Historian Paul Kengor writes, "Paul Robeson Sr. was an unflagging admirer of Joseph Stalin, one of the most prolific killers in history. It was this that brought Robeson under congressional scrutiny in the 1930s when the Democrats ran Congress, the White House, and the attorney general’s office—long before Joe McCarthy emerged on the scene. Even the New York Times once called Robeson 'an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union.' He was dedicated to the Communist Party USA goal of fundamentally transforming America into a 'Soviet American Republic.'"
In 1934 Robeson and his wife Eslanda Goode visited the Soviet Union, where they encountered William Patterson, a leader of the American Communist Party. The Robesons also met with two of Eslanda's brothers, John and Frank Goode, who had decided they preferred life under Joseph Stalin to life in America. Said Robeson of his stay in the USSR: "Here, for the first time, I walk in human dignity." He soon became a dedicated Stalinist, the first world-renowned performer to become a political activist during the peak years of his show business career.
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In 1948 Robeson worked for the presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, who had served in the cabinet of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
During a concert tour of the USSR in 1949, Robeson learned of Stalin’s planned liquidation of Soviet Jews (a liquidation that would aborted by Stalin’s death in 1953). He asked to see with the imprisoned (and soon-to-be-executed) Russian Yiddish poet Itzhak Feffer, who he had met in the United States six years earlier. When Robeson saw Feffer -- in a room bugged with Soviet government listening devices -- Feffer, without speaking aloud, drew his fingers across his throat, indicating that he and others would soon be murdered (which they were).
Robeson chose not to tell anyone about Feffer's fate or what he had learned about Soviet anti-Semitism, since to do so would have hurt the Soviet cause in the Cold War. Upon returning to America, he told the press that he had seen Feffer in good condition; that he had seen "Jewish people [living freely] all over the place"; that he had heard "not one word about" Soviet anti-Semitism; and that the rumors of Yiddish writers being executed were utterly false. He did not even tell his comrades in the American Communist Party what he knew of the USSR's treatment of Jews.
