Seeking to understand how the politics of race and whiteness could become so powerful in post-communist Russia, the chapter explores the reproduction of ideas of whiteness under a supposedly raceless Communist state. Dealing with questions of gender and women’s emancipation, it shows how postwar decolonisation and anti-colonial struggle marked a turning point in the visibility of race questions within the USSR. In the early Soviet period, overcoming ‘cultural backwardness’, carried out in the name of a socialist universalism, paid little attention to its privileging of white European norms in women’s appearance and behaviour. Race would be forced to the fore in the context of global anti-colonial struggles and the Cold War competition with China. It was Chinese accusations that the Soviets were white and hence incapable of real solidarity that moved members of the Committee of Soviet Women in the Women’s International Democratic Federation to change its leadership. Previously, the Soviet women’s organisation mainly ignored the whiteness of its members during initial encounters with African and Asian women. Since the late 1960s, it promoted women from Central Asia as leaders to show Soviet commitment to the uplift of women from all parts of the Union. While these representatives played an important role in promoting the rights of women in countries fighting against colonialism, these ‘non-white’ Soviet delegates were expected to ‘speak Bolshevik’. They had to reproduce Soviet values and adhere to Soviet norms of whiteness in order to perform their tasks. The entanglement of race and Soviet civilisation was never fully addressed.