Black Icons and Bolshevik Legitimacy

Claude Mckay’s experience of an enthusiastic embrace and the warmest of receptions by “Russian folk”, the elite of the Soviets, and prominent socialist leaders in Moscow during the Fourth Comintern in 1922, illustrates how the strategies employed in the proliferation of state propaganda share universal characteristics across the political spectrum. Key among these characteristics is the appropriation of social groups and their struggles for the purposes of re-orienting towards state agendas of gaining legitimacy and manipulating public attitudes. This lies at the basis of Claude Mckay’s sentiments when he was called to speak at conferences and received the opportunity to interact with prominent Soviet and socialist leaders and is also captured by the poster as seen above entitled “Workers from all countries and oppressed colonies raise the banner of Lenin.”

Mckay describes “enthusiastic greetings” by the people in Moscow with which the Bolsheviks had “nothing at all to do with”. Having just been removed from the Lux Hotel by the committee responsible for sifting through credentials for the Fourth Comintern and having received the impression that Rose Pastor Stokes of the American Communist Party did not trust him, Mckay felt his position in Moscow, that is to say the likelihood of his remaining and attending the conferences, “precarious”. But it was after he had received such a reception by the Russian public, from all sides of the political spectrum, and among whom many expressed to him resentments that they had against the Bolshevik party, such as the language teacher who described the difficulties of working under the new regime, that he began to be the focus of attention for the Soviet leadership. Mckay’s declaration that Bolsheviks were attuned to the currents of opinion and “a sense of propaganda values in which they are matched only by French officialdom” such that “as soon as they perceived the trend of the general enthusiasm for me, they decided to use it” evidences best my aforementioned thesis regarding the universality of the features of state propaganda.

In the poster, we can see an exemplification of the Soviet practice of highlighting the diversity that existed within and validated the stated visions of international communism. However, it is the leading title of the poster which places representatives of Afro-Asian ethnicities under the “banner of Lenin” as well as the towering size of Lenin in the poster itself which reflect that the intentions behind this propaganda was to enhance the legitimacy of Lenin's rule and, as we will see with more of Mckay’s experiences, how disingenuous it became to the struggles of the colonized. Mckay describes being told by Grigory Zinoviev, one of the leaders of the Fourth Comintern, and Max Eastman, another prominent socialist figure, to speak at the opening of the Congress. Eastman directing Mckay to tell the crowd that Mckay brings “greetings from the Negro workers in America” and Mckay’s appropriate response that he had received no such mandate, exemplifies how the Soviet Leadership sought to use Mckay to play to the galleries, which once more affirms the dishonesty behind Soviet propaganda. Zinoviev’s disapproval at Mckay’s decision to not speak and perform for the crowds as an “agitator” means little to Mckay who understands that the “Russians wanted a typical Negro at Congress just as much as (he) wanted to attend it”, the sentiment expressing a cognizance of the Soviet enterprise for appropriating and employing Mckay’s race and indeed his features to further the state’s ambitions of strengthening ideological control over the masses and capitalizing on the public’s attraction to Mckay to enhance their legitimacy and support which is a practice that finds parallels across the political spectrum.

Mckay’s intellectual honesty invariably finds himself with odds with state enterprise. His unwillingness to exaggerate revolutionary fervor among American workers like the members of the American Communist Party leads to Comrade Venko imploring him to tell the crowds that the revolution in America was imminent because “That’s what they want to hear” and Mckay describing Venko as having acquired some Anglicisms from living in England. Once more, this highlights my aforementioned idea that Mckay was aware of the appropriation of his ethnicity for intellectual dishonest state propaganda and for enhancing state power. The images of soldiers marching carrying red flags in the foreground of the poster coupled with Venko's reproach of Mckay's honesty highlights how important the idea of revolution among the colonized masses under the patronage of Lenin was for the Bolsheviks.