Nicole Hill

It smells like booze.

All around them, people are talking about art and jazz and dance.

Our ancestors stopped in on a conversation about a thing that we all think of when I say the Harlem Renaissance.

You know what?

You love it.

Let's say it together.

One, two, three.

The Russian Revolution and the rise of communism.

I was going to say jazz.

Four centuries, Russia's labor system of choice was serfdom.

Everyone always points out that it's not slavery.

Peasants were just legally bound to the land they were born onto, and they had to work that land and couldn't leave or change jobs or travel or marry without the landlord's permission.

But the landlord didn't own the people, just the land.

Russian Tsars kept this up until around the time of America's Civil War.

Then they freed the serfs, who were not slaves, but left them with no resources and forced them to live under Jim Crow-esque restrictions.

Black people around the world began to identify with Russian serfs.

In 1917, Communist Party leader Vladimir Lenin, with the help of the peasants, labor unions, and soldiers, overthrows Russia's Tsar and forms the newest, largest country in the world, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The USSR bills itself as a worker's utopia without capitalism, colonialism, or racial hierarchies.

Black people across the diaspora, including Paul Robeson, are so into this.

Now, I know when we think of Harlem Renaissance era black folks, we don't really think, oh, yeah, super into Russia.