The roots of the Arab world's current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. To explore those entanglements, this book presents and contextualizes a set of primary sources translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and Tatar: a 1772 Russian naval officer's diary, an Arabic slave sale deed from the Caucasus, an interview with a Russian-educated contemporary Syrian novelist, and many more. These archival, autobiographical, and literary sources, all appearing in English for the first time, are introduced by specialists and in some cases by pairs of scholars with complementary language expertise. They highlight connections long obscured by disciplinary cleavages between Slavic and Middle East studies.
Taken together, the thirty-four chapters of this book show how various Russian/Soviet and Arab governments sought to nurture political and cultural ties and expand their influence, often with unplanned results. They reveal the transnational networks of trade, pilgrimage, study, ethnic identity, and political affinity that state policies sometimes fostered and sometimes disrupted. Above all they give voice to some of the resourceful characters who have embodied and exploited Arab-Russian contacts: missionaries and diplomats, soldiers and refugees, students and party activists, scholars, and spies. A set of specially commissioned maps helps orient readers amid the expansion and collapse of empires, border changes, population transfers, and creation of new nation-states that occurred during the two centuries these sources cover.

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.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Witness to a New Era: Sergei Pleshcheev's Diary of a Journey to Syria (1773)
John Randolph

2. Extraterritorial Entanglements: Russian Jewish Migrants in Ottoman Palestine (1830s-1850s)
Eileen Kane

3. Shi'i Worlds Interrupted: Waqf and Pilgrimage in Russia's South Caucasus (1863, 1874, 1876)
Zeinab Azarbadegan

4. An Egyptian Teacher Heads to St. Petersburg: al-Tantawi's Gift of the Wise in the Account of the Land of Russia (1840)
Suha Kudsieh

5. With the Tsar's Imprimatur: A Slave Sale Deed from Russia's North Caucasus (1864)
Sergey Salushchev

6. Population Transfer: Negotiating the Resettlement of Chechen Refugees in the Ottoman Empire (1865, 1870)
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky

7. Russianizing Palestine: Vasilii Khitrovo's A Week in Palestine (1876) and the Charter of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (1889)
Spencer Scoville

8. Manufacturing Russian Peasants' Attachments to Jerusalem: IPPO Propaganda about the Holy Land (1894-1903)
Elena Astafieva

9. Orthodoxy across Borders: Maps of the Institutions of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society
Eileen Kane

10. A Reluctant Native Intermediary: Shakirdzhan Ishaev's Journey to Mecca (1896)
Eileen Kane

11. Quarantine Politics and the Hajj: Dr. Zabolotnyi's Mission to the Red Sea (1897)
Eileen Kane

12. Saluting Russia's Islamic Modernists in the Cairo and Beirut Arabic Press (1899)
Roy Bar Sadeh

13. Russian and Soviet Oil Exports to the Persian Gulf (1903-33)
Eileen Kane and Masha Kirasirova

14. Memo to Stalin: Lev Karakhan's Argument for Establishing Diplomatic Ties with the Hejaz (1923)
Masha Kirasirova

15. Soviet Muslims at the Congress of the Muslim World in Mecca (1926)
Norihiro Naganawa

16. Arabic in the Soviet Caucasus: Nadhir al-Durgili's The Delight of Minds in the Biographies of Dagestani Scholars (1920s-30s)
Vladimir Bobrovnikov

17. From Syrian Communist to Soviet Orientalist: Taha Sawwaf in the Comintern Files (1935-53)
Masha Kirasirova

18. Wartime Schism in the Iraqi Communist Party: A Coded Letter to Moscow (1944)
Elizabeth Bishop

19. Armenian Immigration to the USSR from Arab Countries (1946-49)
Ara Sanjian

20. The Abandoned Comrades: Egyptian Communists' Pleas to the USSR (1953-54)
Rami Ginat

21. Revisiting Russia after Fifty Years: Mikhail Naimy's Beyond Moscow and Washington (1959)
Maria Swanson

22. From Nazareth to Moscow: Kulthum 'Awda Vasilieva's ?Happy Life? in Russia (1927, 1937, 1965)
Nicole Khayat and Maria Vologzhanina

23. Statistics on Arab Students in the USSR (1959-1991)
Constantin Katsakioris

24. Should Dormitory Bathrooms Have Doors? Zakaria Turki's An Upper Egyptian Among the Russians (1967-72)
Margaret Litvin

25. A Communist Mourning Icon: Mahmoud Sabri, Iraqi Art Student in Moscow (1960)
Suheyla Takesh

26. Soviet Yerevan's Outreach to Armenians in Lebanon (1967-69)
Ara Sanjian

27. Lotus Magazine: Soviet-Funded Afro-Asian Literary Transnationalism (1969-70)
Rossen Djagalov

28. No Soviet Engineer to Walk in Front of an Egyptian One: Youssef Chahine's Two High Dam Films (1968 and 1970)
Ala Younis

29. Soviet Advisers in Egypt before, during, and after Their ?Expulsion? (1972)
Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez

30. Ba'thists in Baku: Iraq-Syria Tensions Come to the USSR (1975-77)
Etienne Forestier-Peyrat

31. Two Soviet Responses to Frantz Fanon (1978-79)
Philipp Casula

32. Aeroflot Routes to Baghdad: Soviet-Iraqi Relations during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-81)
Steven E. Harris

33. Aleksandr Yakovlev's Memo about his Conversation with the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the Soviet Union (26 November 1990)
Mark Kramer

34. ?The Intellectual is a Hybrid Creature?: Khalil Al-Rez's The Russian Quarter (2019)
Margaret Litvin

Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index