On December 8, 2010, we buried Leah Oliverovna Golden, a friend of ours and one of the oldest specialists in the history and culture of Africa. From December 1957 to early 1960. she worked in the Africa Department of the Institute of Oriental Studies, and then, with the establishment of the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences, worked there until her retirement. Since the early 1990s, she has taught for several years at Chicago State University. In recent years, she has lived in Moscow. She was very ill.

Lia Oliverovna's works on African music, on the history of African Americans, her book "Africans in Russia", articles about the pan-African movement, about M. Garvey, about W. Dubois, the participation of Africans and African Americans in the activities of the Comintern became famous and were published in many countries. She managed to find in the Caucasus descendants of Africans who moved there from the Ottoman Empire in the XIX century. She wrote screenplays for films, starred in a dozen roles. She has traveled with lectures and reports literally all over our country-up to Kamchatka and Yakutia, Sakhalin, Taimyr, Yamal. Since 1987, she has participated in important conferences in many cities in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa.

She was not only intimately acquainted with Paul Robson and his wife Esland Goode, with William Dubois and his wife Shirley Graham, but also became an unofficial representative of those African-Americans who settled in the USSR. Most often, in this capacity, she communicated with African writers, poets, journalists, musicians, and in fact-with almost all political and public figures of African countries who came to the USSR in the 1950s and early 1970s.

She knew A. N. Tolstoy's family well. She was a close friend of Svetlana Alliluyeva, and saw her off when no one else guessed the fate of this difficult emigration. Alliluyeva brought up Lia in her memoirs under the name "Berta". She called her a connoisseur of Africa and was indignant that Leah was "banned from traveling".

The life and scientific path of Lia Oliverovna was determined by her family. His father, Oliver John Golden, was an African-American who came to the USSR from the United States in the mid-1920s and attended one of the political schools established by the Comintern. Then he returned to America, but at the end of 1931 he organized a group of 16 African-Americans to travel to work in the USSR.

The goal is to help develop cotton growing and share agricultural experience. They were attracted by the Soviet Union's call for assistance in implementing the first five-year plan. To that

but the USSR was filled with cheering slogans of optimism, the country was confident in the future, and the United States was oppressed by the depression of 1929-1933, unemployment, and confusion.

After working in Uzbekistan, many of the newcomers returned to America, but Oliver Golden stayed. Perhaps the nostalgia of his wife, Berta Bialik, played a role - her Jewish family once fled to America from the pogroms in the" pale of settlement", but the desire for Russia, obviously, remained.

They lived in Tashkent - my father taught at the Institute of Water Management, was elected to the Tashkent City Council. My mother taught English at the Institute of Foreign Languages and at the Central Asian University.

Her parents ' stories about the life of African-Americans in America, and then their acquaintance with African-Americans who came to the USSR-this could not but arouse interest in them and their ancestral homeland - Africa. Contrary to many advices and circumstances, Lia Golden, a graduate of Tashkent high school, entered the faculty of Moscow State University. After receiving her diploma, her new Moscow life began, which for many years was connected with African studies.

My father died in 1940, my mother-in 1985. Of course, I wanted to see distant relatives. The opportunity appeared only in the years of perestroika, when Lia Oliverovna finally became an "offsite". Both she and her daughter, Elena Hanga, went to America.

Leah had indeed found many relatives. They received her with a bang. The euphoria was so strong that when Leah published a book of memoirs in America, she called it "The Dream of the Future".: "My Long Way Home "(Chicago, 2002).

In fact, a new life has begun. She settled in Chicago and was invited to teach the history and culture of her beloved Africa at the local university. She became involved in the work of international human rights organizations and traveled half the world with her colleagues. Her ebullient nature was once again evident-she continued to fight racism, but now it was often "reverse racism", which she absolutely did not tolerate, no less than the sadly familiar hatred of "blacks". Several times she organized trips of her new colleagues to Russia, introducing them to her country.

Almost the only book of memoirs published by Russian Africanists is a book by Leah Golden. No one else has published such a book of memoirs. So the "Long Road" - to agree or disagree with the characteristics and assessments of its author - is an important testimony to the history of our African studies workshop. This is a testimony to the most interesting people that the author met on her way. And in general-about many decades of our country's life.

By the end of Lia Oliverovna's life, it turned out that the "long way home" was to Russia, to Moscow. Here it ended...

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