Soon after he poached the class on Hegel, Lewis was moved to day shift at the smelter and he continued on his course of acquiring knowledge, this time in solitude. His knowledge of Marxism-Leninism was impressive. Once Lewis was asked to teach a night class to other enlightened workers, only to learn that their enlightenment didn’t reach deep enough to enable them to take instruction in the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism from a black man. “What do you know about Hegel?” an Estonian comrade challenged Lewis on the first day. “You should be swinging from tree limbs.” The Estonian completed this criticism with what he surely thought was a cacophony of piercing sounds of baboons in the jungle. Far from ejecting the racist from the class, other workers laughed. No one attended Lewis’s second class. Even Lewis stayed home.
Marxism was Lewis’s escape route from the construct of race. Theoretically, a man is defined based on his class, which in turn is defined by the relationship to the ownership of the means of production. National origins and race are negated, voided. That is how it should be, yet race remained un-negated, menacing Lewis as he crossed the oceans, the steppes, and the frozen wilderness.
Had he escaped from the land of Jim Crow to become a trained baboon of World Revolution?
For a moment, he thinks that he is waking up in his room on the South Side, but that illusion vanishes as he takes a silent inventory of events of the previous night: “Siberia … Moscow … Levinson … corpses … whiteface … Black Maria … Kogan … dacha … escape … France … How the fuck did I get here?”
As soon as he asks the question, the answer comes: Solomon Mikhoels. Solomon fucking Mikhoels, the man Levinson called a gonif, a crook.
Were it not for Mikhoels, Lewis wouldn’t have come in contact with either Levinson or Kogan, wouldn’t have learned Yiddish, and — most important — wouldn’t be at this dacha, praying to God that no one would notice that a Black Maria and its crew have gone missing.
In 1932, Mikhoels was shooting a talking picture, his first and only. And it is true that the film required one happy, good-natured Negro to play an American Communist, a bricklayer who joins a Jewish comrade to build Socialism in the USSR.
The story was set in Magnitogorsk, a city located on the southern tip of the Ural Mountains, on the boundary between Europe and Asia. The city was named after a mountain of pure iron, a geological oddity. The name means the city of the Magnet Mountain.
The USSR built up massive capital by dumping gold and artwork onto the world market. The funds would finance rapid industrialization. To plan the project, in 1928, the USSR hired the Arthur G. McKee Company of Cleveland, giving it the task to replicate the city of Gary, Indiana, upon the Magnet Mountain.
The city and the steel mill went up rapidly, with only a loose plan.
The place was a construction camp, where workers — mostly displaced peasants and unskilled laborers — had to survive Siberian winters in canvas tents. Workers’ barracks went up; they were filled beyond capacity.
Though some visitors described Gary as the gates of hell, by comparison with Magnitogorsk, it was a garden spot.
The latter metropolis was a forest of half-completed smokestacks tied together with a tangle of pipes and railroad tracks. American earth-digging machines sat abandoned to rust in the open pits where they became incapacitated. In the residential areas, you could see the beginning of incongruously wide boulevards that became rivers of mud in the spring. There were also people’s palaces, with massive columns that grotesquely mimicked Russia’s imperial past. All of it was unfinished, probably impossible to complete, yet amid the chaos of construction, completed smokestacks were starting to spew out clouds of dark smoke, melting ore, making steel.
Workers’ barracks, tent cities, and the zones of prison camps were woven into this mad landscape.
German architects were brought in to make an attempt at urban planning. The Germans wanted to separate residential zones from industrial, creating a kind of balance between work and life. Alas, this vision was just that — a hallucination. Construction of industrial and residential zones was well under way before planning began.
Large numbers of skilled foreign workers were brought in to exercise some control over the situation, and Lewis, an expert welder, was among them.
Dark skin was a rarity in the Soviet Union’s workers’ barracks. There were two Negroes in Magnitogorsk in January 1932. By February, their ranks declined by fifty percent when the African welder, who spoke French and mostly kept to himself, slipped off a scaffold and fell forty-five meters, landing on a pile of steel bars.
This left only Friederich Robertovich Lewis.
Born to descendants of freed slaves, named after Frederick Douglass, and raised in Memphis, Omaha, Chicago, and Cleveland, Lewis was what used to be known as “an enlightened worker,” an autodidact drawn to revolutionary ideologies. He worked as a porter, then a waiter, and ultimately apprenticed as a welder at McKee, a company whose projects included building blast furnaces in the USSR.
One could say that Lewis’s disgust with Jim Crow’s America drove him to a new life in Joe Stalin’s Russia. That would be a bit simplistic, but mostly true. In the late twenties, Lewis tried to join a Chicago cell of the Communist Party, hoping to be sent to the land of victorious revolution, where the color of a man’s skin had been negated. But the wheels of Party machinery turned slowly, and in the spring of 1931 he asked the capitalists at McKee to send him to Magnitogorsk.
On entry to Russia, his name became Friederich — Germanized, presumably, in honor of Engels. The clerk who issued Lewis’s visa knew nothing of Douglass. A Russian-style patronymic Robertovich, son of Robert, was inserted into his name in accordance with rules and traditions.
In his search for a race-free society, Lewis found himself in a place where he felt like a revolutionary from the planet Mars. There was racism in Stalin’s Russia, too, a naïve kind of racism. While a foreman at McKee wouldn’t hesitate to call him a nigger, a drunk on a Moscow streetcar could innocently refer to him as a primate. Along the same lines, his appearance was known to move street urchins to jump like baboons and shout good-naturedly about “djazz.”
* * *
On a particularly cold February morning in Magnitogorsk, Lewis climbed to the top of a scaffold only to be summoned to the office of the kombinat construction director. It was unclear why the matter was so important that even the American engineer Charles Bunyan descended from Olympus, but there he was, in the meeting room, kindly offering his services as a translator.
Bunyan was one of humanity’s secret heroes.
Short, bearded, bespectacled, he was as old as Lewis, yet had the gravitas of a European professor. Armed with a cold Lutheran stare (he was presumed to have been at some point a Lutheran), conspicuously grammatical Russian, and considerable ingenuity, he fought off the ideological hacks and ignorant central planners, preventing complete bungling of the project.
Lewis regarded Marxism as a powerful tool for generating mathematical insights into history and all aspects of the world around him. It was the fundamental science, the science of science. During his enlightened worker, pre-Communist phase, he became attuned to what he called “paternalism” among white comrades. His analysis of the phenomenon yielded the following insight: Paternalism = Racism Repressed. Lewis trusted his ability to see through a man, to gauge his innermost feelings about race. Turned on Bunyan, Lewis’s finely calibrated gauge registered the most extraordinary reading he had ever observed: zero. No paternalism. No racism. A perfect zilch.