Cold War Internationalism: The Myth of Race-Blind Eastern Europe

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.

Summary

Bolaji Balogun opens by placing the Cold War as an ideological contest between Western and Eastern blocs, both of which used race as a political weapon. Race and racism are distinguished as interdependent concepts with European origins dating to the sixteenth century. The chapter traces how Enlightenment-era race science naturalized whiteness as superior and blackness as inferior, then follows this ideology into Central and Eastern Europe. Balogun argues that the Soviet Union and its satellite states promoted a myth of being race-blind while systemic racism persisted beneath the surface. Evidence includes the 1963 death of Ghanaian student Edmund Assare-Addo in Moscow, which triggered large protests; accounts of harassment, slurs, and violence against African students; restrictive marriage laws; and the racialization of Vietnamese and Cuban workers in Czechoslovakia. A lengthy interview with Brian Scott, Guyana-born journalist who studied in Poland in the 1980s, provides a firsthand account of everyday racism. The chapter concludes that the “white gaze” operated under the Soviet race-blind veil, and that Eastern European racism differed in timing but not in kind from Western forms.

Key Events

Death of Edmund Assare-Addo (1963): The Ghanaian medical student’s body found near Moscow. African students protested, carrying signs that read “Moscow—Center of Discrimination” and “Stop Killing Africans!” Soviet authorities ruled the death accidental, but many believed it was racially motivated.
Formation of the Black Africans’ Student Union: Four Moscow State University students expelled after trying to organize and circulate restricted materials. Soviet officials dismissed them as “Pentagon men.”
Brian Scott’s tram incident (c. 1985): In Kraków, an elderly Polish man demanded Scott give up his seat, saying “In Africa, you don’t sit, and white people stand.” Scott refused and was met with hostility from fellow passengers.
Soviet marriage law (1947): Prohibited marriage between citizens and foreigners. Foreign students had to pledge compliance, regulating interracial relationships.
Czechoslovak labor migration (1967–1989): Over 60,000 Vietnamese and 23,000 Cuban workers entered Czechoslovakia. They were racialized as different from Czechs and Slovaks, contrasted with Polish workers who were considered racially similar.

Character Development

The chapter does not follow a single character arc. However, Brian Scott emerges as a significant figure. His six-hour interview reveals a man shaped by Guyanese activism, who chose Poland because of his admiration for Lech Wałęsa and Solidarity. Scott’s personal story—from a UN-funded engineering scholarship to becoming Poland’s first Black journalist—illustrates the tension between official socialist internationalism and lived racial experience. His account of the tram confrontation shows how the “white gaze” confiscated his sense of belonging. Other figures (Edmund Assare-Addo, Pavel Barša, Everest Mulekezi) appear only as brief witnesses to systemic racism.

Themes, Symbols, or Motifs

Myth of race-blindness: The central theme. The Soviet bloc claimed to have eliminated racial prejudice, yet the chapter documents a persistent double standard where official ideology denied racism while everyday practices reinforced it.
Whiteness as property: Following Abby Ferber, the chapter treats whiteness as a privileged category with economic value. Eastern Europeans transformed from “lesser Whites” to simply “Whites” through racial hierarchy.
The white gaze: George Yancy’s concept is used to describe how black bodies were perceived through a lens of biological difference. Scott’s experience on the tram exemplifies this confiscation of personhood.
Globalization and mobility: Population movements (enslaved Africans, European emigrants, postcolonial students) are framed as interconnected. The Eastern bloc was not isolated but globally engaged through trade, academic exchange, and cultural events.
Cold War propaganda competition: Both blocs used race as a propaganda tool. The West highlighted Soviet racism; the Soviets highlighted American Jim Crow, while suppressing evidence of their own.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter fundamentally challenges the widely held assumption that Eastern Europe was immune to racial ideology during the Cold War. By tracing the intellectual history of race in Europe and then documenting racism in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other state-socialist countries, Balogun shows that the “race-blind” claim was itself a political instrument. The chapter matters for contemporary debates because it demonstrates that denial of racism is a feature, not a bug, of state-sponsored anti-racist rhetoric. It also provides a necessary corrective to Western-centric histories of race, insisting that global racial hierarchies included the Eastern bloc. The interview with Brian Scott offers rare, granular testimony that makes abstract concepts concrete. For scholars of decolonization, Cold War history, and critical race theory, this chapter provides both theoretical grounding and empirical evidence.

Study Questions and Answers

How does Balogun distinguish between race and racism, and why is this distinction important for understanding the Soviet Union?
Race is defined as a categorical distinction based on shared physiognomic traits, while racism is a belief in racial superiority tied to those traits. Balogun argues that the Soviet Union officially uncoupled the two—admitting race as a category but denying that racism existed. This uncoupling allowed the state to claim moral high ground while ignoring systemic discrimination.
What does the death of Edmund Assare-Addo reveal about Soviet internationalism?
The death and the subsequent protests exposed a gap between the Soviet image of anti-racist solidarity and the reality of racial violence. African students saw the official dismissal of murder allegations as a cover-up, mirroring the US treatment of civil rights abuses. The protests themselves show that students did not passively accept the race-blind narrative.
In what ways does Brian Scott’s tram experience illustrate the concept of the “white gaze”?
When the elderly man demanded Scott’s seat, he invoked a racial script that placed Scott as an African who must defer to whites, even in Poland. The “white gaze” operated as a perceptual practice that confiscated Scott’s agency and marked him as an outsider. The fact that other passengers ignored or sided with the man shows that this gaze was socially reinforced, not an isolated incident.