IT’S 2018, AND HISTORIANS AREN’T EMBARRASSED TO WRITE ARTICLES LIKE THIS: An Exceptional Case? Problematizing Soviet Anti-Racism.

Apparently, all too many folks on the Left still believe that the USSR’s purported anti-racism was totally sincere. So this “revisionist” piece basically amounts to, “Maybe the Soviet propaganda that naive American Communists and fellow travelers ingenuously accepted wasn’t fully reflective of actual Soviet practice.”

As a Facebook friend, herself a refugee from the USSR, writes in response:

The Soviets were anti-racists only in the sense that they shouted about American racism whenever anyone mentioned mass murders conducted by the Lenin-Stalin regimes. Short of that hypocrisy, the Soviet government had no interest in anti-racism, mostly because it wanted to keep open the option of ethnically-based mass deportations and murders on its own soil. Stalin, after all, presided over the genocide of millions of Ukrainians, followed by genocide, forced deportations, and mass incarcerations of numerous ethnic and religious groups, from the Crimean Tatars to the Volga Germans to the Chechens to the Latvians, to the famed plot to deport all Jews to Siberia which was only thwarted by Stalin’s death.

One problem seems to be understanding racism from an American perspective. Having virtually no African-descended population, the Soviets could feign tolerance toward minorities while systematically oppressing domestic ethnic minorities. It’s the same sort of constricted perspective that leads woke millennials to dismiss the Holocaust as “white on white violence.”