Mixed Race Studies

African American Interest & Experiences in Russia: A Brief History

Afropean: Adventures in Afro Europe
2015-10-28

Robert Fikes, Jr., Reference Librarian
San Diego State University

Robert Fikes, Jr., Librarian at San Diego State University, recounts the history of the African American presence in Russia from the 19th century, noting that African Americans have had a long and prominent history in the region, continuing to the present day, with a focus on the scholarly interest in the history and language by members of the African American intelligentsia.

In early February 1869, Cassius M. Clay, the liberal American ambassador to Russia, was uncertain how Czar Alexander II would react to his personal request to have “a colored American citizen, presented to his Imperial Majesty, as there was not precedent.” He need not have worried however, as Civil War veteran and pioneering black journalist Capt. Thomas Morris Chester from Pennsylvania, was then asked to accompany the czar riding alongside the monarch and his staff in the annual grand review the Imperial Guard – stalwart men splendidly attired in tall black leather boots and gleaming gold and silver helmets crowned with a doubled-headed eagle – and following the awe-inspiring pageantry was treated to a fine meal at the dining table of the royal family. The educated and proudly erect son of an ex-slave, he gladly accepted the invitation and enjoyed an experience unparalleled for an African American in the 19th century. The black editors of the New Orleans Tribune thought the event significant enough that the ambassador’s dispatch to Washington concerning Capt. Chester’s gracious treatment in St. Petersburg was reprinted in the newspaper, believing it would be “instructive to the (racist) white population of the Southern States,” an example of how they should, in the ambassador’s words, “elevate the African race in America.”…

Read the entire article here.

Three Very Rare Generations

The New York Times
1992-12-13

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History
Columbia University

Soul To Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992. By Yelena Khanga with Susan Jacoby. Illustrated. 318 pp. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. $22.95.

AMONG its other consequences, the demise of the Soviet Union has released an emigration of foreign-born leftists and their descendants. Along with Spanish Loyalists and exiled third-world socialists now returning to their countries of origin, this little-noticed diaspora includes Yelena Khanga, the granddaughter of a black American who had moved to the Soviet Union in 1931, along with his Polish-Jewish-American wife. “Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992” tells the remarkable story of Ms. Khanga’s family, shedding light into unfamiliar corners of both the Soviet and American pasts. Its title derives from a Russian expression for close friendship. In an American context, it also suggests encounters among blacks, and the book’s most interesting chapters recount the story of the black side of Ms. Khanga’s family tree.

Her great-grandfather, Hilliard Golden, born a slave, served on the board of supervisors in Yazoo County, Miss., during Reconstruction, and managed to become one of the areas’s largest black landowners (Ms. Khanga is not sure how). The restoration of white supremacy abruptly ended his political career, but Golden clung tenaciously to his property until 1909, when, like many other farmers in the New South, he succumbed to debt and lost his land…

…In 1931, with 15 other Americans — black agricultural specialists and their families — Ms. Khanga’s grandparents sailed for the Soviet Union to help develop cotton cultivation in Uzbekistan. The poverty and backwardness of the region, where polygamy still flourished, reinforced the Goldens’ sense of socialist mission. When their daughter, Lily, was born, they decided to remain in the Soviet Union “because they did not want to raise a racially mixed child in America.” The agricultural experiments succeeded, and Stalin then decreed that Uzbekistan should concentrate exclusively on cotton, transforming the area, ironically, into a one-crop economy bearing some resemblance to the South of Golden’s youth…

Read the entire review here.

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America [Patricia Cleary Review]

William and Mary Quarterly
Third Series, Volume 69, Number 3, July 2012
pages 665-667
DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.69.3.0665

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America. By Gwenn A. Miller. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010. 242 pages.

Patricia Cleary, Professor of History
California State University, Long Beach

In a period of imperial expansion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Russia founded only one overseas colony, in several sites off the Alaskan coast. On Kodiak Island, the focus of Gwenn A. Miller’s study, the Russian American Company pursued the fur trade and sought the support of church and state for its efforts. In the process, the company’s agents disrupted the lives of the indigenous Alutiiq people, not least through forming relationships with local women and creating an ethnically mixed Kreol population. In her exploration of this North Pacific outpost, Miller focuses on how these initially tenuous and later increasingly formalized relationships laid the basis for a distinctive category and community of people within the Russian empire.

Drawing on slim and occasionally challenging sources, Miller traces Russian colonial expansion, examining how conquest and the exaction of tribute from subjugated peoples in Siberia facilitated the Kodiak venture. Teasing out how Russians differentiated themselves from locals, Miller focuses narrowly on the inhabitants of one island outpost, whose interactions, both peaceful and violent, led to the creation of a “new world” that was “never wholly Russian or Alutiiq” (xi). Although less well known than other Russian ventures, such as that at Sitka, Kodiak was, Miller argues, important in no small part because it lay at the “crossroads of early Alaskan colonial contact” (xi)…

…At the heart of Miller’s analysis is how mixed-race children came to be important both culturally and economically. Russian American children drew the interest of company leaders and government officials, who “singled out these children to be groomed for middling and at times high-level work within the colonial apparatus” (138). Demographic changes prompted such attention. With the overwhelming majority of native men forced to engage in the increasingly dangerous and difficult otter hunt, overhunting led to ever longer voyages, and growing numbers of men perished at sea. European diseases further contributed to the decline of the indigenous population. Company officials began to recognize two related needs: for young indigenous boys to remain in their communities “to train in the art of the sea otter hunt” (114) as their elders died at accelerated rates and for a population of future company workers to be educated appropriately. The hardships of life in the colonial outpost, the “difficulty of transporting substantial numbers of settlers from mainland Russia” (127), the skewed sex ratio among those who did emigrate, the declining Alutiiq population, and an expanding Kreol one turned the Kreol into “an important constituent of the subject population on Kodiak” (127), a few of whom were sent to study at the company’s expense in Saint Petersburg. State encouragement of mixed-race unions elsewhere, Miller states, typically took place in the earlier rather than later phases of colonial enterprises, with families rather than the state or firms responsible for making decisions about children’s educations. In stark contrast, Russian imperial officials “took increasing interest in this Kreol group of colonial residents as a loyal local population, and their expectations for the behavior of these people as European Russians was expressed in more concrete terms over time” (138), with the 1820s a high point. The church, state, and company all became more interested in these children; the company paid for their education in exchange for years of service, an arrangement that would turn “the local Kreol population into a literate managerial force that would be loyal to the Russian crown” (112)…

Read the entire review here.

Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America

Cornell University Press
2010-08-05
248 pages
7 Illustrations
6.1 x 9.3 in
ISBN-10: 0801446422; ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-4642-9

Gwenn A. Miller, Assistant Professor of History
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts

From the 1780s to the 1820s, Kodiak Island, the first capital of Imperial Russia’s only overseas colony, was inhabited by indigenous Alutiiq people and colonized by Russians. Together, they established an ethnically mixed “kreol” community. Against the backdrop of the fur trade, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church, and competition among Pacific colonial powers, Gwenn A. Miller brings to light the social, political, and economic patterns of life in the settlement, making clear that Russia’s modest colonial effort off the Alaskan coast fully depended on the assistance of Alutiiq people.

In this context, Miller argues, the relationships that developed between Alutiiq women and Russian men were critical keys to the initial success of Russia’s North Pacific venture. Although Russia’s Alaskan enterprise began some two centuries after other European powers—Spain, England, Holland, and France—started to colonize North America, many aspects of the contacts between Russians and Alutiiq people mirror earlier colonial episodes: adaptation to alien environments, the “discovery” and exploitation of natural resources, complicated relations between indigenous peoples and colonizing Europeans, attempts by an imperial state to moderate those relations, and a web of Christianizing practices. Russia’s Pacific colony, however, was founded on the cusp of modernity at the intersection of earlier New World forms of colonization and the bureaucratic age of high empire. Miller’s attention to the coexisting intimacy and violence of human connections on Kodiak offers new insights into the nature of colonialism in a little-known American outpost of European imperial power.

Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Comparative Timeline
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. An Economy of Confiscation
• 2. Beach Crossings on Kodiak Island
• 3. Colonial Formations
• 4. Between Two Worlds
• 5. Students of Empire
• 6. A Kreol Generation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992

W. W. Norton & Company
1994
318 pages
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0393034046; ISBN-13: 978-0393034042
Paperback ISBN: ISBN 978-0-393-31155-6

Yelena Khanga (with Susan Jacoby)

As the Soviet Union crumbled in early 1991, a young Russian woman in search of her past found her way to Mississippi, to the rich cotton land where her great-grandfather, a former slave, had become the largest black landowner in Yazoo County. In this extraordinary memoir, we share the life and family legacy of the Khangas over four generations and three continents. 32 pages of photos.

The Russian Creoles of Alaska as a Marginal Group

Social Forces
Volume 22, Number 2 (December 1943)
pages 204-208

Margaret Mary Wood
Russell Sage College

The interest in Alaska which has been aroused by its strategic importance in the present world-war conflict is bringing to the fore as worthy of attention many problems of this distant American frontier to which little heed has hitherto been given. Among these problems the marginal position of the Russian Creoles in Alaska is one which is of special sociological interest. The position of this group is not only characterized by the difficulties which are commonly associated with the marginal position of racial hybrids, but it is also further complicated by a number of cultural difficulties which arc in many respects unique. These latter difficulties must be seen in the light of the history of the group to be rightly understood.

The present Russian Creoles in Alaska are the descendants of mixed marriages between the Russians and the Alaskan natives which occurred during the period of Russian rule in Alaska. The term “creole” was legally defined by the Russian authorities to mean the children of Russian fathers and the native women, and it was used in this sense in the Russian colonies. In the southern United States and in the West Indies, however, the term is used differently and only includes children of Spanish or French descent born in America of European parents. Historians in writing about Alaska have, for the most part, adopted the Russian use of the term; but it has not found a ready acceptance with the American settlers in Alaska who tend to designate the Creoles as “natives” or “half-breeds.” Both of these terms are keenly resented by the Creole group as I learned to my regret when I was teaching at Kodiak in 1916. I inadvertently referred to the Creoles as natives in making a distinction between some of their customs and those of the American group in Kodiak.   My tactless remark was repeated in garbled form to the local school board, all of whom were Creoles, and stirred up a furore which cost me my position for the following year, deservedly enough perhaps. The question of their name is one concerning which the Creole group are exceedingly sensitive.

Precise statistics of the Creoles in Alaska are lacking, but their number is not large. Russian records for Alaska in 1860 give the number of Creoles who had been baptized into the Russian Church as 1,676. In the United States census report of 1880, Ivan Petroff, who enumerated the Alaskan population for the government, gives their number as 1,756. In more recent census reports the Russian Creoles are not distinguished from other natives of mixed blood in Alaska. The 1930 census gives 7,825 as the number of natives of mixed blood out of a total native population of 29,983, but does not list the Russian Creoles separately. They probably do not constitute more than a third to a half of the natives of mixed blood, however, for racial diffusion is occurring rapidly in Alaska. This diffusion is to be expected. It is the natural outcome of a situation in which a pioneer breed of white men, isolated from women of their own race, are in contact with a docile and not unattractive native people.   The Russians recognized this situation in Alaska with greater frankness and tolerance than it has since been accorded under American rule.

Under the jurisdiction of the Russian American Company, which was chartered in 1799, order was introduced into the Russian colony and the earlier…

The Born Identity

Arise Magazine
Issue 12
2011-09-28

Sarah Bentley

Photography by Liz Johnson-Artur

Thirty-six year-old Egor Belov has just told a childhood anecdote about scrubbing his face until it drew blood. He’d been playing in the snow and wanted pink cheeks like his friends. His dark complexion was never going to turn his desired shade but as a six-year-old living in a home otherwise occupied by white children, he struggled to understand why. The gathering of St Petersburg-based Afro-Russians (the collective name given to Russian nationals of mixed African and Russian parentage) with whom Belov shares this tale all smile knowingly and begin to offer up their own stories.
 
Some tales, including lovers who were shocked that black skin is lighter on different parts of the body, are humorous. But others, such as how school years were marred by bullying, fights and adolescent paranoia, are indicative of the challenges of the Afro-Russian experience. A candid confession from Marie Madlene, a striking 44-year-old with a blonde afro (pictured below), gets a raucous laugh: “I’m so used to being stared at that when I travel to more diverse countries, I miss the attention.”

Although the group has previously only met online through the ‘black-Russian-Ukranian-Belorussian-Kazakh’ page on Kontakt (Russia’s answer to Facebook), its members have developed instant camaraderie. After all, they are all mixed-race people living in a country that, despite its obvious multiculturalism (almost 180 ethnicities live in Russia), has one of the highest race-hate crime rates in the world. There are around 150 active far-right groups, many with ideologies of racial intolerance…

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