Today we welcome Alina Adams back to the blog with an essay about her interracial family’s trip to Moscow (before the war in Ukraine) and its connection to her recently released novel, Go On Pretending (History Through Fiction, 2025), featuring a fictional interracial family. You can read our previous conversations with Alina here and here. As one of the excerpts below shows, a key element in her novel is the 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow, during Khrushchev’s Thaw, which was meant to demonstrate the Soviet Union’s liberalization and racial tolerance (you can guess how that turned out). The reference to the festival immediately made me think of a different novel by another ex-Soviet Jewish immigrant writer in which it is an important plot element: Petropolis (Penguin Random House, 2008) by Anya Ulinich. If you would like to know more about this lesser-known event and about the Soviet Union/post-Soviet Russia and race, let Alina explain below and then order Go On Pretending (and Petropolis).

Continue reading “How Moscow’s 1957 World Youth Festival Inspired Me to Go On Pretending: Guest Essay by Alina Adams” →