When the Cold War ended, the long history of Russian and then Soviet engagement with Arab countries was largely forgotten, so the dominant role of Vladimir Putin's Russia in the region appeared to come out of nowhere. The thirty-four expertly introduced primary sources in this book recover a complex history of Russian-Arab ties and illuminate some of its most fascinating aspects: Russian Orthodox missionaries in Palestine, Arab communists traveling to the USSR, and, more surprising, Arabic legal documents written by Russian Muslims, Russian Jewish migrants to Palestine decades before Zionism, and 1940s Armenians "repatriated" from Arab countries to the USSR.
Eileen Kane is professor of history and director of the Program in Global Islamic Studies at Connecticut College. She is the author of Russian Hajj: Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca.
Masha Kirasirova is assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is the author of The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire.
Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University. She is the author of Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost and the translator of Sonallah Ibrahim's Arabic novel Ice, set in 1973 Moscow.