The Wayland Rudd Collection: Book Review

ANTON RELIN AND KONSTANTIN KULAKOV

​​The Wayland Rudd Collection
Edited by Yevgeniy Fiks
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021)

In the era of George Floyd and anti-capitalist feeling, it is important to look at the history and art of anti-racist activity beyond the sphere of American capitalism. Yevgeny Fik’s The Wayland Rudd Collection affords us the chance to experience the – sometimes hypocritical – Soviet anti-racist visual culture alongside penetrating analysis from 15 authors and artists from post-colonial and post-Soviet perspectives. 

The collection opens with the words of an unnamed photographer attending a lecture delivered by Fiks: “It doesn’t matter who produced these images and how. It does not matter if the Soviets were hypocritical. [...] These images were strong and dignified and when we saw them in the 1960s in Harlem they meant a lot to us. They meant a lot to us here.” In many ways, as an English-language work, it allows us to look beyond the narrow confines of American racial violence and observe black-white relations in a profoundly different geographic, economic, and social context.

The work divides the essays into three sections: Lives, Representations, and Reflections. The writings can all stand on their own, making the book easy to enter and read around. However, by unifying the essays into separate categories, a sort of narrative evolves. The collection exposes how the Soviet Union’s history with antiracism is complicated and far less idealistic than the already-problematic images. For example, one can point to the 1963 Moscow protest of Black students (the first protest in the Red Square after the communist revolution in Russia) as proof of latent cultural racism. 

After the death of a Ghanian student in the city of Kalinin, Black students gathered to protest the Soviet Union’s failure to fulfill the messages of internationalism and socialism they were promised. However, this negative portrait of Soviet anti-racism must be contrasted with the experiences of Mary Louise Patterson, the only African American student to have gone to university in Soviet Moscow. In her words, “The six years in the Soviet Union, I always say, were the best six contiguous years in my adult life [...] There was no hatred. And that was new for me, coming from the United States.”  

It is striking to consider the profound dissimilarity of these experiences. Patterson’s impression of the USSR was in contrast to the experience of African Americans in the US, but as Lewis Gordon points out in the foreword, “The false dilemma of USSR or USA sets the stage for limited racial vision. Post-Soviet Russia, as we know, fosters fascism and racism [...] just as neoliberalism prepared the ground for neoconservatism and fascist agendas to take root in liberal democracies.” Thus, “the message against antiblack racism”, Lewis Gordon suggests, “points to an ideal beyond both the former USSR and the current USA: democracy.” 

In Lives, we see how many of those who lived in the Soviet Union experienced disillusionment with the anti-racist experience, noting how the Roma people suffered a cruel fate under the Soviet Union, and how Wayland Rudd, the actor after whom the book was named, did not face the most hospitable fate either. Rudd and his wife, a Jewish-American by the name of Pauline Maritsky, struggled to find acceptance in the Soviet Union and Rudd died of appendicitis in 1952. His son, Wayland Rudd Jr. remains in Moscow and is a survivor of skinhead violence. Despite this, he is reluctant to leave the country. 

These experiences are all despite Rudd being the image of the ‘Negro’ in the nominally antiracist Soviet Union. It is not a mistake that the collection was named after him. Rudd himself posed for many of the propaganda posters in this collection. This section demonstrates that African Americans experienced much more equality in the Soviet Union than the US, but that the experience was far from ideal. In many ways, the shock of unexpected disillusionment offered another set of challenges.

The Representations section demonstrates how the posters paralleled the lived experience of Black people in the Soviet Union. While the explicit goal was to create anti-racist posters, these images also uncover the implicit biases active in Soviet society. Yevgeny Fiks notes that “Slavic/Caucasian men are the most prominent figures in Soviet anti-racist/internationalist propaganda.” This “Russian-first” art in the posters uncovers an implicit racism. However, the collection documents more explicit racism in the depictions of anti-communist black African statesmen portrayed with exaggerated features, naked, displaying signs of “tribal” culture, even “cannibalism.” 

The Reflections section elegantly completes the collection. Marina Temkina’s opening begins with a difficult-to-find epigraph from Marina Tsvetaeva, words that could be construed as benevolent prejudice: “I feel blessed when a Negro enters the tram.” While it may be well-intentioned, the statement is certainly othering. However, it represents the ideal that the Soviet Union may have attempted to create: a multi-ethnic and a multi-racial state based on nominal equality. Marina Temkina parallels this with an analysis of the open discrimination of Jews in the Soviet Union, bearing witness to the hypocrisy of the state even when attempting to reach lofty social ideals.

These sections create compelling narratives but they would be incomplete without consideration of the collection posters contained here: the impetus for the creation of the book. The evolution of anti-racist Soviet visual culture is clear in these images, tracking how the approach became explicitly less othering. Each time I read The Wayland Rudd Collection, I am struck by the images. The work adorning the cover (WRC-104) is an stunning example. In the image, a black man holds a rifle high, accompanied by the Russian words “Great Lenin has illuminated our path forward” from the Soviet Russian anthem. The posters are a profound artistic achievement, but the aesthetics are counterbalanced by the deft ethical analysis throughout.

Backgrounded by this complex history, it is important to note that what the Soviet Union did accomplish was critical. As Fiks emphasizes, “the Soviets didn’t manufacture American racism.” Instead “this uncomfortable American truth was instrumentalized by Soviet propaganda for political advantage.” The strategy had at least once changed the course of American civil rights. Soviet women’s strong performances at the olympics were used to demonstrate gender equality in the Soviet Union. The devastating gold medal count disparity exposed how the US underfunded women’s sports teams. Publicizing this disparity lead directly to Title IX, a cornerstone in legislation against sex discrimination in the US. It is understandable how one, looking at the posters that directly called out American and European racism, could have hoped that these, too, may influence the course of global politics. 

Anton Relin is Russian-Jewish-American language engineer, translator, and editor of Pocket Samovar. He has previously translated Church Slavonic manuscripts and for Homintern. He holds BAs in Slavic and Eastern European Studies and Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Konstantin Kulakov (he/they) is a Russian-American poet born in Zaoksky, Soviet Union. His poems and translations appear in Spillway, Phoebe, Harvard Journal of African American Policy, and Loch Raven Review, among others. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University and co-founded and edit Pocket Samovar magazine.