{"id":46534,"date":"2016-04-10T02:06:26","date_gmt":"2016-04-10T02:06:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=46534"},"modified":"2016-04-10T02:06:26","modified_gmt":"2016-04-10T02:06:26","slug":"meet-yosif-stalin-the-soviet-born-black-american-from-kremlin-virginia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=46534","title":{"rendered":"Meet Yosif Stalin, The Soviet-Born Black American From Kremlin, Virginia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meet Yosif Stalin, The Soviet-Born Black American From Kremlin, Virginia<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty<\/a>
\n2016-04-08<\/p>\n

Carl Schrek<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

KREMLIN, Virginia<\/a> — Yosif Stalin stood before his Kremlin home on a windswept afternoon this spring, his weathered hands gripping his walker. “I still own it,” he said of the white, two-story house off a lonely country road.<\/p>\n

It’s no coincidence that this octogenarian was named after one of the 20th century’s bloodiest dictators<\/a>, but it’s just half of his name. His full name is Yosif Stalin Kim Roane, and he was the first child of African-American parents ever born in the Soviet Union<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Didn’t nobody pay that no mind,” Roane said of his notorious namesake in a recent interview with RFE\/RL. “They mostly called me Joe.”<\/p>\n

Roane, 84, is among the few living offspring of African-Americans who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s to seek a better life in the nascent communist state.<\/p>\n

Most of these voyagers were driven by political convictions or economic hardship amid the Great Depression<\/a> and pernicious racism in the United States, including the segregationist Jim Crow laws<\/a> of the American South<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That Roane was born in an empire run from the Kremlin and grew up in this tiny Virginia<\/a> hamlet of the same name is a coincidence that inspired the title of a recent documentary, Kremlin To Kremlin<\/a><\/em>, aimed at preserving the record of his family’s remarkable journey for future generations…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Meet Yosif Stalin, The Soviet-Born Black American From Kremlin, Virginia Radio Free Europe\/Radio Liberty 2016-04-08 Carl Schrek KREMLIN, Virginia — Yosif Stalin stood before his Kremlin home on a windswept afternoon this spring, his weathered hands gripping his walker. “I still own it,” he said of the white, two-story house off a lonely country road. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,28,8,20,693],"tags":[23465,23466,23464,23470,23469,23468,23467],"class_list":["post-46534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-europe","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-carl-schrek","tag-kremlin","tag-radio-free-europeradio-liberty","tag-rferl","tag-soviet-uniion","tag-yosif-stalin","tag-yosif-stalin-kim-roane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46535,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46534\/revisions\/46535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}