How should we explain Putin’s Russia embodying and allying itself with non-Western nations that had been humiliated by European and American imperialisms while inflicting immense violence upon its neighboring Ukraine, no less brutal than its Western counterparts in the past? This is a timely and badly needed book that addresses this puzzle by describing the Soviet century from the East and framing it within global history. Focusing on connectivity between Soviet Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, Masha Kirasirova coins the term “Eastern International” to capture a networked world of actors and institutions that span the Soviet world and the foreign and domestic Easts. These mediators, comprising Central Asians, Jews, and Arabs, deployed the concept of “East” (Vostok) to solicit the Soviets’ resources, intervene in the global discourse on decolonization, and gain legitimacy for the Soviet Union as an anticolonial power. During the Cold War, Tashkent became the primary showcase of Soviet development in the East. Meanwhile, the Eastern International concealed inequalities and exploitation in the Soviet domestic East and restrained alternative historical narratives in Central Asia. The Arab and other Leftists also evaded the discussions about the colonial aspects of Russia’s empires and what they experienced and observed while in the Soviet Union. This partly accounts for the separation of the Russian Empire and the USSR from twentieth-century conversations about colonialism, anticolonialism, and postcolonialism. Kirasirova dismantles this myth and transcends the exceptionalist conceptualization of Soviet history and the conventional divisions of labor in area studies. Multi-archival and multilingual sources, encompassing documents, memoirs, and interviews in Moscow, Tashkent, Dushanbe, Damascus, Beirut, and Boston, enable the author to incorporate the intellectual and social histories of individuals involved in the Eastern International into a global narrative.

Chapter 1 traces the life trajectory of Konstantin Troianovskii, a Jew from the Kiev Province, as an architect of the Bolsheviks’ early efforts to imagine and project the world revolution to the colonized East. Under the influence of the German political geographers’ school, Troianovskii proposed the creation of an “International of the East,” a united anti-imperialist democratic front that could oppose the Western International of capital. The most formative period for his ideal and practice was Turkestan from 1918 to 1921, with the controversial operation of his Union for the Liberation of the East in Tashkent and his friendship with the future Soviet Uzbek leader Fayzulla Khodjaev (they conversed in French). The geopolitical thinking of Eastern International was prone to dismissing the Turkestanis’ local agency and sufferings. Meanwhile, at the Lausanne Conference in 1922, Georgy Chicherin, People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, began to view the Arab world as a potential partner that could challenge British predominance and strengthen ties with the Muslim Near East. Jews from the former Pale of Settlement became an asset for the Bolsheviks to forge the new connectivity. Arab and Jewish communist party leaders presented themselves as willing mediators of the Soviets’ world revolution in the East.

Chapter 2 examines the lives of students at the Communist University for the Toilers of the East (KUTV), which was established under the Commissariat of Nationalities in April 1921. Its rector was a Jew, Grigorii Broido, who had been involved in the Turkestan revolution. Around one-third of KUTV students were foreigners from the “countries of the colonized East,” who were disillusioned with the Versailles order and the Wilsonian moment of self-determination and discovered a Leninist moment as an alternative opportunity. Jews occupied top-level positions in the KUTV administration and the Comintern Eastern Section. “Arab” students from the Eastern Mediterranean, including both Christians and Muslims, were an incoherent and divided category of people who began at KUTV to debate what it meant to be an Arab. Kirasirova acutely detects a gendered dimension in this process. Female students were able to navigate Soviet assumptions about Easternness for their own benefit, utilizing self-orientalizing language and the “rhetoric of backwardness” to defend themselves.

Chapter 3 addresses the “Arabization” of the communist parties in the Eastern Mediterranean, which had been dominated by ethnic minorities, such as Jews, Armenians, and Greeks. This transpired at the intersection of nation-making projects in the Mandates and in the Soviet East. While waves of Zionist migration to Palestine generated tensions and clashes with the native Arabs, Soviet domestic policy of indigenization (korenizatsiia) based on majoritarian ethno-nationalism in the borderlands went hand in hand with Stalinist democracy that assaulted previously untouchable authorities from below. Given the Jewish overrepresentation at KUTV and the Comintern Eastern Section, the Arabization pitted assimilated Jewish teachers and administrators against Arabs. The elimination of most top-level Jewish activists in the late 1930s opened up opportunities for other upwardly mobile, ambitious young communists, including Khalid Bakdash, who, despite his Kurdish origin, would later become General Secretary of the Syrian Communist Party.

Chapter 4 explores the inception of Soviet cultural diplomacy with independent Lebanon and Syria in the 1940s. After the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad and other “societies of friends” facilitated the expansion of contacts between Arab communist intellectuals and the Soviet Union, paving the way for more conventional diplomatic relations. While the Molotov-Ribbentrop had driven the Jewish communists and Arab antifascist leftists to an impossible dilemma, the realignment of Soviet and Allied interests against Hitler allowed them to reconnect with grassroots support for antifascist causes. Showcasing domestic diversity abroad, the Soviets were persistent in the imagination and practice of Eastern International. This could backfire, though, as the Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals’ visit to Tashkent in 1947 revealed the different religious sensitivity to alcohol. The Soviet support for the partition of Palestine in 1948 again caused disillusionment and regret among the Lebanese and Syrian communists. Nevertheless, some Arab intellectuals continued to view Soviet support for culture and literature as an opportunity to nurture a sense of belonging to the Soviet cultural sphere. Erasing the inconvenient history of the 1940s, they would contribute to the flourishing contacts between the Soviet and Arab worlds in the late 1950s.

Chapter 5 illustrates this buildout by using a biography of Uzbek politician Nuriddin Mukhitdinov as the epitome of the Eastern International during the era of global decolonization. Nikita Khrushchev’s expansion of cultural diplomacy, alongside economic and political aid to decolonizing states, took place against a backdrop of waves of resistance to Sovietization in Eastern Europe, the global campaign to discredit the Soviet Union’s anticolonial legitimacy, and China’s participation in this anti-Soviet chorus. Playing on Khrushchev’s trust and anxiety, Mukhitdinov achieved “a level of power unattainable for any other marginalized “minority” representing a Cold War superpower.” (155) He encouraged Soviet leaders to transform Central Asia into a showcase of Soviet modernization for Asia and Africa, hosting festivals for writers and filmmakers in Tashkent. Even after losing power in 1961, Mukhitdinov remained involved in the State Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Thus, the Khrushchev era was the zenith of the Eastern International deploying Central Asia as a window on the decolonizing Afro-Asian world.

Chapter 6 reveals the increasing ideological predicaments between the narrowing possibilities of historical narratives in Central Asia and the theme of revolutionary armed struggle that significantly characterized Afro-Asian cinema, as exemplified by the life path of Uzbek (originally Tajik) filmmaker Kamil Yarmatov. Amid an open global competition between the USSR and China over anti-imperialist credentials in the 1960s, film diplomacy became another way of connecting the domestic and foreign Easts. To be sure, Soviet efforts to enhance its legitimacy as an anticolonial power led to increased resources being allocated to the cinema industry of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Yet, as the making of his Buria nad Aziei (1964) shows, Yarmatov tackled the impossible task of displaying Soviet anticolonialism to the foreign East while narrating pre-revolutionary Russian colonialism in Central Asia as a lesser evil or even progressive. In addition, late socialist culture was fraught with generational conflict: younger filmmakers and intellectuals were drawn to more experimental genres and forms of entertainment that allowed them to explore their new sense of belonging within the Soviet system. As a result, the revolutionary generation’s products failed to capture either international film audiences or the new generation of Soviet intellectuals, increasingly separating conversations about decolonization between the domestic and foreign Easts.

Chapter 7 covers the decline and demise of the Soviet Eastern International and its afterlife in the form of Putin’s global anti-Westernism and Aleksandr Dugin’s Russian Eurasianism, spanning from the 1970s to the present. Sustained cultural diplomacy, the Brezhnev-era’s repeated military interventions that culminated in the invasion of Afghanistan, and the expanding investment in the Third World’s decolonization made the Soviet regime weigh the costs against the benefits. Meanwhile, the growing tolerance of political critique enabled a postwar generation of Central Asian writers to challenge core claims about Soviet political legitimacy and modernity. Alongside Mikhail Gorbachev’s Euro-Atlantic orientation, Moscow began to see Central Asia as more of a liability than an asset, which partly accounts for the collapse of the Soviet anticolonial empire. Today, the West’s support of the White Christian Ukrainians lent a certain credibility to Russia’s anti-Westernism in non-Western countries. The Russian authorities cynically and brutally suppress critical reflection about the historical contexts of Soviet anticolonialism. Dugin’s Eurasianism finds its supporters among influential Muslim leaders in Russia.

Masha Kirasirova spectacularly demonstrates how productive the collective biography of domestic and foreign intermediaries between the Soviet Union and the Eastern Mediterranean is in revealing otherwise murky encounters and linking them to global conjunctures. The selection of these intermediaries, however, seems to obscure other forces of change. The book gives the impression that Central Asia persistently remained the core of the Eastern International throughout the Soviet century. In the course of the Bolsheviks’ gathering of the collapsed empire in Central Asia, their implementation of nationalities policy in the Muslim regions, and the early Soviet diplomacy in the Middle East, Volga Tatars were a prominent role model, as Troianovskii saw the Tatar-Bashkir Republic as the “cultural center” of his International of the East (33), and the author herself mentions them as old predecessors (218n6).Footnote ¹ Nariman Narimanov (1870–1925) from Azerbaijan served in 1919 as the chief of the Section of Near Eastern Muslims and then as Deputy of Soviet Russia’s People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs. The Congress of the Peoples of the East in September 1920 epitomized Baku’s significant place alongside Tashkent for the Eastern revolutionaries. Narimanov was also audacious in exporting revolution to the Iranian province of Gilan.Footnote ² Why were Daghestanis not visible during the Soviet period, while the Russian Federation has deployed them as its agents in the Arab countries, particularly in its hajj enterprise? Tatarstan may no longer have been considered Oriental enough to represent the Soviet domestic East for Asia and Africa in the Cold War. Yet Moscow counted on Fikriat Tabeev, first secretary of Soviet Tatarstan’s party committee from 1960 to 1979, as Soviet plenipotentiary in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1986. Mikhail Suslov argued for this appointment, “It is very important that you are a Muslim, and as a member of the Union Party’s Central Committee, you participate in many international organizations of Asia and Africa,” although he regarded himself as a “nonmilitant atheist”; Leonid Brezhnev also trusted him, “I never doubt Fikriat” (Shafikov Reference Shafikov2001: 278, 327–328). In short, much remains to be done in tracing the changes and contingencies in the Soviet visions of domestic Muslims and their roles in Soviet foreign policy.

The case of the Eastern Mediterranean also opens a question of its particularities and commonalities in comparison with other Arab countries (like Yemen), Turkey, Iran, and African countries. If Arab intellectuals contributed to Russia’s detachment from the global conversation of colonialism, what about their Turkish and Iranian counterparts, who tackled histories of Russia’s imperialist aggression as part of their endeavor to construct national narratives while receiving alternative forms of modernity from the Soviet Union? (Matin-Asgari Reference Matin-Asgari2018; Hirst, Reference Hirst2024) No doubt, Masha Kirasirova’s book is a fundamental milestone in the expanding horizon of entangled histories of Russia and the Middle East, as well as the Global South interventions in world history.