An engineer from Ford worked in the USSR for 43 years. The Unusual Story of Robert Robinson
The photo shows Robert Robinson, a former Ford worker who came to work in the USSR from the United States.
He came to America from Jamaica. He got a job at the Ford plant in Detroit.
He was a good worker. But here he was constantly bullied by his white colleagues. To make matters worse, his cousin was lynched by whites.
In 1929, an agreement was reached between Ford and the Gorky Automobile Plant on the exchange of experience. In addition, the USSR offered high salaries, and the United States was during the Great Depression.
By comparison, in the U.S., he earned $140 a month ($2,200 in today’s inflation-adjusted equivalent). And he had no prospects. Higher education was expensive and he could not afford it.
At the Soviet Union, Robinson was offered $250 a month (about $3,900) and free tuition at the Moscow Evening Machine-Building Institute.
And in 1930 he moved to the USSR.
In total, about 40,000 foreign specialists worked in the USSR in the 1930s. Many of them stayed here and started a family. Some could not return to their homeland because of the threat of the Nazis. But half of them, having worked under the contract, returned to their homeland.
In the USSR, Robinson got a job at the famous tractor plant in Stalingrad.
But even here it was not possible to hide from the attacks of the whites. Two American workers, fellow contractors like him, began to insult Robinson. And three weeks later, they moved on to physical violence.
Two Americans, Lewis and Brown, attacked Robinson and punched him in the face. He tried to answer, but they were quickly separated.
This case was widely reported in Soviet newspapers. This incident was used for propaganda purposes – to show the mores of the West. In general, it is true that the morals can hardly be called highly moral and humane. In the United States, racial segregation was abolished only in 1964.
Lewis and Brown were sentenced to two years in prison. But then they forgave me.
Two years later, Robinson returned to America, but not for long.
Here he came under the crosshairs of journalists, who asked him how he lived in the USSR.
Robinson complained that he was not given a car and his salary was not paid in full. He also complained about the harsh Russian climate.
But the attitude towards Robinson was negative. Most likely, the story of Soviet propaganda, of which he became an unwitting participant, played a cruel joke.
Time magazine called the émigré “Stalin’s black as coal.” They didn’t want to hire him. So Robinson goes back to the Soviet Union.
Here Robinson received a higher education and became a mechanical engineer. Then he worked in Kuibyshev and Moscow. He was elected a deputy of the Moscow City Council. Of course, the filmmakers could not pass by such a colorful character. In 1947, Robinson starred as the Papuan Malu in the film Miklouho-Maclay.
However, Robinson was not happy in the Soviet Union. He dreamed of going back. The reason is simple: Robinson was a Christian, and socialist ideology did not correlate with religion, especially Protestant Christianity.
In addition, he sincerely suffered from the Russian climate.
Robinson lived here for 43 years, he was released only in 1974. The Americans were not ready to accept him, and the Ugandan government took care of the departure.
Then he moved to his native America, where he died in 1994 at the age of 88. When he returned to the States, he scolded Gorbachev a lot. But not for the reason why Gorbachev is disliked in our country. Robinson believed that Perestroika and rapprochement with the West was a clever move by Gorbachev to break up the United States.