To start, let’s look at some documentation– how did the Soviet Union set out, or at least claim to set out to address issues of discrimination as they relate to ethnic (again, non-Russian) minorities?
Well, according to the Constitution of the Soviet Union (1936), anti-discriminatory policy was a pretty big deal:
Article 123. Equality of rights of citizens of the USSR, irrespective of their nationality or race, in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life, is an indefeasible law. Any direct or indirect restriction of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of direct or indirect privileges for, citizens on account of their race or nationality, as well as any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law. [1]
Likewise, Trotsky, Stalin, and Lenin (among others of course) debated around this idea that they called the National Question. Essentially the matter is this: what role does nationality play in revolution? If you want to read about this debate in more detail, I talk about it at some length in this answer, but fundamentally, the entire early Soviet platform with respect to the National Question could be summarized by the terse statement that discrimination along ethnic lines was bad. I realize how blasé it sounds to put it like that, but the reason I mention it at all is simply to state again that racist, anti-ethnic, or otherwise similarly discriminatory policy was considered anathema to the Soviets before, during, and after the creation of their workers’ paradise. Coupled with the excerpt from the Constitution above, I think we can all agree combating racialized discrimination was at least on the Bolshevik radar if not completely at the fore (note though that that the racial equality clause doesn’t appear until Article 123). Again, I’ll point you to that aforementioned answer for more detail but the Bolsheviks more or less sought to eliminate the idea of ethnicity and nationality entirely because they saw it as a tool used by the bourgeoisie to divide the proletariat and thereby make the former easier to control– i.e. it’s ethnicity B’s fault ethnicity A is poor! That general line of thinking was challenged to some extent by Iosef Stalin who underlined the need for different ethnicities to ‘experience the revolution’ in their own way, but he was not openly a racist or a perpetrator of racial discrimination in his early years. Quite the opposite in fact. His anti-racist bona fides were so solid one of his early roles in the Bolshevik leadership was that of the head of the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities– whose sole function was the reconciliation with and advocacy for non-Russian nationalities in the RSFSR and USSR.
Okay, so we have a document-based foundation, but I’m sure anyone reading this would rightly challenge the notion that just because something is written down in a constitution doesn’t mean it’s going to be enforced in any meaningful way. So now we have to consider some of the actual practices of the Soviet government vis-a-vis ethnic minorities writ large. In short, the evidence is fairly damning. This answer I worked on talks about the Holodomor specifically, but there is also mention of numerous instances of brutal, racialized oppression: mass deportations of minorities, effective enslavement for others, suppression of undesirable cultures, in short– racism in every sense of the word. The Holodomor alone, whether genocide or not– as discussed in that question, is a demonstration of targeted, racial violence. Nearly everything mentioned in that answer is specific to Stalin’s reign, though Decossackization was Leninist policy as well. To name a few others in no order of magnitude or travesty:
- Operation Ulusy: around 100,000 Kalmyks were deported from the north Caspian Sea region to Siberia for being anticommunist Buddhists. Resisters were shot.
- Operation Lentil: around 500,000 Caucasus peoples (like Chechens and Ingush, among others) were deported from their mountainous homeland to Siberia. Resisters were shot.
- Operation Priboi: around 100,000 Baltic peoples (like Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians) were deported from their homeland to Siberia. Resisters were shot.
- Though not given an official operational name, tens of thousands of Chinese were relocated to GULag sites or deported from the country altogether based on their supposed loyalty to the Republic of China (at war with the Chinese Red Army). Resisters were shot.
These are all examples of what we’d call today overt racism and those are just four, but you get the idea– I intentionally chose distinct ethnic groups as well: i.e. Baltic people would generally be identified as ‘white,’ Chinese people as ‘Asian,’ Caucasus people as ‘Turkic,’ and Kalmyk people as ‘native.’ Soviet racism was, to put it perhaps far too crudely, non-discriminatory. This was not an uncommon occurrence in glorious post-racial Soviet Union, and never once repeated unto ethnic Russians. There were never mass deportations of Russians based on their Russian-ness. There are plenty of other examples though that occurred both before and after Stalin’s reign.
You specifically mention African-Americans being propagandized to concerning the discrimination they faced in the capitalist United States and there’s a great incident at a factory in Stalingrad,1930, which underlines the apparent paradoxes of Soviet power vis-a-vis ethnic minorities. The background of the story is this: in the 1920s and 1930s, American industrialist Henry Ford (almost unbelievably) cooperated with the government of the Soviet Union to build Ford automobile factories in the latter industrializing nation, and even provided American engineers and workers to aid in the project. Other individual workers chose to emigrate of their own accord for a variety of reasons. To talk about all of the underpinnings and subtleties of the dealing here would take ages, but as it relates to this question, the key point is that a certain factory in Stalingrad employed a number of European American engineers as well as one African American engineer alongside Soviet engineers. Two of these (white) engineers had a significant physical altercation with the single darker-skinned employee on the job which was clearly racially motivated– slurs, targeting, repetition, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind. They were arrested and the Soviet Union launched a huge, propagandized trial against the two men (identified as Messrs. Lewis and Brown). The USSR really went all out here. Robert Robinson (the victim of the attack) was portrayed as a proletariat hero who survived the oppression of his adopted homeland (he had immigrated from Jamaica), escaped to the Soviet Union, and even still was pursued by the racism of America. Not an unfair description at all actually. During the Great Depression, when the Soviet Union was still in its infancy, many (mostly, but not exclusively, black) Americans who sympathized with the ideals postulated by Lenin et al. or desirous for better opportunity than what the United States of the time had to offer had likewise fled the capitalist USA and expatriated to the socialist USSR. Some of these people had entered the Soviet political machine via party membership and they were brought to the fore (despite holding minor, if any, political offices) during the trial to show people in the west (and indeed, in the Soviet Union) how progressive the Soviet Union was (this was largely before much of the aforementioned racial violence had either occurred or become well-known). Lewis and Brown were deported from the Soviet Union back to America but not imprisoned. According to SUNY professor Meredith Roman (who is uniquely qualified to comment here considering the thesis which earned her a PhD was titled Another Kind of ‘Freedom’: The Soviet Experiment With Antiracism and Its Image as a ‘Raceless’ Society), the reasoning was as follows:
On a practical level, deportation signaled a return to the vast unemployment and hunger of the depression-ridden United States. Symbolically, expulsion sent a message to the large number of (noncommunist) American workers […]: racists belonged in a racist society. [2]
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