Can you elaborate, and explain why the author's skin tone is relevant? Unless I'm very mistaken, Russian people are mostly very fair-skinned...
I'm not saying the rest of the criticism is right or wrong, but that last bit was uncalled for.
I'm not saying the rest of the criticism is right or wrong, but that last bit was uncalled for.
The episode I remember the most was one when an American delegation went to Moscow (IIRC this was in the sixties, remember, the book is fiction), anyway, in the book the American delegation is comprised by you know, normal people, students and so on. The Soviet delegation is comprised by political-quasi-robots zealots a-la Ivan Drago. One of the members of the American delegation is a black woman, a fact the "Soviet zealots" take as an opportunity to claim that under capitalism racism exists in America. Well, what you do know, the black character proceeds to educate them and tell them they are very well mistaken because black Americans enjoy the same opportunities as white Americans.
This seemed to me very very weird, even if this was a work of fiction. No person of color in their right mind would have that opinion, even less in the 1960s. So I was interested to check who the author was and why they wrote such an unbelievable character. He is a white English guy. Surprise, surprise. The fact he minimized or discarded the huge challenges black Americans faced and still face, just to score a cheap political point in a work of fiction was disgusting to me.
That is to say, what she said may not have even sounded truthful to herself, but it is plausible that it would be said in that context.