To the East Turn: The Russian Revolution and the Black Radical Imagination in the United States, 1917–1924

Abstract

Abstract The last three decades have witnessed a burgeoning scholarship on Black radicalism in the United States and abroad. Much of it concerns Black radicalism’s relationship to international and transnational currents linked to the Soviet Union. The vast bulk of this literature is concerned with the years 1928–1935—dubbed the Third Period by the Communist International (Comintern). This essay registers and analyzes the responses of US-based Black radicals to the Russian Revolution, Comintern policies, and developments in early Soviet Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union (1922–91). It focuses on a moment truncated in the literature: the outbreak of both the February and October Revolutions of 1917 up to Vladimir Lenin’s death in January 1924. Important in its own right, that moment also laid the foundations for the later and more substantial involvement of African Americans in leftist politics in the United States. The essay examines the policies of the Bolsheviks—especially as articulated through the Comintern—that proved particularly compelling to Black radicals. What was Bolshevism’s attraction for Black radicals, both leftists and Black nationalists? The answer is less self-evident than it may at first appear. The profound impact of the “heroic period” of Bolshevism (1917–24) set in place Black radical loyalties to the Soviet Union that became entrenched and difficult to disavow.