page_title: And you are lynching Negroes
section_title: Early usage
hierarchical_section_title: And you are lynching Negroes / History / Early usage
caption_attribution_description: English: Joseph Stalin, seated outdoors at Berlin conference
context_page_description: "And you are lynching Negroes" and the later "And you are hanging blacks" are catchphrases that describe or satirize Soviet Union response to United States criticisms of Soviet human rights violations.
  The Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination, financial crises, and unemployment in the United States, which were identified as failings of the capitalist system that had been erased by state socialism. Lynchings of African Americans were brought up as an embarrassing skeleton in the closet for the U.S., which the Soviets used as a form of rhetorical ammunition when reproached for their own perceived economic and social failings. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the phrase became widespread as a reference to Russian information-warfare tactics. Its use subsequently became widespread in Russia to criticize any form of U.S. policy.
  Former Czech president and writer Václav Havel placed the phrase among "commonly canonized demagogical tricks". The Economist described it as a form of whataboutism that grew ubiquitous after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
context_section_description: The use of the phrase as a reference to demagoguery and hypocrisy is traced to a Russian political joke about a dispute between an American and a Soviet man. 
  One of such political jokes was referring to availability of a personal car for an engineer.
  After receiving criticism of his country because of the deaths caused by the 1903 anti-Jewish Kishinev pogrom, the Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve pointed out "The Russian peasants were driven to frenzy. Excited by race and religious hatred, and under the influence of alcohol, they were worse than the people of the Southern States of America when they lynch negroes." Soviet artist Dmitri Moor produced the lithograph Freedom to the Prisoners of Scottsboro!, after the 1931 trial of the Scottsboro Boys of Alabama. 
  The treatment of the Scottsboro Boys popularized the phrase in usage by the Soviet Union against the U.S. as a form of criticism against those who themselves criticized human rights abuses. In his 1934 book Russia Today: What Can We Learn from It?, Sherwood Eddy wrote: "In the most remote villages of Russia today Americans are frequently asked what they are going to do to the Scottsboro Negro boys and why they lynch Negroes."
  Apparently, when the Soviet Union faced harsh words from the Western world over its civil liberties problems, it employed the phrase as a common retort. 
  In a 1930s argument with black student Pierre Kalmek, Bolshevik politician Dmitry Manuilsky said that in the United States "whites have the privilege to lynch Negroes, but Negroes do not have the privilege to lynch whites." He called this a form of white chauvinism, asking: "Do we have a difference here between the salaries of Negro and white workers? Do we have the right to lynch Negro citizens?"
  During the Stalin era, praise for the quality of any aspect of U.S. life prompted the rejoinder "Yes, but they lynch Blacks, don't they?" Throughout the 1930s, white men traveling from the U.S. to the Soviet Union on business reported to the U.S. consulate in Riga, Latvia, that locals asked them about the dichotomy between living in a free society and "the 'lynching' of blacks." The term worked its way into fiction literature books written in the country, and was seen in this context as criticism of foreigners. Years later a science fiction comic, Technique - The Youth - 1948. - No. 2 titled "In a world of crazy fantasy" (Russian: "В мире бредовой фантастики") featured a poem of political attacks on the cover which included a similar line: "Every planet's Negroes are being lynched there."
  The phrase became a common witticism used among Soviet citizens; a parable involved a call-in program on Radio Moscow where any question about their living conditions was met with the answer: "In America, they lynch Negroes." A U.S. citizen living in the Soviet Union in 1949 was arrested after complaining the government barred him from work; a local paper made fun of his expectation of fair treatment, writing of the U.S. as "the country where they lynch Negroes." In 1949 Soviet author and war poet Konstantin Simonov gave a speech at a Soviet jubilee event honoring poet Alexander Pushkin, where he delineated between the Soviet Union and the Western world by simply using the phrase to refer to English-speakers: "There is no need for those who hang Negroes to commemorate Pushkin!" Historian Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov wrote in his 1953 book The Reign of Stalin that Soviet media put forth the notion that U.S. citizens "are unanimous in pursuing an anti-colour policy, and that the average American spends his time lynching negroes." Perpetuation of the phrase during the Soviet period engendered negative feelings towards the U.S. from members of the working class.
caption: Use of the phrase was common in the Soviet Union during the Joseph Stalin era.[15][16]
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