Video:
Documentary
"Black Russians
- The Red Experience"
Shadow and act profiled the documentary "Black Russians - The Red Experience". A story of the lives and experiences of the black Americans who went to the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era in search of an ideal life. Escaping from racism and the Great Depression, they dove into new lives, having “nothing to lose” and no reason to turn back. Did they find what they were looking for? Their descendants who live in Russia and America today will share a story of their ancestors as well as their own.The subjects include Wayland Rudd Jr., a Moscow-based singer and the son of an African-American actor who moved to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and Russian TV personality Yelena Khanga, granddaughter of a Mississippi cotton farmer and a Polish-Jewish American woman who relocated to then Soviet Uzbekistan, the cradle of the country’s cotton industry, around the same time. See video below.
See the film's website at www.redpalettepictures.com
Also check the story "US filmmaker on the trail of Soviet Black Americans" of the director of the film, the New York–based filmmaker Yelena Demikovsky. She was captivated by “The Circus,” a 1936 Stalin-era musical about a white American circus performer and her illegitimate black son who find racial harmony and acceptance in the Soviet Union.
The reality today is that Russia is a completely different environment for black people, check out some of the links below.
The challenges of biracial children in Russia
Video: Black in Russia - harsh life on the streets in Moscow
Portraits of black people in Russia