Go On Pretending: African-Americans and the USSR
Josef Stalin
Josef Stalin ruled the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with an iron fist from 1927 to 1953. He had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, while somewhere between six and nine million more died from a combination of forced labor, deportation, famine, and other policies.
Stalin’s favorite movie was The Circus. It’s the story of an American woman who flees to the USSR after she is ostracized in the States for having a mixed race, Black son. She is warmly welcomed in the USSR and everyone sings a rousing song about how Wide is My Motherland while all the oppressed peoples of the Soviet Union joyfully and not at all because they were forced to march in a May Day parade. Watch the stirring spectacle now:
https://youtu.be/1FkIKzrA3Pw?si=QYNdfMU6nYUNaW1-
Before we moved to the US, the only African-American my family had ever heard of was Paul Robeson, a proud performer of Wide is My Motherland, along with many other Socialist ditties. You can hear him sing it, in Russian and English, below:
https://youtu.be/lWUIfqyLpII?si=1aPReFHASjS3G_Wx
Robeson was Stalin’s favorite American. And Stalin was Robeson’s favorite dictator. As I wrote in my 2020 historical fiction, The Nesting Dolls:
Still, whether TASS was authorized to announce or not, there was always gossip. Like their samizdat copies of forbidden books were passed from hand to hand, so did rumors travel from mouth to mouth. It’s how they knew about the Lenin Library protest, and the Passover service, and the worldwide protests. Or about Solomon Mikhoels, artistic director and star of the Moscow State Jewish Theater. He once met everyone from scientist Albert Einstein to singer Paul Robeson while traveling to the United States to gain their support in the fight against German fascism. But then Stalin decreed that contact with citizens of non-communist countries was bourgeois, and had Mikhoels murdered. The official cause of death was a hit and run, but everyone Natasha knew was convinced the reason the great icon had a closed coffin state funeral was to hide evidence of the torture he’d endured prior to being dumped on the side of the road and crushed by a truck. They laughed at Mikhoels’ self-proclaimed good friend, Robeson, accepting the Stalin Peace Prize from the man himself and telling the international press regarding Stalin’s war against the Jews, “I heard no word about it.”
Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson was the inspiration both for my May 1, 2025 (yes, May Day; not a coincidence) novel, Go On Pretending, and for Go On Pretending’s heroine, Rose, and her African-American fiance, Jonas, defecting to the Soviet Union.
Like Robeson, Rose is convinced that she and Jonas will have a better life in the USSR, as an interracial couple, and as artists. (Jonas is less convinced, but he allows Rose to overwhelm him with her political enthusiasm.) Decades later, Rose and Jonas’ now adult daughter, Emma, struggles to defend her parents’ decision to Jonas’ elderly mother, Annabelle:
“How are you in New York?” Annabelle asked. “I thought you weren’t allowed out.”
That wasn’t precisely true. Her parents were allowed to leave the Soviet Union. The only stipulation was that they had to leave Emma behind. As insurance to make sure they returned. Mom and Dad had every intention of returning, so that wasn’t a hurdle.
“The opposite, actually.” Emma wasn’t specifically keen on defending the USSR. But she did feel obliged to defend why her parents had never visited their families. “They were afraid that, if they came back to America, they’d be arrested, and their passports taken away. Then they’d be stuck here, and I’d be left behind. It happened to this American couple in the 1930s. Eugene and Peggy Dennis. They left their son, Tim, in the Soviet Union while they returned to the US, and then Eugene was put into prison, so they couldn’t go back for Tim.”
“What was this Dennis creature sent to prison for?”
“Calling for the violent overthrow of the American government,” Emma mumbled.
“Hm,” her grandmother said. Then she asked, “So why wasn’t the boy sent back to live with his parents in the States? His mother wasn’t in prison, was she?”
“I don’t know,” Emma admitted. “But that’s why the singer Paul Robeson...”
Emma had hoped that invoking the internationally-esteemed figure would demonstrate for her grandmother that, despite growing up across the world, Emma had been educated about important African-American figures in history. Instead, she could feel the contempt radiating off Annabelle Moore after Emma prefaced Robeson’s name with his profession. As though the older woman might not know who he was.
Deciding to quit while she was behind, Emma raced through the remainder of her tale. “It’s why Robeson was advised not to leave his son in a Soviet boarding school while he came back to the US. And that’s why Mom and Dad never took the risk.”
It is highly unlikely that Robeson didn’t know what had been done to his allegedly good friend, Mikhoels, not to mention how, why, and by whom. It is also obvious why Robeson declined to leave his son in a Soviet boarding school. He knew he risked not being able to get him back. Paul Robeson, there can be no doubt, was aware of the many, many crimes taking place in the Soviet Union, all of them instigated by his other good friend, the Stalin Peace Prize’s namesake.
But Robeson dismissed it. Why? For the same reason as this other Go On Pretending excerpt, set at WEVD, New York City’s Socialist radio station, demonstrates:
Rose was at the studio when she heard two of the news writers arguing over whether to broadcast whispered reports coming in of USSR Premier Khrushchev’s speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where in a private session closed to foreign delegations, he denounced his predecessor, Josef Stalin, exposed his brutal purges of party loyalists, as well as the torture, deportation to Siberia, and execution of millions of innocent citizens.
“We put this on the air,” one of the writers contended, “we’re giving every Red-basher out there ammunition to get us shut down.”
“No. Khrushchev made it clear it wasn’t the system that was at fault for what happened, it was one man perverting everything that Marxist-Leninism stood for. Stalin misinterpreted and misrepresented otherwise faultless political thought in order to hold onto his own power.”
“You think your average uneducated bozo off the street can make that distinction?”
“It’s our duty to report the news.”
“Not if it doesn’t serve our stated goals. WEVD’s mandate is to promote socialist thought and action. How does it serve our objective to report on criticism of how it went wrong in another country? You think our competitor stations report every time capitalism goes wrong?”
It was a familiar argument, though one Rose hadn’t felt compelled to join since she’d left Workmen’s Circle. Back then, she’d been regularly lectured that sure, Hitler was bad for the Jews, but the international struggle to liberate workers was greater than a tiny ethnic group’s temporary discomfort. Breaking ranks with the USSR over their non-aggression pact with Germany and the subsequent division of Poland would hurt the movement overall. Any schism would be instantly exploited by fascists and capitalists eager to discredit them.
Robeson had to know what Stalin was doing to his own people. But Robeson also believed in the Communist cause enough to overlook Stalin’s crimes in the name of the greater, theoretical, it’s going to happen any second now good. Not to mention, as an African-American (nay, an African-American celebrity), Robeson was, of course, treated better in the USSR than he was at home. He thus assumed that all African-Americans in the Soviet Union (and thousands of African-Americans, as well as Africans did make that move in the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s and 1960s) were treated equally well. And since the Soviet Union had outlawed racism upon its creation, that meant all minorities were treated exactly like him.
The fictional Rose agrees with Robeson. Because I based Rose’s attitude on Robeson’s. She sees the USSR as she desperately wants it to be, not as it actually is. That is, until her daughter calls Rose out and insists to Rose that she can’t Go On Pretending.
About the Author
Alina Adams is the NYT-bestselling author of soap-opera tie-ins, figure-skating mysteries, and romance novels. Born in Odessa, USSR, Adams immigrated to the United States at age seven and learned to speak English by watching American Soap Operas. After receiving her B.A. and M.A. in broadcast communications at San Francisco State University, Adams worked in television as a writer and researcher. Years later she penned the As The World Turns book tie-in, Oakdale Confidential, which became a New York Times bestseller. Adams continued writing and is now a prolific and innovative writer who has authored more than a dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her book, The Nesting Dolls, is a Soviet-Jewish historical novel published by HarperCollins in July 2020. Her newest novel, My Mother’s Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region, was published by History Through Fiction in November 2022. Adams lives in New York City with her husband and their three children.
History Through Fiction’s newest publication…
Go On Pretending is a fascinating, romantic, and inspiring look at the ways that women's struggles and ethnic and racial identities have played out across time and continents. Mixing real-life figures and events into these fictional women's lives makes them all the more relevant, while illuminating the grand sweep of history as well as the truth that the political is personal."
–Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, author of When Women Invented Television
