Anticolonialism in Interwar Moscow: Migrant Intellectuals and the Exilic Production of American Radicalism

Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s was a hub of anticolonialist activity, attracting a myriad of artists, activists, and students from across the colonial world.  Some of these sojourners came for brief visits to witness the creation of a new society, while others stayed for lengthier periods of time to study and to work in institutions administered by the Communist International (Comintern).  As open revolutionary work against empire was impossible in most colonial locations, the trip to Moscow was rarely these migrants first experience overseas.  In fact, a surprising number of Moscow’s anticolonials were recruited in the United States, from Indian revolutionaries studying engineering at Ford’s Rouge Factory to West Indian militants in Harlem. 
This paper will analyze the work and contributions of three major intellectuals who theorized and organized this work: Manabendranath Roy, Katayama Sen, and George Padmore, each of whom traveled to Moscow after experiencing radical transformations in the United States.  On a basic level, the work sheds new light on the interplay between racial politics and the heightening tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union in the interwar period.  More importantly, by presenting the story of migrant activism in Moscow through the theoretical prisms of race and territoriality, the manuscript departs from a narrow focus on ideology and institutions, instead offering a broad conceptualization of the Cold War as a geopolitical confrontation that took shape along with other major transformations of the twentieth century, namely migration and decolonization.