On December 8, 1987, Yelena Khanga, a Russian journalist who has played a significant role in Russian journalism and written about her experiences as a Black Jewish woman in Russia, arrived in the United States as a member of the Soviet Press Corps to cover the historic Reagan-Gorbachev Summit in Washington, D.C. The summit was one of several official meetings between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, during which they discussed various topics, including human rights, arms control, and regional conflicts. As one of the only Black reporters to cover the summit, Khanga garnered significant attention from American audiences, who were interested to discover her existence as a Black Russian with U.S. ancestry. 

Khanga is the granddaughter of Bertha Bialek, a Polish-born, Jewish-American labor activist, and Oliver Golden, an African American communist who led a team of Black agricultural specialists to the U.S.S.R. in 1931 to help develop the cotton industry in Uzbekistan. Khanga’s mother, Lily Golden, married Abdullah Hanga, a revolutionary leader from Zanzibar who was studying in Moscow in the early 1960s. 

Khanga’s time at the summit was her first exposure to American race relations, as well as the American side of Cold War propaganda. In reflecting on this experience, Khanga has been met with resistance to her portrayal of the contrasts between race relations in the Soviet Union in which she grew up and in the America she visited, especially her insistence that she was made more aware of her race in the United States and was never threatened with racial violence in the U.S.S.R.. Khanga attributed such skepticism to reflexive Cold War assumptions about the Soviet Union and expressed frustration with pervasive U.S. perceptions of conflict and aggression as coming only from Moscow.

In the late 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Khanga hosted a talk show called Pro Eto or “About It,” which for the first time in Russian media openly confronted topics like H.I.V./AIDS, homosexuality, and workplace sexual harassment. She approached the ultimate taboos in Russian society, bringing stigmatized topics and misunderstood individuals and demographics to center stage. In 1992, she published Soul to Soul, written with Susan Jacoby, in which she discusses her family ancestry from Mississippi, New York, Moscow, Harlem, and Zanzibar, as well as her experiences in Russia as a Black Jewish woman. Khanga has also worked for multiple Russian networks, covering a wide variety of topics, and broadcasts her own program on her YouTube channel. 

Sources:

Schwirtz, Michael. “Revolution? Da. Sexual? Nyet.” New York Times, July 14, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/fashion/15sex.html. 

Savranskaya, Svetlana and Blanton, Thomas. “The INF Treaty and the Washington Summit: 20 Years Later.” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 238, (December 10, 2007). https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB238/index.htm 

Meredith, Roman. “Soul to Soul: Americans’ Discovery of Yelena Khanga and the Promise of Russian-American Relations.” Journal of Russian-American Studies. Vol 6, no. 1 (2022) https://journals.ku.edu/jras/article/download/17979/16210