Professor Roman notes that in this case the other factory workers themselves acted as judge, jury, and executioner (rather, deporter) of these two men, which was an idiosyncratic way of doling out Soviet justice as well that was part of the entire anti-racist schtick the USSR was playing up at the time. Please don’t interpret that moniker as some belittlement of anti-racism, but I think in the case of the Soviet Union, to say the government was acting in good faith (as opposed to calculated propaganda) in this case would be dishonest at the least and outright insulting to people who experienced inarguable racial discrimination in the USSR. Other works I’ve read by Roman really, really downplay the amount of actual racism that occurred in the Soviet Union and really, really play up the admittedly forward-thinking posture the Soviet Union took towards African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s.
For example in Opposing Jim Crow (2012) she writes:
The 1928 Comintern decree was also consistent with Soviet nationality policy, which afforded the officially sponsored non-Russian nationalities of the USSR the nominal right to national self-determination. Besides encouraging their cultural development, Soviet leaders established an ethnicity-based affirmative action system that privileged non-Russians over ethnic Russians in terms of hiring, admissions, and promotions. [3]
Factually true? Absolutely. Missing important, if not critical, contextualization? Also, absolutely.
Professor Roman brings up an important point though, which are the many programs present in the Soviet Union which we would today call ‘Affirmative Action.’ Indeed, she repeatedly refers to the Soviet Union as the Affirmative Action Empire– which to be frank, I can’t tell if she’s saying in a cheeky way or not. Besides the idea of calling the Soviet Union an empire that I talk about in this answer, someone so openly anti-imperialist in every imaginable capacity using it as a potential positive descriptor is a little bizarre on the face of it. But on to these programs– besides the practice of promoting and positively selecting for non-Russians on occasion, the early Bolsheviks implemented a number of localization programs under the aegis of wide-sweeping attempts to ‘de-Russify’ what had formerly been the Russian Empire. These were called in bulk korenizatsia which can be translated roughly to localization, though really it’d be closer in a literal sense to the non-existent word ‘root-ification.’ Root here being used the way English speakers describe the root cause of something or the root of a word etymologically.
Korenizatsia is championed as an example of explicit Soviet anti-racism and was indeed, fairly innovative in the context of turn of the 20th century Europe when nationalism was on the rise just about everywhere else. Most recently (that I’m aware of), a group of Finnish historians (as well as one German historian) wrote about this and other processes in a 2018 work called The Fall of an Empire, the Birth of a Nation which studies the evolution of racial identities from the Russian Imperial period to the modern day Russian Federation. They make a really profound point which is that the Russian Empire was unique in that nearly all of its so-called colonial holdings were along its contiguous borders. This created a special need for the inheritor of this colonial-ish mantle to address more directly issues of national and ethnic sovereignty than say, the British Empire– the majority of whose subjects lived in lands far away from ol’ Blighty and primarily were of a drastically different skin color. The authors go so far as to say the following:
What is […] missing [in the political discourse of the Russian nation] is the open acknowledgement of Russian national identity as multiethnic and multicultural. (see Chapter 2, Origin and Power…)
As much as the initial salvo I provided you with concerning blatantly and unarguably racist practices in the Soviet Union were just that, as we’ve seen above there were also far-reaching, legitimate, and good faith attempts to deconstruct racism (and indeed nationalism) as a concept completely. That deserves positive accolades the same way the latter days sins of Stalin deserve unmitigated condemnation. The Soviet Union was a paradox in many, many ways– as you see here, its treatment of and relationship to ethnic minorities is just one in a long list of reasons why.
In conclusion (what a tacky ending right?), we have a strong idea of how both racism and anti-racism presented themselves with respect to the Soviet government, and it’s important to note that many of the more egregious actions I mention above largely, though not exclusively, occurred before or during Stalin’s reign (which spanned nearly three decades– four if we include Lenin’s rule as well– nearly, or more than, half of the lifespan of the entire Soviet project), so although partly his doing, it’s unfair to entirely dismiss these occurrences as the machinations of one bad apple. There was a systemic element to Soviet racism (as well as anti-racism though too). I think that is the most important issue raised by your question because exploring individual-to-individual racism is going to immediately start running into all those issues I mentioned above, it’s just such a vast question that I think you’ll just have to be satisfied with a rather unsatisfying, ‘yes, there was racism in the USSR.’ How were ethnic minorities treated? Sometimes good, sometimes okay, sometimes really, really not okay. Next article: 202005151927 Part 4 - Soviet union