“They mostly call me Joe,” says Yosif Stalin, an octogenarian resident of Kremlin, Virginia who claims to be the first child of African-American parents ever born in the Soviet Union.

Now aged 84, full name Yosif Stalin Kim Roane, he is among the few living descendants of the black men and women who travelled to the nascent USSR in the 1920s and 1930s in search of a better life.

At a time when America was struggling through the Great Depression and black citizens were segregated under racist Jim Crow laws in the south, the apparently classless utopia in the east proved an attractive alternative.

Yosif Stalin’s father, Joseph Roane. Photograph: RFE/RL

That Yosif Stalin was born in an empire run from the Kremlin and grew up in a tiny Virginia hamlet of the same name is a coincidence that has inspired the title of a new documentary, Kremlin To Kremlin, which explores his family’s remarkable journey.

The film is produced by local historians and primarily tells the story of Yosif’s father, Joseph J Roane, a member of a team of African-American agronomists recruited to the USSR in the 1930s to help improve cotton production in the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan.



The elder Roane, who died in 1995, is widely credited with helping develop a successful hybrid of American and local cotton capable of growing more quickly in Central Asia, leading Uzbekistan to become one of the world’s leading growers.

“Of course Uzbeks knew cotton growing, but these new types of cotton dealt big changes in the industry,” says Bekjon Toshmuhammedov, a biology professor from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. “As far as I know, Uzbeks still grow the types of cotton created by the Americans.”

A new society

Raised in a relatively affluent family in Kremlin, Virginia, Joseph Roane was recruited to go to the USSR by Oliver Golden, an African-American cotton specialist from Mississippi who would ultimately give up his US citizenship and remain a Soviet national until his death in 1940.

But Golden and his colleagues weren’t the only African-Americans travelling there. In addition to the agronomists, another group was taken over to help make a Soviet propaganda film about the evils of racism. They were accompanied by the influential Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, though the film never materialised.

“Then [there were] some political trainees from the 1920s who were very attracted to this country that professed a non-racial society and actually treated them in a hospitable way that was totally unheard of in the United States,” Joy Gleason Carew, author of Blacks, Reds, And Russians: Sojourners In Search Of The Soviet Promise, says. “It’s amazing when you think about these people willing to leave home, and country, and language, culture for what they hoped would be a better life.”

Yosif Stalin, photographer when he was aged around five years old. Photograph: RFE/RL

Roane told Golden’s granddaughter, Russian journalist and television personality Yelena Khanga, that he signed up to leave the US because the Soviet foreign trade agency hiring the workers “was offering better pay for a month than a lot of people would make in a year in the Depression.”



“Secondly, I was young and I wanted to see the world. I thought this might be the only chance I’d ever get,” he told Khanga for her 1992 book about growing up as a black Russian-American.

‘You don’t know you’re black?’

Though he was just five years old when he left Uzbekistan, Yosif remembers climbing around through fields and forests, and creeping around Red Army barracks in the former Soviet republic.

He erupts into laughter when remembering a time he saw a black man on a bus in Tashkent. “I said: ‘Mama, Mama, look! Look at that black man!’ And everybody on the bus cracked up. I was almost as black as he was. And everybody said, ‘You mean to tell me you don’t know you’re black?’”

Like many other African-Americans who came to the Soviet Union during this period, Yosif’s father said that he experienced less racism there than back home. He told Khanga that the only incident he could recall was when two white Americans hurled racial slurs at him in a Moscow barbershop.



Roane extended his contract to work in the Soviet Union in 1934 and was sent to Soviet Georgia to work at a tomato cannery. The family remained there for another three years before Soviet authorities delivered an ultimatum: give up US citizenship, or leave the country.

This turning point came in 1937, at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror, a violent campaign that is estimated to have resulted in more than one million killings by the Soviet state amid an atmosphere of rising paranoia.

Speaking to Khanga, Yosif’s father portrayed his return as bittersweet. “In just a few years – you’d be surprised – you could forget what segregation was like.

“When Golden spoke at my college, I didn’t believe him when he said there was no segregation in the Soviet Union. Why should I? But it proved to be absolutely true.”

Roane was taken to Uzbekistan in the 1930s to help advance its cotton industry. Photograph: Alamy

‘Nobody calls me Stalin’

Yosif was not the first child of an African-American to be born in the Soviet Union. In the late 1920s, a few years before his birth, Golden fathered a son named Ollava who went on to become a ballet dancer and choreographer and died in 2013, aged 87.

But based on open sources and research published by Carew, he was the first whose parents were both African-Americans.

Most other black children born in the USSR had Soviet mothers and African-American fathers. “They all practically stayed in the Soviet Union,” says New York-based film-maker Yelena Demikovsky, director of the film Black Russians: The Red Experience.

Yosif, however, returned with his family to Kremlin. His father became a widely respected local teacher at AT Johnson High School in the nearby town of Montross, one of the first high schools for African-American students in the area.

Yosif says he didn’t speak English – only Russian – when he returned with his family from the Soviet Union. “When my mother and father didn’t want me to know what they were talking about, they spoke English,” he says. After serving in the US navy, Yosif followed in his father’s footsteps and became a teacher, had a family, and ran a barbershop.

It’s still a mystery as to why his home town is named after the heart of the Russian superpower. According to Khanga’s book, the town’s name nearly prevented Roane and his family from returning to the US at all.

She writes that a US diplomat at the newly reopened embassy initially refused to believe that Roane hailed from a town called Kremlin, and only signed off on the paperwork after cables from Washington confirmed his story.



As for his own name, Yosif says: “Nobody called me Stalin. In fact, a lot of people don’t know, even right now, don’t know nothing about Stalin. It didn’t matter. It’s just a name.”

A version of this article first appeared on RFE/RL