James Lloydovich Patterson, the son of an African American father and a Russian mother who became a celebrated child actor of the Stalinist era for his supporting role in Circus, a 1936 propaganda film mythologizing Soviet racial harmony, died May 22, the Washington Post reported. Patterson, who was born in Moscow and spent most of his life in Russia, came to Washington, D.C., after the collapse of the Soviet Union to live closer to his father's relatives.
"Throughout the Cold War, the Communist press documented his rise from Soviet military academies into the Black Sea submarine fleet," the Post wrote. "He later joked that he might have been appointed admiral had Stalin not died in 1953 and his own aspirations not led him to follow in Pushkin's footsteps as a poet."
After being demobilized, Patterson published books of poetry extolling the Soviet Union--where he felt his Black heritage was valued--and took a caustic view of American race relations. "Sometimes I try to imagine what my fate would have been had I been born in America," he told the Daily World, a Communist Party newspaper, in 1970. "I grab my coat and walk out into Kutuzovsky Prospekt, [an avenue] in the Soviet capital. I stride along and inhale deeply the air of freedom. I smile at people I meet, and they smile back at me. And then I walk through the fields of Georgia and Mississippi, smelling of blood and smoke."
Denise J. Youngblood, a professor emerita of Russian history at the University of Vermont specializing in Russian and Soviet cinema, said Circus ranks among the most significant films of its time and place: "It was canonical propaganda. Musicals were sensational hits in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, and this film was one of the most enduringly popular of that era. It promoted the so-called anti-racism in the Soviet Union, which was very far from the truth."
She added that Patterson "was trotted out for propaganda appearances as a teenager, but there were no other roles for Black or mixed-race children. The Soviet Union really was a very racist society, so there would not have been a place for him as an actor in Soviet cinema."
A member of the Soviet Writers' Union, Patterson wrote lyric poems that appeared in Soviet newspapers and magazines. His nine books include Russia-Africa (1963), a collection of poetry, and Chronicle of the Left Hand (1964), which he described as a "poetic biography" about his father's sharecropper ancestors (an English-language edition was released in 2022).