Over the past two decades, an increasing number of scholars have turned their attention to the matrix of topics that unites: relations between the Soviet Union and the decolonizing world, Soviet conceptions of race and Blackness, and Soviet anti-imperialism and support for oppressed minorities in the capitalist west (and in the US in particular). Several of the pioneers of this wave of scholarship are contributors to the volume under review, which offers a thought-provoking and valuable new resource for work on these questions.
Two names should be mentioned as foundational for this volume: Wayland Rudd and Yevgeniy Fiks. The latter is a visual artist based in New York City whose works often draw on the history of his country of birth, the USSR. As Fiks explains in his short introduction, Wayland Rudd was an African American actor who repatriated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and remained a part of the Soviet theatrical world until his death in 1952. Over the past decade or so, in the process of an extended artistic and research project regarding representations of Black Africans and African Americans in the visual culture of the USSR, Fiks accumulated a collection of relevant images from Soviet propaganda and print culture, some in the form of physical artifacts and others in digital form. In the course of this undertaking, he decided to name the collection for Rudd, who appears in several of its items. This volume, which presents reproductions of these images as well as a series of commissioned essays interpreting and contextualizing them, is one element of Fiks's ongoing project around the collection that also includes “contemporary artworks, several related salons, events, and installations” (5).
The Wayland Rudd Collection is neither exhibition catalogue, nor volume of academic essays, nor artist's book, although it contains elements of all of these. Its final 45 pages present 150 fine color reproductions of images from the Wayland Rudd Collection (henceforth WRC), presented in small or medium scale enabling scholarly reference, if not always a complete grasp of formal characteristics or full information about dimensions or media. The book is introduced by 48 full-page color illustrations of striking, artistically composed details from the WRC images.
The essays included in the volume present a range of distinct genres: memoir, interview, artistic/poetic project, and scholarly essay. Following Fiks's introduction, philosopher Lewis Gordon frames the collection with a foreword, in which he meditates on the historical and philosophical intersections of the images in the WRC with Rudd's biography and with global and American histories of race and racism, up to and including the present moment of mobilization for racial justice in the US.
A first major section of the volume, titled “Lives,” contains short contributions oriented on the history and biographical experiences of Black Americans in the USSR, with particular focus on Rudd himself. It begins with an interview with Mary Louise Patterson about her experiences as an African American student at the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow in the early 1960s. Joy Gleason Carew presents an overview of Rudd's Soviet acting career, including an account of his first arrival in the USSR in the group of African Americans that journeyed to Moscow in 1932, coordinated by Patterson's mother Louise Thompson and including Langston Hughes and other prominent cultural figures, to work on the unsuccessful film project Black and White. Jonathan Shandell's essay examines Rudd's career in the US prior to repatriation. Maxim Matusevich offers an account of Paul Robeson's Soviet engagements, with focus on interpretation of the singer's public silence concerning Stalinist antisemitic repressions. The section ends with Vladimir Paperny's account of his 2003 meeting with Lorita Rudd, née Marksity, the last of Rudd's five wives, and with his daughter Victoria Rudd.
The second major section, “Representations,” turns to discussion of the WRC images. It includes poet Douglas Kearney's poem and collage in response to a 1964 Soviet poster showing a lynch victim hanging from the statue of liberty, Fiks's short essay on the implicit racial and gender hierarchies of Soviet images that include Black subjects, and four longer analytical essays by Jonathan Flatley, Christina Kiaer, Kate Baldwin, and Raquel Greene. Flatley's evocative essay treats a linked series of images of the human figure together with the globe as representations of world solidarity, emancipation, and revolution. Kiaer traces the emergence of a coherent aesthetics of anti-racism in Soviet visual culture at the end of the 1920s and into the 1930s, offering as a case study an intriguing account of works by Aleksandr Deineka, produced from his 1935 visit to Harlem, and their Soviet critical reception. Baldwin offers a detailed examination of representation of gender in Soviet anti-racist images, illuminating both its patriarchal limitations and its revolutionary promise. Greene offers a short account of representations of Africa in Soviet children's literature.
A final, shorter section, “Reflections,” begins with a reflective essay by poet-artist Marina Temkina about her encounters with race in the USSR and after emigration to the US, followed by Christopher Stackhouse's short essay on the 1985 American film White Nights, about race, politics, and dance in the USSR. Fiks presents here his report and commentary on a 2014 exhibition that he organized, in which contemporary artists responded to the images of the WRC. A brief afterword by Meredith Roman reflects on the legacies of Soviet anti-racism and the entanglements of that history with contemporary struggles for racial equality.
This is a beautiful and inspiring book. It will stimulate further work on the images of the WRC and on the American, Soviet, and global histories intertwined with them, yet also effectively addresses audiences far beyond scholarly circles. Study of Soviet aspirations for a future of racial justice and of the contradictory history of the USSR's failure to achieve those ideals is of crucial importance for the contemporary world that can hardly be said to know the path forward to a world of racial equality. The multiple voices and genres offered in this volume are its great strength, allowing it to grapple provocatively in various modes with the contradictory legacies of Soviet anti-racism, which are in so many ways tied to the contradictions of our own moment.
