Gone are the days, of course, when Soviet spokesmen were denouncing those Africans whose taste for independence did not coincide with a belief in the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (among them Dr...

...All of which makes me wonder whether the African students should not feel—in a peculiarly perverse yet essentially accurate way—that, in Russia at least, they are not really different from everyone else...

...For one thing, Mr...

...The pitiful Soviet maiden attempted to break away from her predatory husband, though to no avail...

...Unlike, say, antiSemitism, a malaise to which segments of the Soviet population and leadership alike are prone, and which finds expression in concrete policies (e.g., discrimination in higher education and diplomatic service, proscriptions on cultural activities in Yiddish or Hebrew, etc...

...One finds it difficult to understand why this should be so, and indeed the standard explanations for racial hostility—the economic, the psychoanalytical, the sociological, the anthropological—all fail in the case of Russia, which has no tradition of white-black relations at all...

...And how many Africans, one wonders, enjoy being not merely lectured to but crudely used as propaganda pawns...

...The article in question appeared in Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Young Communist League newspaper, and it dealt with the woeful experiences of a young Soviet girl identified merely as Larissa...

...He was contemptuous of their efforts to tell him what Africa was really like...

...The Soviet authorities were well aware that these students from the underdeveloped countries were enraged by the patent lack of political freedoms...

...Yet it would be a mistake to think that the Soviet leaders learned nothing from the incidents of this sort...

...It is frequently difficult to ascertain either the backgrounds or nature of such flare-ups: the reported assault on several Ghanaian students in Kiev last August, for instance, which was at first indignantly denied by Izvestia, whose correspondent supposedly interviewed a Ghanaian student in Kiev...

...That this was indeed the thinking that guided the Soviet leaders became clear to me when I visited Friendship University in the autumn of 1961...

...Abraham Brumberg is editor of the bi-monthly Problems of Communism...

...Only then" — here he paused dramatically—"only then will they learn to hate Communism...

...But then, a few weeks later, a friend put the August 12 issue of the New Times in front of him and said: "Look what they have done to you...

...And this," he added challengingly, "is our baby...

...Because it is!," he shouted...

...In fact, the mounting dissatisfaction of students from Africa—as well as from Asia and Latin America—a dissatisfaction frequently erupted in a manner which could not help but be embarrassing to Soviet officials, finally prompted them to embark upon a radically new policy...

...You tell the Africans not to go to Russia, because they would be mistreated here...

...After some desultory conversation, he suddenly leaned over the table, grasped my hand, and, glaring at me with his blood-shot eyes, said: "Come on now, let's exchange watches...

...Those who have spent any time at all in Moscow have sooner or later heard of cases of outright antiNegro hostility on the part of, say, a waiter who refuses to serve an African, or have seen—as I myself have—small groups of Africans huddled together at night trying to hail a passing taxi be patently ignored in favor of a white customer just a few yards away...

...Yet one thing was certain: The reasons were political...

...And while Potekhin goes as far as to admit that the African "village community can, under certain conditions, become a starting point for the non-capitalist development of a country and for the building of Socialism," the primary role in effecting this process is still assigned to the Communists who, in the words of B. N. Ponomarev, a leading Soviet theoretician, "have always been in the first ranks of fighters for national independence," and "thousands" of whom "died as heroes in the struggle against colonialism" (quite a claim for a continent where the total number of Communist party members can hardly be counted in the thousands...

...For the coarse remark is but a part—and a reflection—of something larger...

...What had happened to Mr...

...But I was wrong...

...Thoroughly stirred up, the Africans broke the story at an extraordinary news conference last summer...

...This policy had as its goal no less than the complete segregation of students from underdeveloped countries...

...Again I explained that I did not very much go for his idea...

...Let them come...

...by the ignorance and arrogance of Soviet officialdom...

...The Soviet authorities obviously could not deny the truthfulness of this incident...

...by the red tape and petty frustrations that comprise so much of everyday life in the USSR...

...They're just a bunch of lechers and speculators...

...Okonkwo's protests to the Soviet authorities were, of course, to no avail...

...I declined the offer, explaining that my watch had a certain sentimental value for me and that, in addition, we really didn't know each other well enough for so touching a display of brudevschaft...

...When the Arab students in Moscow read the story, they immediately appointed a delegation to speak to the editors of Komsomolskaya Pravda in order to obtain full clarification of the incident...

...In the course of their inquiry, however, they were told by one official that the newspaper story was printed for "instructional" purposes—in other words, that it was a hoax...

...Y. could well have resented the Soviet attitude towards African culture and towards that continent's political future, permeated as it is with a heavy dose of dogmatic Marxism...

...Yet there is much more to it than misguided sensitivity on the part of Africans, or the penalties of living under a totalitarian regime...

...Once finding himself on native soil, Mahamud proceeded to sell Larissa for a considerable sum of money to a nobleman who already possessed a sizeable harem...

...I remember a humid night two years ago in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, when I was sitting at the table in what I had been told was the city's best and most elegant restaurant...

...Instead, they published a smear attack on the Nigerian student in Trud, the Soviet "trade-union" newspaper, accusing him of being a spy and a drunkard—as standard a Soviet technique as forging photographs...

...Y. (as I shall call him) was decidedly proud of his local acquisition, and even more so of their joint product, a chubby two-year old girl, neither Russian nor African looking, whose picture he triumphantly displayed before us...

...He indicated that he smarted under all sorts of restrictions...

...How much of it really exists, and how much is a product of the overly sensitive imaginations of Africans...

...And this, needless to say, did not contribute to the improvement of their relations with Soviet officialdom...

...Y. resented being "lectured" by his Soviet hosts...

...apart from the perhaps innate discomfort aroused by the presence of someone who so conspicuously is not of your "kind"—apart from all this, there is the fact, so simple yet so difficult to explain to one who has never experienced Soviet reality, that life in Russia tends to lend itself to friction, to hatred between one group and another, be it either economic or ethnic or religious or racial...

...Y. had more on his mind than a desire to flaunt his manly prowess...

...What the next chapter in this dramatic tale would be the editors of Komsomolskaya Pravda did not know...

...It is also true that a good part of the Africans' resentment is aroused by conditions to which the ordinary Soviet citizen is subjected no less than a Ghanaian or Nigerian who chooses to reside in Russia over a longer period of time...