BLACK ON RED

Robert Robinson

Acropolis Books Ltd. 1987

This is a riveting personal account of a black toolmaker at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, who in 1930 was recruited by the Russians to go to the Soviet Union to work and teach his skills for one year.

Robert Robinson went to Russia for a better job. He hoped to leave behind him the soup lines, the intimidation of the Ku Klux Klan, and all other forms of racism.

With the Depression worsening in the United States, and a written contract that promised job security and a larger salary, Robert Robinson went to Russia.

What he found in the Soviet Union was both a dream and a nightmare.

There were good times and bad; adequate food in times of peace; shoe-leather soup in times of war. And racism reared its ugly head repeatedly in the "Workers’ Paradise."

Robert Robinson’s personal integrity got him into trouble often, but he never spent a night behind bars.

He learned to live within the system, secure in his belief in God, which helped him to preserve his sanity in a crazy world that he neither liked nor could accept.

He was "elected" to the Moscow Soviet (city council), something he was not consulted about nor had any interest in.

Amazingly, this apolitical toolmaker found himself in the company of men the rest of the world was just reading about – Stalin, Bulganin, Molotov and others.

Robinson was in Moscow during Stalin’s virulent purges in the 1930’s. He saw World War II from inside Soviet Russia.

When the soviets tried to exploit him as a black man who would praise socialism and denounce capitalism, he refused again, expressing his lack of interest in politics. He was a toolmaker and designer, not a politician.

Both the dust jacket and the book are in excellent condition.