“I feel like a human being for the first time,” Robeson told reporters after he arrived in Russia. Of all the African-American artists and activists who traveled there, none developed as enduring a relationship with the Soviet Union as Robeson. Upon his arrival, he was received ecstatically by the Soviet theatrical establishment, which invited him to sing an aria onstage from Modest Mussorgsky’s opera “Boris Godunov.” Despite Soviet atheism, he was asked to sing Negro spirituals over the radio and at government parties. His song “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” became newly emblematic of his relationship to his home country; the Soviets had put his recording of the song over an animated short film about racism and labor exploitation in the American sugar industry.

But by the time Robeson was beginning his great romance with the Soviet project, McKay and many African-Americans (including the novelist Richard Wright) were moving away from it. McKay, like many of the Russian artists he collaborated with in Moscow, would have a falling out with communism. The instigating event, for him, was Soviet Russia’s failure to cease trade with Italy even after Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, then ruled by Haile Selassie. The invasion was widely seen as an affront to the very idea of black sovereignty. McKay would turn his political disillusionment into “Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem.”

Wright would soon join McKay in his disillusionment. In 1944 he wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly called “I Tried to Be a Communist.” Frustrated by the American Communist Party’s tepid response to his novel “Native Son,” Wright wrote to a friend that the party “encourage[s] the creation of types of writing that can be used for agitprop purposes,” but had “a tendency to sneer at more creative attempts.”

Hughes’s overt involvement in communism also waned by this time, but perhaps more out of necessity. He was under intense scrutiny from the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused him of being at one time or another part of 91 communist organizations. Hughes, though, like Wright, did sense that too close an affiliation with a political organization or ideology could prove to be artistically stifling. Explaining to a friend why he never officially joined the Communist Party, he said, “It was based on strict discipline and the acceptance of directives that I, as a writer, did not wish to accept.”

Robeson was one of the last black “sojourners” to see in the Soviet Union an alternative to the racist and exploitative culture of the West. Between the Nonaligned Movement and a resurgence of black nationalism, the brand of communism bred from the Global South seemed to many by the 1960s and ‘70s to be a sharper weapon against racism and colonialism. As the black feminist writer Audre Lorde wrote when she reflected on her 1976 trip to Moscow, “Russia became a mythic representation of that socialism which does not yet exist anywhere I have been.”

Russia has long served as a repository for different kinds of mythology, from the Third Rome to the Red Scare. The myth of Russia as a racial paradise was perhaps one of its best, both as a muse to black artists across the diaspora and as a strategic tool in the African-American fight for political recognition. But as an early adherent, Hughes implied that the Soviet Union was just part of a larger narrative of black creative and political revolution; as the refrain of his 1938 poem “Ballad of Lenin” reads: