Black man in Red Russia

the long version

Homer Smith writes a memoir, as a black man disillusioned with life in the U.S. in 1930's in the U.S. who travelled to Russia in 1932 to see for himself whether the "democracy of the proletariat" was really a myth. He lived in the USSR for 14 eventful years, witnessing famine, the birth of the new Soviet Constitution in 1936, the horrible purges that followed, and the rise of the great industrial complex that was conceived during the monumental Five-Year Plans.