source.

Back in the 1970s when the Soviet Union was interested in expanding its sphere of influence in African countries, in addition to backing African freedom movements, it brought many African students to study at Russian universities, most notably Patrice Lumumba.

Shubin emphasises the wide spectrum of Soviet support of liberation
movements in Southern Africa, ranging from financial assistance, medical aid, food
and other civilian supplies, to academic education, military and political training in
the USSR and in African countries, the supply of weapons and other war materials,
and the provision of military advisors and specialists and political/diplomatic aid, all
according to the call of circumstance.

As many black students stayed in the Soviet Union because of marriage, they had children on their own or with Russians.  Some American blacks also immigrated to the Soviet Union because they saw it as more equal than the United States before civil rights.

Yelena Khanga is one of Russia’s best-known black citizens. The popular host of a top-rated 1990s chat show about sex — “Pro Eto,” (About That) — she became one of the few black faces regularly seen on Russian television.

Khanga’s grandparents came to the Soviet Union in the 1920s to escape the racism they had endured in the United States as a mixed-race couple.

Despite the official words of both the Soviet and Russian government, blacks and mixed-race citizens of Russia have experienced tremendous amounts of hostility and racism partially because Africans in Russia are so extremely rare and often seen as exotica:

But black skin remains extremely rare in Russia. One estimate says that there are between 40,000 and 70,000 Russians of full or mixed-African heritage.   That distinction has singled many black Russians out for treatment that they say swings between curiosity, at best, and open hostility, at worst.

Grigory Siyatinda, an actor at the Sovremennik Theater in Moscow, grew up as the only black man in his hometown of Tyumen in the 1970s. His experience was that of an object of fascination in an isolated Soviet society where foreigners, and especially black foreigners, were exotic.  “How to put it? It wasn’t racism, what I experienced during my childhood in Tyumen,” Siyatinda says. “I was the only black person in Tyumen — Tyumen is a Siberian city and there were no black-skinned people at all. No one had ever seen one. That’s why there was simply this heightened curiosity toward me. It was heightened so much at times that it crossed over the borders of tact.

Now, with Obama as America’s first black president, some are hopeful within the community that things will change, although the increased rate of attacks on Africans are a dismal sign:

While much of the violence seems to be purely racist, some believe Africans are also targeted as scapegoats for Russian society’s ills and the media is often accused of fostering an image of African students as drug-dealers.

The attacks have turned murderous in recent years. In St Petersburg, three Africans have been killed in suspected race attacks since September.

Sites like Asylum in Bardak report frequent attacks against Africans in Russia and it seems that, with economic hardships from the crash of the oil economy settling in in 2010,racism and attacks will only increase.