Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-321-16159-5
Ph.D.
Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies
New York University
2014
This dissertation reconstructs interwar and cold war-era interactions between the Soviet Union and the Middle East, highlighting the non-Russian and non-European dimensions of Soviet political imagination and exchange. It situates Soviet history in a broader Eurasian context by examining how the category Vostok ('the East') structured the organization and operation of key Soviet bureaucracies responsible for transnational exchanges, especially ones focusing on the Arab world. Throughout the major shifts in Soviet domestic and international contexts from the early 1920s to the 'cold war,' these institutions tailored images and experiences of Sovietness for audiences in the 'foreign East' (Middle East, Africa, and Asia). In so doing, the Comintern, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, and other Afro-Asian organizations helped create new Soviet foundational narratives by re-writing and re-enacting early histories of republics of the Soviet East (Central Asia and Caucasus) in ways that legitimized the USSR as an anti-imperial and anti-colonial power.
Middle Eastern history; History; Russian history
Social sciences;Anti-imperialism;Central asia;Internationalism;Middle east;Orientalism;Soviet