Only 100,000, of the 144 million people in Russia are of African descent. That’s less than 1%. Russia’s African diaspora population is largely made up of a combination of non-Russian students and expats and mixed-race Russians, in most cases the product of interracial relationships between African and African-American men, and white Russian women. They speak Russian, and identify as Russian, in many cases growing up in fatherless homes, estranged from their African cultural heritage.
The first record of a major African presence in Russia begins in the 1700s when it became common for Russian aristocracy to have black servants. The most famous enslaved African in Russian history was Abram Hannibal who was a servant of Tsar Peter. He was also the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, a renowned writer and poet, who is widely considered to be the founder of modern Russian literature. The great-grandfather Abram Hannibal, was born in 1696 either in Cameroon, Ethiopia or Eritrea, depending on the source. During his incredible life he became an esteemed military commander and engineer. He had 11 children, the majority of whom became members of the Russian mobility. A number of British aristocrats are allegedly descendants of Hannibal, including Natalia Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster, and the Queen’s cousin George Mountbatten, 4th Marquis of Milford Haven.
There were small black settlements in the region of Abkhazia on the Eastern coast of the Black Sea, descended from enslaved Africans brought to work on the citrus plantations. By the 19th century the Afro-Abkhazians were fully assimilated, speaking only Abkhazian and engaging in Abkhazian cultural customs.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century up until the Second World War, many African-Americans seem to have had a pleasant experience in Russia where they enjoyed greater social mobility and freedom than they had been afforded in the United States. African-American writer Nancy Prince wrote of the years she lived in Russia in the early 1800s with great fondness, and even stayed at the Royal courts of St Petersburg.
Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, attracted by the Marxist ideals of solidarity among the oppressed, African-American and Afro-Caribbean travellers began to arrive in Soviet Russia in larger numbers. Jamaican writer and activist Claude McKay travelled to Russia in 1922 on what he later described as a “magical pilgrimage”. Poet Langston Hughes spent several months in the USSR in the early 1930s to assess the Communist regime. Actor Paul Robeson became a household name in Russia and declared it his adopted homeland. WWII signalled a change in the racial climate of Russia and the majority of the African diaspora left Russia after the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.
The third wave of Afro-descent migration to Russia came in the 1960s. In an effort to increase its influence in post-colonial Africa, the Russian government offered university scholarships to thousands of African students, some of whom had mixed-race children with Russian women. Unlike their African-American predecessors, the African students were less interested in Soviet Ideology and more interested in receiving a low-cost education which they could put to good use in their newly independent homelands. Racial tensions sometimes bubbled-over; the most famous incident was the March on the Kremlin by African students, following the racially motivated murder of a Ghanaian medical student. However, despite enjoying relative freedom and opportunity in the USSR, many students did not stay permanently, returning to their homelands after their studies. Many of those who had fathered children had to leave them behind. By 2006 the number of mixed-race Afro-Russians in Moscow was believed to be 4,000.
The eventual demise of the USSR facilitated a hostility towards ‘outsiders’ and ‘otherness’. The dissolution of the Soviet Union happened in 1991. The highest rate of attacks on foreign students of colour occurred in the period from 1995 – 2006.
Many mixed-race Afro-Russians who are born in Russia and raised by their white parent grow up with limited contact with other black people. They are culturally removed from their African heritage and do not claim as strongly the African identity of other European diaspora groups. However, neither are they fully accepted as Russian, often having to explain of justify their ‘Russian-ness’.
In 2007 Afro-Russian Amelian Tynes-Mensah established Metis, an international children’s charity which social services to Afro-Russians and works with African embassies to give them greater access to their African cultural heritage.
Notable Afro-Russians include Jean Gregoire Sagbo, Russia’s first black elected official, Yelena Khanga, a prominent journalist, basketball player Katerina Novoseltseva, and adult movie star Erick Lewis who goes by the name Otello.