"А у вас негров вешают": Советский прием защиты от критики

Soviet catchphrase

"And you are lynching Negroes" ("А у вас негров вешают"; which also means "Yet, in your [country], [they] hang Negroes") is a catchphrase that describes or satirizes Soviet responses to US 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 supposedly erased by state socialism. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the phrase became widespread as a reference to Russian information warfare tactics. The Economist described it as a form of whataboutism that became ubiquitous after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Author Michael Dobson compared it to the idiom the pot calling the kettle black, and called the phrase a "famous example" of tu quoque reasoning. The British liberal political website Open Democracy called the phrase "a prime example of whataboutism".

[[File:Stalin 1945. jpg|thumb|upright|Use of the phrase was common in the Soviet Union during the Joseph Stalin era. 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." 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." 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" ("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 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.

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."

[[File:Krievijas Revīzijas palātas priekšsēdētājs (4187361112). jpg|thumb|upright|Prime Minister of Russia Sergei Stepashin unsuccessfully used the phrase in a joke in a 1999 visit to the National Press Club. [[File:Václav Havel na Václavském náměstí 17. listopadu 2009c (cropped). jpg|thumb|Václav Havel 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 during the Ukrainian crisis, 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'." In 2017, in response to the UK's criticism of the annexation of Crimea, the Russian ambassador to the UN suggested that the UK should first return the Falklands and Gibraltar. 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 Alexey 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."

The 1993 book Exit from Communism, edited by Stephen Richards Graubard, argued that this saying encapsulated an overall divorce from reality: "Perhaps there are and perhaps there are not prison camps in Siberia, perhaps in the United States they do or perhaps they do not lynch blacks  Ultimately it does not matter whether we are for real or just pretending: it is all just part of the story." African American novelist Zora Neale Hurston was a staunch anti communist, and she wrote a 1951 essay titled "Why The Negro Won't Buy Communism" which criticized communist propaganda targeting African Americans.