American racism has long been described as a domestic moral and political problem. It is also a national-security vulnerability. Foreign adversaries, above all Russia, have repeatedly sought to amplify racial divisions as a geopolitical weapon to weaken the United States. This isn’t new; it’s been ongoing since the early 20th century.
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After the First World War, Vladimir Lenin knew that Soviet Russia lacked the military and economic strength to directly confront the up-and-coming global power—the United States. The Soviets turned to a low-cost option: leveraging propaganda to target a very visible internal fracture—racism.
The Soviets knew little about American racism. To succeed, they needed boots on the ground. Through the Communist International (Comintern), Soviet agents cultivated African American intellectuals and activists, like Cyril Briggs and Langston Hughes, both blacks who lived under Jim Crow.
These “Race Travelers” were brought to the USSR, given privileged treatment, and instructed in a specific “whiteness” narrative: White American capitalists would never permit genuine black equality because a permanent underclass was essential to the capitalist system. Capitalism, they were told, relied on racism, unlike racist-free, egalitarian Soviet communism. Peaceful reform of capitalism was impossible; only violent upheaval could produce change.
The strategy was brilliant. Blacks were justifiably angered at inequality and racism in America and desirous of a racist-free system. This made them receptive to Soviet propaganda and eager to facilitate the allegedly racist-free communism in America.
Travelers like Briggs, Hughes, and Paul Robeson used their platforms to advance Soviet framing. Cyril Briggs formed the African Blood Brotherhood, an Afro-Marxist organization instructing its members in violent protest. Sponsored by a Communist Party of America (CPUSA) front organization, Robeson co-authored with W.E.B. Du Bois the 1951 UN-presented petition We Charge Genocide, which echoed Soviet talking points. Soviet media amplified this as evidence of American hypocrisy.
contrasted racist America with praise for the racist-free Soviet Union, even though he personally knew this was untrue.
The Red Scare, followed by McCarthyism, motivated the Soviet Union to work through the financially supported CPUSA to identify and promote racial travesties of justice. The Scottsboro Boys and the murder of Emmett Till were turned into durable, global propaganda events.
In America, the theme was whiteness, while for the world, it was capitalism and worker repression. Communists were portrayed as champions of black civil rights even though the Soviets relied on blacks remaining a subordinated and segregated population.
A lot rode on this strategy besides weakening America. The Soviets couldn’t glorify communism’s superiority without casting America as an immoral, racist capitalist. The Soviet Union had engaged in genocides, ethnic cleansings, and torture. It constantly needed to deflect attention from its human rights abuses.
When America confronted the Soviet Union over its human rights abuses, the latter shut down criticism with whataboutism: “and you lynch negroes.” The Soviets knew the guilt Americans felt over their history of slavery, and Jim Crow could inflame white remorse while deflecting from Soviet atrocities.
Martin Luther King’s (MLK) peaceful approach and calls for integration with whites made him the Soviets’ enemy number one. Uniquely, MLK was a target of both the KGB and the CIA.
After MLK’s death, the Soviets attempted to create a full-blown race war to reverse the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and prove the futility of peaceful protests. To do this, they amplified tensions between Jews and blacks. This overlapped with another geopolitical strategy to have the world reject Israel as a racist state denying Palestinian statehood. Both tactics required Jews to be portrayed as racists, fascists, and imperialists.
The Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 directly challenged the whiteness narrative by demonstrating that American institutions could change and a majority of Americans were willing to confront the country’s racial past. This message was deadly to the Soviet claim that capitalism made America irredeemably racist.
They adapted and turned these milestones to their advantage. Legislation was mocked as window dressing to placate blacks while propaganda highlighted that racism continued, thereby “proving” that America was immutably racist.
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The Soviets also modified their strategy. The Democrat party was evidently forging an electoral alliance with black voters. Partisan talking points framed Democrats as the anti-racist, working-class party, and Republicans as a party of the racist, capitalist bourgeoisie.
Now the Soviets amplified racial and partisan divisions simultaneously, weakening America along two mutually reinforcing fault lines.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was clear that, after 70 years of Soviet and CPUSA propaganda, combined with the media’s obsessive coverage of discriminatory hiring, rising black incarceration, and police brutality, the whiteness narrative had been accepted by many Americans. Reports of black progress were dismissed as white noise. Attempts to update the narrative were complicated by American “whiteness” academics amplifying Marxist and Soviet-aligned talking points, including those found in writings from Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes.
Publications by professor and the Marxist Noel Ignatiev presented white people as committed to maintaining racial and economic hegemony. Harvard professor Derrick Bell co-authored Critical Race Theory, which sees everything in America through the prism of race or a lens of whiteness.
Academics advancing whiteness-related concepts quickly gained an institutional foothold, and some, like Ibram Kendi, Robyn DiAngelo, and Ben Crump, parlayed these ideas into bestsellers. Crump’s book Open Season, like Robeson and Du Bois’ We Charge Genocide, accuses America of genocide against blacks. Anyone presenting alternative views could find themselves publicly discredited.
Meanwhile, unvalidated theories and assertions by whiteness academics provided cover to “civil rights” leaders, like Al Sharpton, and media figures echoing Soviet-styled scripts: identify racial travesties of justice and appeal to white guilt by reminding Americans of their history of slavery and Jim Crow. One change, however, was necessary because the demand for racial travesties had exceeded supply. Travesties were embellished, racial hoaxes proliferated, and complex racial disparities were turned into simple morality plays of profit-driven white oppressors and black victims.
The Russians had taken a whiteness siesta after the Soviet collapse. Upon awakening, they could admire, through the protests and riots surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd, that their legacy lived on and even lurched further left.
Americans were building campaigns to reinforce whiteness, repackaged as systemic racism, trying to revise American history to implant whiteness, and framing left-wing violence as a legitimate form of political expression.
American innovations in social media gave the pervasive racism narrative greater reach, including back to America’s adversaries, and permitted the global framing of racial progress in America as illusory and racial conflict as permanent. The Russians adapted again. They leveraged troll farms to seize the momentum and supercharge divisions by playing both sides: black and white, and Democrat and Republican.
In the 2020s, black American were the most educated and wealthy black population in the world. Despite undeniable progress, large shares of the public continued to believe that racism remained as pervasive as ever.
Did Russian and foreign interference influence this perception? Of course, but America’s racist history, in combination with activists, politicians, and the media downplaying black progress and successes, as well as the cultural, behavioral, family, and policy factors that shape outcomes, was also very influential.
Understanding the foreign role in the enduring and proliferating whiteness narrative in America is not about denying real injustices or principled civil rights activism. It’s about examining the fingerprints of sustained external influence designed to prevent healing and keep American racial conflict salient. The ghosts of Soviet strategy have haunted American race relations long enough.
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The Soviet and Russian geopolitical strategy of leveraging Americans to weaken the United States; the influence this has had on history, education, civil rights, racial activists, and America’s willingness and ability to celebrate anti-racist progress; and an examination of non-racist factors that drive racial disparities today are the subjects of Brush’s newest book, Ending Racism in America: Breaking the Russian Hoax.
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