Draft:Lily Golden

Liya Oliverovna Golden (18 July 1934 – 6 December 2010) was a Soviet and Russian historian and civil rights advocate.

Biography
Liya Oliverovna Golden was born on 18 July 1934 in Tashkent, Uzbek SSR. Her father Oliver Golden was an African-American agronomist from the Southern United States, and her mother Bertha ( Bialek) was a Polish Jewish immigrant to the United States. After being unable to return to their native United States alongside her mother due to anti-Black racism and World War II, Golden remained in the Uzbek SSR, where she played tennis for the national team and was the 1948 national champion. She was educated at the Tashkent Conservatory, becoming a locally-renowned pianist. Following the encouragement of actor Wayland Rudd, she majored in African-American history at Moscow State University, where she became their first Black student.

Golden began working at the Oriental Institute's African studies department, before becoming part of the newly-inaugurated Institute for African Studies (Russia) in 1958 and eventually serving as acting director. Although her academic research was ideologically controlled, she did some research on Abkhazians of African descent and contemporary black music. In addition to her work on African music and the African diaspora of the Soviet Union, she also released an autobiography, My Long Journey Home (2003).

In 1960, she married Prime Minister of Zanzibar Abdullah Kassim Hanga, whom she had met during the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957; Their daughter, journalist Yelena Khanga, was born in 1962, and the couple remained married until Hanga's execution in 1968. She later married Boris Yagovlev, a Vladimir Lenin expert.

Golden worked on three Soviet documentaries about the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal in 1966 with Soviet cameraman Georgy Serov.

In 1987, amidst Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika reforms, Golden visited the United States to find relatives at the invitation of Center for Citizen Initiatives founder Sharon Tennison. She later moved to the country the next year, remaining there until 2003. She began working at Chicago State University in 1992, becoming a distinguished scholar-in-residence there.

Inspired by her multiethnic heritage, she became an advocate for racial equality while living in the United States, and she was known to be a "tower of strength, hope and source of inspiration" for Afro-Russians, especially with the rise of racism after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and for her advancements in Russia's relations with Africa. She also was a United Nations representative for such NGOs as the Center for Citizen Initiatives was the founder of the Golden Foundation of Russian-African Culture.

Golden died in Moscow on 6 December 2010. In 2024, Kester Kenn Klomegah said that Golden "has a special place in history of the relations between Russia and Africa" and that her works are "still considered as foundations to multifaceted relations from the Soviet times until today".

External Resources

 * Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family 1865-1992. By Yelena Khanga with Susan Jacoby.