Maxim Matusevich – författare

This book draws on the latest scholarship and archival research to examine the story of the Soviet Union and race. It looks at how the Soviet Union’s antiracist campaigns attracted interest from Black radicals, activists, and intellectuals and how many of these individuals sought to experience the Soviet Union firsthand because of the Soviet claims to racial egalitarianism and Moscow’s stated support for the movements for racial justice and anticolonialism.Maxim Matusevich places special emphasis on the promises and unresolved dilemmas of Soviet internationalism and official antiracism, as well as their complicated legacy in the post-Soviet period. Black Encounters with the Soviet Union makes extensive use of individual case studies, including luminaries like Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis and W.E.B. Du Bois, to identify the points of contact and the inherent tensions between ideological aspirations and the pragmatic demands of foreign policy. Furthermore, the book brings attention to the impact of Soviet antiracism on the Soviet society, where it functioned both as a vehicle of ideological conditioning and, somewhat counterintuitively, of cultural and political subversion.

This book draws on the latest scholarship and archival research to examine the story of the Soviet Union and race. It looks at how the Soviet Union’s antiracist campaigns attracted interest from Black radicals, activists, and intellectuals and how many of these individuals sought to experience the Soviet Union firsthand because of the Soviet claims to racial egalitarianism and Moscow’s stated support for the movements for racial justice and anticolonialism.Maxim Matusevich places special emphasis on the promises and unresolved dilemmas of Soviet internationalism and official antiracism, as well as their complicated legacy in the post-Soviet period. Black Encounters with the Soviet Union makes extensive use of individual case studies, including luminaries like Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis and W.E.B. Du Bois, to identify the points of contact and the inherent tensions between ideological aspirations and the pragmatic demands of foreign policy. Furthermore, the book brings attention to the impact of Soviet antiracism on the Soviet society, where it functioned both as a vehicle of ideological conditioning and, somewhat counterintuitively, of cultural and political subversion.

Six Trains of No Return collects twelve short stories and novellas that examine immigrant sagas and dislocations that are both uniquely personal and universal. These are the stories of past lives and loves, memories both fragile and unreliable, and our shared ties to larger historical narratives. They also evoke the Soviet Jewish experience during what was thought to be “The End of History” of the waning days of the USSR.  A French-Cambodian woman embarks on a series of mysterious trips to the “killing fields” of her youth, an encounter in a Nigerian jail forces the narrator to face an impossible moral dilemma, a tender friendship grows between three young soldiers drafted into the Soviet army, a story of a young man’s chance romantic encounter with a childhood friend and how it triggers memories of long-forgotten schoolyard cruelties, a pair of soldiers in the waning days of the Soviet Union watching the movie Jaws for the first time at a semi-underground video salon. Emotionally resonant yet edged with quiet humor, these stories explore themes of displacement, belonging, and memory—speaking across cultures and backgrounds.