This chapter’s themes include Afro-American writers and artists’ reverence for Alexander Pushkin and his great-grandfather Abram Hannibal as exemplars of high achievement by people of Black African descent; Pushkin’s pride in his African ancestry; kinship between Russians and African Americans historically through both being considered ‘others’ and inferior outsiders in Western societies; historical parallels between the contemporaneous modernization and democratization in Russia and the United States that included the ending of serfdom and slavery, respectively, and inspired populist thought in both countries; early twentieth-century notions of “Moscow as ‘Mecca’” among black American intellectuals visiting Russia in search of a society free of racism; Vladimir Lenin’s and Joseph Stalin’s special interest in African Americans as what they described as a ‘nation’ and a potential driving force in Lenin’s theory of worldwide revolution; Soviet weaponization of America’s race problem in the Cold War; Soviet Society’s special attraction to African American music, especially jazz; and Late twentieth-century borrowing from Soviet ideology by black American radicals, including the Black Panther Party. Prominent African American intellectuals featured here include W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes.