Peniel Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor of history. He is the author of several books, most recently "Stokely: A Life." The views expressed here are his. Watch CNN's "Distorting the Truth," about how a Russian government-linked group exploited the death of Philando Castile, on CNNgo.

(CNN) The news that Russian hackers, in the wake of the police shooting death of Philando Castile, sought to exploit increasing racial divisions in America through a social media campaign of disinformation should come as no surprise. Historically, both during and after the Cold War, the Russian state has tried to use America's tragic history of racial violence and segregation for its own political purposes.

Peniel Joseph

In some chapters of American history, the commingling of Russian state action and American racial politics has unfolded in the open, with the consequences fully obvious for all to see. In an era before Black Lives Matter, communists at times provided the most full-throated and unequivocal defense of black humanity even if this defense was at times used in service of international propaganda against the United States.

So contemporary Russian trolls who set up a phony Facebook account -- complete with a planned demonstration -- in the aftermath of Philando Castile's 2016 death at the hands of a police officer in Saint Paul, Minnesota, entered this long and complex history . Where in the past the Soviet Union touted itself as a state free of racial discrimination and attracted tiny numbers of blacks like Paul Robeson to tour the country and at times live there, Russia's post-Cold War state of "managed democracy" offers no such illusions. Instead, the Russian project under President Vladimir Putin seeks to destabilize American democracy by turning the nation's inner demons against itself.

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During the Great Depression era, the Soviet Union trumpeted naked displays of Jim Crow injustice as proof of the insincerity of American claims of freedom and democracy. The unjust imprisonment of nine African-American boys and young men in Scottsboro, Alabama, on the false charge of raping two white women on a train in 1931 became a major propaganda victory for the Communist Party (which also helped garner much needed legal, financial, and moral support for the innocent black defendants at a moment when mainstream civil rights groups looked the other way).

During the height of the Cold War, Communist interest in black lives rested on a Janus-faced platform. On the one hand, genuinely sincere American Communists truly believed in Marxism as a vehicle for racial equality. White American Communists affirmed this belief to the point of (in some cases) risking injury or death by organizing interracial unions, crossing the color line in the North and South, and marrying African-Americans when it was illegal to do so. For these true believers, dismantling racism and white supremacy held the key to eradicating the political and economic horrors unleashed by global capitalism.