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Freedom Yacht anyone

• Thread starter Fergus
• Start date 10 Aug 2009
• 10 Aug 2009

Interesting design - unstayed rig. Does anyone have experience sailing one? Wonder why the design didn't catch on?  

Lord High Commander of Upper Broughton and Gunthor

unstayed rig= unnatural.  

Twister_Ken

Well-known member.

"Wonder why the design didn't catch on?" It did. On Toppers. On Lasers. On Finns. On sailboards. Otherwise, put it down to the innate conservatism of cruising sailors, and the need for offshore racers to have lots of sails and strings and things to play with.  

Fergus said: Interesting design - unstayed rig. Does anyone have experience sailing one? Wonder why the design didn't catch on? Click to expand...

bilbobaggins

David_jersey.

AntarcticPilot

There were two Freedom yachts at the Junk Rig Warsash rally earlier this summer. Both had been converted to jumk rig, and both seemed to go pretty quickly for cruising boats. However... on one boat one of the carbon fibre masts snapped in what was only F4 at most. Presumably it had been damaged in some way earlier and this is when it chose to let go.  

I sail a Freedom 39 quite frequently so I guess I have some practical knowledge of the rig. The one I sail is a schooner with conventional mast track and booms rather than wishbone booms and sleeve type sails. The carbon masts are as tough as old boots and dont degrade with UV since they are painted with twin pack poly. The boat is very definitely a cruiser and doesnt point to wind better than about 40 deg. Tacking obviously is a doddle with no foresail. Going down wind you have two sails to worry about jibing and the forward mast is right in the bow so a special jibe control is needed. Sail area gives decent downwind performance. One minor advantages of the unstayed rig is the absence of wind noise. If, like me, you are no hero one of the worst things about heavy weather is wind howl. As against that there isnt much to hold onto moving about the deck. Would I have one? The answer is no, but thats because I want the sort of boat that performs well round the cans. And if I went long term cruising again I would always chose a cat. So personally I dont see much use for a heavy cruising mono.  

I know the owner of a Freedom 35, she is a lady of certain years, who sails it single handed, and goes further in it than most well crewed cruisers. To me it seems a bit cramped below, but then I am used to a larger modern boat. As far as I can tell it is a very good design for short handed sailing, with an easily handled twin sail wishbone rig. As for stress on the mast base, I reckon an Aerorig puts a lot more strain there.  

Freedom Yachts As you can guess, I am biased. Great cruising boat.Mine has two fully battened sails on conventional booms which was a later evolvement from the wrap around wishbone rigs. Masts have a "mud coat" covering the carbon and then awlgrip, so UV not a problem. They are designed to flex upto 1 mtr. Obviously in any blow the fully reefed sail only reaches about 1/3rd up the mast, which reduces any flexing, so well within this design limit. . Where it is very useful is in ordinary sailing conditions as you can keep more sail on as if a gust happens, the top of the mast "bends" away and thus spills some of the effort which would otherwise be translated in a conventionally rigged boat into excessive healing. Freedom owners like to compare the advanced design of the Freedom rig to those of airplanes. You dont see many with wires holding up the wings! The quality of the build is impressive and I have no qualms regarding the deck support through which the mast pass through. They were designed to take the loads. Surprisingly the 44 is quite light. The design weight is 10 tons, probably nearer 12 when tanked up for cruising. Where it really comes into its own is when sailing shorthanded as tacking is a doddle. Only the main needs a winch when close hauled, otherwise both sails can be trimmed by hand. Not bad for 840sq ft. Non of that genoa grunting here! HOW DOES SHE GO TO WINDWARD? This is a common question after someone has made sufficiently appreciative noises about the boat that they think they can now ask the slightly pointed question which they have been dying to ask from the beginning. To be truthful, it is OK. It is not up to a modern fast cruiser but is quite acceptable. I have “raced” against others and hard on the wind she achieves a similar track to a cruising ketch of her age. But where the fun starts, is anything slightly off the wind. Here the combination of the unstayed masts and sea kindly hull shape ensures a fast and extremely dry ride. The sails have an extensive roach which makes her very powerful but at the same time, not threatening. Because of the give in the masts, she can carry full sail in conditions where others are reefing. She also can carry a very large mizzen staysail, which makes her invincible in the right conditions : we won with 2 crew, a local cross channel race with about 50 entrants, much to the disgust of the second place, a brand new Dufor 40 in full racing trim and hairy arsed crew. Very satisfying! . Internally the dimensions are less than more modern boats of a similar length, but still very comfortable. This shape translates into a very sea kindly hull which is comfortable in all but the most horrid conditions, which we try to miss anyway. There were only 26 44 footers built in America, and they are therefore rare in Europe. The 39 pilothouse is popular over here. The 35 is underrated and you can pick them up cheaply and they offer a lot of boat for your money. If i could only work out how to post photos I would put some up to prove my point that they are great boats!  

Sailed my mates 39 quite a bit and great off the wind but as soon as you tried to point the mast bend affected sail shape and pointing was not good. For some reason my wife always threw up on board yet she managed 2 years on my Jeanneau and never felt sick. Oh and if a boat is rafted outboard of you wait for the large thump in the middle of the night as the drunks come back and reach for your stays as they clamber over you - except you haven't got any!!!! Mind you there was this quick on in this years Bequia easter regatta who won his division and had all sorts of go faster kit - between mast spinnakers, tiny jibs etc so they can work.  

we owned a freedom 35 centerboard version for several years with the wishbone rig- the carbon masts were great but some older ones used to have alloy masts which are not as good from what i hear and have been known to break - performance wise - as a 35' cruiser overall good - offwind superb - hard on the wind kept up with similar sized boats in general - one well known and well sailed f35 used to claim that compared to the then popular sigma 33 (and bear in mind the freedom 35 was only 33 plus a bowsprit) he could be mid fleet upwind and romp all over them downwind for us we found the accom good - great forecabin and very useable twin berth aft cabin - ability to dry out with legs great and we liked the individuality of the boat compared to AWB (including our current one) the negatives saloon is cosy with all seating arranged on one side of centreboard case wheel can be heavy - bluntly for us too heavy hoisting sails was hard work but once up effortless manouvering under power in tight areas could be challenging - they are not like fin and spade modern boats !!  

phantomlady

Our mate has a Freedom 40. Sails like a pig - cant hardly go to windward. Steerings very 'wooly' too.  

Sails like a pig and the steering is woolly? Sounds like you're mixing up animals.  

fishermantwo

Active member.

phantomlady said: Our mate has a Freedom 40. Sails like a pig - cant hardly go to windward. Steerings very 'wooly' too. Click to expand...

• 11 Aug 2009

Freedom Yachts re Fergus You have highlighted one of the weaknesses of this otherwise excellent forum; you tend to get lots of uninformed opinions and often, too little fact. And with a couple of exceptions, most of your Freedom responses are uninformed and consequently misleading. If you want some 'sensible' information re Freedoms and the 35 in particular, send a post to JOHNOO, he and I have raced one extensively and can claim knowledge as opposed to mere opinion.  

bilbobaggins said: Most yotties are quite conservative. P'rhaps that's why the Bermudan rig - which is quite a long way from the most efficient, on any point of sail - still exists in tens of thousands. Click to expand...

richardgooderick

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Freedom 35/36/38 vs Pearson 36-2/38

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CardiacPaul owned a Freedom IIRC. He'd be a good one to PM about this.  

I don't know diddly about the 35-38 ft ones. I had a 33 cat-ketch. I do know they were Hoyt designs and the ones built by TPI have very good quality, great gelcoat and fittings. TPI made a stack full of boats, including J/boat. (be a bit careful about the contract (europe) built ones, can't vouch for the same build quality.) Most of the carbon fiber rigs have had the heavy wrap around sails replaced with a more conventional track system, as long as it was installed professionally, you should have no worries. For what its worth, I never had any problems with pointing at all. I think that was far overblown. (pun intended?)  

Freedom I'm owner of freedom 28 Cat Ketch. While searching for my boat I looked at number of Freedom 30/32 sloops. Quality of constructions is good. Rig is simple. I have centerboard model and I have no problem with pointing at all. I can tack through 90. Cat ketch is "go anywhere" model. I believe that Freedom "Cat sloop" is even simpler and easy to sail and better performer. Boat is comfortable. They are old boats. They are balsa cored boats, so there is always possible problem with water penetration.. If you like Freedom, you can also look at "Nonsuch" models. I believe Nonsuch is ultimate coastal cruiser  

CrazyRu said: If you like Freedom, you can also look at "Nonsuch" models. I believe Nonsuch is ultimate coastal cruiser Click to expand...

From what I've heard the freedoms are great in every aspect of coastal cruising, except for pointing. I remember my friend who has one using the word "flogging" to describe the upwind sailing (a little frustrated). I heard the biggest problem isn't so much the size of the mast as it is the inevitable bending and spilling of air with the bigger sticks. Overall they are great boats and on top of great off wind performance they are comfortable and fun. Definitely check them out.  

Sailed a Freedom 35 for a week in the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior. We found she performed really great on anything from a beam reach aft to dead downwind. Anything forward of the beam and she lost her strength, considerably more the farther forward the wind was. Down below the F35 is very comfortable. Overall, the build quality and finish work appeared very good. Superior Charters had that boat, and I would assume it is still in their charter inventory (when they go back in the water up there, of course...). Might be a good way to really get a feel for one.  

A freind of mine has had a 35 since new. I've gone with him from Jax to Bahamas. As stated above , it sails much better off the wind than up wind.The construction is good, no blisters, gel coat has held up well. He did have to replace all his tanks, the fuel and holding tanks coroded ( ? stray electrical current) and the plastic watertank cracked. You will need an electric winch to raise the main.  

Ed, Before I bought my P-33-2, I spent a couple of years lurking on Sailnet email lists for a number of boat manufacturers -- Sabre, Tartan, Island Packet, Freedom (and some others I forget.) You can learn a lot by sitting back and watching the email traffic as people write in about problems, solutions, projects, good things, bad things, etc. Eventually you get a pretty good feel for the quality of the boats and for potential problems. The one thing that stuck with me about Freedom's and their carbon fiber masts is that they can be damaged (stuck by lightening for example) and not really show any damage on the exterior. One fellow wrote in with a story about buying a used Freedom that supposedly had cosmetic cracks in the mast. Well, after he bought the boat the mast came down in very benign conditions and he was stuck. As I recall, the mast had been struck by lightening but at the time it appeared to have survived the event unsacthed. No factory support of course. and replacing a carbon fiber mast is EXPENSIVE. I mention this not to denigrate Freedoms because they are very good boats. I have talked to a number owners who love their boats and would own nothing else. But if you decide to go with a Freedom, and if the surveyor finds "cosmetic" cracks in the mast -- think twice.  

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Freedom Yachts

• Thread starter RW Rawles
• Start date Feb 18, 2007
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• Other Sailboats

Reaching out to make contact!  

Barnacle Bill

What do you want? I don't think anyone understands what you want.  

Capt Ron;-)

Santa Barbara Yacht Club? Met a gentleman, not many left, in La Paz last year. He had a nice Freedom 40 methinks, beautiful yacht too. He could run a small jib, and I think he had a wing? keel...He was heading back to Santa Barbara after we left. I've been into Santa Barbara, can't remember the fellows name?Aye mates...the sun be oa'r the yard-arm sumplace...  

2005 not 06 Memorie is going...had to be the previous year...too much Appletons 151 down the hatch...';-)  

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• Sailboat Guide
• Freedom Yachts

Founded by Gary Hoyt. Most feature unstayed cat, or cat ketch rigs. The boats were built by Tillotson Pearson Inc.

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29 sailboats built by Freedom Yachts

Freedom 40 AC

Freedom 45 AC

Freedom 40/40

Freedom 21 Slp

Freedom 28 (Mull)

Freedom 39 Pilot House

Freedom 40 CC

Freedom 32-2.

Freedom 28 Cat Ketch

Pierce arrow 31.

Freedom 24 (Tripp)

Freedom 44 (Cat Ketch)

Freedom 35 Cat Ketch

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Moscow Boat Tour

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Description

See all the gems of historical and cultural center of the capital in short time and without traffic jams or tiresome walking.

Depending on the itinerary and duration of the Moscow River boat trip, the tour can be 3 or 5 hours.

Highlights of the tour

• St Basil’s Cathedral;
• Stalin skyscraper on Kotelnicheskaya (Tinkers) embankment;
• The Kremlin;
• “House on the Embankment” Stalin skyscraper;
• Monument to Peter I;
• The Central House of Artists;
• Christ the Savior Cathedral;
• Gorky Park;
• Moscow State University;
• Russian Academy of Sciences;
• Luzhniki stadium;
• Novodevichy Monastery;
• Kiev railway station;
• Europe Square;
• Moscow City Hall;
• Government House;
• Expocentre Exhibition Complex;
• and other famous sights.

You will learn about the different epochs of the city from the foundation in 1147 till Soviet times of 20 th  century.

Moscow River

Moskva river has the form of a snake and is the main waterway of Moscow, consisting of a cascade of reservoirs. Within the city, Moskva river is 80 km long, 120 m - 200 m wide and up to 14 m deep. The narrowest part of the river is the Kremlin area in the city center, and the most extensive is around the Luzhniki Stadium in the south. 

Bridges in Moscow

Undoubtedly, bridges and embankments are among the most scenic spots and main attractions of Moscow. Plus, they are so romantic.

• Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge –  Great Stone Bridge –  is the main bridge of Moscow . The first stone bridge was constructed here in the 17th century.
• Patriarshy Bridge  is one of the youngest pedestrian bridges, built in 2004. The bridge connects the iconic Christ the Saviour Cathedral with funky Bersenevskaya embankment, extremely popular place among locals for its trendy art galleries, cafes and panoramic views. Patriarshy Bridge used to be a shooting location for ex-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's New Year speech to the nation.
• Borodinsky Bridge,  erected in honor of the 100th anniversary of the glorious victory in the Battle of Borodino (which every Russian kid knows about), a fierce legendary battle during the Russo-French war of 1812.
• Bagration Bridge  one of the  pedestrian bridges with most picturesque views of the Moskva River with its numerous upper-level observation platforms. The bridge was erected to celebrate the 850th anniversary of Moscow city in 1997.
• Krymsky Bridge  used to be in Top 5 Europe’s longest bridges some 100 years ago. The bridge got its name after the ancient Krymsky ford which Crimean Tartars used to invade Moscow in the 16 th  century.

Embankments of Moscow

Moscow river boats 37 embankments, the most popular being Kremlevskaya, Sofiyskaya, Pushkinskaya, Vorobyovskaya and Kolomenskaya.

You can get the most spectacular views of the Kremlin from  Kremlevskaya and Sofiyskaya embankments.

• Pushkinkaya embankment  is the most romantic in Moscow. It meanders along Gorky Park and Neskuchnyi garden and is rich for all kinds of entertainment as well as cozy nooks, including Olivkovy beach, the famous Zeleny theater as well as a pier for river cruisers.
• Vorobyevskaya embankment  is part of Sparrow Hills nature reserve. This place opens a beautiful panorama of the river and city from the observation deck and is considered to be the place for taking serious decisions in life.
• Embankment in Kolomenskoye  Museum-Reserve has a special charm due to its peculiar geographical relief. The boat trip around Kolomenskoye would be the most peaceful in your life.
• Taras Shevchenko embankment  is popular among photographers for its modern Moscow City skyscrapers. Highly recommended for your night boat trip.
• Embankments of Moscow are the pride of the capital. A distinctive feature of each of the promenades is its architecture and beautiful views. In addition, almost all the embankments of Moscow have a rich history and a lot of notable buildings.

Different epochs

Taking a walk along the Moskva River by boat, you will witness the architecture of Moscow from different eras and styles. Archaeological studies indicate that already in the XI century there stood a fortified settlement on Borovitsky hill, which is now called the Kremlin. Little fortress could not accommodate all the residents of the rapidly growing city, and the Grand Duke ordered the construction of a new Kremlin, larger than the former.

Boat trip around Kolomenskoe Park

Moscow river boat trip starts from the pier Klenovy (Maple) Boulevard and provides reat views of Nicholas Perervinsky monastery.

Nicholas Perervinsky monastery was founded at the time of the Battle of Kulikov (1380). The monastery, got its name from the surrounding area – “Pererva”, which can be translated like “tear off” and because of the location –  here it abruptly changed its course, turning to Kolomna, standing on the opposite bank.

Nowadays Kolomenskoye is State Art, Historical, Architectural and Natural Landscape Museum-Reserve, which doors are open to everyone who wants to get in touch with the ancient history of Russia.

Take a break from the big city hustle in the shady parks and gardens of the Kolomenskoe Museum-Reserve. Don’t miss a wonderful Church of the Ascension and Tsar Alexey’s Palace in Kolomenskoye!

Monasteries and temples

• Novospassky Monastery
• Founded in the 13th century on the site where now is located the Danilovsky monastery. After a few decades, in 1330, Ivan Kalita moved the monastery onto the Borovitskii hill of the Kremlin. However, in the 15th century, Spassky Monastery again moved, this time to a more spacious place on Krasnoholmskaya waterfront.
• Church of St. Nicholas in Zayaitskom
• Erected in the middle of the XVIII century in baroque style. The building survived after the 1812 fire, but the utensils were destoyed. Parishioners collected donations and restored the temple on their own. In Soviet times, it was closed and re-opened only in 1992.
• Cathedral of Christ the Savior
• The church was originally erected in honor of the victory over Napoleon and was being under construction for long 44 years. Notoriously demolished in 1937 to be a giant swimming pool under open sky. The current building was constructed in 1990s. It is the tallest and one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world.
• The temple was built in 1679-82, during the reign of Tsar Fedor Alekseevich, in late Muscovite Baroque style and can be characterized as bonfire temple. Each gable is a symbol of a heavenly fire.
• Novodevichy Convent
• The most famous concent and monastery in Moscow, presumably founded in 1524. Novodevichy’s status has always been high among other monasteries, it was in this monastery where the women of the royal blood, the wives of Tsars and local rulers of Moscow were kept in prison as nuns.
• St. Andrew’s church  (male acts as Compound Patriarch of Moscow)
• St. Andrew’s church stands right on the slopes of the Sparrow Hills, on the way down to the Moskva River, on the territory of the Nature Reserve “Sparrow Hills”. The monastery is small in size but is very cozy. It’s situated in a quiet courtyard surrounded by temples, fruit trees and flowers.

What you get:

• + A friend in Moscow.
• + Private & customized Moscow river cruise.
• + An exciting pastime, not just boring history lessons.
• + An authentic experience of local life.
• + Flexibility: changes can be made at any time to suit individual preferences.
• + Amazing deals for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the very best cafes & restaurants. Discounts on weekdays (Mon-Fri).
• + A photo session amongst spectacular Moscow scenery that can be treasured for a lifetime.
• + Good value for souvenirs, taxis, and hotels.
• + Expert advice on what to do, where to go, and how to make the most of your time in Moscow.

Write your review

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Check out Moscow’s NEW electric river trams (PHOTOS)

Water transportation has become another sector for the eco-friendly improvements the Moscow government is implementing. And it means business. On July 15, 2021, on the dock of Moscow’s ‘Zaryadye’ park, mayor Sergey Sobyanin was shown the first model of the upcoming river cruise boat.

The model of the electrical boat with panoramic windows measures 22 meters in length. The river tram - as Muscovites call them - has a passenger capacity of 42, including two disabled seats. The trams will also get cutting edge info panels, USB docking stations, Wi-Fi, spaces for scooters and bicycles, as well as chairs and desks for working on the go. The boats will be available all year round, according to ‘Mosgortrans’, the regional transport agency. 

Passengers will be able to pay with their ‘Troika’ public transport card, credit cards or bank cards. 

The main clientele targeted are people living in Moscow’s river districts - the upcoming trams will shorten their travel time in comparison to buses and other transportation by five times, Mosgortrans stated. 

As the river trams are being rolled out, Moscow docks will also see mini-stations, some of which will also be outfitted with charging docks for speed-charging the boats.  

Moscow is set to announce the start of the tender for construction and supply in September 2021. The first trams are scheduled to launch in June 2022 on two routes - from Kievskaya Station, through Moscow City, into Fili; and from ZIL to Pechatniki. 

“Two full-scale routes will be created in 2022-2023, serviced by 20 river trams and a number of river stations. We’ll continue to develop them further if they prove to be popular with the citizens,” the Moscow mayor said .

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A Black Communist’s Disappearance in Stalin’s Russia

By Joshua Yaffa

In the spring of 1936, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, an African American man from Dallas, Texas, vanished in Moscow. He had lived in the Soviet Union for nearly a decade, most recently with his wife, Marina, a Russian Jewish chemist, in a cramped apartment around the corner from the Central Telegraph building. By then, a half-dozen African Americans had settled in Moscow permanently. Even among them, Fort-Whiteman, who was forty-six, was a striking sight. He wore knee-high boots, a black leather cap, and a belted long shirt in the style of Bolshevik commissars. Homer Smith, a Black journalist from Minneapolis and Fort-Whiteman’s close friend in Moscow, later wrote, “He had adopted the practice of many Russian Communists of shaving his head, and with his finely chiseled nose set into a V-shaped face he resembled a Buddhist monk.”

Nearly two decades had passed since the Bolshevik Revolution established the world’s first Communist state, a society that promised equality and dignity for workers and peasants. In the Soviet Union, racial prejudice was considered the result of capitalistic exploitation, and, for the Kremlin, countering racism became a question of geopolitical P.R. Throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties, dozens of Black activists and intellectuals passed through Moscow. Wherever they went, Russians would give up their place in line, or their seat on a train—a practice that an N.A.A.C.P. leader called an “almost embarrassing courtesy.” In 1931, after the so-called Scottsboro Boys—nine Black teen-agers falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama—were put on trial, the American Communist Party provided pro-bono legal defense, and rallies in their support were held in dozens of cities across the Soviet Union. Two years later, Paul Robeson, the singer, actor, and activist, visited Moscow and remarked, “Here, for the first time in my life, I walk in full human dignity.”

Homer Smith eventually published a memoir, “Black Man in Red Russia,” in which he described Fort-Whiteman as one of the “early Negro pilgrims who journeyed to Moscow to worship at the ‘Kaaba’ of Communism.” Fort-Whiteman, Smith went on, was a “dyed-in-the-wool Communist dogmatist” who once said that returning to Moscow after a trip to the U.S. felt like coming home.

By the mid-thirties, however, the exuberance of Moscow’s expat community had begun to wane. In 1934, Sergei Kirov, a leading Bolshevik functionary, was shot dead in Leningrad. Joseph Stalin, who had spent the previous decade consolidating power, used the event to justify a campaign of purges targeting the Communist élite. Foreigners, once fêted, became objects of suspicion. “The broom had been sweeping steadily,” Smith, who attended the hearings for a number of high-profile defendants, wrote. “Thousands of lesser victims, I knew, simply disappeared or were liquidated without benefit of trial.”

Fort-Whiteman had become a polarizing figure. He could be pedantic and grandiose, with a penchant for name-dropping. “He did his best to proselytize and indoctrinate,” Smith wrote. Increasingly, Fort-Whiteman came to argue that the Communist Party, in order to win more support among African Americans, must acknowledge that racism, as much as social class, fuelled their plight. For Marxist ideologues, this was heresy.

One day, Smith stopped by Fort-Whiteman’s apartment. He knocked a few times, and finally Marina opened the door. “Is Gospodin Fort-Whiteman at home?” Smith asked, using the Russian honorific. Marina was clearly on edge. “No, he isn’t,” she said. “And I beg you never to come here looking for him again!” From his reporting on the purges, Smith could reasonably assume the worst. He later wrote, “I had been living in Russia long enough to understand the implications.”

Like many African Americans in the early twentieth century, Fort-Whiteman’s life was directly shaped by the atrocities of the antebellum South. His father, Moses Whiteman, was born into slavery on a plantation in South Carolina. Shortly after Reconstruction, he moved to Dallas and married a local girl named Elizabeth Fort. They had a son, Lovett, in 1889, and then a daughter, Hazel. When Fort-Whiteman was around sixteen, he enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute, the historically Black university in Alabama, then led by Booker T. Washington. Moses died a few years later, and Elizabeth and Hazel moved to Harlem. Fort-Whiteman eventually came, too, finding work as a bellhop and moonlighting as an actor in a Black theatre troupe.

In his mid-twenties, he went to Mexico, entering without a passport, and headed for the Yucatán. The Mexican Revolution was under way, with upstart anarchist and socialist movements confronting the wealthy landowning class. By the time Fort-Whiteman returned to Harlem, four years later, in 1917, he was a committed Marxist.

In Russia, it was the year of the October Revolution, in which Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, seized power and declared a dictatorship of the proletariat. In the U.S., the appeal of Communism for many immigrants and ethnic minorities was obvious: few other political philosophies at the time held out the possibility of full equality. “It can be difficult for many who think of the Soviet Union through the lens of Stalinism or the ‘evil empire’ to recognize all it seemed to offer African Americans,” Glenda Gilmore, the author of the 2008 book “Defying Dixie,” a history of the radical roots of the civil-rights movement, told me. “They weren’t delusional but, rather, thinking quite practically.”

Fort-Whiteman enrolled in a six-month course at the Rand School, a socialist training academy operating out of a converted mansion on East Fifteenth Street. He told a reporter from The Messenger , a Black-owned magazine that covered the politics and literature of the Harlem Renaissance, “Socialism offers the only lasting remedy for the economic ills from which humanity is suffering and which weigh so heavily on the colored race.”

In the years that followed, Fort-Whiteman returned to acting and began publishing theatre criticism and short fiction in The Messenger . His stories were richly imagined and often laced with a brash disregard for the era’s racial mores. In “Wild Flowers,” Clarissa, a Northern white woman with “a slight but well-knit figure,” has an affair with Jean, a Black man from the South “of pleasing countenance, and in the early flush of manhood.”Eventually, Clarissa gets pregnant, and she tries to hide the affair by accusing her husband of harboring Black ancestry.

As soldiers returned from the First World War, increased competition for jobs and housing contributed to rising racial tensions in the United States. During the summer of 1919, some twenty-six race riots broke out across the country. In Chicago, a Black teen-age boy who drifted on a raft into a whites-only area of Lake Michigan was attacked with rocks and left to drown by a crowd of white bathers. In the violent aftermath, hundreds of Black businesses and homes on the South Side were destroyed, and nearly forty people were killed.

Fort-Whiteman set off on a speaking tour, in the hope that this nationwide spasm of racist violence, known as the Red Summer, would open up African Americans to his radical message. A labor organizer from Illinois compared him to “a man carrying a flaunting torch through dry grass.” Fort-Whiteman was detained in Youngstown, Ohio, after trying to convince Black laborers to join striking steelworkers. He drew a meagre audience in St. Louis, where the police arrested him, boasting to the local papers that they had busted the “St. Louis Soviet.”

Fort-Whiteman eventually caught the attention of the Bureau of Investigation, soon to become the F.B.I. In February of 1924, an agent named Earl Titus, one of the first African Americans to work at the Bureau, saw Fort-Whiteman speak in Chicago. As Titus wrote in his report, Fort-Whiteman told the crowd that “there is nothing here for the negro, and that until they have a revolution in this country as they have had in other countries, the negro will be the same.” Fort-Whiteman added that he “would like very much to go to Russia.”

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Four months later, at the age of thirty-four, he got his chance: he was selected as a delegate to the Fifth World Congress, the preëminent gathering of the Communist International, to be held that summer in Moscow.

On arrival, Fort-Whiteman and other delegates to the Comintern, as the Communist International was known, were taken to Lenin’s mausoleum, on Red Square. The father of the Revolution had died six months earlier, and his body lay in perpetual state, attracting pilgrims from all over the world. Stalin had been named the head of the Party, but he had not yet solidified power. Bolshevik politics were in a liminal phase, marked by a boisterous debate over the future of Communism. Everything seemed up for grabs, including the Comintern’s policy toward recruiting and organizing African Americans.

During a session devoted to the “national and colonial question,” Fort-Whiteman was given the floor. Stalin was in the audience, along with foreign delegates such as Palmiro Togliatti, a leader of the Italian Communist Party, and Ho Chi Minh, then a young Vietnamese socialist, who had travelled to Moscow on a fake Chinese passport. Fort-Whiteman began by explaining the Great Migration: Blacks were moving north, he said, not only in search of economic opportunity but also as an “expression of the growing revolt of the Negroes against the persecutions and discriminations practiced against them in the South.”

Fort-Whiteman suggested that issues of race and class, in varying and overlapping ways, were responsible for the oppression of African Americans. “The Negroes are not discriminated against as a class but as a race,” he said, seeming to acknowledge that this was a controversial statement. For Communists, he continued, “the Negro problem is a peculiar psychological problem.”

Much of the congress was leisurely. Delegates went boating on the Moscow River and attended a classical-music concert held along the shore. At the end of the three-week event, Fort-Whiteman decided to remain in Moscow. He was invited to enroll as the first African American student at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (K.U.T.V.). White Americans attended the International Lenin School, Moscow’s premier academy for foreigners. But, because Soviet policy deemed African Americans a “colonized” people, they were to study at K.U.T.V., alongside students from China, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere. (Ho Chi Minh was a student there; so, too, was Deng Xiaoping, the future Chinese leader.) Students spent ninety minutes a day on Russian lessons, and the rest of their time reading Communist texts.

That summer, Fort-Whiteman embarked on a tour of the Soviet Union. Gilmore, in her book, recounts that a Cossack division in Ukraine made him an honorary member; in Soviet Turkestan, residents voted to rename their town Whitemansky. The archives of W. E. B. Du Bois contain a letter from Fort-Whiteman, written “from a village deep in the heart of Russia,” in which he describes how the many nationalities of the Soviet Union “live as one large family, look upon one another simply as human beings.” He tells Du Bois of evenings spent with his K.U.T.V. classmates, staging open-air theatrical performances in the forest: “Here life is poetry itself!”

Back in Moscow, Fort-Whiteman settled into his room at the Hotel Lux, where he wrote a number of letters to top Communist officials. I read them in the Comintern archive, held in the building that once housed the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute—a five-story edifice in what is now a posh stretch of central Moscow, across from a Prada boutique. Fort-Whiteman asked Grigory Zinoviev, a powerful Bolshevik and the head of the Comintern, about the possibility of enlisting “the discontented elements of the Negro race in America into the revolutionary movement.” He noted that, though African Americans were the most oppressed group in the United States, American Communist organizations had done little to reach out to them. Even if most Black workers had not read Marx, they had been pushed toward radicalism by the crucible of American racism. The Party, he wrote, must “carry Communist teaching to the great mass of American black workers.”

Fort-Whiteman soon returned to Chicago, where he established the American Negro Labor Congress (A.N.L.C.), a forum for Communists to make their pitch to Black workers. Not long after he arrived, he ran into Oliver Golden, a friend from his student days at the Tuskegee Institute. Golden, who was in his late thirties, worked as a railway porter. Fort-Whiteman was walking down the street in a Russian blouse and boots. Golden later recalled, “I asked him what the hell he was wearing. Had he come off stage and forgotten to change clothes?” Fort-Whiteman said that he had just returned from Russia, and asked if Golden wanted to study in Moscow. Golden remembered, “At first I thought he was kidding, but, man, I would have done anything to get off those dining cars!” A couple of weeks later, Golden was on a boat headed across the Atlantic.

That year, Fort-Whiteman dispatched ten Black students to study at K.U.T.V. “Feel assured that the university will be satisfied with the group of young men and women I am sending,” he wrote to K.U.T.V.’s director. The New York Herald Tribune reported that Fort-Whiteman hoped for his recruits to “do some real upheaving when they come home,” and that he planned to open a K.U.T.V. branch in Harlem with courses such as “Economics of Imperialism” and “History of Communism.” The journalist, clearly alarmed, wrote, “The flame of Bolshevism, kindled by Lenin and threatening at one time to set all Europe ablaze, is being quietly concentrated upon the United States through the instrument of the American Negro.”

Harry Haywood, a child of enslaved parents, who had served in a Black regiment in the First World War, helped Fort-Whiteman organize the American Negro Labor Congress. (His older brother Otto was among the men whom Fort-Whiteman convinced to study at K.U.T.V.) Haywood, in his memoir, “Black Bolshevik,” published in 1978, wrote, of Fort-Whiteman, “There was no doubt that he was a showman. He always seemed to be acting out a part he had chosen for himself.”

On the evening of October 25, 1925, five hundred people assembled in a rented hall on Indiana Avenue, in Chicago, for the A.N.L.C.’s founding convention. The program, which Fort-Whiteman had arranged, quickly went awry. A member of a “Russian ballet” company—actually made up of white American dancers—shocked by all the Black faces in the audience, shouted a racial slur. Someone yelled back, “Throw the cracker bitches out!” The company refused to go on. A Soviet theatre troupe performed a one-act Pushkin play, in Russian. “Of itself, it was undoubtedly interesting,” Haywood noted. “But its relevance to a black workers congress was, to say the least, quite unclear.”

After the convention, Fort-Whiteman mounted a barnstorming tour of industrial cities, inviting press attention wherever he went. In Baltimore, the local African American newspaper wrote, approvingly, “If this is red propaganda, then for God’s sake let all our leaders supply themselves with a pot and a brush and give 12,000,000 colored people in this country a generous coating.” The white press reacted with predictable hysteria. In 1925, an article in Time referred to Fort-Whiteman as the “Reddest of the Blacks.”

Fort-Whiteman never ventured farther south, where the vast majority of African Americans lived. The A.N.L.C.’s recruitment efforts floundered. A Communist Party directive in the Comintern archive notes the failure of Fort-Whiteman’s mission, informing Party members that “all shortcomings in tactics and organization must be frankly brought to light.” One high-ranking Black official in the Workers Party of America declared that the organization ended up “almost completely isolated from the basic masses of the Negro people.”

Fort-Whiteman was removed as head of the A.N.L.C. in 1927. It appeared that his great ambition had failed: he hadn’t convinced many African Americans that socialist revolution was a means for combatting racism, nor had he convinced his Communist brethren in Moscow that African Americans were oppressed based on their race. But Fort-Whiteman wouldn’t let the matter drop.

In an article in the Comintern’s official organ, he wrote that “race hatred on the part of the white masses extends to all classes of the negro race.” This debate about the roles of race and class in the perpetuation of inequality continues among leftist activists and thinkers today. “It was clear then, as it is now, that, in America, race classes you,” Gilmore told me. “Fort-Whiteman and others were talking about which should be fixed first.” If race is a social construct, then an egalitarian revolution could be seen as a means for achieving racial equality, too. But, Gilmore added, Fort-Whiteman had a different notion: “Even as a devoted Communist, he understood that, in America, it always came down to the fact that he was a Black man.”

In the Comintern archive, I read an “editorial note” that Fort-Whiteman’s comrades later attached to his essay, calling his position “very superficial.” Fort-Whiteman, they warned, was “shifting from the Communist to the petty bourgeois nationalist point of view.”

At the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, in the summer of 1928, there was a major debate about how best to agitate for Communist revolution among African Americans. Some people within the Party pushed for recruiting sharecroppers and rural laborers in the South. Fort-Whiteman, who had returned to Moscow as a delegate, argued that it was better to wait out the Great Migration, organizing Black workers once they became urban proletariat in the factories of the North. His position aligned with that of Nikolai Bukharin, the editor of Pravda , who saw capitalism as ascendant; worldwide revolution, Bukharin argued, would have to be deferred. Stalin, of course, disagreed.

But, even as Fort-Whiteman found himself in opposition to the Communist mainstream on the “Negro question,” as Comintern ideologues called it, he was thriving in the Soviet Union. He studied ethnology at Moscow State University and spent a summer in Murmansk, in the Arctic Circle, researching the effects of hydrogen concentration in water on fish metabolism. The Moscow Daily News , an English-language paper, hired him as a contributor. His clips reflect an omnivorous mind, on subjects ranging from early radiation therapies (“The result of this experiment was a 70 per cent cure of cancerous mice”) to the fauna of western Siberia (“The expedition reports the presence of an abundance of elk”). In an interview that Smith conducted for the Chicago Defender , a Black-owned paper, Fort-Whiteman described the Soviet Union as a place where “the Negro is untrammeled by artificial racial restrictions to make a genuine contribution to human culture.”

Along the way, he married Marina, a chemist in her late twenties, although, as Smith recalls, Fort-Whiteman’s Russian was still rudimentary, and Marina’s English wasn’t much better. Soviet authorities opened an Anglo-American school in Moscow, to educate the children of foreign workers; Fort-Whiteman took a job there, as a science teacher. Yevgeny Dolmatovsky, a celebrated poet, wrote a verse about a visit to Fort-Whiteman’s classroom: “The black teacher Whiteman / Leads the lesson. / From in my heart I draw my words / From the deepest reaches within / I see again, and again, and again / You, my Black comrade!”

Fort-Whiteman was eager to mentor the other African Americans living in Moscow. He regularly hosted lunches at his apartment, where he expounded on Marxist theory and boasted about his connections to top Bolsheviks, such as Bukharin and Karl Radek, an Austrian-born Jewish Communist and a former secretary of the Comintern. He also implored his visitors to remain acutely aware of their race. This emphasis on color consciousness, which ran counter not only to reigning Communist theory but also to the everyday experience of being Black in Moscow, was often met with resistance. One of Fort-Whiteman’s guests suggested that, if he enjoyed “going around with a black chip on his shoulder,” he should return to the American South. Smith later wrote, “His Negro guests relished the food and drinks, but the indoctrination dish did not prove as digestible.”

In 1931, a production company financed by the Comintern backed a big-budget movie, “Black and White,” about the American race problem. The film was set in Birmingham, Alabama, and featured Black stokers in steel mills and domestic workers in affluent white households. Fort-Whiteman was enlisted as a screenwriting consultant. A number of aspiring Black actors in the U.S. expressed interest in taking part. Langston Hughes joined on as a writer.

In the early-morning hours of June 14, 1932, twenty-two Black students, teachers, actors, and writers set off from New York, travelling to Germany on the ocean liner Europa, and then by train to Moscow. Fort-Whiteman met them on the platform with a welcome party that included most of the city’s small African American community. As Hughes later recalled, invoking a popular spiritual, “Certainly colored comrade Whiteman didn’t look anything like a motherless chile, a long ways from home .”

The Americans spent the next few weeks dancing at the Metropol Hotel, cavorting with nude bathers along the riverfront, and embarking on love affairs. A member of the company was soon engaged to a Russian woman; Mildred Jones, an art student at the Hampton Institute, in Virginia, was pursued by an official from the Soviet Foreign Ministry. According to Smith, one couple were so engrossed in their rendezvous on a rowboat in the Moscow River that they failed to notice the boat was sinking.

Fort-Whiteman had helped write the first draft of the “Black and White” script. I found a copy at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, where a typewritten note from the esteemed Soviet filmmaker Boris Barnet was attached to the first page. “This picture tries to provide a historical perspective to the narrative of the enslavement of American Negroes, which is part of the general enslavement and exploitation of the capitalist system,” Barnet wrote. “Even if individual events in this picture may seem grotesque or almost incredible, the fault lies not with the author but with the viewer himself, who deliberately closes his eyes to the cruelty of the capitalist system.”

Hughes, put in charge of revising the script, found the draft “improbable to the point of ludicrousness.” He recalled, “I was astonished at what I read. Then I laughed until I cried.” A number of the film’s scenes, including one in which the son of a rich white industrialist asks a Black servant to dance at a party, were “so interwoven with major and minor impossibilities and improbabilities that it would have seemed like a burlesque on the screen.” At one point, a well-heeled capitalist hatches a plot to keep labor unrest at bay, saying, “You see, racial hatred allows us to avoid more serious conflicts.” The workers, however, aren’t having it: “The proletariat does not see racial differences,” one of the union leaders proclaims.

“Black and White” was a dream world of Fort-Whiteman’s making. As Smith put it, “He was a negro intellectual and so steeped in party dogma that he had completely lost touch with America.” Hughes told his Soviet hosts that the script was beyond saving.

In the end, the project fell apart for reasons that had nothing to do with Hughes or Fort-Whiteman. In the autumn of 1933, after years of negotiations, the United States agreed to grant formal diplomatic recognition to the Soviet regime. The agreement, Stalin hoped, would help secure the loans and the foreign machinery needed to realize his Five-Year Plan, an ambitious race to build up industry and modern infrastructure. But in return the Kremlin was required to limit its dissemination of anti-American propaganda. “Black and White” was cancelled before a single scene had been shot.

By the mid-thirties, Stalin had squelched internal debates about the pace and the objectives of the Communist project. His secret police, the N.K.V.D., was sending previously loyal Party members to an expanding network of work camps, the Gulag, in the harshest corners of the country. Smith began to sour on the Soviet Union, wondering, “Was the racial equality worth the bare subsistence living in an atmosphere filled with fear and suspicion?”

Even Fort-Whiteman was having doubts. He confided to Smith that he feared Stalin was leading the country away from the original tenets of the Revolution. In October, 1933, he sent a letter to the Workers Party head office, in New York. “I wish to return to America,” he wrote, proposing that he work as a lecturer at the Party school on East Fourteenth Street. Soviet authorities monitored the correspondence of foreigners in Moscow, and the letter was intercepted before it left the country. I found it in Fort-Whiteman’s file at the Comintern archive. A handwritten note from a top official at the Comintern’s Anglo-American secretariat, scribbled across the page, instructed subordinates to bring Fort-Whiteman in for a talk. His request to leave was denied.

Letters documenting Fort-Whiteman’s activities began piling up in his personnel file. His informal apartment gatherings were a cause of concern: “Fort-Whiteman held the most backward view that a group of this kind should not exist as a political entity nor within existing structures.” Indoctrination was the exclusive role of the Party, and Fort-Whiteman was going off script.

During the purges, ideological disagreements and skirmishes over bureaucratic positioning often blended with petty personal grievances. In April, 1935, at the Foreign Workers’ Club, Fort-Whiteman led a discussion about “The Ways of White Folks,” a new collection of fiction by Hughes, which depicts the immutability of racism with tragicomic irony. Fort-Whiteman, perhaps still stung by his experience on “Black and White,” was not a fan of the work, dismissing it as “art, not propaganda.”

William Patterson, a prominent Black Communist and a leading civil-rights lawyer, who had travelled to Moscow from Harlem some months before, was in the audience that night. He seemed to harbor ill feelings toward Fort-Whiteman, and moved to strike against him under the pretext of defending Hughes. In a letter to the Comintern, Patterson wrote that Fort-Whiteman had used his review of the book as cover for making “a very open attack upon the Comintern position on the Negro Question,” adding that Fort-Whiteman should be “sent to work somewhere where contact with the Negro comrades is impossible.”

That summer, at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, a few American delegates met to discuss what to do about Fort-Whiteman’s efforts to “mislead some of the Negro comrades.” It was agreed that Patterson and James Ford, a Black Communist who had run for Vice-President of the United States on the Party’s slate, would take charge of the question. During the next several months, Patterson filed a flurry of letters with the Comintern. In an elegant cursive, he alleged that Fort-Whiteman had a “rotten” attitude toward the Party and was preoccupied with “the corruption of the Negro elements.”

Once a person was identified as unreliable, the pile-on was inevitable; the only danger was to be seen as inadequately vigilant in calling out class enemies. A kindly archivist passed me a summary of the “secret” portion of Fort-Whiteman’s personnel file, still technically off limits nearly a hundred years after its compilation. According to the accounts of unnamed informants, Fort-Whiteman had been overheard saying that the work of the Comintern had amounted to “empty talk,” that Stalin was a “minor” figure in the Bolshevik Revolution, and that Communists held their “white interests dearer and closer” than those of Blacks. Fort-Whiteman, one source claimed, considered himself a natural “leader of the people” who would return to the U.S. and create a movement among African Americans outside Soviet influence.

Reading the list of Fort-Whiteman’s supposed transgressions, I pictured him strolling through Moscow in those days, projecting an air of headstrong industriousness. He was still working on manuscripts and speeches, teaching, travelling, and attending the theatre—generally enjoying the kind of spirited intellectual and social life that would have been impossible in the land of his birth. In the spring of 1936, when he was ordered to report to N.K.V.D. headquarters, on Lubyanka Square, how could he have foreseen the cruelty that his adopted country was about to inflict on him? By the time Homer Smith knocked on Fort-Whiteman’s door, a few days later, he was in exile.

After the Soviet collapse, many archives in Russia were suddenly accessible. Alan Cullison, who worked as an A.P. reporter in Moscow during the nineties, spent much of his free time researching the fates of Americans in the Soviet Union. In the Communist Party archive, he found a partial record showing that Fort-Whiteman had been banished to Semipalatinsk, a distant outpost in the eastern reaches of Soviet Kazakhstan. It was a hard, unforgiving place, but Fort-Whiteman made a life for himself. He found work as a language teacher and a boxing instructor, attracting a circle of curious locals to his sports club.

Back in Moscow, the purges had taken on a fearful momentum. Radek, the former Comintern secretary, who had mentored Fort-Whiteman, was declared a traitor and sent to a labor camp. Bukharin was executed after providing a false confession at a show trial. On November 16, 1937, a squad of N.K.V.D. agents showed up at Fort-Whiteman’s apartment in Semipalatinsk. Fort-Whiteman’s investigative file at the agency’s Kazakh bureau was unearthed by Sean Guillory, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who is working on an audio documentary about African Americans in the early Soviet Union. The file includes the testimony of a young man, whom Fort-Whiteman tried to recruit as a boxing pupil, reporting that Fort-Whiteman had recommended foreign literature and said, “Come join my club, we’ll earn a lot of money, travel across the Soviet Union and go abroad.”

For the next eight months, Fort-Whiteman was held in a prison cell in Semipalatinsk, while a “special council” of the N.K.V.D. was assembled to decide his fate. The Kazakh prosecutor’s office sent me a copy of his case. It showed that, in August, 1938, he was found guilty of crimes including anti-Soviet agitation, slandering the Party, and “cultivating exiles around himself while instilling a counter-revolutionary spirit.” He was sentenced to five years in a correctional labor camp.

His destination was Kolyma, a region in the Russian Far East which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described as a “pole of cold and cruelty.” Fort-Whiteman was assigned to a network of forced-labor sites known as Sevvostlag, where convicts mined for gold and laid new stretches of road on the frozen tundra. The prisoners were outfitted with crude boots and thinly padded jackets—little defense against temperatures that regularly dipped to fifty degrees below zero.

Within a few months, Fort-Whiteman fell behind on his work quota, and his daily food rations were withheld. Camp guards beat him brutally and often. A man of so much vitality, even glamour, was reduced to a dokhodyaga , camp slang that roughly translates as “a person nearing the end of his walk.”

None of his Moscow friends had any idea what had happened to him. Among them was Robert Robinson, an African American toolmaker from Detroit who had been recruited to work in Russia by Soviet emissaries who were visiting the Ford Motor plant. Robinson ultimately stayed in the Soviet Union for more than four decades. In a memoir, he described an encounter with a friend in Moscow who had been a prisoner in Kolyma with Fort-Whiteman. “He died of starvation, or malnutrition, a broken man whose teeth had been knocked out,” the friend said.

The final document in Fort-Whiteman’s long record is his death certificate, a faded sheet of paper held in a distant archive in Kazakhstan. Just after midnight on January 13, 1939, Fort-Whiteman’s frozen corpse was delivered to the hospital in Ust-Taezhny, a settlement carved out of fields of snow. The official cause of death was “weakening of cardiac activity.” Fort-Whiteman is the only African American recorded to have died in the Gulag, but in his final moments that distinction made little difference. He was buried in a mass grave with thousands of fellow-inmates who met the same fate. ♦

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