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It was this promise of a creative solidarity unhindered by racial segregation that propelled Thompson, Hughes and the cast to invest their hopes in Black and White. When production the fell through, tempers flared. Some of the cast accused the Soviet Union of betraying the African-American cause to curry favor with Washington, from which the Soviet Union was hoping to receive official recognition. Hughes, perhaps the most seasoned artist of the group, attributed the failure to creative differences (too many people with opinions). Reflecting on the project years later, he wrote: O, Movies. Temperaments. Artists. Ambitions. Scenarios. Directors, producers, advisers, actors, censors, changes, revisions, conferences. Its a complicated art the cinema. Im glad I write poems.

After the production of Black and White fell apart, many members of the cast stayed in the Soviet Union, believing it was their best place for their artistic careers. The actor Wayland Rudd was hired by one of Moscows experimental theater companies. The writer Loren Miller stayed to edit a Soviet anthology of African-American poetry. Lloyd Patterson, a recent college graduate who had signed on to the project merely looking for adventure, became a designer for film sets. His son Jimmy, still a baby, appeared in a famous 1936 Soviet film Circus in which a young white American woman with a black child flees the United States for racial sanctuary in Soviet Russia. Hughes stayed for several months in Soviet Central Asia, particularly Uzbekistan, reporting on Soviet reforms for various American publications, including the NAACP journal The Crisis. He was reportedly the first American poet whose work was translated into Uzbek.

Despite its demise, Black and White did not deter other black artists from taking a chance on the Soviet film industry. The singer and actor Paul Robeson arrived in Moscow in 1934 at the invitation of Sergei Eisenstein, the director behind such revolutionary classics as Battleship Potemkin, October and Strike. Inspired by the play Black Majesty, penned by C. L. R. James, an Afro-Trinidadian communist scholar and writer, Eisenstein had invited Robeson to potentially star in a film about the Haitian Revolution.

I feel like a human being for the first time, Robeson told reporters after he arrived in Russia. Of all the African-American artists and activists who traveled there, none developed as enduring a relationship with the Soviet Union as Robeson. Upon his arrival, he was received ecstatically by the Soviet theatrical establishment, which invited him to sing an aria onstage from Modest Mussorgskys opera Boris Godunov. Despite Soviet atheism, he was asked to sing Negro spirituals over the radio and at government parties. His song Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child became newly emblematic of his relationship to his home country; the Soviets had put his recording of the song over an animated short film about racism and labor exploitation in the American sugar industry.

But by the time Robeson was beginning his great romance with the Soviet project, McKay and many African-Americans (including the novelist Richard Wright) were moving away from it. McKay, like many of the Russian artists he collaborated with in Moscow, would have a falling out with communism. The instigating event, for him, was Soviet Russias failure to cease trade with Italy even after Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, then ruled by Haile Selassie. The invasion was widely seen as an affront to the very idea of black sovereignty. McKay would turn his political disillusionment into Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem.

Wright would soon join McKay in his disillusionment. In 1944 he wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called I Tried to Be a Communist. Frustrated by the American Communist Partys tepid response to his novel Native Son, Wright wrote to a friend that the party encourage[s] the creation of types of writing that can be used for agitprop purposes, but had a tendency to sneer at more creative attempts.

Hughess overt involvement in communism also waned by this time, but perhaps more out of necessity. He was under intense scrutiny from the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused him of being at one time or another part of 91 communist organizations. Hughes, though, like Wright, did sense that too close an affiliation with a political organization or ideology could prove to be artistically stifling. Explaining to a friend why he never officially joined the Communist Party, he said, It was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept.

Robeson was one of the last black sojourners to see in the Soviet Union an alternative to the racist and exploitative culture of the West. Between the Nonaligned Movement and a resurgence of black nationalism, the brand of communism bred from the Global South seemed to many by the 1960s and 70s to be a sharper weapon against racism and colonialism. As the black feminist writer Audre Lorde wrote when she reflected on her 1976 trip to Moscow, Russia became a mythic representation of that socialism which does not yet exist anywhere I have been.

Russia has long served as a repository for different kinds of mythology, from the Third Rome to the Red Scare. The myth of Russia as a racial paradise was perhaps one of its best, both as a muse to black artists across the diaspora and as a strategic tool in the African-American fight for political recognition. But as an early adherent, Hughes implied that the Soviet Union was just part of a larger narrative of black creative and political revolution; as the refrain of his 1938 poem Ballad of Lenin reads:

Comrade Lenin of Russia,

High in a marble tomb,

Move over, Comrade Lenin,

And give me room.

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was a committee in the House of Representatives and a model for Senator Joseph McCarthys investigations into Communists in the government; it was not Senator McCarthys committee.

Jennifer Wilson (@jenlouisewilson) is a postdoctoral fellow in Russian literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

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