Mixed Race Studies

Black in the USSR: The children of Soviet Africa search for their own identity

The Calvert Journal
2016-02-04

Photography by Liz Johnson Artur

Photograph by Liz Johnson Artur

“When people ask me about my background I usually start by explaining how my mum is Russian, my dad is Ghanaian and that I was born in Bulgaria,” says the photographer Liz Johnson Artur. “It often becomes a long explanation.”

The explanation goes something like this. Along with many African students in the 1960s, Johnson’s Ghanaian father was given the chance to study in Eastern Europe as part of the Soviet Union’s efforts to expand its influence across the African continent during the Cold War. His time in Bulgaria studying biochemistry was cut short after four years when all Ghanaian students were expelled from the country following a confrontation between African students and the police. By then he’d already met Johnson Artur’s mother, who gave birth to their daughter in 1964, a few months after his departure.

Johnson Artur spent her childhood in Bulgaria and then Germany and has been based in Britain since 1990. Her father was unable to return to Bulgaria and is now settled in Ghana. She only met him for the first time in 2010. After doing so, she felt moved to start documenting the stories of other Russians of African and Caribbean origin. “Most black Russians that I met in Moscow and St Petersburg had also grown up without their fathers. Some had been fostered or grown up in children’s homes and had never met their mothers. But we all agreed that we felt Russian as well as African.”…

Read the entire photo-essay here.

The Born Identity

Arise Magazine
Issue 12
2011-09-28

Sarah Bentley

Photography by Liz Johnson-Artur

Thirty-six year-old Egor Belov has just told a childhood anecdote about scrubbing his face until it drew blood. He’d been playing in the snow and wanted pink cheeks like his friends. His dark complexion was never going to turn his desired shade but as a six-year-old living in a home otherwise occupied by white children, he struggled to understand why. The gathering of St Petersburg-based Afro-Russians (the collective name given to Russian nationals of mixed African and Russian parentage) with whom Belov shares this tale all smile knowingly and begin to offer up their own stories.
 
Some tales, including lovers who were shocked that black skin is lighter on different parts of the body, are humorous. But others, such as how school years were marred by bullying, fights and adolescent paranoia, are indicative of the challenges of the Afro-Russian experience. A candid confession from Marie Madlene, a striking 44-year-old with a blonde afro (pictured below), gets a raucous laugh: “I’m so used to being stared at that when I travel to more diverse countries, I miss the attention.”

Although the group has previously only met online through the ‘black-Russian-Ukranian-Belorussian-Kazakh’ page on Kontakt (Russia’s answer to Facebook), its members have developed instant camaraderie. After all, they are all mixed-race people living in a country that, despite its obvious multiculturalism (almost 180 ethnicities live in Russia), has one of the highest race-hate crime rates in the world. There are around 150 active far-right groups, many with ideologies of racial intolerance…

Read the entire article here.