chapter 16

the fare is cheap and all can go

—“Get on Board, Little Children”

On December 23, the Robesons and Seton arrived in Moscow, receiving a warm welcome from Eisenstein and Essie’s younger brothers John and Frank. John, who had immigrated to Moscow a year earlier, was an auto mechanic and had a job as a bus driver at the Foreign Workers’ Club. Frank, a powerfully built man, had just arrived in the Soviet Union and planned to join the Russian circus as a member of the wrestling team. Essie had stayed in touch with her brothers through letters. John had written that although everyday items such as underwear, typing paper, and brooms were not available, no Jim Crow segregation was present in the Soviet Union. Robeson had heard and read similar reports from American friends who had visited Russia. Black people were treated like honored guests—and he and Essie found it to be true.

Right away, Robeson and Eisenstein chatted in Russian like two old friends. “I find it much easier to speak Russian than any other language,” said Robeson. “It seems more expressive of my feelings.” That first night after dinner and the theater, Robeson and Eisenstein stayed up late discussing their passion for languages and music. Robeson had brought his gramophone and records of his own spirituals, as well as music from Africa, China, and Thailand. These records were impossible to get in Russia and Robeson wanted to share them. He and Eisenstein played them over and over again, analyzing the rhythms.

Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (on the right) greets Robeson at the Belorussky Railway Station in Moscow, December 1934. Actor and director Herbert Marshall (in the middle), who was studying with Eisenstein, joins in the welcome.

During the next two weeks, the Robesons and Seton were wined and dined. Although Robeson did not give any concerts, he sang on many occasions. At a Christmas Eve dinner, everyone feasted on turkey and caviar, and guests danced the tango and the Irish jig. To everyone’s amusement, Eisenstein demonstrated dance steps he thought he had learned at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. After the guests refreshed themselves with Russian tea, Robeson said, “I would like to sing some of my people’s Psalms,” which included “Go Down, Moses.”

Robeson moved the Russians, as he had Americans and Europeans, with the spirituals, which he knew might be considered subversive. He said, “The Russians have experienced many of the same things the American Negroes have experienced.” Before Robeson arrived in Russia, the All Soviet Broadcasting Committee had played his recording of “Steal Away,” but then apologized to listeners because the communist government had banned religion. The London Times reported the incident. The Soviet press characterized Robeson’s intentions of singing spirituals as a protest against the treatment of black people in America, a capitalist country.

At a party held at a club for people in the movie industry, Robeson gave a short speech in Russian and sang an aria acapella from the Russian opera Boris Godunov. People rushed to embrace him and called him Pavelushka, “dearest, beloved little Paul.” He also performed several songs including “Ol’ Man River,” which the audience lovingly dubbed “Meesseesseeppee.”

Robeson also sang spirituals for the workers at a factory in Moscow. He explained that despite the religious language of the spirituals, they were protest songs about a people’s struggle for freedom. He observed that the laborers in the factory were men of color who came from outlying regions of the Soviet Union—Chinese, Manchurians, Uzbeks, Mongolians, and Jews—yet accomplished their tasks side by side, as equals.

When a reporter for the Daily Worker, a Communist Party newspaper based in New York, asked him if he had noticed a race problem in the Soviet Union, Robeson chuckled, replying, “Only that it seems to work to my advantage!” “I was not prepared for the happiness I see on every face in Moscow…. I was not prepared for the endless friendliness, which surrounded me from the moment I crossed the border…. This joy and happiness and friendliness…is all the more keenly felt by me because of the day I spent in Berlin on the way here, and that was a day of horror —in an atmosphere of hatred, fear and suspicion…. This is home to me. I feel more kinship to the Russian people under their new society than I ever felt anywhere else.”

Like many idealistic visitors, including black friends from Harlem, Robeson caught the upbeat spirit in Moscow. Foreign visitors were given carefully arranged tours to leave them with a good impression. Robeson was blind to Josef Stalin’s crimes and didn’t know that his program to industrialize and modernize the Soviet Union had caused raging famine in Ukraine.

In the early 1930s, Josef Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union’s communist government, was considered by many to be the head of a society where everyone would be equal. But he was just starting to launch his wave of political purges known as the Great Terror.

Stalin, leader of the communist government, ruled the Soviet Union with brutal control. Just days before Robeson’s arrival, Stalin had plotted to assassinate his main political rival. Robeson heard about the execution of a number of counterrevolutionaries, and when asked for comment, he said, “It is the government’s duty to put down any opposition to this really free society with a firm hand.” The Soviet opposition to racism and fascism outweighed all other considerations for Robeson. He had gradually become more involved with politics, although he had never joined a political party in the United States. “He was an independent artist and would never submit to any kind of organizational discipline,” recalled Paul Jr. in later years. Now, in the Soviet Union, Robeson was beginning to use his voice to express his views. This trip aroused in him “a new sense of purpose.”

What touched him most was the Soviet attitude toward minorities, which was more tolerant than he had experienced before, even in England. Special theaters were available for collective farmers and various minority groups, who performed dramas in forty different languages. A state-sponsored Jewish Theatre was preparing a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear in Yiddish. Robeson was amazed, given Russia’s history of anti-Semitism under the rule of the Czars. At the Moscow Children’s Theatre, he particularly enjoyed The Negro Boy and the Monkey, a popular play about an African child who comes to the Soviet Union to find his lost monkey. The theme delighted Robeson because it showed Soviet interest in Africa. Robeson and Essie were greatly impressed by their tours of the Theater School of the National Minorities, children’s nurseries, and modern hospitals.

They saw no slums on their trip. Robeson said, “I made it a point to visit some of the workers’ homes…. And I saw for myself. They all live in healthful surroundings.” New apartment buildings were under construction in factory districts. During these years of the Great Depression in America and Western Europe, with millions of people out of work, the capitalist system seemed to have failed. Robeson and Essie believed that the Soviet Union’s experiment created a better society. “This stuff about starvation [in Russia] is the bunk,” he said in an interview. “Wherever I went I found plenty of food. Of course, it wasn’t in every case the finest food, but it was healthful and everyone got enough to eat.” Or so he thought.

They had come to Russia wearing heavy winter coats but weren’t prepared for the extreme cold weather. When the temperature plunged to thirty-three degrees below zero, Essie went out and bought Robeson a warm, black, sable-lined coat. One snowy day as he was walking through a park in his coat, children spotted him and ran over to him. He spoke to them in Russian and they happily called him their “black Grandfather Frost.” In Russian culture, Grandfather Frost, an old white man with a long white beard and floor-length fur coat, was the equivalent of Santa Claus. Robeson was touched by his new name and the fact that the children hadn’t been taught to fear black men. He and Essie began to consider settling Paul Jr. in Russia for a few years. They thought he would enjoy “the sincere friendliness” of the Soviets toward people of color.

By the end of his visit, Robeson said to Eisenstein, “I feel like a human being for the first time since I grew up. Here I am not a Negro but a human being. Before I came I could hardly believe that such a thing could be…. Here, for the first time in my life I walk in full human dignity. You cannot imagine what that means to me as a Negro.”