Most of this book is good history, and the reader should be told so before anything else. Robert Ivanov was a working Soviet Americanist, a specialist on the Civil War, and the middle chapters of Blacks in United States History are the product of archival research rather than of a propaganda department. His notes cite the Russian Foreign Policy Archives by case and page, the US National Archives microfilm publications, the Congressional Globe, the War of the Rebellion official records, Basler's edition of Lincoln's collected works, and the Russian press of the 1770s and 1860s — Moskovskiye vedomosti, Sanktpeterburgskiye vedomosti, Severnaya pchela, Russkoye slovo. His secondary reading is serious and not confined to friends: Herbert Aptheker, William Z. Foster, Philip Foner and James Allen, but also W.E.B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction, Benjamin Quarles, John Hope Franklin, J.G. Randall, the Stampp and Litwack anthology of revisionist writing on Reconstruction, and Eric Foner's Tom Paine and Revolutionary America and Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War. Ivanov quotes Foner approvingly on the Reconstruction governments' "inability to protect Blacks against violence" — a Moscow historian in 1985 citing an American historian's judgement as a judgement, not as an exhibit. He had also been in the United States: he mentions in passing that he lectured to students in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Ithaca and California in the spring and summer of 1972.
What the book is for is a separate question, and Ivanov answers it himself, in the introduction, without embarrassment. Writing of the Carter administration's human rights campaign, he says that in "defending civil rights" in socialist countries, Carter "saw one of his main tasks as diverting the attention of the international and American public from the most crude violations of elementary civil rights of colored citizens in the US." That is the commission stated aloud. The book was written in the trough of the second Cold War — after the Euromissile deployments, after Reagan's "evil empire" speech, in the last months of Chernenko — and its job was to answer an American human rights offensive with an American subject. Progress Publishers put it into English because English was the language in which the argument had to be made.
The unusual thing is how little that job deforms the historical chapters. They were evidently written by someone who wanted to get the history right and who then bolted a contemporary polemic onto either end. The seams are visible, and once you can see them you can read the two halves separately.
The strongest material is on the Civil War and Reconstruction, and it is strong for reasons that have to do with the tradition Ivanov was working in. He treats the war as a revolution and Reconstruction as its second, descending stage — "the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1861–1877" — which is a periodisation, not a slogan, and he sustains it. "Slavery was abolished by revolutionary, not constitutional, means." He is precise about why the northern bourgeoisie moved when it did and not before, precise about the Black Codes, precise about the land question and the meaning of its defeat. He gives the Union Leagues their proper weight and their half-million members. He records the extraordinary expansion of Black schooling — a more than five-hundredfold increase in pupils over the period — and notes that integrated schooling actually worked where it was tried, which he offers, correctly, as evidence against the segregationists of his own day. And he does not romanticise the labour movement he is otherwise committed to: "The workers and farmers of the North and West did not give Blacks direct aid during Reconstruction... This is one of the most important reasons that Blacks lost the struggle for their rights." That is an honest sentence, and a Marxist historian less confident of his method would not have written it.
He is willing to name betrayal as betrayal. "Reconstruction concluded with virtually the direct betrayal of the Blacks by the North's bourgeoisie." And he is willing to write about Reconstruction as an achievement rather than only as a defeat: "The period of Reconstruction was a renaissance of the black people in America." A reader should register how unusual that sentence still was when Ivanov wrote it. It is worth being exact about the historiography, though, because the book's own framing is not. Ivanov repeatedly attacks "reactionary bourgeois historiography" as an anonymous mass; he never once names the Dunning School. He does not need to, because by 1985 he was not really fighting it — Stampp, Franklin, Woodward and Foner had substantially won that argument in the American academy, and Ivanov is citing them. The Soviet school's real merit on Reconstruction belongs to its founding decades, and the honour of standing against Dunning in the year it mattered belongs to DuBois, whose Black Reconstruction of 1935 Ivanov cites. What the book preserves is the interpretation, not the priority.
The most original chapter is the one an English reader is least likely to have seen anywhere else: "The Russian Public and Slavery in America," in Chapter III. Here Ivanov is on his own ground and doing work nobody else had done in English. He traces how the two censored newspapers then publishing in Russia handled American slavery, and shows that they handled it as a coded argument about serfdom — Desnitsky writing in 1768 that in North America "the Europeans... do business in people just as with cattle," which was also a description of Russian landlords; Novikov's Moskovskiye vedomosti printing a pro-slavery traveller's letter and then appending an editorial note demolishing it; Radishchev on the American Revolution and its founding crime. Ivanov's own summary is the key to the chapter: "any mention of slavery in America involuntarily caused the reader to draw parallels with serfdom in Russia, which was hardly what the landowners wanted." He extends the method into the 1860s and 1870s, quoting a despatch from the Russian mission in Washington to Chancellor Gorchakov of 31 March 1871 on Klan terror. This is real scholarship, it is genuinely comparative, and it is the part of the book with the longest life.
It is also, unintentionally, the book's indictment of itself.
Because the comparison Ivanov teaches the reader to make — a state's writers attack a distant slavery in order to say something about their own — stops dead at 1917. Search this book for the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens and Ingush, the Volga Germans, the Kalmyks, the Meskhetians: there is nothing. Search it for the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, for the Doctors' Plot, for Birobidzhan, for the emigration question: nothing. The word "anti-Semitism" occurs exactly once, inside a quotation from the constitution of the Communist Party USA. In a book about the deportation and dispossession of a people, the Soviet deportations of 1943–44 are not mentioned, not defended, not denied. They are simply outside the frame.
What stands where they might have stood is a set of positive claims. "The revolution in Russia destroyed the tsarist prison for peoples and smashed the doors of the multinational Russian Bastille." The socialist bloc "is the prototype of a future brotherhood of peoples in all countries of the world who will live together regardless of race, nation, or religion." And: "there is interest in the US as to how the national question has been solved in the USSR, that unique phenomenon in world history which convincingly proves the vital force and advantage of socialism." The tense is the point. Solved. Ivanov supports it with DuBois's genuine, and genuinely made, 1945 tribute to Soviet racial tolerance — words written by a man who did not know, and could not have known, what had happened in the Crimea eight months earlier.
This is not a matter of the book being wrong about America. On the substance it is largely right, and where it is right no amount of Soviet hypocrisy makes it less so. Reagan's cuts did fall hardest on Black Americans; Klan membership did rise in his first term; the Atlanta murders of 1979–81 were real. The point is narrower and harder to evade: a book that judges a state by how it treats a subject nationality was published by a state that had, within the living memory of its author, loaded entire nationalities onto trains. Ivanov taught his readers to read Moskovskiye vedomosti between the lines. He did not offer them the same service for his own book. Whether the silence was censorship or self-censorship or conviction cannot be recovered, and it does not much matter to the result.
A second silence is smaller but more revealing about the book's method. Ivanov claims the Communist Party USA "is the only party in the 200 years of the country's history which has from the very beginning of its existence consistently and steadily fought for the liberation of Blacks in the US from racial discrimination and segregation." He then declines to prove it. Scottsboro is not in this book — not the name, not the case, not the International Labor Defense. Neither is Angelo Herndon, nor the Alabama Sharecroppers' Union, nor the Unemployed Councils, nor the 1941 March on Washington Movement. The 1930s, the decade in which the party's claim on Black America was actually earned, receive a few paragraphs on the New Deal and nothing else. In their place the book substitutes quotation from Henry Winston, Gus Hall and party programmes of the 1970s and 1980s — testimony rather than history, from a historian who elsewhere goes to the archives.
The reason is not mysterious. Scottsboro cannot be told without the Comintern's 1928 "Black Belt" thesis of self-determination for a Black nation in the American South, which shaped the party's whole intervention; and that thesis cannot be told without its quiet abandonment, or without Harry Haywood, who formulated it and was expelled. The phrase "self-determination" does not appear in this book. "Black Belt" appears once, as a synonym for the cotton South. An entire theoretical episode has been converted into geography. Everything to the party's left gets a single sentence: "a number of leftist extremist groups strongly influenced by Maoists and Trotskyites stepped up their activities." Their arguments are not given, so they cannot be answered.
The contemporary chapters are also where the book's evidentiary standards slip. Ivanov reports, on the authority of "the American press," that Harry Truman "was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan" — a claim that rests on a disputed episode in 1922 in which Truman paid a joining fee and had it returned, and which the historian who cited Foner and Randall on Lincoln would not have let past in Chapter IV. It is a small thing, but it marks the boundary between the two books bound together here.
The reply to the second of them was made in print, in the same tradition and often in the same years. On the deported nations, see G. Stepanovich, "Crimean Tatars: The Struggle of an Entire People," in Inprecor no. 44, 19 February 1976 — a long account of the deportation of some 238,500 people on the night of 18–19 August 1944, of whom only slightly more than half survived, and of the parallel fate of the Volga Germans, Balkars, Chechens, Ingush, Karachais, Meskhetians, Kalmyks and Black Sea Greeks. On the theory that connects the two halves of the question, Livio Maitan's "Trotsky's Views on the National Question" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 10 no. 30, 31 July 1972) defends "the validity of the principle of self-determination for Afro-Americans" within the same framework it applies to the nationalities of the USSR, which is precisely the framework Ivanov's book will not construct. And on the American ground itself, the same press was covering the subject as politics rather than as ammunition: Andrea Gonzalez on the Goetz shooting and the racial construction of "crime" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 23 no. 2, 4 February 1985), and Larry Cooperman's assessment of the Jackson campaign as an attempt to reform the Democratic Party rather than break from it (International Viewpoint no. 57, July 1984) — an argument Ivanov's framework, which sorts American politics into monopoly capital and its opponents, has no equipment to make.
Read this book for the Civil War, for Reconstruction, and above all for the Russian chapter, which is the work of a real historian doing something no one else had done. Read the introduction and the final chapter as what they are: a state's brief, filed in a case where the facts happened to favour it. And when Ivanov writes that "it is not racial, but class relations which are the chief watershed" — a proposition worth taking seriously — notice which watershed his own book was never permitted to cross.