I remember a while ago watching a movie, I think it was K-19 the Widowmaker, and seeing sailors watching a propaganda movie about Black Americans. I wasn't sure if it was accurate, but it had me thinking in what ways was the US's history of racial problems used a propaganda.
thanks.
edit: I spelled a word wrong.
That section of the movie is very accurate (unlike Harrison Ford's accent). Early in its inception, the USSR fitted in American race relations within its propaganda. Much of the initial impetus came from black American communists who informed the USSR about Jim Crow in the 1920s and helped provide the Bolsheviks with a degree of familiarity with the issue. American racism first became particularly prominent in Soviet propaganda between 1928-33 as a way to distinguish the model society Stalinism was allegedly creating and the advanced capitalist West. Jim Crow was an emblematic sign of capitalism's moral decal for Soviet propagandists prior to he advent of the Third Reich
Here's a crude (both in animation and content) 1933 Soviet cartoon showing how capitalist exploitation manifests itself in various forms, including a ridiculous black priest who looks more like an Orthodox clergyman.
The Soviets would pick up on Jim Crow again during the Cold War. As early as 1946, the US embassy in Moscow reported that the Soviet press was emphasizing lynchings in its news reports on the US (often garnered from US progressive papers). The US's race problems (real or exaggerated) became a consistent theme of Soviet propaganda until the end of the USSR.
It's also important to observe that just because the government of the USSR took a stance against Jim Crow does not necessarily imply that its society or leadership was absent of racist sentiments. Much of this propaganda was about positioning the USSR as the protector of marginalized racial groups, which was a highly paternalistic attitude. The propaganda also was directed not only at global public opinion, but domestic audiences as well; it was a way of saying that American prosperity had a baleful price.
Sources
Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Roman, Meredith L. Opposing Jim Crow African Americans and the Soviet Indictment of U.S. Racism, 1928-1937. Lincoln: UNP - Nebraska, 2012.