Russia's Recent Facebook Ads Prove the Kremlin Never Loved Black People

What is new with today’s Kremlin is that a new opportunity to exploit race in a different way has presented itself. Instead of siding with the oppressed black American population, Russian security services have clearly realized that it is to the Kremlin’s advantage to side with racist white people. Russia’s own rising nationalism, which views immigration from Central Asia as a threat, and Russian politicians’ support of it make for a very convenient relationship with American racists.

“The Russian leadership sees themselves as the redeemers of whiteness,” said Maxim Matusevich, director of the Russian and East European Studies program at Seton Hall University. “It is a reversal of the past when the Soviets were standing up for the oppressed and the minorities. Now all of a sudden they’re standing up for whiteness. That’s why I think Putin is so popular with segments of the American right because they see Russians as the guardians of whiteness: They’re white and they are Christian, they are anti-gay and anti-minority.”

For more than 70 years, the USSR engaged in a robust propaganda campaign to prove it was the oasis of black liberation. It was all a lie. In its current model of the Russian Federation, the Kremlin has proven that, like its former USSR predecessor state, it will use black people as a political tool whenever it suits them.

We were a tool of the USSR foreign policy then and we are a tool of Vladimir Putin’s Russia now. The Soviets didn’t love us then, and Putin’s Russia certainly proves it doesn’t love us now.