Oliver Golden

Oliver John Golden (; November 18, 1887 – 1940) was an American and Soviet agronomist and politician. Born in Yazoo County, Mississippi, he studied cotton at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. A member of the Communist Party USA, he spent time in Soviet Russia and was later part of a delegation of cotton experts who arrived in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic at the invitation of the Soviet government. During that time, he worked in cotton cultivation, was a teacher at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Melioration, and served as a municipal councilor in Tashkent. Eventually, he and his wife remained in the Soviet Union and became naturalized Soviet citizens.

Biography Oliver John Golden was born in Yazoo County, Mississippi on November 18, 1887. He was the son of Catherine and Hilliard Golden, the latter of whom became one of the state's wealthiest Black landowners after being freed from slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. (Sources differ on Catherine's race: although Nassor Said Ali says that she was Native American, After the 1924 death of his first wife Jane Wilson, Golden had a child with his Udmurt nurse Anya.)

Golden was inspired to participate in a Soviet experiment involving the recruitment of Black people and later heard about a complete lack of African Americans within a similar delegation of engineers invited to work at the Soviet Union.

Golden and his wife became naturalized Soviet citizens, staying in the country after the other delegates returned home in 1934. Golden died from heart failure in Tashkent in 1940.