Adriana N. Helbig is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh and an affiliated faculty member in Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, Global Studies, and at the Center for Russian and East European Studies. She is author (with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vanja Mladineo) of The Culture and Customs of Ukraine.

Hip Hop Ukraine

Music, Race, and African Migration

Indiana University Press

Contents

MUSIC AND BLACK IDENTITY IN THE SOVIET UNION

People who move to former Soviet spaces from the African continent face specific challenges that cannot be compared with experiences of other immigrants, due to the historical relationships between the Russian Empire (and later the Soviet Union) and Africa that continue to influence attitudes toward blackness and race. This chapter offers a brief overview of the changing attitudes toward Africans and African Americans in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. It analyzes the root of certain stereotypical representations and ideas relating to the construction and performance of black identity through music. Drawing on the experiences of public artists such as Ira Aldridge, Taras Shevchenko, Alexander Pushkin, and Mark Twain, this chapter analyzes the ways in which the spoken and written word codify and embody certain attitudes regarding blackness, slavery, and an imagined Africa. Significant attention is paid to the experiences of Paul Robeson and the role his musical output and political ideologies had in shaping attitudes regarding African Americans in the Soviet Union. It also draws on personal memoirs of African Americans living in the Soviet Union to point to the disparities between official Soviet rhetoric on racial equality and the realities of being black in the USSR.

SLAVERY AND SERFDOM IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE: IRA ALDRIDGE AND TARAS SHEVCHENKO

By the time Peter the Great ascended to power, the Atlantic slave trade had been active for well over a century. Colonial expansions in the Russian Empire differed from those in Europe in that they did not extend into the Americas or the African continent. Russia's attempts to establish a relationship with Madagascar grew out of Russia's commercial and strategic interest in India and the Far East (Wilson 1974). The search for allies against the Ottoman Empire also led to tsarist interest in Ethiopia. However, Russians did not succeed in establishing colonies on the African continent due to the already dominant presence of European colonial powers.

The Russian Empire opposed the African slave trade, although it reinforced a similar structure of peasant servitude at home (Blakely 1986, 28–29). Russian serfdom would be abolished in 1861, four years prior to the abolition of slavery in the United States. Russian revolutionaries such as Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Chernyshevsky, the radical publicist of Sovremennik (The Contemporary), spoke out against African slavery and the slave trade. Copies of the U.S. Constitution were circulated secretly, because it was censored by the tsarist regime. The parallels between African American slavery and serfdom in the Russian Empire were apparent. In 1858, Chernyshevsky published sections of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the antislavery novel written by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852, in two issues of Sovremennik. This publication would influence early Soviet rhetoric on racial equality as the Soviet Union strived to position itself as a country free from the kind of racial discrimination evidenced in the United States. Soviet films and short stories highlighting racial discrimination in the United States often featured a black male protagonist named Tom, pointing to the broad influence in the Russian Empire of Stowe's publication, which appeared in book and serial form for Russian-language readers (Roman 2012, 77–81).

From the mid-1800s, Russian audiences became increasingly familiar with representations of African Americans through translated literature and theatre productions featuring actors such as Ira Aldridge. Ira Frederick Aldridge (1807–67), an African American Shakespearean actor born in New York, moved to London with hopes of developing his career in the British Empire. He was a novelty on British stages but had difficulties gaining audience acceptance in London due to a sustained press campaign motivated by racism. He toured Europe with great success and accepted an invitation to perform in the Russian Empire in 1858. Despite discourses regarding the end of serfdom and Russian opposition to slavery in the American South, Aldridge experienced similar kinds of racial discrimination from Russian critics as he had in London. Certain reviews of Aldridge's performances are particularly drenched in discourses of biological racism. In a letter to the editor of Den' (Day), N. S. Sokhanskaia, a writer who submitted her editorial under the pseudonym N. Kokhanovskaia, wrote:

Not the Moscow Maly Theatre, but the African jungle should have been filled and resounded with voices at the cries of this black, powerful—that it is genuinely black, so naturally un-white does it howl—that savage flesh did its fleshly work. It murdered and crushed the spirit. Our aesthetic feelings made the mistake in its expectations.... This blatant flesh introduced into art, this natural black Othello, pardon me, causes only ... revulsion. (Blakely 1986, 65)

Discourses of African American "savagery" and difference find parallels in Russian and American narratives of the mid-1800s. In the above quote, the description of Aldridge as "naturally un-white" reveals the biological nature of race discourse rooted in binary oppositions of nature versus civilization. Whiteness is equated with culture, and blackness is cast in threatening opposition. Whereas on the one hand the Russian Empire of the mid-1800s opposed African American slavery in the American South, racial biases rooted in an evolutionary discourse of savagery (which resurfaced in the Soviet Union in relation to jazz) positioned African Americans as unable to perform "art," casting them as not having reached higher forms of "civilization" embodied by the Russian nobility.

Despite having performed in Shakespeare's Othello and King Lear, plays later banned by the Russian tsar alongside Macbeth, Aldridge was perhaps best known in the Russian Empire for his role as the slave Mungo in the two-act opera The Padlock (1768) by Isaac Bickerstaff. The opera tells the story of an old man who keeps his young fiancée behind closed doors for fear that she will not be faithful to him. The title of the opera takes its name from the large padlock on the cottage door. Mungo, the comic relief character, is the man's black servant from the West Indies. Usually played by a white man in blackface, Mungo sings and dances at his master's beckoning. Aldridge attempted to represent Mungo as a more serious character and to rework the more stereotypical aspects of the character's role.

Whereas Aldridge was an unacceptable Othello for some Russian circles, his popularity as Mungo, a comic character, invokes traditions of blackface minstrelsy where African Americans are represented as happy-go-lucky. Minstrelsy casts the African American as an entertainer, a natural performer. The "naturalness" of black performance places the African American as close to nature but without intellect. As ethnomusicologist Ronald Radano states, "Drawing in line the disparate figures of racial difference was the trope of the natural musician, a conceit that embodied the exceptional qualities of slave music to the point of defining black character for the next hundred-odd years" (2003, 146). The supposed natural proclivity of blacks for performance would eventually establish an unexamined association between African Americans and music. Such tropes became codified in the Russian Empire to the point that when early African American sojourners traveled to the Soviet Union, they were met with a general stereotype among Russians that all African Americans could sing and dance.

Ira Aldridge had many supporters and friends, including Leo Tolstoy and Taras Shevchenko (1814–61), the Ukrainian poet who had been born into serfdom, referred to in Ukrainian as kripatstvo, and had been exiled for writing satirical verses that offended the tsar in 1840 in St. Petersburg. There have been many editions of his work, and the title Kobzar (The Bard) has become applied to all of Shevchenko's poetic works. The six volumes of his works published in 1964 at the time of Nikita Khrushchev's "Thaw" were the first uncensored editions of Shevchenko's poetry to appear in Soviet Ukraine. Literary scholar Dale Peterson, in his analysis of the parallels of the black and Russian "soul," states that African American and Russian writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on similar concepts to augment African American struggles against slavery and Russian struggles against serfdom (2000). Shevchenko's poetry focused on the plight of the serf and the oppressed and evoked discourses of equality and freedom, similar to the works of those who opposed slavery in the United States. His poem "Kateryna," published in the first edition of the Kobzar in 1840, offers insights into the lives of serfs in the Russian Empire, with an illustration on the status of women. Kateryna was seduced, abandoned, and disgraced by a Russian soldier. She serves as an allegory for Ukraine itself. Shevchenko warns Ukrainian women not to fall in love with Russians and does not hide his hatred for the exploitative Russian Empire. His artistic illustration of "Kateryna" in 1842 points to the developments in Ukrainian art regarding critical realism and folk motifs. In his poetry, Shevchenko criticized the aristocracy's oppression ofthe peasants in the Russian Empire, and for this he was arrested. He was exiled for ten years in the Caspian steppes in the far reaches of the Russian Empire as a rank-andfile officer from 1847 to 1857. Imprisoned and in exile, Shevchenko composed some of his most compelling works.

Shevchenko concerned himself with the plight of oppressed ethnic groups and people. Forbidden to return to Ukraine until 1859, he became acquainted with Aldridge in St. Petersburg. Shevchenko attended Aldridge's opening performance at the Russian Imperial Theatre in 1858, and the two men were introduced. One of Tolstoy's daughters served as an early translator for Shevchenko and Aldridge and wrote about the experience and their friendship. Shevchenko attended Aldridge's performances, and Aldridge visited Shevchenko in his studio, posing for a portrait. Unlike common minstrel representations of blacks in America at the time, Shevchenko's humanist portrait ofAldridge represents him as an intellectual with emotional and psychological depth. Sketched in 1858, it hangs on display at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Shevchenko's friendship with Aldridge is significant in that it shows parallels between experiences of oppression. Both were free, famous, and creative and had powerful friends. Both shared a hope for a better future, but neither could forget his past. Those who knew both men noted that they often sang together. As Irena Bell, producer of the radio program Ukrainian Hour in Ottawa, Canada, noted in a segment on Shevchenko and Aldridge, "Aldridge greatly appreciated the sorrowful and melodic Ukrainian songs that captured the unfortunate plight of the people of Ukraine. Shevchenko, in turn, loved the songs of the Negro South no doubt for the same reason." When Aldridge returned to tour the Russian Empire between 1861 and 1866, Shevchenko had already passed away. Shevchenko and Aldridge serve as examples of individuals who fought against the oppression of their people and strived for human dignity throughout the world. Support for their friendship and interest in them among certain circles within the Russian Empire's elite foreshadowed the revolution that overthrew a regime that exploited the peasantry and kept them poor, illiterate, and silenced. The ideology of equality for all, leading to the creation of what Terry Martin has dubbed "the affirmative action empire" (2001), would pose great challenges for the Soviet Union, fostering its own structures of injustice from its earliest inception.

IMAGINING BLACKNESS: ALEXANDER PUSHKIN, MARK TWAIN, JOSEPHINE BAKER, AND CLAUDE MCKAY

Soviet officials found the African heritage of its national poet Alexander Pushkin a convenient platform in promoting the Soviet Union as a racially blind society (Nepomnyashchy and Trigos 2006, 24). Pushkin's maternal great-grandfather Abram Hannibal was a black child servant of Peter the Great, the son of a prince who was captured and brought to Russia from Ethiopia. African slaves like Hannibal, not uncommon among the Russian nobility, functioned more as entertainment and status figures in Russian society, as evidenced in numerous paintings, where they often are depicted as children in subservient positions (Blakely 1986, 59). However, Peter sent Hannibal to Paris to be educated, and Hannibal went on to have an illustrious military career in the Russian Empire. Pushkin wrote about Hannibal in his unfinished historical novel The Negro of Peter the Great (1837). In the Russian title of the work, Arap Petra Velikogo, Pushkin uses the word amp, or Arab. According to Russian African American social activist Lily Golden, tsarist officials frequently listed Africans as Arabs and made no distinctions between people from different parts of Africa (Golden-Hanga 1966, 10). "Negro" was not included in Soviet census or other official Soviet records, so it was never possible to really determine the number of African Americans in the Soviet Union (Fikes and Lemon 2002). Nevertheless, "Negro" signified a nationality in Soviet discourse, equal with all others in the logic of the Soviet "affirmative action empire" (Martin 2001). In 1930, two white American Communists working at the Stalingrad Tractor Factory assaulted an African American worker and were tried in court for "national chauvinism" rather than "racial chauvinism" because the language of the Soviet law code did not account for difference in terms of race but rather of nationality (Roman 2012, 30).

Pushkin first made reference to his African ancestry in Eugene Onegin (begun in 1823):

    Time to leave the dull shore
    of a, to me, inimical element,
    and 'mid the meridian swell,
    beneath the sky of my Africa,
    to sigh for somber Russia,
    where I suffered, where I loved,
    where (my) heart I buried

Pushkin chronicled his African ancestry in a note to the above-quoted verse. Writing in exile at his mother's estate of Mikhaylovskoe in north Russia, he established a literary connection with his African ancestor by contrasting their treatment by the tsarist regime—Hannibal was rewarded for his military achievements, whereas Pushkin was viewed with suspicion because of his political leanings (Hasty 2006, 231).

Pushkin was used by Soviet officials to establish relationships between African Americans and Africans in the 1920s (Nepomnyashchy and Trigos 2006, 25). African Americans viewed Pushkin as a great model to show how African roots were incorporated into Russian national identity (Hasty 2006, 234). Writers of the Harlem Renaissance positioned Pushkin as the champion of the oppressed (235). Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, an academic journal published by the National Urban League, published Pushkin's Arap Petra Velikogo serially in the February, March, and April 1924 issues of the journal. In 1925, Opportunity established the Pushkin Poetry Prize to recognize outstanding poetry written by African Americans.

Ideas about African Americans in the Russian Empire and later in the Soviet Union were introduced via the works of Mark Twain. Twain, a fan of the minstrel show (Ogbar 2007, 13), was the most translated American writer in the Russian language in the early twentieth century and imbued the Russian psyche with myriad stereotypes regarding African Americans and relationships between whites and blacks in the United States. The Soviet press edited his works to augment class issues and published Twain's work without permission and without paying royalties. In 1926, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in Russian translation as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a Runaway Negro (Parry 1941, 174). Among the most loudly touted stereotypes was that all African Americans could sing and dance. Preconceived notions of African Americans as singers and dancers were evident in the motivation to involve Langston Hughes in the filming of Black and White, a script he eventually vehemently rejected due to its degrading representations of African Americans as victimized slaves in the American South. Louise Thompson, an African American journalist who accompanied Hughes to the Soviet Union for the filming, reveals in her correspondence with Hughes that the Soviets were aware of their lack of knowledge regarding race relations in the United States (Baldwin 2002, 99). They requested that the Black and White troupe bring clothes, historical and sociological books on "the Negro in America," and various phonograph records (99). According to historian Maxim Matusevich, the Soviet sponsors of the project shared Western stereotypes of blacks, expecting every member of the troupe to be able to sing and dance (2008, 68). Allison Blakely notes that the basic problem with the script was that the writer had never been to the United States and had depended on the few books that had been translated into Russian about race relations in America. Blakely surmises that the characterization of "Negro manners and mentality" were taken from Uncle Tom's Cabin (1986, 94). Film scripts and, by extension, most forms of Soviet propaganda relating to African Americans stemmed from an imagined sense of blackness and black realities.