Robert Robinson — toolmaker; mechanical engineer; author with roots in the USSR
Robert Nathaniel Robinson was born in Jamaica on 22 June 1906 and grew up in Cuba with his mother, Octavia, who was from the Dominican Republic. He trained as a mechanical engineer and moved to the United States, where Ford hired him in Detroit, first sweeping floors and then as a toolmaker. By 1930 he was the only Black toolmaker among some seven hundred in his department, and as the Depression began he feared for his job. He had no Russian ancestry.
In 1929 Ford and the Soviet Union agreed to cooperate on building an automobile plant, and in April 1930 a Soviet delegation toured Ford's works. Offered higher pay and better housing, Robinson signed a one-year contract and on 4 July 1930 began work at the new tractor factory in Stalingrad, one of several hundred Americans recruited for the plant. When the contract ended, officials persuaded him to sign another, this time at the First State Ball Bearing Plant in Moscow, and he studied at the Moscow Evening Institute of Mechanical Engineering.
On 10 December 1934 he was elected to the Moscow Soviet, the city council, an event Time magazine reported with the headline Black Blank. In 1937 the American government told him to return home or give up his citizenship. The Soviet authorities offered him citizenship with assurances that he could return to the United States when its economy recovered; he took it, and for the next three and a half decades his applications to travel abroad were refused. Of the Black Americans who had become Soviet citizens in the early 1930s, he later said, all had disappeared from Moscow by 1937. He met Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes on their visits, and lived through the purges and the German invasion while working in the factory.
In 1974, through the efforts of two Ugandan ambassadors in Moscow, he was allowed to travel to Uganda on holiday. There he stayed, was given a post teaching, and was at last free to marry; he called his departure an escape. He later returned to the United States, and in 1988, with Jonathan Slevin, published Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union, a detailed first-hand account of a Black American's life in the Soviet Union. He died in Washington, D.C., on 23 February 1994, aged eighty-seven.
"Jamaica, Cuba, Detroit; to the Stalingrad Tractor Plant on a one-year contract in 1930; Moscow ball-bearing plant; Soviet citizen; left for Uganda in 1974; returned to the United States and died in Washington in 1994."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Born in Jamaica; worked in the USSR 1930–1974 (Stalingrad, Moscow)
No Russian ancestry. Recruited from Ford's Detroit plant in 1930 to work at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, he stayed 44 years in the Soviet Union as a toolmaker and engineer, was elected to the Moscow Soviet in 1934, became a Soviet citizen and was not permitted to leave until 1974.
No Russian ancestry; born in Jamaica, raised in Cuba by his Dominican mother, Octavia.
Born in Jamaica; worked in the USSR 1930–1974 (Stalingrad, Moscow). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.