Yelena Khanga — journalist; television presenter; author with roots in the USSR
Yelena Abdulayevna Khanga was born in Moscow on 1 May 1962. Her family history spans three continents. Her maternal grandfather, Oliver Golden, born in Yazoo County, Mississippi, to parents who had been enslaved, was an agronomist and Communist; her grandmother, Bertha Bialek, was the Jewish daughter of a Hebrew-school teacher, born in Warsaw according to one account and in New York according to another. Disowned by her family for the interracial marriage, the couple went to the Soviet Union in 1931 with a group of Black agricultural specialists Golden had recruited to help develop cotton growing in Uzbekistan. Golden became a Soviet citizen and taught at research institutes in Tashkent until his death in 1940.
Their daughter, Lily Golden, born in Tashkent in 1934, became a historian of Africa. At the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1957 she met Abdullah Kassim Hanga, a leader of the independence movement in Zanzibar and later one of its senior officials. Yelena was born in Moscow; her father returned to Zanzibar and was killed there in the late 1960s, in 1965 by one account and 1968 or 1969 by others. She was brought up in Moscow by her mother and her grandmother Bertha, often the only child of African descent in her school.
After graduating in 1984 she joined Moscow News, and became known as the first Black television correspondent in Moscow. In 1987 she was selected for the first Soviet journalist exchange with an American newspaper and worked at the Christian Science Monitor in Boston, the first woman chosen for such an exchange. While living in New York in the early 1990s she traced her American relatives, met Golden and Bialek family members in Chicago, New York and Mississippi, and with the writer Susan Jacoby published Soul to Soul: The Story of a Black Russian American Family, 1865-1992.
She later became a familiar television presenter in Russia. She holds both Russian and American citizenship and divides her time between the two countries. She is the aunt of the Hungarian basketball player Ádám Hanga.
"Born and raised in Moscow; worked in Boston in 1987 on a journalist exchange and lived in New York in the early 1990s; divides her time between Russia and the United States, holding both citizenships."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Moscow (Russian SFSR, USSR)
Born in Moscow in 1962, the granddaughter of Oliver Golden, an African-American agronomist who in 1931 led a group of Black agricultural specialists to Soviet Uzbekistan, and the daughter of the Tashkent-born historian Lily Golden and the Zanzibari leader Abdullah Kassim Hanga.
Mother Lily Golden, Soviet historian born in Tashkent; father Abdullah Kassim Hanga, Zanzibari independence leader; maternal grandparents Oliver Golden, African-American agronomist from Mississippi, and Bertha Bialek, Jewish, who moved to Uzbekistan in 1931.
Moscow (Russian SFSR, USSR). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.