And you are lynching Negroes
[3] Lynchings of African Americans were brought up as an embarrassing skeleton in the closet for the US, which the Soviets used as a form of rhetorical ammunition when reproached for their own economic and social failings.
[9] The conservative magazine National Review called it "a bitter Soviet-era punch line",[10] and added "there were a million Cold War variations on the joke".
"[13][14] 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.
2 titled "In a world of crazy fantasy" (Russian: "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.
"[28] 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.
"[29] 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.
"[31] 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.
[38] 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.
[1] 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.
[39] 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.
Writing for The Moscow Times, journalist Allison Quinn posited that coverage of the protests in Ferguson served as an optimal method to distract media from the Ukrainian crisis.
[3] 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.
[6] Russians used the term between themselves so often it became a form of satire, as a ubiquitous rejoinder to all crises dealt with and low quality of life, including purchasing groceries or dealing with road congestion.
[20] 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.
"[6] 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.
[50] 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'.
"[51] 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'.
"[11] Shalev followed up on this analysis in a September 2016 article, writing: "Trump conducts pro-Russian propaganda along the same lines as the old retort 'And You Hang Blacks' with which the Soviets tried to deflect U.S. criticism of their human rights abuses.
[62][63][64][65][66][67] 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 ...
