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Lenin’s essays on national self-determination and anticolonial struggles are well known. Much less are his earlier remarks on the process of internal colonization of the Russian Empire’s “free” borderlands. “Oppressed nations” are conspicuously absent in those writings, which are complemented with a cross analysis of the shared destiny of Russian serfs and American slaves. This urges us to look afresh at the later identification between the experience of Asian and African people subjected to the yoke of European imperialism and that of African Americans considering themselves as colonized from within. Finally, Langston Hughes’s narrative of his travel to Soviet Central Asia in the early thirties offers a valuable perspective for reaxamining the emancipation of the Empire’s “colored people” after 1917, and it limits.