On December 19, 1963, hundreds of African students enrolled in Soviet universities gathered in Moscow’s Red Square to protest racism and discrimination they believed had led to the death of Ghanaian medical student Edmund Assare-Addo.Footnote ¹ Soviet authorities dismissed the death as accidental, attributing it to alcohol and freezing. The demonstration, though highly visible, yielded few tangible results. Dozens of African students left the USSR hoping to continue their studies in western Europe. The Ghanaian embassy in Moscow denied the existence of any “exodus,” but acknowledged that public attitudes had become “less friendly” and that some Soviet students had responded to the protest with hostility, including physical assaults.Footnote ² This episode made clear that the USSR’s official anti-imperial and anti-colonial stance did not always shape attitudes on the ground.

Scholars examining the experiences of African students in the Soviet Union have shown that while Soviet citizens were generally curious about their perspectives as foreigners and occasionally viewed them as intermediaries to western culture, African students frequently reported experiences of discrimination and racism.Footnote ³ When I turned to the African students who attended the Gorʹkii Literary Institute, the premier Soviet institution for writers, I expected to encounter similar narratives.Footnote ⁴ Instead, I initially found a strikingly more positive picture. None of the Institute’s African students participated in the 1963 protest, and most left behind highly favorable accounts of their time in the USSR. In memoirs, poetry, and interviews, they praised Soviet hospitality, cultural sophistication, and ideological commitment to anti-imperialism. Gaoussou Diawara, a Malian playwright, poet, and literary scholar, wrote admiringly of the USSR’s efforts to build “a world as beautiful and magnetic as the Golden Fleece,” recalling how he was welcomed with “bread and salt, symbols of traditional Russian hospitality.”Footnote ⁵ In interviews, he lamented that Mali had not adopted scientific socialism.Footnote ⁶ His classmate Atukwei Okai, a Ghanaian poet and founder and Secretary General of the Pan-African Writers’ Association, praised the Soviet publishing system, its translation practices, and its support for multilingual literary development.Footnote ⁷ Ethiopian writer Fikre Tolossa credited the Soviet system with providing him “a very strong academic background,” and asserted that “Russians could never be racists,” since they had themselves “been oppressed under tsarism.”Footnote ⁸ Yet a deeper engagement with their creative works, alongside archival sources and memoirs by Soviet peers, reveals a more ambivalent reality. Even the most privileged African students—writers—were subjected to exoticization, discrimination, and racist behavior, often unacknowledged in their public recollections.Footnote ⁹

Focusing on the cases of Gaoussou Diawara and Fikre Tolossa, this article investigates how African students at the Gorʹkii Institute navigated the paradox between ideological embrace and racial hierarchy. Unlike their peers in technical fields, writing students enjoyed elevated visibility: they were featured in the press, received generous stipends, were sent annually to writing residences and sanatoriums, and participated in international literary conferences.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet this prominence also brought symbolic pressure to perform gratitude, exemplify Soviet ideals, and suppress contradictions. Drawing on Russian and African archival sources, literary works produced by the students, memoirs by both African and Soviet writers, and original interviews I conducted with the authors and their relatives, this article explores how Diawara and Tolossa negotiated belief and critique, affiliation and alienation, illuminating the tensions within Soviet internationalism and the lingering appeal of its promises.

Only five African students were admitted to the Gorʹkii Institute in the 1960s.Footnote ¹¹ Among them was Gaoussou Diawara (1940–2018), who would later become a key figure in Malian literature and drama.Footnote ¹² After graduating in 1967, he returned to Mali but maintained close ties with the USSR. He completed a theater internship at GITIS, defended a dissertation at the Africa Institute, participated in Afro-Asian conferences, and served as Secretary General of the Mali–USSR Friendship Association. In his poetry and public statements, Diawara never mentions racial prejudice, instead expressing appreciation for Soviet support.Footnote ¹³

His Lithuanian wife and fellow Gorʹkii student, Viktorija Prėskienytė-Diawara, offered a more critical view. In memoirs and interviews, she described systemic racism, including backlash from the Institute’s administration over their relationship.Footnote ¹⁴ She recalled being transferred to a correspondence division for defending Diawara against racist remarks.Footnote ¹⁵ Her anti-Soviet stance as a staunch critic of the regime and a proponent of Lithuanian independence informs her account, yet her testimony also highlights forms of marginalization that official narratives overlooked. Prėskienytė-Diawara suggests the possibility of mutual understanding between Lithuanians and Africans, both of whom, she argues, were occupied and subject to imperial domination. In her framing, the primary antagonist is not just any Soviet citizen, nor even a generic white Soviet, but specifically the figure of the Russian chauvinist, portrayed as an imperial “monster.”

Prėskienytė-Diawara’s emphasis on Russianness, rather than whiteness, directs attention to the imperial structures that underpinned racial hierarchies in the USSR. This perspective highlights how racism in the USSR extended beyond anti-blackness and was deeply rooted in Russian imperial hierarchies. As Jeff Sahadeo has shown, Soviet racism was frequently directed at non-Russian populations from Central Asia and the Caucasus, who were often stereotyped as backward or uncivilized, despite being Soviet citizens.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet while Prėskienytė-Diawara implies that shared experiences of marginalization might have fostered solidarity, many non-Russian Soviet students did not align themselves with African peers. On the contrary, they often echoed Russian resentment over the privileges afforded to Africans, viewing them as outsiders who received preferential treatment. As Margaret Litvin argues, “Soviet racism occurs not despite Soviet multiculturalism but because of it.”Footnote ¹⁷ The nation-based logic of Soviet internationalism reinforced identity categories rather than transcending them, reifying each student’s society of origin and entrenching a nested system of racial and cultural hierarchies under the guise of equality and solidarity. These dynamics of racialization were not abstract or distant; they could take shape in everyday moments, even within the celebrated internationalist environment of the Gorʹkii Institute.

A striking example of this appears in the creative writing seminars attended by Gaoussou Diawara. Despite the generally positive feedback Diawara received during these sessions, where he was praised for his high pathos, civic spirit, his depictions of African reality, and his gratitude toward the Soviet Union, which he referred to as his “second mother,” one seminar stands out for its stark contrast.Footnote ¹⁸ On March 30, 1964, the meeting focused on poems by Diawara’s classmate Gennadii Riabchikov. As usual, one student was assigned to record key comments and reactions. At first, the note-taker, whose identity remains unknown, followed the format, summarizing peers’ remarks about Riabchikov’s work. Soon, however, this individual abandoned their task and began composing satirical verses that mocked both students and the instructor. When Diawara, the final speaker, offered his comments, the note-taker responded with a so-called “song of Gaoussou Diawara (for tom-tom and three tambourines)”:

Prior to Diawara’s turn, the note-taker’s mockery was directed at the content of others’ critiques, but here the focus shifted to identity. There is no record of what Diawara actually said. Instead, the note-taker employed racist tropes to construct a caricatured fantasy of African life, populated by jungle animals, drums, and sorcery. The reference to “Aztec,” despite a footnote suggesting it means “doom or fate,” bears no cultural relevance to Mali and further collapses African and Mesoamerican imagery into a single, exoticized blur. This mock poem reveals that, despite Diawara’s privileged status and public recognition as an African writer in the USSR, some of his peers continued to perceive him through a lens of racialized exoticism, disregarding both his individuality and the seriousness of his literary work.

Though Diawara never discussed racism in public recollections, his short story “Vacances d’hiver à Moscou” (1983) offers a subtler critique. Its protagonist, Diallo, a Malian geology student in Baku, visits a friend in Moscow and encounters both the privileges afforded to African students, including material comforts, access to high-tech gadgets, travel opportunities, and theaters, as well as the underlying racial tensions that accompany them. His relationship with a Russian woman, Natalie, and her husband, Iurii, becomes a study in unease masked by civility. As Diallo grows closer to Natalie, he senses Iurii’s discomfort and attempts to defuse it through humor, telling overtly racist jokes that caricature both Africans and Soviets.

The first anecdote describes a plane making an emergency landing in the African jungle, where cannibals, upon recognizing a Russian passenger from their time at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, decide to spare him. On one level, the joke exaggerates Soviet-African solidarity to the point of absurdity. At the same time, it reinforces colonial-era fantasies of Africa as savage and cannibalistic, even as it flatters Soviet internationalism for having “civilized” the natives. By invoking the image of the Soviet-educated cannibal, Diallo both acknowledges Iurii’s unspoken fears and attempts to preempt them, using exaggerated self-parody to diffuse tension. The joke does not confront racism; rather, it accommodates it, offering reassurance by reproducing the very myths that render Diallo suspect in the first place.

The second anecdote takes place in a Moscow subway, where a “Russian kindly asks a Negro”:

On one hand, the repeated misidentification suggests a tendency to collapse diverse non-white identities into simplified, interchangeable categories, despite the USSR’s own diverse population. The Russian’s insistence that the speaker “looks like a Negro” reveals how skin color becomes the primary and only marker of identity. But more than just a commentary on Soviet ignorance, the anecdote also functions as a parable of racial erasure. The Black character, exhausted by repeated questioning, eventually capitulates: he claims to be Vietnamese, thereby erasing himself in order to be understood.

This joke serves as an allegorical representation of Diallo’s own predicament. Sensing Iurii’s unease, he feels compelled to make himself unrecognizable, both racially and socially. By recounting racist jokes and participating in their logic, Diallo distances himself from his Black identity, whether through caricature or erasure. As Frantz Fanon observed, the racialized subject is forced to wear a mask authored by others.Footnote ²¹ Diallo’s humor exemplifies this masking—at once self-parody and survival strategy, a way to deflect discomfort by embodying the very stereotype he might otherwise resist. Rather than confront Iurii’s prejudice directly, Diallo renders himself legible and non-threatening, highlighting the psychological negotiations African students often undertook to navigate Soviet social spaces.

The tension culminates when Iurii, adopting a posture of exaggerated civility, offers to divorce Natalie if Diallo can make her happier. This gesture borders on the absurd, especially within the context of Soviet reality, where conflicts between Soviet men and African male students over relationships with Soviet women were frequent and violent. Rather than reading Diawara’s story as a simple reproduction of the racist cliché of the white man jealous of a Black rival for “his” woman, this unexpected offer of divorce reframes the narrative as a wish-fulfillment fantasy—one that imagines a USSR where love, reason, and cross-cultural understanding can prevail over racism.

The story’s ending amplifies this idealized vision. Diallo apologizes for nearly jeopardizing Natalie and Iurii’s marriage and decides to return to Baku, prompting Iurii to reflect, “Diallo is a man. I know it now.”Footnote ²² While this line may suggest resolution, it also reveals the underlying prejudice: Diallo had not been fully recognized as an equal, or even as fully human, until that moment. In this light, the story is not merely a tale of romantic rivalry, but an allegory of the precarious social navigation required of Black men in a society that simultaneously invites and excludes them.

The juxtaposition of Diallo’s privileges with his racialization highlights the distance between outward opportunity and lived inequality. Diawara’s story critiques Soviet internationalism not through overt denunciation, but through allegory, exposing the emotional and cultural compromises required to survive in a society that positioned African students as symbols of ideological success while subjecting them to everyday prejudice. The gap between this fictional reconciliation and Diawara’s real-life challenges, such as his prolonged struggle to gain approval for his marriage to a Soviet citizen and to secure an exit visa for her to join him in Mali, illuminates his complex position both as a symbolic representative of Soviet internationalism and as someone acutely aware of the racialized limits of its promises.

Following the graduation of Diawara and several other African writers from the Gorʹkii Institute in the late 1960s, the institution temporarily ceased admitting new African students. It was not until 1973, amid increasing political unrest in Ethiopia preceding the revolution, that the Soviet Writers’ Union and the Ministry of Higher Education deemed the admission of Ethiopian writer Fikre Tolossa (b. 1949) to be of “significant political and propaganda value.”Footnote ²³ Tolossa, a playwright, poet, and literary scholar, would later gain recognition in both Ethiopia and Germany. He consistently praised his Soviet education and insisted that Soviets were inherently incapable of racism.

The memoirs of his classmates, however, paint a more complex picture. For example, Mariia Zorkaia recalled a seemingly utopian environment of interethnic friendship, where students “danced African dances at Tajik, Armenian, and Ukrainian weddings” and “only heard vague rumors about national conflicts that didn’t align with our real-life experiences.”Footnote ²⁴ Yet she also noted that Tolossa’s admiration for Pushkin as an Ethiopian writer provoked mockery. Other recollections are more troubling. For example, Vadim Samokhin described an incident in which Latvian student Juris Čapiņš directed a racial slur at Tolossa during an argument:

Such remarks and Samokhin’s attempts to “downplay” them underscore the normalization of racist outbursts beneath the surface of internationalist rhetoric.Footnote ²⁶ Returning to Prėskienytė-Diawara’s memoirs, one might argue that her depiction of Russian students’ behavior as “monstrous” is not far off, with one important correction: Čapiņš was not Russian, but Latvian, himself from a Baltic republic also occupied by the Soviets. This detail suggests that white supremacist beliefs were not limited to ethnic Russians but extended to other European populations within the USSR, including those who were themselves politically marginalized.

When asked decades later about racism, Tolossa acknowledged that during seminars peers often criticized and looked down on him, believing, as he put it, that he came from a country lacking renowned writers like Pushkin or Fedor Dostoevskii. Yet he did not interpret these experiences as evidence of racism. Instead, he described them as humbling. Reflecting on the broader Soviet context, Tolossa recalled instances where Soviet men intimidated both Soviet women and African students who were dating. He observed that Soviets were often resentful and envious of Africans not only because they were more popular among Soviet women, but also because they possessed “better outfits, clothes, material possessions … even cigarettes and chewing gum.” Since Tolossa studied in the Soviet Union between 1974 and 1978—a period of worsening living conditions—his recollections align with Maxim Matusevich’s analysis of African students’ experiences during the Brezhnev-era stagnation. As resources became scarcer, Soviets increasingly sought scapegoats, and African students, perceived as beneficiaries of undeserved privilege, became convenient targets.Footnote ²⁷

Despite these experiences, Tolossa maintained that Soviets had no reason to harbor hatred toward Africans, citing the absence of a transatlantic slave trade. Rather, he argued, some Soviets became “imitators of racism” under the influence of American films: “They pretend that they are racists and want to discriminate, but deep down inside their hearts they are not like that; their psychological makeup was not racist at all.”Footnote ²⁸ Although racism is not exclusive to the west, the Soviets consistently framed its origins as external to the USSR, overlooking both the legacy of Russian imperialism and their own discriminatory policies toward Soviet ethnic minorities. By pointing to the slave trade and European colonization of Africa, they presented Soviet and socialist modernity as a more just alternative. Proclaiming itself a racism-free society, the USSR promoted an image of peaceful multiethnic coexistence. Tolossa, isolated as the only Black student at the Institute, appears to have internalized this official position, one in which racism was western, external, and incompatible with socialism.

Nevertheless, in 1978, after graduating from the Gorʹkii Institute, when Tolossa was granted permission to visit East Berlin, he fled to the west. He explained this act of departure by his disillusionment with the socialist model and Marxism-Leninism due to the poor living conditions of the Soviet people. But even after defecting to the west, Tolossa never publicly described the USSR as racist. His departure marked a turn from Soviet modernity, but not a repudiation of its ideals, and he preserved a narrative in which Soviet internationalism, while flawed, still represented a meaningful alternative to western imperialism.

This tension between personal disillusionment and the enduring appeal of the Soviet ideal reflects the broader ambivalence shared by many African intellectuals who engaged with the USSR during the Cold War. Drawn by strong anti-colonial commitments and a sincere belief in socialist solidarity, they embraced Soviet cultural life, formed meaningful relationships, and publicly supported the USSR’s anti-racist rhetoric. In doing so, they became participants in a system that, despite its structural inequalities, offered powerful opportunities for cultural affirmation and symbolic belonging. The experiences of Diawara and Tolossa suggest that these figures should be understood as strategic narrators: individuals who navigated a political environment that demanded performances of gratitude and belief. Their creative works and retrospective accounts complicate this performance, registering both commitment and critique. Their narratives reveal the tensions of inhabiting a system that denied the existence of race even as it reproduced racial hierarchies, while also showing how, despite these contradictions, the ideals of socialist internationalism continued to provide a meaningful framework for imagining postcolonial dignity, equality, and solidarity.