The Eastern International: Culture, Power, and Realpolitik in Soviet-Arab Relations

FAIN: FT-264973-19

Masha Kirasirova
NYUAD (Abu Dhabi United Arab Emirates)

Research and writing leading to a book publication on Soviet foreign policy with the Arab Middle East (1920-1990).

The Eastern International is a study of how Moscow leaders’ embrace of the flexible and vague concept “East” in political and cultural initiatives created a mutually interacting relationship between the Soviet Union’s supposedly decolonized “domestic East” (the predominantly Muslim Soviet republics in Central Asia and the Caucasus) and the colonized “foreign East” (South and East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East). I argue that from the interwar period through the Cold War, this conceptual linkage created an unusual relational space of interactions and exchange that shaped official Soviet Central Asian histories, literatures, and cinemas, facilitated the spread of Marxist-Leninist ideas in the Middle East, and shaped Russia’s foreign relations.