A Black Soviet Icon’s Extraordinary Journey and Troubled American Twilight

The son of an African-American émigré to the Soviet Union and a Russian mother, Jim Patterson played an iconic part as a toddler in the legendary 1936 Soviet film “The Circus” before going on to a career as a Soviet naval officer and a well-known poet. Together with his mother, he emigrated to his father’s homeland in 1994 following the Soviet collapse but became a virtual recluse after her death in 2001. After spending around 18 months in the hospital, he returned home to his apartment in downtown Washington last year, where he continues to write and hopes to publish a collection of his poems in Russian and English.
Photo: Jim Patterson as the child of an American performer who finds racial harmony in the Soviet Union in the 1936 movie “The Circus.”

Jim Patterson working on a movie script at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute.

Jim Patterson at his typewriter in Moscow in 1963

Jim Patterson, center, talking with schoolchildren in the Russian Far East city of Petropavlovsky-Kamchatsky in 1967.

Jim Patterson speaking at Moscow’s Central House of Actors in 1975.

Jim Patterson reading his poetry in the village of Zakharovo, outside Moscow, in 1980 in commemoration of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin’s 181st birthday.

Jim Patterson and Irina Tolokonnikova at their wedding in Moscow in the late 1980s. The two divorced before Patterson moved to Washington in 1994.

Jim Patterson, center, with radio journalist Anna Toprovsky (left) and his mother, theater designer and painter Vera Aralova, in the Washington area in the late 1990s.

Jim Patterson holding a picture of himself recently with Soviet film star Lyubov Orlova and her husband, director Grigory Alexandrov, at the couple’s dacha in western Moscow.

Jim Patterson speaking to RIA Novosti in an recent interview at his apartment in Washington, where he is recovering from an extended illness. He turns 80 on July 17.