SUMMARY:

This article by Maxim Matusevich proposes to develop the model of modernity presented by Paul Gilroy in his seminal essay The Black Atlantic, to better understand the modernizing impact of African students in the Soviet Union on their host society. While it is true that the Soviet Union, just as its Russian predecessor, possessed no African colonies and, in fact, remained unrelenting in its critique of European colonialism and North American racism, it experienced its own modernizing encounter with the Black Atlantic. In the aftermath of the 1957 Youth Festival in Moscow, first dozens, and eventually thousands of African students made their appearance in the USSR. They arrived in Moscow, Leningrad, Baku, Kiev, Minsk, and other Soviet cities attracted by generous educational scholarships but also inspired by their own postcolonial dreams of reforming and rebuilding their newly independent nations. For the Soviets, steeped in anticolonial rhetoric and guided by Cold War exigencies, these young Africans seemed to be “natural allies” who could help to enhance Moscow’s credentials in the Third World and cultivate its future elites. However, the reality of the encounter between these postcolonial nomads and a largely isolationist society produced some unintended consequences. From the point of view of Soviet authorities, the community of African students in the Soviet Union continued to be a source of ambivalence and even, on occasion, political and cultural subversion. Cosmopolitan and globally minded African students repeatedly challenged the norms of Soviet political and cultural discourse and, in doing so, proved to be the true harbingers of modernity and globalization for the hosts. In the course of the encounter with Soviet society, they inadvertently expanded the reach of the Black Atlantic, bringing its tidal waves well beyond the Iron Curtain.