Origin in the Russian Empire during the
Stalinist era. In a 1905 interview with
The Century magazine,
Leo Tolstoy criticised American culture, where despite "virtually no hindrances to individual development", yet "you lynch negroes, form
trusts, and adopt imperialism."
Early usage by the Soviet Union Soviet artist
Dmitri Moor produced the
lithograph Freedom to the Prisoners of Scottsboro!, after the 1931 trial of the
Scottsboro Boys of
Alabama. 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." 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." Throughout the 1930s, white men traveling from the US to the Soviet Union on business reported to the
US 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 Youth1948.No. 2 titled "In a world of crazy fantasy" () 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 US 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 US 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 (who had African ancestry), 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 US 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 US from members of the
working class.
Growth during the Cold War During the
Cold War, the leftist French publication
Combat used the phrase to criticize the operations of the
House Un-American Activities Committee, pointing out what it saw as corruption of "a nation that lynched blacks and hounded anyone accused of 'un-American' activities." Use of the phrase as a
tu quoque fallacy grew in popularity in Russia during the 1960s, and was used as a widespread quip between Russians. The phrase garnered numerous iterations during the Cold War period. When the government faced criticism for discrimination against
Jews in the Soviet Union, the idiom was used with excessively sentimental tone to complain about
racism in the United States. It was used as an aphorism among fellow Soviets during the
Mikhail Gorbachev period, as an answer to complaints about the lack of
civil and political rights including
freedom of movement. A variant used during this time as a form of reciprocity when faced with criticism over imprisonment and treatment of
Refuseniks, was to put the focus on
race in the United States criminal justice system. A similar phrase was used to counter complaints about Soviet transportation inefficiency. In 1980 then dissident and later
president of the Czech Republic and writer
Václav Havel characterized the phrase among "commonly canonized demagogical tricks."
Usage by Soviet satellite states Alternate versions of the phrase have been used in Eastern European Soviet Republics and several Central European countries, then-controlled by the Soviet Union, such, that it was ported for usage in
Poland. The phrase also saw usage in other languages, including
Czech,
Hungarian, and
Romanian. Similar phrases in the
languages of
Eastern Europe and
Central Europe include: • ("And, in turn, you beat up blacks!") placed the idiom among "commonly canonized demagogical tricks". With the election of
Barack Obama as US president in November 2008,
The New York Times expressed the hope that the tactic could see decreased usage: "In Russia, for example, where Soviet leaders used to respond to any American criticism of
human rights violations with 'But you hang Negroes,' analysts note that the election of Mr. Obama removes a stain." In a 2009 article, journalist George Feifer recounted that when he traveled to
Moscow to cover the
American National Exhibition in 1959, he faced those who were using the phrase against him. Feifer believed that: "Skilled propagandists stationed among the listeners regularly interrupted to repeat questions intended to discredit me.
Why did America tolerate shameful poverty and lynch Negroes?" In 2011, author
Michael Dobson wrote that the phrase was a form of
the pot calling the kettle black, and a "famous example" of the tu quoque fallacy derived from a "famous 1960s era Russian joke." Writing in March 2014 for the American liberal magazine
The New Republic, Julia Ioffe made a similar comparison as Quinn regarding Soviet versus the 2014 use of the technique. Ioffe wrote that the phrase took the form of a "cartoonish reply", and had been extended after the fall of Soviet Russia to a similar strategy used by
Vladimir Putin. In a 2015 article for the
conservative magazine
National Review, correspondent
Kevin D. Williamson called the phrase "a bitter Soviet-era punch line." Williamson pointed out: "There were a million Cold War variations on the joke". Reporter David Volodzko wrote for the international news magazine
The Diplomat in 2015 about "the famous tu quoque argument". The piece said that the term was used as a way to criticize
capitalism as practiced in the Western world. Writing for the British liberal political website
Open Democracy in 2015, journalist Maxim Edwards observed: "The phrase 'and you are lynching Negroes' has entered Russian speech as a prime example of
whataboutism, a hypothetical response to any American criticism of Soviet policies."
Michael Bohm, a US reporter who is working out of Moscow, became the target of the phrase after he appeared on
Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, which aired on the major state-run television channel
Russia-1. Commentator Igor Korotchenko wrote: "people like Bohm dropped
atom bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they lynched Negroes." Journalist Catherine Putz commented on the phrase in a July 2016 article for the international news magazine
The Diplomat, and compared it to use of whataboutism by businessman and politician
Donald Trump: "Criticisms of human rights in the Soviet Union were often met with what became a common catchphrase: 'And you are lynching Negroes'." Writing for
ChinaFile after Trump won the
2016 United States presidential election, James Palmer feared an increase in racism "would give a brutal new credibility to the old Soviet whataboutism whenever they were challenged on the gulag: 'But in America, you lynch Negroes'." Writing in July 2016 for the liberal Israeli newspaper
Haaretz, Israeli journalist
Chemi Shalev made a similar comparison: "Trump told
[T]he New York Times this week that America is in such a mess in terms of civil liberties that it cannot lecture foreign countries anymore, which is an echo of old Soviet propaganda that responded to American reprimands with the retort 'And you are lynching Negroes'." Following the
2024 Russian presidential election, Vladimir Putin gave a speech after the close of voting on March 17. He acknowledged the February 2024 death of opposition leader
Alexei Navalny, who had been held in a Russian penal colony, but did not comment as to the cause of death or who was ultimately responsible. "As for Mr. Navalnyyes, he passed away. It is always a sad event. And there were other cases when people in prisons passed away. Didn't this happen in the United States? It did, and not once."
Usage by other countries In addition to Soviet Union and its satellites, and later, Russia, similar deflecting arguments related to racism in the United States have been used by a number of politicians, diplomats and state-controlled media from countries whose human rights abuses have been criticized by the United States government, NGOs or citizens. Countries which have been said to use the "Are you lynching Negroes" rhetoric in the early 21st century include
China,
Iran,
Ba'athist Syria, and
North Korea. == Analysis ==