Russia: We Too Are People

Not since the Trotskyite riots in the 1920s had Moscow seen anything like it. While crowds of Russians watched with amazement, more than 400 African students last week battled Red cops in the streets, inside Red Square itself, right past Nikita Khrushchev's own office window. "Moscow—A Second Alabama," said one crudely lettered sign, in Russian and in English. "Stop Killing Africans," warned another placard.

Mourning Bands. The race riot was touched off by the mysterious death of Edmond Asare-Addo, 29, a second-year medical student from Ghana who was studying at Kalinin Institute, about 100 miles northwest of the capital. On the eve of his marriage to a Russian girl, the student's body was discovered near the railroad tracks of a suburban Moscow station. The Soviet police claimed that Asare-Addo, drunk, had fallen down in the 11 °-below-zero weather and frozen to death. But Ghanaians, who knew that the marriage was fiercely opposed by the girl's Russian friends, insisted that the youth was stabbed below the chin and tossed into the snow.

Quickly swinging into action, students at Patrice Lumumba Friendship University spread the word to other Africans in Leningrad, Kalinin, and as far away as Odessa and Tashkent. The message: We march on the Kremlin. Wearing the traditional red mourning band of Ghana around their heads, the students gathered before the Ghana embassy on a street a mile from Red Square. "No trouble," shouted their leaders as the procession trooped off, but at the end of the street, there was plenty.

Soviet police had barred the way with trucks and cars. When the cops refused to budge, the crowd began rocking a police car, intending to flip it over. Anxious to avoid bloodshed, and outnumbered 100 to 1, the police gave way after a brief scuffle. As English-speaking Russian youths—members of the Young Communist League—blocked the view from Western photographers, the students regrouped, marched through the heart of Moscow singing freedom songs. But the police regrouped too, and near Red Square, officials commandeered more trucks to block the entrance. Loudspeakers blared "Entry to Red Square is closed," but the Africans squeezed through a space between two trucks; as two students dropped a policeman with a flying tackle, other marchers grappled with cops on top of the vehicles.

"It's Natural." Once again police gave way. The horde raced across Red Square, up an incline not far from Nikita's window (he was out inspecting an economics exhibition), past Lenin's granite mausoleum, and on toward the historic Spassky Gate that leads to the inner Kremlin grounds. At that moment the huge iron gates clanged shut. Using sound trucks, the police pleaded with the students to disperse, but for two more hours they argued and jostled with police. Ogling the demonstration were thousands of Russians, who watched from the street and from the windows of GUM, the big state-owned department store, until employees curtained off the uncomradely scene.