This book draws on the latest scholarship and archival research to examine the story of the Soviet Union and race. It looks at how the Soviet Union's antiracist campaigns attracted interest from Black radicals, activists, and intellectuals and how many of these individuals sought to experience the Soviet Union firsthand because of the Soviet claims to racial egalitarianism and Moscow's stated support for the movements for racial justice and anticolonialism.

Maxim Matusevich places special emphasis on the promises and unresolved dilemmas of Soviet internationalism and official antiracism, as well as their complicated legacy in the post-Soviet period. Black Encounters with the Soviet Union makes extensive use of individual case studies, including luminaries like Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Angela Davis and W.E.B. Du Bois, to identify the points of contact and the inherent tensions between ideological aspirations and the pragmatic demands of foreign policy. Furthermore, the book brings attention to the impact of Soviet antiracism on the Soviet society, where it functioned both as a vehicle of ideological conditioning and, somewhat counterintuitively, of cultural and political subversion.