Soviet Travellers Between Romanticism and Scepticism

In the Soviet Union the period under scrutiny, roughly between 1960 and 1976, was a time of vivid intellectual debates about the developing world. These debates also produced the intellectual background of Soviet travellers and contributed to their way of perceiving, assessing and representing Middle Eastern revolutionary movements. Following the twentieth congress of the Community Party of the Soviety Union (CPSU) in 1956, Soviet authorities started a process of reorganisation of Soviet academic institutions dealing with Africa and Asia, including the Middle East. Anastas Mikoyan demanded up-to-date regional expertise that could serve policy making.Footnote ¹⁴ This demand eventually led to the establishment of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO)Footnote ¹⁵ in 1956, as well as other new research centres for ‘area-studies’.Footnote ¹⁶ The IMEMO and the Institute of Oriental Studies became important sites of intellectual debate on the developing world, a debate conducted by a small community of intellectuals with limited field experience. This community consisted of scholars and party representatives. A key figure in these debates was Rostislav Ulianovskii. He tried to keep Soviet theory current against the background of the changing circumstances in the developing world. Due to the lack of first-hand field experience, Ulianovskii and others drew comparisons between developing socialism in Soviet Central Asia and in the ‘foreign East’. Ulianovskii was sceptical that the same strategies would work. He continued to advocate ‘non-capitalist development’, which should last an entire historical period, and which should not be equated with the implementation of socialism – he explicitly warned against just ‘jumping’ into socialism, in other words, against what he called ‘voluntarism’.Footnote ¹⁷

In the late 1960s ‘the very phrase non-capitalist development inevitably led to problems, [and] it tended to be replaced in the second half of the 1960s and in the 1970s by the phrase socialist orientation’, which was a ‘static’ concept that ‘did not automatically raise the question of development to what?’.Footnote ¹⁸ However, non-capitalist development and socialist orientation still required vanguard parties, or at least a broad alliance of parties, which is why, for example, Soviet publications praised the Syrian Ba'ath regime's Progressive National Front.Footnote ¹⁹

Various Soviet academics at that time raised similar concerns as Ulianovskii did, and advocated similar solutions: Aleksei Lefkovskii, a well-known Soviet scholar, developed the concept of multistructuralism (mnogoukladnost), a coexistence of various modes of production and classes.Footnote ²⁰ Karen Brutents, deputy head of the CPSU International Department, raised the problem that the bourgeoisie within revolutionary democratic fronts could push a country towards capitalism rather than towards socialism.Footnote ²¹ Nodari Simonia, a researcher at the IMEMO, had similar doubts: he sparred with Ulianovskii after the publication of Simonia's Countries of the East: Paths of Development (Strany Vostoka: Puti razvitiia) in 1975, which had caused an ‘ideological scandal’.Footnote ²² Simonia questioned the revolutionary potential of the national bourgeoisieFootnote ²³ and argued that capitalism was a precondition for socialism.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, Georgii Mirskii, in a discussion with Alexei Kiva and Nodari Simonia, implied the existence of achievable degrees of development and possibly socialism, when he argued that ‘States such as … Democratic Yemen … have a tendency, with the help and support of the socialist world, to approximate the Vietnamese, or perhaps more likely, the Laotian variant of development’.Footnote ²⁵ Kiva concludes by differentiating between degrees of progress and degrees of revolution, arguing that ‘the level of revolution of a regime is not causally related to the duration of its development along a progressive path. Some countries have been on this path for a relatively long time, but the revolutionary process is developing … inconsistently. Others … have only recently embarked on socialism, but their revolutionary transformation has been deeper, more consistent from the outset.’Footnote ²⁶ South Yemen would fall into this latter group of countries. Summing up, as can be seen, within academia and the party, scepticism prevailed regarding the rise of socialism in the developing world.

Revolutionary Romanticism and the Dhofar Revolution

Despite this theoretical background, journalists with prolonged stays in the field,Footnote ²⁷ writing for popular media and addressing a broader audience, produced more optimistic accounts of Middle Eastern liberation movements. Audience, format and field experience influenced their interpretations, and, thus, at times their accounts took a romantic perspective. By ‘romanticism’ and ‘romantic’, I denote those representations of socialist-inspired liberation movements in the Middle East that unfolded a narrative of struggle with ‘human interest’ elements,Footnote ²⁸ accounts of outnumbered but faithful fighters for the just cause, who seemed pure in their belief in socialism, stories of physical beauty and political righteousness in the face of an impersonal, overwhelming force of reaction. This Soviet romanticism is well in line with a broader tradition of representing Oriental Otherness, known as Orientalism.Footnote ²⁹ Orientalist depictions are characterised by longing, delight and pain, as well as dreams, riddles, uncanny strangers, impressive natural phenomena and magical meetings.Footnote ³⁰ The Soviet romanticism about the Middle East contrasted with the academic debates, which the Soviet journalists had in mind when they travelled to the Middle East. However, academic and journalistic treatments are two sides of this Soviet Orientalism. While academics might have been more sceptical about the prospects of socialism than journalists, both spoke from a position of authority and power about the Middle East. Moreover, the authors often had a background in Oriental studies themselves. Among such academics turned journalists or politicians were Evgenii Primakov, Igor Beliaev, Leonid Medvedko, his son Sergei Medvedko, Vitali Naumkin and Aleksei Vasil'ev, who all produced a wide array of publications, both academic and non-academic, at the intersection of journalism, policy advice and academic debate.Footnote ³¹ This literary production has been almost exclusively male-dominated, as Oriental studies have traditionally been a domain of men, albeit with notable exceptions.Footnote ³² In the following, I will focus on the early work of Aleksei Vasil'ev on Yemen and Dhofar because of the key role he played in analysing the region for a Soviet audience.Footnote ³³ Born in 1939 in Leningrad, Vasil'ev exemplifies the trajectory from academic to journalist, and from journalist back to academic with close ties to formal politics and diplomacy. Like many Soviet public figures dealing with international affairs, and being in the field, Vasil'ev always hovered at the intersection between academia, politics, diplomacy and journalism. Another well-known example for such a career is Yevgenii Primakov. Much like Primakov, Vasil'ev graduated from the Oriental Studies Institute and worked as correspondent for Pravda. While Primakov started his journalistic career in politically more relevant places of the Middle East, such as Egypt and Iraq, Vasil'ev travelled the border between Oman and Yemen. There, again in a parallel development to Primakov, he became tightly connected with Soviet diplomats in the Middle East. While Primakov's path eventually tilted towards politics, Vasil'ev used his political connections for academic research.Footnote ³⁴ Today, Vasil'ev is a well-established scholar of African and Middle Eastern studies.

In the 1960s and 1970s Vasil'ev visited Yemen and reported on the War in Dhofar. As he highlighted in two of his books, Journey to Arabia Felix (Puteshestvie v Arabia Feliks) Footnote ³⁵ and Difficult Passage (Trudnii pereval), Footnote ³⁶ Vasil'ev was invited to meet with PFLOAG rebels through the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, which oversaw contacts and exchanges with the liberation movement.Footnote ³⁷ He also took part in the production of a short, fifteen-minute documentary in 1971, Hot Wind of Freedom (co-authored by Oleg Lebedev), which draws on the same events mentioned in Vasil'ev's books.Footnote ³⁸

These books are full of ambivalence about the liberation movement and its members in Dhofar. On the one hand, they reflect a romanticism of revolution, the fight for a just cause against all odds and against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy – dedication, self-sacrifice, basically all things that at the time of writing had widely ceased to exist in the Soviet Union and persisted only as memories of the Russian revolution, the Soviet participation in the Spanish Civil War or the Second World War. On the other hand, they point to the deficiencies of the region in question, in culture, living conditions and overall capabilities to conduct this fight. Most importantly, they put into question whether what Yemen and PFLOAG pursued could be called socialism at all, precisely because it was so romantic and thus irrational. Hence, Soviet observers displayed Orientalist prejudices about the irrationality and emotiveness of the East. Vasil'ev produced and criticised the Soviet idealisation of liberation movements such as the Dhofari one. His narrative revolved around the idea of a noble savage-revolutionary, who professed a belief in a petty-bourgeois and utopian socialism. The latter's critique was a recurring topic in Soviet academic literature, which contrasted it with scientific socialism.Footnote ³⁹

Vasil'ev started his observations by highlighting the romantic side of Dhofari revolution. He described the Dhofari's physical appearance, almost as if his analysis was an anthropological study. Vasil'ev's text is a mix of repulsion and fascination. He thus clearly ‘inherited the discourse of Orientalism described by Edward Said’, as did other Soviet scholars.Footnote ⁴⁰ For Vasil'ev, the Dhofari were ‘black eyed Eastern beauties’ with ‘Arab and Semitic traits, mixed with Indian and Somali ones’.Footnote ⁴¹ Repeatedly, he alluded to such external features, referring to an enigmatic attractiveness. ‘We met the rebels, who have been contacted through a telegram from Aden. … A dark, almost black Arab with obvious African traits led the group. [Sal'man] was of medium height, very exhausted and moved with a soft, tiger-like gait … he wore a Lenin-badge … and was still very young, maybe 17 or 18 years old, an Oriental beauty surrounded by mystery, which emanated especially from his deep dark eyes that were surrounded by thin eyelashes’.Footnote ⁴² These rebels thus featured almost faunal characteristics on the one hand (‘the tiger-like pace’), and on the other bore the markings of rationality, revolution and progress (‘a pin with Lenin's profile’). This was the basic paradox that challenged, puzzled and confused Vasil'ev and possibly every Soviet observer: how to square these contradictory characteristics? Are they communist revolutionaries or are they backward savages? Could they be both? Should it not be industrial proletarians who raise Lenin's flag? Would peasants not be too stuck in feudal structures to stage a revolution? This was not only a theoretical discussion, as highlighted above, or a matter of international affairs. This was also a cultural question, a question about a Soviet sense of superiority stemming from race and ethnicity, which in turn reduced the Soviet observers’ ability to understand its partners in the Middle East, leading to disrespect and condescendence.Footnote ⁴³ In short, racist prejudices determined Soviet assessments of PFLOAG possibly as much as theoretical considerations on socialism and revolution. These prejudices also call into question Soviet internationalism.Footnote ⁴⁴

While Vasil'ev quite often highlighted the backwardness of the country he visited, he was full of praise for beautiful Sal'man, who so fervently condemned the power of ‘imperialists and sultans’. Vasil'ev lends him a voice and allows him to speak directly to the Soviet readership: ‘we are not slaves … and we have a bright future, in which none will sit in the neck of another, and power will reside with the people. Our children will go to school. Doctors will visit us in our huts. Our oil will further the prosperity of the people. We follow the path that has been shown to us by the October Revolution in Russia, which has been sparked by the great Lenin.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Through Sal'man, Vasil'ev unfolds a vision of progress and prosperity, of an end of feudalism, of modernisation and possibly of socialist revolution. Then, by letting Sal'man quote Syrian poems, Vasil'ev demonstrates to his readers that this Dhofari peasant is not as illiterate as he seems, and that his political aspirations can build on a solid intellectual background.

Vasil'ev was even more impressed by a female fighter at the Dhofari Front: at first, the author considered ‘comrade Guda’ as too fragile or spoiled to fight for revolution.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, he quickly changed his opinion. Retelling her personal experience of oppression, he highlighted that Guda abandoned university studies in Lebanon and started to teach refugees at the ‘Lenin-school’ in Dhofar.Footnote ⁴⁷ Not only did she quit university, she also gave up family life for the revolutionary cause. She could have married a ‘good and honest’ man, who, however, worked for the Saudi oil-producer Aramco. Guda thus resisted the temptations of capitalism and bourgeois happiness and turned into a revolutionary. Vasil'ev's account of Guda's life allows for two interpretations. First, in line with ‘romanticism’, Guda stands for the ardent follower of socialism and revolution, willing to sacrifice everything. Secondly, this fervour could paradoxically also be used against her. In Ulianovskii's terms, Guda's attitude could be branded as ‘utopianism’ and ‘voluntarism’. And this is exactly what Vasil'ev will do later. However, Vasil'ev was at least equally impressed by Guda's beauty. Vasil'ev's text sexually objectified Guda, describing her looks in minute details. Vasil'ev conflated the exotic and erotic, the romantic and the revolutionary. In doing so, he replicated standard topics of Orientalist travelogues of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fostering a widely white and male conception of the world.Footnote ⁴⁸ Paradoxically, Vasil'ev criticised gender relations in Dhofar and in the Arab world, in which women are allegedly considered to be ‘second class human beings’ and forced ‘to wear mobile prisons’,Footnote ⁴⁹ while Vasil'ev also continuously objectified Guda himself. The sexual objectification of Guda is particularly surprising as a key effort of such schools in Dhofar consisted in achieving women's liberation: ‘there is no social liberation without women's liberation and no women liberation without social liberation’ was the motto of a play staged at the Lenin School in Dhofar.Footnote ⁵⁰ Vasil'ev, while pretending to have the same goals as Guda, put her back into his male gaze of patriarchy.Footnote ⁵¹

‘Guda’ and her ‘liberated sisters’ appeared often in many Soviet visual depictions, prominently on covers of Asia and Africa Today (Aziia i Afrika segodnia), a popular journal jointly published by three Soviet institutions focused on dealing with the developing countries of the East.Footnote ⁵² Time and again, the journal's covers prominently featured young, exoticised women, possibly female revolutionaries or resistance fighters, looking confidently into the lens of the camera. Eastern women also appeared as beacons of modernisation in proximity of Soviet symbols of modernity such as cars and planes. These depictions conflated exoticisation and sexual objectivisation and modernisation due to Soviet technical support, as if modernisation would go hand in hand with emancipation. In the 1980s, when sexual taboos in the Soviet Union itself started to crumble, illustrations on journal front pages became more openly sexualised and underscored the lack of modernity in the ‘East’, possibly to attract new readers and to underscore the backwardness of the East (in contrast to Soviet–Russian superiority).

To summarise, three issues are particularly striking in Vasil'ev's representation of the Dhofari revolutionaries: first, it is the romanticisation of the Dhofari revolution. Vasil'ev found it striking that in Dhofar, some people did believe in socialism, that they believed in Lenin's message, in the example set by the Soviet Union, and were willing to fight for it. Yemeni and Dhofari revolutionaries even gave up the little comfort they might have had to serve a higher cause. Secondly, it is striking how Vasil'ev seems to inscribe revolution into the bodies of the revolutionaries, to analyse the War in Dhofar by focussing on the rebels’ physical appearances. In doing so, Vasil'ev's approach bears similarities to what bell hooks, in a different context, later called the commodification of dark bodies.Footnote ⁵³ The fascination for the prowess of the male black body and for the female beauty of Guda corresponded to the revolutionary spirit attributed to Dhofar and contrasted with the presumably older, white, weaker, (physically and politically) exhausted, male Soviet observer and narrator (Vasil'ev),Footnote ⁵⁴ who had drained his own revolutionary potential and arrived in Dhofar with politically sober but ‘ethnographically’ interested looks, technical expertise and a sterile scientific socialism. His gaze was directed to the dark female body, which is depicted as exotic and fragile and also as submissive to the revolutionary cause, yet, at the same time, combative and willing to sacrifice itself and its features of femininity. Vasil'ev looked at it with a ‘frank expression of longing’, with a ‘desire to make contact with those bodies deemed Other’, and yet he established ‘a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by the structure of domination on those designated Other is deflected by an emphasis on seduction and longing, where the desire is not to make the Other over in one's image, but to become the Other’ and thus projecting on the Other not lack and loss but a ‘sense of plenty, bounty, a field of dreams’,Footnote ⁵⁵ of beauty and revolution, of youth and combat readiness. In this sense the young rebels represented everything Vasil'ev and the Soviet Union had ceased to be. A deep power gap separated Vasil'ev from the Dhofari insurgents, precisely due to their status as objects of analysis. Vasil'ev looked upon these rebels with an omniscient glance, from the perspective of a representative of the powerful Soviet Union, almost like a benevolent father, and certainly not as a ‘comrade’ or ‘brother’ on equal terms.

Thirdly, this power gap is also reflected by the axiom in the Soviet press and in Vasil'ev's accounts that progress could only come with Soviet help. It was always the Soviet side that remained firmly the bearer of knowledge and of modernity: Soviet cars in Ghana,Footnote ⁵⁶ Soviet planes in Somalia,Footnote ⁵⁷ Soviet dams in Iraq or Syria.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Soviet Union seemed to have simply delivered these goods, as if there was no Middle Eastern participation in their construction or use. It was a recurring depiction to have Middle Eastern locals posing in front of yet another Soviet achievement, of yet another marker of modernity, as receiver of a gift which otherwise would not have reached the Middle East, completely disregarding both the possibility that ‘modernity’ could be and was also achieved autonomously.

Vasil'ev's account contrasts the revolutionary fullness and the materialising of modernising dreams with a more sceptical and critical vision of Dhofar. This scepticism is fuelled by a disbelief in the capabilities of the local revolutionaries in implementing socialism. Their political and cultural inaptitude delivers a justification for a rectifying Soviet intervention. Furthermore, Vasil'ev now changes his view on the Dhofari’s revolutionary zeal: earlier it was a cause for romantic admiration, now it turns out to be something which requires intervention and correction.

Disillusion and the Dhofari Revolutionaries

Despite his romantic praise for the Dhofari revolutionaries, Vasil'ev also cautioned his audience against too much optimism in Dhofar. His target audience included a wider, academically interested public: the two major publications of Vasil'ev under scrutiny here (Puteshestvie v arabia feliks and Trudnii pereval) were published by Nauka (an academic publisher) and by Molodaia Gvardiia (renowned for its publications for young readers). He remarked that in Dhofar there were no urban classes and that, overall, the region resembled more a ‘medieval country’ than anything else – the reference to the ‘middle ages’ was a recurring phrase in Soviet publications to mark backwardness and betrayed a teleological vision of history. How could ‘cowherds and farmers’, Vasil'ev asked in his travelogue, adopt Marxist ideals? Let alone implement them? Vasil'ev considered the Dhofari views of socialism misguided, diluted and distorted, since it did not arrive in its ‘original’ form to Dhofar ‘but more often as a free adaption, sometimes inaccurate, sometimes with a twisted essence’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Abdel Razzaq Takriti, a scholar of state building in the modern Arab world, basically concurs with Vasil'ev but sees this ‘twisted essence’ of socialism in Yemen and Dhofar in a more positive light:

Vasil'ev forgot that the Soviet Union was a deviation from the Marxist script itself: tsarist Russia had comprised quite a number of ‘cowherds and farmers’ in 1917. Vasil'ev, however, saw the Middle Eastern vernacularisation as just this: as a ‘misreading and misinterpretation’. Here, the allegedly superior Soviet knowledge about socialism, the Soviet claim to truth, the Soviet ability to distinguish right and wrong came to fully display.Footnote ⁶¹ It shattered all revolutionary dreams, both the Dhofari ones about socialism and the Soviet ones about Dhofar. It is with condescending ‘deep sympathies’ (and not with respect) that Vasil'ev looked at this supposed revolution en miniature, but, in the end, these revolutionaries were hopelessly wrong. It was useless to have false hopes about the real level of socialist convictions in Dhofar: people there, Vasil'ev argued, thought that socialism was simply about achieving an overabundance of everything.Footnote ⁶² But this was not socialism, as Vasil'ev knew from the Soviet Union. Socialism was, for him, a much more complicated matter. Such a departure from the romantic illusions about revolution resulted from the increasingly widespread political Soviet cynicism that set in in the 1970s, coupled with a sense of supremacy that could be played out in the Middle East and that offset any sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the West. This cynicism is noticeably clear in Vasil'ev's account of the Dhofari revolutionaries and it was coupled with the conviction that Soviet socialism was the new standard for everything left-wing around the globe.

To confirm his cynicism and the scepticism about the long-term viability of a Yemeni revolution, Vasil'ev referred to the social and economic conditions in Dhofar. In doing so, he implicitly chose a very Marxist way of reasoning: existence determines consciousness. He discussed hunger, dirt and illness. He added that it was a supposed lethargic idleness of Yemenis that favoured the grip on the country by colonial powers.Footnote ⁶³ This was a recurring description that was in line with statements made by Western authors about Yemen at the same time. J.B. Kelly, a fellow ‘Orientalist’ of Bernard Lewis, for instance, denounced the Yemeni traits of character, ‘their inveterate suspiciousness, proneness to superstition and rancour and contumacy towards one another’ that were not conducive to modernisation.Footnote ⁶⁴ Vasil'ev also mentioned how he was mistaken for a physician and approached by people with various diseases. Every white man, Vasil'ev implied, could be a doctor. Sickness, superstition and outdated customs were mentioned by him repeatedly.Footnote ⁶⁵

Gender relations were the most recurring litmus test of backwardness. From the Russian-led modernisation of Central Asia to contemporary discourses on the Middle East and Islam, the ‘liberation’ of women has been used as a political device to measure ‘progress’ and justify corrective measures or even military intervention.Footnote ⁶⁶ This obsessive discussion of gender relations was also paramount for Soviet travellers to the Middle East. They seemed particularly apt to be inserted into a narrative of backwardness, transition and leap into socialism. This holds for Vasil'ev's narrative, too. The clash of backwardness and modernity was staged in a dramatic encounter between the author and an old Dhofari woman and her daughter: the old woman flatly rejected modernity, while her daughter was pictured as striving for education. She asked for Vasil'ev's help in order ‘to know the world’, to change her way of life. In a dramatic climax, the daughter finally agreed to unveil herself in front of and for Vasil'ev as a symbol of her wish to be ‘modern’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Vasil'ev presents himself as Soviet liberator of Dhofari women, symbolically unveiling and undressing them and thus pushing them into modernity.Footnote ⁶⁸ Narrower political questions, such as the possibility of achieving socialism in Dhofar, whether the Dhofari political aims correspond to the Soviet yardstick, suddenly appear less important. It is irrelevant whether the Dhofari daughter is socialist, communist or nationalist; all she has to do is to unveil herself, disclose her secrets to the Soviet researcher and leave ‘backwardness’ behind. Vasil'ev and the Soviet Union are portrayed as bearers of a universal modernity and of ‘modern’ gender relations.Footnote ⁶⁹

Vasil'ev also condemned ‘child marriage’ and ‘bride price’. Vasil'ev uses these catchphrases to exoticise Yemen and Dhofar and to outrage his readers. He recounted his practices with a mixture of disgust and fascination, possibly even with secret enjoyment. Vasil'ev, however, failed to provide any context for these practices in time and space, and provided no explanation for their occurrence. Their presentation is merely intended to create a system of distinction and hierarchy between the modern Soviet Union and Dhofar. In this system, the Soviet Union could indulge in its own superiority and modernity, having itself overcome the practices it now condemned, observing with condescension a wild, archaic Yemen. Such a stance systematically disregarded the fact that, in the same period, similar practices still existed in parts of the Soviet Union (for instance in the Caucasus or in Central Asia). Indeed, ‘modernity’ and ‘pre-modernity’ coexist in many places. Instead of exploring such grey, blurred and hybrid zones, Vasil'ev preferred to draw a black and white picture of Soviet modernity on the one hand, and Yemen's and Dhofar's backwardness on the other.

Revolutionary Routines and Bureaucratic Symbiosis

In this section, I would like to highlight how, despite the deep-seated ambivalence about their partners, the Soviet Union developed a bureaucratic symbiosis with various Middle Eastern states, movements and individuals. Both sides needed each other as a source of legitimacy. This holds particularly for the period under scrutiny, in other words the transition from ‘Thaw’ to ‘Stagnation’. With much of the political, cultural and social optimism generated by the Thaw fading away, the Soviet Union also readjusted its founding myths: in the post-Khrushchev era, victory in the Second World War, and not the 1918 Revolution, became the pillar of Soviet historiography. Along with the détente, this shift had an impact on Soviet international relations. It contributed to limiting Soviet support for revolutionary movements in the Middle East and subordinating it to realpolitik. Western and Russian observers, including Vasil'ev, hailed this shift as a move from ‘messianism’ to ‘pragmatism’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Nevertheless, without being very revolutionary itself anymore, the Soviet Union was still eager to be seen as a champion of revolutions.

In the same period, while the Soviet Union exited the Thaw, for most of the Middle East the key ideological development was a widespread disillusionment with Nasserism, following the 1967 war. For Middle Eastern communists and revolutionaries, the changing, increasingly pragmatic position of their Soviet allies meant an additional complication. Furthermore, after the Islamic revolution in 1979, and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a new revolutionary vision attracted significant support in the Middle East.

What thus emerged after the Second World War was a Soviet–Middle Eastern symbiosis of changing intensity and contents. While during the Thaw it was driven by ideological optimism and reciprocal curiosity, it became increasingly bureaucratic in the post-Khrushchev era. This symbiosis was uneven and characterised by a power gap, as it was the Soviet Union which supplied material resources. Still, Middle Eastern regimes and movements could provide legitimacy to the Soviet position in the Middle East, either as champion of decolonisation or anti-imperialism. The Soviet presence was also ‘proof of its superpower position and of its capacity to guide foreign revolutions’.Footnote ⁷¹ Still, while the power distribution was in favour of the Soviet Union, this fact does not preclude that at times Middle Eastern or developing world partners could push their Soviet interlocutors to provide material assistance or immaterial concessions. In the 1950s post-revolutionary Egypt was courted by the United States but opted for Soviet support,Footnote ⁷² in the 1970s Ethiopian politicians pushed for an alliance with the Soviet Union,Footnote ⁷³ and Yemeni decision makers acted similarly at times. To understand the changing nature of this Soviet–Middle Eastern symbiosis, two sources are particularly important for analysis: first, sources that show how Middle Eastern political agents conceptualised independence, socialism and revolution; and, second, communications between Middle Eastern liberation movements and the array of Soviet institutions tasked to interact with them. Both topics will be dealt with in the following section, using the Yemen/Dhofar case study.

Independence and Socialism for the Middle East

Many of the paradoxical Soviet stances discussed above, which wavered between praise, admiration, exoticism, misunderstanding and disillusion, were based on the multidimensional stances taken by the Middle Eastern liberation movements themselves, especially on socialism. Arab socialism had many sources, one of the most influential being the socialism proposed within Nasserism, which also played a significant role in Yemen. While PFLOAG had rejected Nasserism, this political ideology and its downfall represented an important backdrop both for the activity of PFLOAG as well as how the Soviet side interpreted socialist experiments in the Middle East.

In his Philosophy of the Revolution, Gamal Nasser repeatedly stressed the double character of his revolution, which was both political and social.Footnote ⁷⁴ It was only in 1956 that Egypt officially inaugurated Arab Socialism and enshrined, among other things, the destruction of imperialism, the end of feudalism and of the domination of capital over the government, as well as the establishment of social justice in the new constitution.Footnote ⁷⁵ The Suez Crisis echoed this legislative framework on the level of political action. Against the background of Thaw optimism, Nasser's 1956 intransigence left a deep impression in Moscow, causing ‘fascination’ and making Nasser a ‘legend’ not only in the Arab world but also in the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Nasser, Soviet observers saw a chance for socialism because they wanted to. However, Mohammed Heikal, one of Nasser's closest advisers, also remembered that in 1961 Nasser felt it was necessary to make clear the distinction between socialism, which Nasser practiced, and communism, which Nasser rejected’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In May 1962 the National Charter of Socialist Principles was presented to the Congress of Popular Forces by Nasser.Footnote ⁷⁸ It reiterated the aforementioned principles and stressed Egypt's revolutionary tradition, drawing a continuity between scientific socialism and Islam as a socialist religion.Footnote ⁷⁹ Egypt also intervened to help republican forces in Northern Yemen (1962–7) against the royalists. It sought and received Soviet support in this endeavour.Footnote ⁸⁰ ‘Soviet theoreticians, such as Ulianovskii, thought they could discern in the [Nasserist] Vanguard the nucleus of a new progressive party’.Footnote ⁸¹ Other Soviet observers dismissed Nasserist socialism as ‘utopian’ and ‘transitory’, in other words as not yet ‘scientific’Footnote ⁸² and certainly not ‘theoretical’ enough: indeed, for Nasser, theories were meaningful ‘only in their practical application’.Footnote ⁸³ The Nasserist Arab Nationalist Movement abandoned Nasserism and adopted Marxism-Leninism instead, especially in its non-Soviet variants,Footnote ⁸⁴ and fell apart soon thereafter.

Socialism was also a part of Ba'athism in Syria and Iraq. While Ba'athism had no significant foothold in Yemen, it is discussed here as another key ideological current in the region with a relation to socialism. In a 1966 speech Michel Aflaq, one of the founding fathers of Ba'athism, firmly underlined his left-wing beliefs but also neatly distinguished between socialism on the one hand, and communism and Marxism on the other.Footnote ⁸⁵ Soviet observers had few illusions about the instrumental role socialism played in Ba'athist theory: Georgii Mirskii compared the Ba'ath party to a ‘medieval secret order’, ‘unable to honestly cooperate with anyone’,Footnote ⁸⁶ and Evgenii Troitskii, a Yemen-expert with the Institute of Oriental Studies, mentioned the Ba'ath only as a necessary partner of the Syrian Communist Party.Footnote ⁸⁷ Aflaq, however, represented the first-generation Ba'athist:Footnote ⁸⁸ for second generation Ba'athist politicians, like Hafez al-Assad of Syria, power issues were more important than ideological subtleties. While there were policies that could be sold as vaguely ‘socialist’ in Syria, such as land reform programmes,Footnote ⁸⁹ Assad was much more focused on strengthening his grip on the country and making Syria a key Middle Eastern player.Footnote ⁹⁰

Even after Nasser, pan-Arab nationalism and Arab socialism were the key ideological factors for many Middle Eastern liberation movements, including in Yemen; Vitali Naumkin expressed the Soviet conviction that socialism ‘was part and parcel’ of national liberation ‘since socialism allowed the colonial peoples to become aware of the state of subordination and backwardness’.Footnote ⁹¹ It was with this basic belief that a wide array of Soviet individuals and organisations entered into contact with national liberation movements in the Middle East. Some of them, like the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), harboured more left-wing convictions and had broken with Nasserism, despite the influence Nasser had on the anti-British struggle in Yemen. The Egyptian failed military campaign in Yemen (1962–5) and the Egyptian-Syrian defeat in the Six-Day War (1967) led to a decay in appeal of both Nasserism and Ba'athism. The defeat of the Nasserist wing within the liberation movement in 1967 contributed to the rise of ‘scientific socialism’ in South Yemen.Footnote ⁹² The key takeaway here is that for most of the liberation movements and regimes in the Middle East, socialism was not a priority, although it featured among its aims. The most important ideological elements were Arab nationalism and independence. Also, socialism in the Middle East appeared in many different forms. Only South Yemen (and PFLOAG) explicitly made scientific socialism a political means and goal. Still, neither the former nor the latter could ignore the role of Nasserism and Ba'athism in the region.Footnote ⁹³ Finally, for the Soviet Union, too, Nasserism and Ba'athism were two important, however ideologically disappointing manifestations of something remotely like ‘socialism’ in the Middle East.

Crafting the Symbiosis

The Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee (SKSSAA) was the key Soviet interlocutor for PFLOAG and other Yemeni ‘public organisations’ modelled along Soviet lines.Footnote ⁹⁴ It was one of the many non-state, party-affiliated, Soviet organisations that entertained relations with foreign movements. Other Soviet organisations were the Soviet Committee for Peace, the Soviet Women's Committee,Footnote ⁹⁵ the KomsomolFootnote ⁹⁶ and the Friendship societies. However, the SKSSAA was the one which fulfilled most obviously quasi-diplomatic tasks entertaining relations with organisations with which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could not negotiate, as the latter worked only on a state level. To call it a development agency in the contemporary sense of the term would be misguided, even if it took over responsibilities like such organisations. Formally, it is also correct to designate it a ‘public organisation’ (in its official Soviet terminology) or a ‘non-state organisation’, as it was subordinated to the foreign policy arm of the CPSU, the International Department of the Central Committee, and not to the State apparatus.Footnote ⁹⁷ As such, according to the testimony of a former member, Samandar Kalandarov, it dealt with public diplomacy, political and material support, the organisation of conferences and meetings at various levels and on different topics, the mobilisation of the Soviet population and the declarations of solidarity in the context of the many proxy conflicts of the Cold War, as well as with the education of foreign cadres.Footnote ⁹⁸ Most importantly, however, the SKSSAA awarded scholarships for universities in the Soviet Union to members of foreign liberation movements.

One issue that stands out is the bureaucratic symbiosis between these liberation movements, such as PFLOAG, and Soviet officials.Footnote ⁹⁹ The SKSSAA and its partners shared the interest to make a variety of events happen, because it was conducive for both sides: conferences, business trips, medical treatments and scholarships, all gave both sides a reason to be. Both sides made a living out of staging a permanent revolution abroad. Therefore, they collaborated to connect the system of Soviet relations to liberation movements, of which both sides were a product, and which – at the same time – they constantly shaped and reshaped. Routine messages bear witness to the day-to-day work to get things organised, especially regarding scholarships, the most important and highly coveted commodity of the SKSSAA. The committee implemented strict deadlines for all applications. The Solidarity Committee, for instance, laconically dismissed a request by Yemeni comrade Faruk Hakimi, informing him that ‘because documents have been sent from Aden directly to the Ministry of Higher Education bypassing the Solidarity Committee, we could not follow [up on the] question in due time and our last efforts on your cable have been helpless’ (sic).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Between the lines, the SKSSAA official signalled that bypassing the committee was not an appreciated idea. On the other hand, Soviet embassies, too, relied on the committee's help to get their Yemeni protégées to the Soviet Union: ‘we ask you to check the documents of these [scholarship] candidates [for eligibility for a SKSSAA grant] as getting them to Soviet universities on a state grant encounters serious problems’, argued a Soviet diplomat in Yemen in a letter to the Solidarity Committee, without elaborating the nature of these problems.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Organising the scholarship was a joint effort between the Yemeni partners (who could propose candidates), the Soviet embassies, the Ministry of Higher Education and the SKSSAA. Different grant lines were available, their numbers limited. Regarding its partner organisations, the SKSSAA functioned as a gatekeeper. To get through the SKSSAA-guarded gate a certain degree of linguistic symbiosis was necessary in addition to the bureaucratic one. Both sides knew what to say and what to write, they knew the requested jargon to solicit their interlocutor to act in a certain way.

The PFLOAG played a prominent role in the SKSSAA's correspondence. Letters from the SKSSAA routinely confirmed the revolutionary credentials of their interlocutors. For instance, the PFLOAG, which Vasil'ev had described with this mix of admiration, paternalism and arrogance, was officially praised by the SKSSAA, stressing that ‘freedom flag raised by your revolution marked beginning new life for people masses in liberated territories’ [sic]. In its public statements and personal communications the SKSSAA did not cast any doubt that this was a revolutionary movement. It even acknowledged that in Dhofar there are ‘working masses interests’ that benefit from the ‘important transformations … being carried [out] under PFLOAG leadership ‘to overcome backwardness’.Footnote ¹⁰² Contrary to revolutionary axioms, in Yemen and Dhofar the revolution did not necessitate a certain degree of development – it was supposed to create the development that sustained it.

However, the congratulations were overshadowed by the risks that the movement incurred: ‘imperialist reaction forces build up military bases and use open military intervention try[ing] to preserve their control over oil resources, to stop national liberation struggle headed by PFLOAG. [The] Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee declares resolute support and solidarity with fighting patriots of Dhofar, expresses firm confidence in the victory of the just cause your people struggle for under PFLOAG leadership.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Hence, while PFLOAG was praised for its achievements, the SKSSAA presidium stressed that this revolution needed Soviet support as well as that of other socialist countries to resist imperialism's attempts to undermine the movement's progress. The importance of such Soviet statements should not be underestimated: Yemeni and Dhofari letters of congratulation were often ‘published in full. … These letters reasserted to Omani readers their belonging to the global community of revolution and informed them of the achievements of other liberation movements’ or, as in this case, of the unwavering support and the recognition by the foremost socialist power, the Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

On another occasion, the SKSSAA congratulated the ‘brotherly Yemeni people’ on the anniversary of the revolution and the progress made in the ‘liquidation of imperialism’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Here, all emphasis was put on Yemen's ‘progressive anti-imperialism’ and the ‘fight against the forces of imperialism and reaction’, for which the SKSAA assured the ‘broadest support of the Soviet Union’. Here, there was no mention of socialism. The SKSSAA official embraced the national liberation narrative.

In turn, there were Yemeni expectations regarding what Soviet support actually meant, and Yemeni counterparts used a similar vocabulary as their Soviet partners to achieve their goodwill and material support: ‘you have followed the quickly developing events [in Yemen] that reflect … the enormity and fury of the plot that reactionary and imperialist forces stage against our people and our land’, and hence, ‘world revolutionary powers, headed by the Soviet Union, are required to provide even more attention, help and support’ to the Yemeni comrades.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Yemeni author correctly identified ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’ in the socialist world, but most importantly highlighted the Soviet Union's role in this socialist community of states. By attributing this position to the Soviet Union, the Yemeni authors surmised that the Soviet Union had an obligation or duty to support Yemen. At the end of the long letter the author stressed that he would seize any opportunity to meet SKSSAA representatives and exchange views as well as information, but also followed up on a critical issue, with which his letter reaches its climax: ‘this year we have sent you some letters, raising questions about student scholarships, which we have been receiving for a long time, and an agreement to increase them to 15 … that was reached during my visit. But unfortunately, after this agreement, for unknown reasons, we did not receive these scholarships. Your representative here has informed us that your response about these scholarships was negative. Could you explain your position on this matter?’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Thus, while the Soviet Union promised its support, and was forced to by virtue of the leading position it wanted to keep, it apparently failed on such a small issue. On the one hand, this exchange highlights that the SKSSAA either had a problem with keeping track of its promises and assurance or that its decision could be overruled by other players higher-up in the hierarchy. On the other hand, the message shows the degree to which the Yemeni side mastered the language needed to push forward and receive the support which had been pledged by Soviet partners. Often enough, this approach seemed too ‘pushy’ for the Soviet side: a high-ranking KGB official, Vadim Kirpichenko, recalled that his South Yemeni partners ‘were often aggressive in their conduct of negotiations, especially when they needed to hammer out various kinds of material-technological aid from us. … We provided, of course, the minimum, mostly operational technology.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Such statements mark the limits of cooperation, possibly even a dysfunctional relationship. While ‘the minimum, mostly operational technology’ could barely satisfy the Yemeni side, this approach is hardly a sign of Soviet appreciation for the partnership with the Yemenis.

Finally, the linguistic symbiosis also touched the practical, organisational side. I.V. Talalaev, an advisor at the Soviet embassy in Aden, produced a report after meeting with Ahmed Hamid Mulgi, head of the Yemeni People's Defence Committees. These were modelled along the lines of the Cuban Committees for the Defence of the Revolution. Mulgi stressed the international outreach of his organisation and that it had concluded agreements with the National Fronts of Czechoslovakia and East Germany, as well as with the Fatherland Front of Bulgaria.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Thus, Mulgi had presented his well-established network in various other socialist countries to Talalaev. Now, Mulgi wanted to further expand these connections to Moscow and contact similar Soviet organisations. However, Talalaev had to disappoint him and explained that such organisations did not exist in the Soviet Union. He referred, however, to the SKSSAA and the Peace Committee.

The involvement of East Germany, Cuba and China underpins how the Yemeni revolutionaries placed themselves into a ‘global community of Revolution that boasted its own practices, literatures, modes of expression, ideologies and signs’,Footnote ¹¹⁰ and which particularly referred to Palestinian, Cuban, Chinese and Vietnamese experiences. Dhofari revolutionaries particularly gave ‘pride of place … to the Palestinian revolution. References to it are to be found in a wide range of poems, essays, interviews, posters and drawings, and enormous space was given to Palestinian voices in Dhofari [and Yemeni] revolutionary publications’, endowing the Yemeni side with a ‘cultural means of legitimation’, in the Arab context.Footnote ¹¹¹ Thus, the Yemeni revolutionaries claimed their own revolutionary tradition that was independent from the Soviet Union and truly global.Footnote ¹¹² It is this independent political claim to revolution and its symbols with which the Soviet side struggled to come to terms. There certainly was an overlap with the Soviet symbolic universe, but these revolutionary traditions were not identical. While Moscow was one socialist player among many, it certainly was the most powerful and the most authoritative. Therefore, the alignment with the Soviet Union endowed the Yemenis with legitimacy in the socialist system, as much as the Soviet alignment with Yemen gave Moscow legitimacy in the Middle East, especially with the movements the Yemenis referred to, as well as in the socialist system as a whole.

Thus, to keep their cooperation alive and to legitimise it, the Yemeni and Soviet sides needed each other. They established a bureaucratic symbiosis. For the Soviets, represented by the SKSSAA, the Soviet Union was the shining example and master of successful socialist revolution. More specifically the SKSSAA provided study grants, paid for medical treatments in the Soviet Union and sponsored the coordination between various organisations in the ‘Third World’. The Middle Eastern and ‘Third World’ revolutionaries received the Soviet seal of approval. They worked on their revolutions with assistance from Moscow and confirmed in turn that the Soviet Union was the true keeper of the revolutionary grail. Furthermore, the mere existence of the revolutionary movements underlined to the Soviet audience that socialism worldwide was ‘on track’, that it was spreading at a quick pace.