MOSCOW — Welland Rudd isn't a typical American. He's never eaten Thanksgiving turkey or watched fireworks on the Fourth of July. At 52, he has yet to set foot on U.S. soil.
Rudd isn't a typical Russian, either. Although he speaks the language fluently and has lived his whole life in Moscow, he cuts an unusual figure here. What sets him apart is the cafe-au-lait color of his skin.
The fact that the African American Rudd is a Russian citizen--let alone one born to two Americans who met in a theater troupe on the Russian front during World War II--confounds many of his fellow Russians. In a land famous for its contradictions, he causes sheer bewilderment.
Rudd, whose background is African, Jewish and Serbian American, is an exception within an exception. Of the roughly 14,000 Afro-Russians in the country today, says Emilia Mensah, director of a Moscow-based cultural fund for mixed-race children, the majority are the descendants of male African students who studied in the Soviet Union in the 1960s-'80s and white Soviet women.
A Rise in Hate Crimes
Whatever their heritage, Afro-Russians remain a curious phenomenon in a country boasting hundreds of ethnic groups.
Unlike Americans, who are familiar with the concept of the "hyphenated" American, Russians continue to draw a distinct line between ethnicity and nationality. Afro-Russians, who can simultaneously be Russian and foreign, black and white, fly in the face of conventional wisdom on what it means to be Russian.
There aren't many; they make up only one-hundredth of 1% of this country of 146 million. Other Russians frequently mistake them for foreigners. Some don't even know they exist. Afro-Russians themselves have often lived in isolation from one another, a fact that is slowly changing as many of them reach adulthood and begin to seek each other out.
One factor bringing Afro-Russians together is the increasingly threatening forms of discrimination they face. Although racist jokes have always been a fact of life, police harassment and hate crimes appear to be on the rise. Last year witnessed a rash of attacks on people of color in Moscow, including the beating of an African American Marine in May.
Only two Afro-Russians are clearly figures of national renown. The first was a literary genius; the second is a talk-show host.
The Shakespeare of the Russian language, 19th-century writer Alexander Pushkin, was the great-grandson of an Eritrean nobleman who in his youth served as Peter the Great's valet.
