It'll take some digging Chris. Here is one source I found googling.
http://www.africana.ru/biblio/afrocentrism/08_Mazov.htm
“?????? ??-??????”?
??????????? ???????? ? ????
? 1960 ?.
>...The author points out, that more than 500 African students studied
in the USSR in early sixties. They were faced some revealing of racism.
Soviet officials rejected the facts of racism or explained these facts
as the acts of foreign (“bourgeois”) secret services. Africans in the
USSR were equal to ‘whites’ and were divided according to class
distinctions. This approach to Africans in the USSR kept invariable up
to the USSR’s disintegration.
Michael Pugliese
---------------------- Africans in Russia are mostly:
1. Refugees. (I simply can't fathom the common racist claim that "the blacks are lording it over Russians" ("blacks" here meaning also Caucasians), considering that Caucasians living standards are usually below Russian ones, not to mention the absurdity of asserting that refugees from Gabon are the economic lords of Russia.)
2. Lots of students come here. There are about 5,000 African students studying in Russia.
3. People who came here during the Soviet era and stayed, or their descendents. Usually, they have become Russian citizens and often married Russians, which makes for some pretty striking-looking children with Negroidal features and big, wide, flat Slavic faces. Celebrity TV host Yelena Khanga, who used to host the first-ever Russian TV show about sex, has a Russian mother and an Afro-American father. You also get Asian Russians, like Duma deputy Irina Khakamada, whose father was a Japanese Communist who immigrated to the USSR during the Stalin era.
There are pretty romantic Soviet-era stories here about Westerners who fell in love with Russian men and women and defected to the USSR to marry them. Foreigners who defected for political reasons lived the feted life of the nomenklatura, while the people who did so for personal ones lived the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal