"I felt as if we alone, of all the people at the Conference,
shared that knowledge and that threat,
Toni [ԓыгъоравэтԓьэт (ḷygʺoravètḷʹèt) woman] and I.
At dinner Toni kept telling me how beautiful I was,
and how it was not only my beauty that she would carry with
her always but my words, and that we should share our joys
as well as our sorrows, and some- day our children would be
able to speak freely with each other. She made toast after toast
to women and to their strength. All of this was through
our interpreters. I was trying to decide what to make of all this
when Toni got up, moved over, and sat down beside me.
She touched my knee and kissed me,
and so we sat all through dinner.

We held hands and we kissed,
but any time we spoke to each other,
it was done through our interpreters,
blond Russian girls who smirked
as they translated our words."
_{- Audre Lorde, Notes from a Trip to Russia, 1976}

Audre Lorde is a vital voice in making sense of oppressive systematic and societal machinations. As a black lesbian feminist, she was rejected by the mainstream protest movements of her time in the United States. She was then, and remains, one of key voices for the ideas of intersectionality, and thanks to her, we know more and better about what solidarity is.
In 1976, at the height of Cold War propaganda on both the USSR an American sides, Audre Lorde was invited to attend the Meeting of Young Writers of Asia and Africa, organized by the Union of Writers̆ of the USSR, as an observer from the United States. Audre Lorde was traveling to a socialist revolutionary country, but instead found herself in one of the Soviet controlled representations. One of such representations was the VDNKh — an idealized image of the Soviet state condensed in a Moscow park near the Ostankino TV tower, the point of all-Soviet-Block propaganda. But Audre Lorde managed to see much more on this journey than the official representations and their agents had shown. This visit is documented in the essay “Notes from a Trip to Russia,” which we’ve discussed as a group, and took time to collaboratively annotate as the texts we offer below.
This text performs a caring local companion that dear sister Audre Lorde so sorely lacked on this heavily mediated two-week trip to the USSR by Anastasia Kolas, Denis Esakov and Marina Solntseva.

^{Anastasia Kolas} 

It begins with a dream

The dream tells us of an impossible lesbian affair (at the time, and in many parts of the world discussed here, still), and of an apparently readily available quality health care, unknown to an average Soviet citizen — a kidney scan and a brain scan! The healthcare, in reality — as unequally distributed as the prices for the hotel rooms, which Audre Lorde claims had cost all the same across the Soviet Union. 

Perhaps placing a dream at the start of a personal essay about a place far away across the ocean and behind the iron wall in pre-internet times, is a device, whether intentional or subconscious, to consider (or admit) that Audre Lorde is an unreliable narrator in this instance.

I read the rest of the essay as if it were a dream Lorde had, in which she imagines a possibility of a place, in the same way I had imagined one when leaving the former territory of the USSR  towards the West.

My intention with contributing to this commentary or annotation, is to offer a reparative reading of the essay. I hope it to be particularly beneficial to the anglophone and international readers, while acknowledging Audre Lorde’s experiences, desires, and constricted ability to engage with the place she’d visited, and the reality of being chaperoned by the many local unreliable narrators offered by the interface of the USSR: the interpreters, guides, regional party appointed community reps, etc.

The essay makes many of us gathered on January 19, 2025 on Zoom for the Nearby Reading Room discussion — uneasy. Uneasy because who’d want to be critical of Audre Lorde? Yet, the essay offends us preemptively, sheerly from the title. Those of us from the region of the former USSR already know we will be reading a work of fiction. Because in these “Notes from a Trip to Russia”, Soviet Union = Russia. This equating and, with it, erasure and flattening, is not Lorde’s invention. What she doesn’t challenge, had been propagated by russification and centralization policies within the USSR proper, promoted to the international audiences, and adopted and further perpetuated through the Western narratives for as long as the Union had existed, and has continued since its demise. During our Zoom call, we wonder if, nevertheless, by copy-pasting existing naming conventions without a second thought, Audre Lorde shows a lack of care, for those, whom she might have been well-placed to be in solidarity with.

To me, who spent ten years in the US, the essay appears to be a composite. Rather than “Notes on Russia” it is, as much, notes on the US, and on both real and imaginary places, interchangeably. Like many travelers before and after her, Lorde fantasizes and looks for proof in the environment: what the US lacks, USSR, the affirmative action empire, she wants to have. She lets herself spend some time inside this projection, but there are too obvious blemishes in the hopeful optimistic image she is attempting to conjure up. Audre Lorde is forced to realize quickly something is obscured by the stories of Soviet equalities and diversities, when she discovers she and the delegates of African-Asian Conference had been assigned to live in a less “civilized” hotel. Assessment of “civilized” here, she muses, might refer to the benchmark of the “American standard”. The high quality of life in America, is another kind of fiction — one that she knows something about. Lorde appropriately brings into focus the two countries’ entangled knot of mutual resentment and fascination. They have something in common, she notes, in the mirrored grandeur of the phallic skylines of their respective centers of influence: Moscow — New York.

Lorde is equally surprised with what can only be summed up as incongruent class tensions in reverse. A strange parallel world, a portal to another dimension: here, one can’t get any service if they are perceived as elite, complains to Audre Lorde her (most likely KGB-appointed) translator. A job to dine and wine an American writer was certainly considered elite in the Soviet Union, where “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant that everyone must be of humble origins. My nearby story here can be of my grandmother, on the maternal side. Born in a city, to owners of a store (of which kind, unknown), she was only a kid when they had to run, during “cleanse”, dressed in what they were standing; be shuttled this way and that, live hidden in a basement, until being shipped across the country to a safer location in the south of Belarus; her passport forged to read “ born in a so-and-so village”.

As a guest from America, Lorde enters through the “parade entrance” (direct translation from Rus.) and enjoys an elite reception. Likely, to her, it doesn’t feel all that elite — as compared to the US. “People eat a lot here”, she writes flatly. Despite being assigned to a lesser hotel, she dines on sturgeon and other delicacies, and is attended to at all hours, which frames Lorde’s visit in an idealistic shades of magic hour. The only thing missing is someone to carry her bags. Here too, one might remark, is a knot of confusion: no matter one’s ability, health condition, or weight of the bags, you’re on your own in the USSR, carrying your bags, unassisted. She intuits: “I felt that there were many things we were not seeing.” 

Just like many that go unseen today, in rooms outside of social media frame and news headlines. The related nearby experience I did not bring up in our discussion, but will include here, surfaced later, after we hung up the Zoom call, with an image of the Soviet Union map appearing in my mind. During a presentation to counter various locally concocted identitarian flattenings, at my graduate program in the US, I am asked to pull up a map of the USSR, to explain and illustrate to (and, ultimately, educate) my peers, about what I mean, exactly, when referring to the multiethnicity of where I come from. I do as I am asked. My, mostly American, audience gazes, coldly. A silence falls. The central focus of activism-flavored art and nearby discourse at the time is the US-specific Black Lives Matter movement, to the exclusion, it seems, of complexity of the subject as applied elsewhere. It’s 2016, the first administration of Trump is about to be elected, the shock of interior fragmentation in America dominates all wavelengths, and no bandwidth is left for the global histories. I am shunned for the rest of my time in the program.

This is nothing new. American pain is always the strongest. Anglophone audiences learn anglophone history. Francophones learn the francophone version. The world over had just learned of the spectacular limits and blind spots of the German Erinnerungskultur. What we’d learned as history in the USSR and its post- territories, is hard to even name. Since the USSR’s demise, the rote Russia-centered framing has only partially been adjusted to reflect the full picture of what used to constitute the Soviet Union. The map I am asked to show to my peers does not convey the complexity of erasure and displacement, violence, forced relocation; and enforced oblivion that went on in the Soviet Union and after its fall. Highlighted in Lorde’s “Notes” — are many holes that will take centuries and generations to mend, like the unaddressed effects of Soviet, next to Western, modernization on the environment, as simultaneously unfolding colonial, extractivist and nationalizing projects: “Hills of cotton being loaded onto trains” — writes Lorde.

What Audre Lorde finds in the USSR is not so much a possibility of differently organized society, as a warped mirror: indifference to the plight of people of colour in the US, and avoidance of “the jewish question”. These are points she does not dwell on in her “Notes”. The oblique indexical mention of both might be a symptom of two things: first, simply of making a mental note, and second — of exhaustion. Solidarity across these contexts, in a true sense of reciprocity, attempts of understanding of each other’s histories, and empathy, while touted about, was as rare then, as it is now. 

^{Denis Esakov}

The dream is a wonderful metaphor for the dominance of imagination over knowledge. Indeed, what do I know about the lives and problems of people in other corners of the planet even now, with access to the vast information about the world in my pocket? Probably not much more than Audre Lorde knew about the USSR in a time when there were no smartphones and no affordable internet. Nation-states make up histories of their own countries and neighboring ones too, invent nations, histories, heroes, victories, enemies, facts, whatever. And how, within this production of national knowledge, and with it propaganda and prejudice, can we rather learn what others think of themselves? This question of distance has interested me for several years now. I wrote an essay a couple of years ago, about how distance interferes with power relations and how the invention of perspective has widened this gap. Once the distance is reduced to personal contact, the fabrications about the Other immediately become obvious. I’d like to focus my annotation on these very moments, where Audre Lorde noticed the propaganda on the side of both Soviet and the United — States.

Seen

This happens even in conversations with specially appointed and trained people. It wasn’t easy for foreigners to get into the Soviet Union, you had to be invited for a special occasion more often than not. Once in the country, the arrived were besieged by specially appointed and trained individuals whose function was to control both the foreigners' mobility and the guest’s knowledge and impressions of the Soviet country. Audre Lorde writes, the translator "Helen was running after me and living my life as well as hers. Because always, she stuck to me like white on rice.”

Perhaps the same function is served by the absence of any languages other than Russian even in places intended for foreigners. The lingua franca of the USSR was Russian. Was this the failure of the Soviet school system? Or is just another form of control and restriction of the flow and international information exchange in the Soviet state? Or is it a colonial tool to erase other epistemologies and archives? Or is it the construction of a nation-state? Probably all of them together. 

Intourist heterotopias (or ghettos? or zoos?) were created for foreigners in the USSR-Russia, for example, Peoples' Friendship University (now Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia named after Patrice Lumumba) was established in 1960 as part of the assistance to countries liberated from colonial subjugation and accepted students from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The international students could study only at this university, and at the VGIK (Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography); all other educational institutions were closed to them. 

In addition to segregation, Audre Lord notices that the “Jewish question” is being silenced, and feels that something important is located there. She notices the apologies offered to her and other Afro-Asian conference attendees, for being put in a “not so civilized place” — a former student dormitory. What does “civilized” mean here? Perhaps it is a colonial trope and the action of the Soviet organizers can be interpreted as racist?  Her inkling is confirmed several times, when she meets a woman from the Union of Soviet Writers (another institution of control in the USSR), who studies the "Negro policy," as she says. Oleg, the KGB supervisor (I guess), makes a comment on apartheid in South Africa as a territory of his  influence or his own property  — "this sounded to me both removed and proprietary". 

“They are an Asian people in Tashkent. Uzbeki. They look like the descendants of Ghengis Khan, some of whom I’m sure they are. They are Asian and they are Russian. They think and speak and consider themselves Russian, for all intents and purposes so far as I can see, and I really wonder how they manage that. On the other hand, the longer I stayed the more I realized some of the personal tensions between North Russian and Uzbek are national and some racial.”

We can find reflections on this in the work of researcher Adrienne Edgar, who notes how the tools of Settler colonialism were used to create the “Soviet nation”: military land grabbing, assimilation, integration, consolidation and Russification. Underpinning these processes is racist thinking. What Nandita Sharma calls Indirect-rule colonialism.

Therefore, when Moscow is compared to New York, and Toshkent to Accra in the text of these notes, I would like to suggest that New York should be replaced with London, so that the British colonial context in Ghana thus becomes evident, and opens up the discourse to Soviet colonial politics as well. 

In amalgamation, the above observations show that the Soviet Union not only failed to overcome racism in domestic and foreign policy, but instrumentalized it in its own policies, concealed beneath the socialist banners and under the guise of optimistic anti-racist slogans. But there is "a large gap between the expectation and the reality.”

Audre notices how the mass industrial production of things, cars for example, in the Soviet Union lacks variety and homogenizes space. If a factory produces only yellow cars this month, the landscape of Soviet cities becomes visibly yellow, and thus, becomes Soviet.

This project of homogenization, specific to Soviet colonialism, aimed to produce a standardized and controlled society and people (Foucault’s dystopia), as Audre Lorde observes by noting “a stony rigidity, a resistance to questioning.” In response to her questions in museums, one hears the irritation with doubt and the demand to follow one particular canon of knowledge. This creates tension and makes palpable the vast layer of erased histories, personal memories, and people. 

This disingenuous quality also extends to the Soviet Union’s foreign relations. Audre Lorde, an activist and voice for oppressed people in the U.S., came expecting Soviet solidarity, but was met with indifference and visible racism within the society — visible in the streets, at demonstrations and during the delegate meetings, which looked like staged hokey spectacles with no real dedication to common struggle. The solidarity of the Soviet people with the black population in the US, as well as with other oppressed people in the world, turned out to be all but a farce. It was a tool of foreign policy, while inside the country the Soviet people were concerned with a completely different set of problems.

In the same vein the “socialist” propaganda broadcasting the state’s care for its people turned out to be a false narrative too.

“The peoples of the Soviet Union, in many respects, impress me as people who can not yet afford to be honest. […] I think that in America there are certain kinds of problems and in Russia [USSR] there are certain kinds of problems, but basically, when you find people who start from a position where human beings are at the core, as opposed to a position where profit is at the core, the solutions can be very different. I wonder how similar human problems will be solved. But I am not always convinced that human beings are at the core here, either, although there is more lip service done to that idea than in the U.S.”

Audre Lorde, an activist from the United States, had expected to see a completely different country from what she found socialist, dedicated to people rather than capital and power, met another horrible state machine that uses people and nature as a resource. The romanticization has turned out to be — a dystopian nightmare. I can empathize with Audre Lorde’s disappointed hopes that there might be a “good” state. And also expectations of international solidarity were shattered in a very short time.

“I have no reason to believe Russia [USSR] is a free society.
I have no reason to believe Russia [USSR] is a classless society.
Russia [USSR] does not even appear to be a strictly egalitarian society.”

“I feel very much now still that we, Black Americans,
exist alone in the mouth of the dragon.” 

Unseen

In the manifested dystopian reality of the USSR, obvious in a short two-week period to a visitor who knows now that there are racist, xenophobic, and sexist problems in this country, there were still moments of positive reprieve, outside all that was attempted to be controlled by her KGB guides. I want to point out just a few.

Audre Lorde notes that even small towns have cafes and common spaces for public life, even if they are infiltrated with propaganda. It’s unfortunate, that during her visit, she did not have a chance to experience the quintessential meeting space — the Soviet kitchen in a "khrushchevka". Totalitarian state-control left no room for real conversations, out in the open spaces. All the important conversations, expressions of doubts, questions that Audre Lorde wanted to hear the answers to, took place in the kitchens, garages, and far away from authorities and Intourist guides.

The joy of being outside  a capitalist country and in a working class country was also somewhat lost in the heavily guarded context of her visit. The unemployed people in the Soviet Union were criminalized where every able-bodied adult  was expected to work until their official retirement age, set by the state. Thus unemployment was officially and theoretically eliminated. Those who refused to work, study or serve in another way, risked being criminally charged with social parasitism (Russian: тунеядство tuneyadstvo, тунеядцы [tuneyadets/tuneyadtsy]"), in accordance with the socialist principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution."

In accordance with another principle — "He who does not work, neither shall he eat." The autumn harvest festival Audre Lorde that encounters and sees as festive, was not quite as happy of an occasion as it appeared to her on her visit. In fact, this was a  forced gathering of students to perform unpaid but compulsory labor, more akin to slavery, than to fair socialist labor relations.

One last thing I’d like to remark on in response to the “Notes” — is the Soviet Terraforming:
“All through Uzbekistan the feeling of a desert having been reclaimed and bearing huge fruit is very constant […] at an oasis, and I picked some desert flowers that were growing — small little scrub flowers that were growing in the sand. And just for so, I tasted one of them and as honeysuckle is sweet, so is this flower salt. It was as if the earth itself was still producing salt or still pouring salt into its products.”

This working landscape is an example of the Soviet extractivist approach to land and water that led to a disaster. One of the largest lakes on the planet, the Aral Sea, began to dry up in the 1960s due to Soviet irrigation policies and forced cotton cultivation for the war industry. And by the time Audre Lorde visited Uzbekistan  in 1976 large parts of the lake had already been drained. The dryness had generated dust storms, which can carry salt, dust and toxic chemicals up to 500 kilometers away. Sodium hydrogen carbonate, sodium chloride and sodium sulfate, when airborne, destroy or retard the growth of natural vegetation and crops.

The beautiful desert flower she tastes, does not taste of the earth, but of the Soviet colonial extractivist economy.

^{Marina Solntseva}

 Why am I angry today? 

"Why am I angry today?"
I have no answers
No explanations
No hypotheses
Just
Questions 

Why am I angry today
From the moon to the sky
Why do puppies not get angry
Cats don’t get angry
Birds don’t get angry
Books don’t get angry
But I get angry 

Why are the monuments around us
Look Like that
With swords
On horses
In helmets
Sometimes cosmic
Sometimes fairy-like
With sticks
And Hammers 

I don’t even ask
Why are they all men
Why are they so huge
Why unknown
Why heroes
Why mustached
Bearded
Hairy
Sometimes they are women too
But they are also heroes
And heroines
Why

And also — why are they white
Close your eyes
What does that person look like
Whom we imagine
When we talk about war 

But most of all
I ask
Why are all these images — able 

Why do they have
hands
legs
helmets and swords
Why is this person standing
Straight and tall
And also — why is this person — healthy?
In body and soul

Do people really look like that
Who return from war 

My friend returned in a zinc box
And I don’t know
If he had hands
Legs and head 

But such monuments
Will never be made

When I write
My stomach hurts
Is it my period
Is it coffee
Is it all these images
That ache inside me

A friend told me,
that some scientists there
Calculated
Determined
Found out
if we ever lived
Without wars 

It turned out
That for all the time
While our world existed
As we know it
As humanity
As people
Who wrote something down
And who Remembered 

It turned out
That in this world
in the last 2000 years
There were only 36 days without war

Or 58
I don’t remember exactly
But I remember,
that it was surprisingly few
Not even a hundred days
When we lived in this world
Without wars

That’s the world we live in
Where we say
Never again
And then we again and again 

The day before yesterday I saw the news
That Putin and Lukashenko
Are conducting nuclear tests
Again 

I just thought,
that this needs to be said
while we all stand here
Next to the monument
of the weeping woman 

While we stand here
Other men make plans
Sell weapons
Buy weapons
And conduct tests
On people 

And also,
I remembered
I was told 

That once upon a time
in Central Asia
There was the Aral Sea
You all probably know
How people wanted to
Turn back the rivers
And conquer the nature
And a whole sea dried up 

We were told,
About climate catastrophe
That it’s a disaster
that it’s an industrial project
And that’s how it goes 

We were told
that it was necessary
For agriculture
They just needed a lot of water
For the fields 

We were told, that
It’s all because of cotton!
Because people need clothes
To cover their bodies
That have no place
In imperial politics 

And from cotton
They make
Sheets,
Dresses,
Pillowcases and pants. 

And now imagine
I was told here,
That in reality
from cotton -
they make gunpowder.
For war. 

So imagine
That the Soviet Union
Dried a whole sea
To make as much weapons as possible
For war
For war 

Can you imagine?
They fucking dried the whole sea!
To produce more war.
Can you imagine? 

With these images now
I can talk about war
Because now we have no more
People,
No sea,
No home
A whole sea
That is no more

And they continue to put up
New monuments
To unknown soldiers
And make more and more weapons
For war 

This is a poem
Because it’s written like that
And it’s not journalism
Not history
Not facts
It’s just words
And I don’t care
That there’s no rhyme 

Can the oppressed speak?
Spivak asked
We still can
speak,
Read and write 

And we still can
Gather here together
And mourn together. 

About war
About another war
And also about the sea,
That was turned into gunpowder
And is no more.

May 9, 2024