The official USSR proclaimed the equality of all peoples and the idea of internationalism. But Moscow has a history of racism, and the first unsanctioned demonstration since the 1920s which took place in 1963 on the 18 ^th of December reminds us of this.

Seven hundred black students marched through Red Square with the slogans "Stop Killing Africans!", "Moscow is a center of discrimination!", and "Moscow is a second Alabama! The occasion was the death of Edmund Assare-Addo, a Ghanaian student at the Kalinin Medical Institute. The reason for his death was the domestic racism faced by students from Africa in Russia.

Assare-Addo's body was found near a country road on the outskirts of Moscow. No signs of violence except a small scar on his neck. How did an African student end up alone in a remote location on the outskirts of the city? How did a student from Kalinin end up in Moscow? And why did 700 other students from different cities of the Soviet Union got in the capital with him?

... The early 1960s was the time of the first contacts between the new free Africa and USSR. In January 1960, the Soviet Central Committee issued a decree on expanding cultural ties with Sub-Saharan Africa, and in February the Peoples' Friendship University named after Patrice Lumumba was founded. In 1959-1960, only 72 students from the Dark Continent studied in the USSR while in 1961 there were 500 of them and by the end of the decade - 4000.

As early as March 1960 (two months after the decree on expanding ties was issued) the self-organized Union of Black African Students sent a letter to Khrushchev: "Russian students have repeatedly insulted and continue to insult African students. One student was called a monkey and two other students received an insulting letter from Russians... the university administration and police do not take necessary measures, but on the contrary are biased".

It was about an incident at Moscow State University, when during a student party four Russian students insulted a student from Somalia for trying to dance with a Russian girl. An investigation by the party, the KGB, and the Ministry of Higher Education concluded that the Somali student was to blame. According to the official version, the student Abdul Hamid Mohammed asked the girl for a dance but she refused and went to dance with her friend. After the dance Abdul Hamid spat in her face, she responded with a slap. Other students interfered, one of them demanded an apology. "My comrade could not stand to see a foreigner insulting a Soviet girl," said one of the witnesses during the interrogation.

African complaints about racist pranks flooded into embassies, universities, and organizations that brought students to the country. Much of the tension was caused by the love affairs between African boys and Soviet girls. Part of the reason was the great gender imbalance among African students. Assare-Addo, who had died, was also about to marry a Russian girl.

Africans also complained about constant document checks and searches by police officers. There was a known case when a student from Sierra Leone visited his Russian girlfriend, and the police called by neighbors subjected the lovers to a long humiliating interrogation. The police often ignored the racist background of the conflicts. There was a case where the police did not intervene in the beating of a student from Mali - allegedly mistaking the violence for mischief –did not assist him after the beating and refused to investigate the case after all.

In 1962, the Ghanaian Embassy received so many complaints about racist aggression by Soviet citizens that an investigation required. However, certified by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs it found most of the cases unproven. At times there were insults and provocations such as an episode in the Moscow metro when a couple of drunken Russian citizens demanded to make way with the words: "You can't even take the subway with white people in your country, but here you sit while white people are standing." In many other cases physical violence also took place.

Of course, the foreign policy maneuvers of the USSR and African countries also influenced students. The Soviet Union used two channels in its contacts with developing countries. Public organizations - the Society for African-Asian Friendship, the Central Committee of the Komsomol, the All-Union Central Trade Union (trade unions), and the Committee of Soviet Women - were responsible for working with students from abroad. These structures - which had some formal autonomy – used to select students according to strict ideological criteria, relying on recommendations from friendly parties.

The country's political authorities were not so much engaged in supporting radical leftist movements in African countries as in forming a broad, as we would say today, geopolitical bloc to confront the West. This dual scheme helped to get out of awkward situations.

In 1964, radical Moroccan students outraged by political repression in their homeland seized one of the premises of the Moroccan embassy in Moscow. The North African authorities demanded that the Kremlin storm the embassy and deport the participants. The Kremlin has pacified the students. As for the rest of the demands it was stated that it is in the jurisdiction of public organizations, not the country's leadership, to fulfill them. The Moroccan rioters thus remained in the USSR.

The notion of the USSR as a society of victorious socialism and internationalism was often at odds with reality causing doubt and ferment among students. Soviet curators therefore had to weed out the obvious rebels like the Maoists and ensure that the revolutionary fervor of the rest was directed at criticizing capitalism and colonialism, not at the flaws of Soviet society.

For this, student organizations are being created. First of all, community organizations were created. In these, politically conscious students were supposed to influence the unreliable - the maximalists and the extreme left-wing romanticists, as well as those who were addicted to the dances and parties organized by Western embassies.

The tactics had the opposite effect - many students began to see such associations as a real mechanism for protecting their rights, including the opportunity to make demands on university administrations. The story of the first independent organization, the Black African Students' Union, was a sad one.

At the origins of the union was Theophilius Okonko, son of a Nigerian Christian minister from the African middle class. Okonko renounced Christianity and in his own words "found a fervent faith" in communism through his study of the Marxist classics. Against his father's wishes he applied for a UN scholarship and winning it, enrolled in Moscow in early 1958. Okonko soon became secretary and chief speaker of the Union of Students from Black Africa.

The claims made by Okonko and the union were not so much about racism as about the repressive political climate in the USSR and the exploitation of African students for political purposes. Union activists were outraged when Egyptian students who refused to speak out against President Nasser at the time of his rift with Khrushchev were evicted from their dormitory at Moscow State University. Another story concerned Okonko personally - the Soviet export magazine The New Times published without a permission a photo of him in a gymnasium. In it a student with chains drawn symbolizes Africa throwing off the oppression of colonialism. Okonko was furious at such a blatant exploitation of his image.

The authorities denounced the activists "for separatism" and for trying to talk about racism in the Soviet Union. But that's not why the organization was banned in the end. In 1960, the students decided to organize a protest against French nuclear testing in the Sahara. It seemed like an approvable topic of protest. But in those same days Khrushchev was planning his visit to France and the university was told not to allow the amateurism. Meetings and actions of the union were banned, then the organization itself was banned, and activists were threatened with expulsion from the country. Okonko ends up in the West where he publishes numerous interviews about the situation in the USSR.

Forced to respond, the Soviets were outraged that Okonko was telling the press in South Africa, a country of legalized apartheid, about the shortcomings of the Soviet Union. As for racism in the USSR, it was claimed that it did not exist. Okonko was accused of slander. The newspaper Trud called him an alcoholic, a bigot, and just in case a spy.

On December 9, 1963 the Ministry of Higher Education received information that students from Ghana were coming for the weekend from Leningrad, Kalinin, and Kharkov to a certain embassy event in Moscow. The embassy, meanwhile, did not invite anyone. The universities were told not to let students go to Moscow.

Nevertheless, on December 13, about 300 young people from Ghana and other African countries gathered outside the Ghanaian embassy in the capital. Ambassador Eliot later reported that the students had been living outside for four days, drinking, making noise, disturbing their work, so that he and his family even had to barricade themselves in the embassy. According to Eliot's version, the rally was instigated by one of the Western embassies. The diplomat said the students demanded increased scholarships, better housing, an expanded menu to include Ghanaian dishes, including rice-based dishes, and travel to the West. Calling these demands impossible and fantastic, and emphasizing the hooligan behavior of the students near the embassy, Eliot clearly concealed the political nature of the gathering and generally accepted the official Soviet version of events.

According to another version, the President of Ghana, Nkrumah, was behind the strange initiative who, through his people, summoned the students to a meeting and then changed the decision. Nkrumah was obsessed with the idea of pan-African unity but under Ghanaian hegemony. He used Ambassador Eliot to promote this idea. Perhaps the scandalous meeting was part of his multi-track plan to change the balance of power.

There is a third version. According to it, the initiative belonged to the Ghanaian students themselves. The rule of Nkrumah in Ghana, the first African country to be freed from foreign dependence, looked more and more like a one-party dictatorship. Ghanaian youth in the USSR, the country's potential elite, were also feeling this pressure. The students may well have been intent on using their newly formed community to speak out independently about both the racist excesses in the USSR and the situation in their homeland.

But even if the original initiative for the Ghanaians to meet in Moscow came from outside, the assembled students were most likely acting in their own interests. During a gathering to discuss racism and publicity tactics news of Assare-Addo's death arrives. The students decide to boycott classes pending an official investigation.

On the morning of December 18, they gathered again at the embassy and prepared a memorandum to the Soviet authorities. Then the column with hand-drawn anti-racist posters moved toward the Kremlin. "House of Friendship - House of Discrimination," "No More Murders" - after marching through Red Square the demonstrators stopped at the Spasskaya Tower, where they gave interviews to Western correspondents.

Party and ministerial officials began to approach the demonstrators. The students refused to disperse demanding a meeting at the Supreme Soviet to present the memorandum. They were offered to choose ten delegates. The negotiations lasted for two hours. Then the protesters moved to the building of the Ministry of Higher Education and settled in the courtyard of the Architectural Institute next door. Officials, including Education Minister Yelutin, were not happy - the delegates refused to talk to them behind closed doors and offered to come out to the protesters and listen to the memorandum.

The meeting in the auditorium of the Institute of Architecture was, according to Yelutin, extremely tense and lasted two hours. All the students who spoke, with noisy support from the audience, rejected Yelutin's interpretation of racism in the USSR as an anomaly and read a memorandum demanding an investigation into the death of Assare-Addo and other incidents: "We are not convinced of our safety in this country. When we are beaten no one reacts. Perhaps the minister is just not aware of the case."

A soon-to-be-released investigation revealed that Assare-Addo's death was the result of frostbite in a state of alcoholic stupor. The answer to the question of how the student ended up on the outskirts of the city and where the scar on his neck came from has never been found or at least has not reached the general public.

As a result of the December demonstration, not only did the ideological training of students from Africa increase, but more attention was paid to the education of internationalism in the USSR.