James Lloydovich Patterson, the son of a Black American set designer and a Ukrainian artist who became the poster child for racial unity in the Soviet Union after appearing as a child in a popular 1936 propaganda film, died on May 22 in Washington, D.C. He was 91.
His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by Amy Ballard, a close friend.
At 3 years old, Mr. Patterson was catapulted to national fame in the U.S.S.R. for his emotive performance in “Circus,” in which he played Jimmy, the lovable Black son of a white singer, an outcast from American society, who joins a circus troupe in Moscow.
The film, directed by Grigori Aleksandrov and released in the early days of Stalin’s Great Purge, combined comedy and satire with music and caricature. It explicitly took aim at racism in the United States and fascism abroad — once she is in Moscow, Jimmy’s mother is blackmailed by her conniving German theater agent — while presenting the U.S.S.R. as a haven of internationalism. Richard Stites, a historian of Russian culture, wrote in his book “Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900” (1992) that “Circus” was “in many ways the ultimate Stalinist film.”
The film’s national ubiquity, and Mr. Patterson’s unique role in it, buoyed his profile decades later when he became a naval officer and a poet, writing on topics including Soviet workers, race and his travels abroad. He often gave poetry readings as an opening act for Lyubov Orlova, the famed singer and actress who had played his mother in “Circus.”
Even at the height of his literary career, Mr. Patterson remained the Soviet public’s “little Jimmy.” At poetry readings, audiences often begged him for stories about his time on set.
His writings, which criticized America’s predilection for violence and extolled the virtues of the U.S.S.R., reinforced his reputation as a champion of racial tolerance. Representing the Soviet Union at the 1957 World Festival of Youth in Moscow and in writer delegations on trips across Africa, Mr. Patterson was touted as a testament to the state’s ideals of brotherhood and internationalism.
He was, in some respects, a product of the same national image he was deployed to project.
James Lloydovich Patterson was born on July 17, 1933, in Moscow. His mother, Vera Aralova, was a Ukrainian painter and theatrical set designer. His father, Lloyd Patterson, was a radio broadcaster from the Bronx who also did set design.
His father arrived in Moscow in 1932 as part of a group of 22 Black Americans — including Langston Hughes and the actor Wayland Rudd — to work on a film about American racism; his job was paperhanger. The film was never made, but he stayed and married Ms. Aralova several months later. They had three children and worked together on designing theater sets and decorating Moscow’s streets for the 1933 May Day parade.
By then, a small contingent of Black Americans had set roots in the Soviet Union, some for political reasons, some for work, others because of the country’s reputation for being without racism. Mr. Hughes, as well as artists like Paul Robeson, became family friends of the Pattersons and frequent visitors to their home.
In 1941, Lloyd Patterson sent his family to Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), near Siberia, while he remained in Moscow, working as an English-language radio host for the Soviet state as World War II intensified. He died later that year from complications of a concussion he sustained from a German aerial bombing.
In 1943, James and his mother returned to Moscow, where he attended the Nakhimov Naval School in Riga, Latvia, and the K.E. Voroshilov Naval Academy in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), graduating in 1955. He was eventually promoted to the rank of captain-lieutenant and served in the Soviet Navy until 1957, when he enrolled in the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute. After graduating in 1962, he published his first poetry collection, “Russia and Africa.” He joined the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1967.
Mr. Patterson developed a lifelong identification with the celebrated 19th-century poet Alexander Pushkin because of their shared African heritage; a 1992 article in National Geographic noted that he kept a Pushkin death mask in his home.
As an establishment poet, Mr. Patterson wrote in a socialist realist style characterized by “simply stated thoughts and ideas, transparent language, traditional meter and rhyme, sparing use of metaphors, avoidance of more complex tropes,” Rimgaila Salys, a scholar of Soviet literature at the University of Colorado, wrote in the journal The Russian Review in 2016.
In “Lullaby,” a poem translated by Sasha Razor, he recalled childhood memories from “Circus”:
I cupped a handful of scattered stars
— three years old, no more than that.
The milk-swept sky seemed drawn to me,
as if we’d made some ancient pact.
There was no fleeing what I’d become. Childhood dissolved among the clouds.
I soared, a laughing child, upheld by Soviet arms both strong and proud.
Mr. Patterson published nine books of poetry and prose in Russian, as well as picture books illustrated by his mother, who also worked as a shoe designer and manager of Moscow’s House of Fashion. His marriage to Irina Tolokonnikova in the late 1980s ended in divorce in 1994. He moved to the United States with his mother shortly after.
Settling in Washington, Mr. Patterson contributed to small poetry publications, spoke at cultural events and arranged showcases for his mother’s paintings. “Chronicle of the Left Hand,” his only book to appear in English, was published in 2022; translated by Jennifer E. Sunseri, it recounts the life of his grandmother Margaret Glascoe, a formerly enslaved sharecropper in Virginia, as her son, Lloyd, moved to the U.S.S.R.
Mr. Patterson’s creative output dwindled after his mother died in 2001. His younger brother Lloyd Jr. died in 1961; another younger brother, Tom, died in 2023. No immediate family members survive.
Though he had alluded to encountering racial prejudice in his poetry, Mr. Patterson maintained that he was never personally discriminated against, either in the Soviet Union or in the United States.
In a 2020 interview with The Los Angeles Review of Books, he joked about the political circumstances that facilitated his pivot to literature.
“If Stalin hadn’t died back in 1953, I would probably have become a high-ranking naval officer,” he said. “But Stalin died, and I became a poet, unfortunately.”
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