In 1973, when three thousand scholars gathered in Paris for the twenty-ninth International Congress of Orientalists, the majority rejected their marquee. The participants voted against any reference to “the Orient,” in part because the term was a product of Western power; the organization then rebranded itself the International Congress of the Human Sciences in Asia and the North of Africa. In one of those curious twists of history, the loudest defender of the old approach hailed from the Soviet Union—a country whose scholars regularly criticized Western hegemony. Masha Kirasirova concludes her new book, The Eastern International, with this episode from the life of Bobojon Ghafurov, a man who left his native kishlak (village) to become the first Tajik to lead Tajikistan’s communist party and who, by 1973, headed the Oriental Studies Institute in Moscow. She seeks to explain how the Soviet Union produced a distinctive language of anticolonial politics, one that often clashed with global trends.

Kirasirova offers a story of original sin. She argues that, as the Bolsheviks sought to fashion a world after empire, they committed to an “Eastern” politics. When she describes “the Eastern International,” she acknowledges elements of anticolonialism, anticapitalism, and anti-Westernism, but she uses a vague formulation to assert essence: a state-sponsored attempt to connect the “domestic East” to the “foreign East.” Consistently, she highlights Soviet leaders’ claims that the Soviet Union had intimate experience of both oppression and liberation, that the Soviet state’s engagement with anticolonial movements abroad built on a program of decolonization among the non-Russian peoples of the former Romanov Empire.

Ghafurov’s performance was therefore dissonant in 1973 precisely because it was consonant with the language of the Eastern International: even as Soviet politicians practiced anti-imperialism, they embraced the categories of Eastern and Western that had so often served to legitimize empire. The institutional metaphor, combined with a broad definition of the ideological core, allows Kirasirova to tie her story to Soviet and post-Soviet Russian great power politics (Vladimir Putin figures in chapter 7 and the conclusion); ultimately, her Eastern International was—and its legacy is—a tool of the Kremlin’s power.

Although the book’s introduction and conclusion are state-centric, the chapters focus on “intermediaries”— the subtitle’s “Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews.” Each chapter is a “case study” (3, 16), loosely organized around institutions or events—among them: the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV); the purges of the late 1930s; the Thaw; and the Tashkent Film Festival of the 1950s and 1960s. Two factors explain the selection of these cases: one, Kirasirova’s interest in a particular set of connections, that between Central Asia and Arab societies in the Eastern Mediterranean; and two, her desire to trace a steady progression from the Russian Revolution to the present. Her approach blends intellectual history and the study of cultural diplomacy, and she draws heavily on secondary literature to provide context about Soviet anti-imperialism; in keeping with her argument, she highlights works on decolonization at home and decolonization abroad, on Soviet nationalities policies and Soviet foreign policy.

The broader point about Moscow’s Eastern overtures is welcome and plausible, but the Eastern International works less well as a metaphor. And it is here a metaphor, not an institution—very unlike the familiar Communist International, which drew on a more recognizable ideology. Kirasirova classes individuals like Nuriddin Mukhidinov, George Hanna, and Evgenii Primakov as intermediaries because they helped build connections between the Soviet Union’s domestic East and the foreign East. But the absence of an institution—no one carried an Eastern Party card—allows her to smooth over complex questions of inclusion and exclusion. The word “intermediary” places distance between the Eastern International that serves as analytic framework and the individuals who constitute the book. When Kirasirova writes that her intermediaries sought to “access Soviet power” (7) or “access Soviet state resources” (217), they seem to stand outside of what it meant to be Soviet in those years. But many of these figures reached such heights that, if they were merely intermediaries, one wonders who else stood at the heart of the Eastern International.

It is much easier to imagine these individuals as central participants of socialist, anticolonial, or Afro-Asian internationalisms. The awkwardness of the Eastern metaphor is visible, for example, when Kirasirova writes that a stream of foreign visitors in the 1950s made Tashkent “a ‘showcase city’ for the Eastern International” (177). Although Tashkent certainly connected Soviet Central Asia to the Soviet Union’s Third World allies, most guests presumably saw it as a showcase for socialism, for a model of development, for Uzbekistan, or even for the Soviet Union itself. Indeed, Kirasirova’s description of the ideology—one she defines in terms of the Kremlin’s quest for power—makes it hard to imagine the Eastern International as an expansive and inclusive institution.

Ghafurov’s performance in Paris demonstrates the lasting importance of the East as a geographic category; but, more than the evidence she provides of continuity, Kirasirova’s attention to moments of rupture is compelling. And these ruptures raise the question: was the Soviet state less creator and monopoly owner of an Eastern International than a source of interventions—often with mixed success—intended to shape the meaning of an autonomous Eastern imaginary? The first intervention (the moment of original sin) came in 1919, and it is the subject of chapter 1, in which Kirasirova explains that Stalin chose “the East” because it lacked the religious connotation of the related word “Muslim” and was vague enough to foreclose calls for territorial secession (29). This moment produced the rare explicit invocation of an Eastern International (31), and it also produced an institution that brought together Central Asians and Arabs: KUTV (although it would soon close, in 1938). The external borders and internal divisions of this early East were ill-defined. Yet, as Kirasirova goes on to explain, the Kremlin was pushed by nationalism at home and pulled by events abroad, and cosmopolitan beginnings gave way to a vision of divided space. By the 1930s, as Moscow developed a preference for centralized states and the territorialization of ethnicity, it had moved closer to global practices of anticolonial organization.

Indeed, Kirasirova argues that the Soviet Union’s success with the Third World in the 1950s emerged from a striking ideological convergence: a shared preference for centralized states and territorialized ethnicity which she describes as “revolutionary statism” (153). It was another intervention, one that came in the 1960s, that determined Ghafurov’s divergence. Kirasirova does a wonderful job showing that the Soviet Union had an analog for the questioning of geographic categories that transpired in Paris in 1973. She brings writers like Olzhas Suleimenov and Chingiz Aitmatov into the story here, since they embraced a radical humanism not unlike that of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon—that is, until the Soviet censors intervened. In an especially evocative chapter, she tells of the Tajik actor and director, Kamil Yarmotov, who adhered to the censors’ preferred script and sank into obsolescence. If we seek to understand Ghafurov’s defense of Orientalism in 1973, this last intervention, a decision to enforce a bounded and outdated understanding of the East, seems more relevant than the 1919 origins story.

The weaknesses of the institutional metaphor notwithstanding, The Eastern International advances conversations about the Soviet Union and decolonization. Among its many valuable contributions, Kirasirova’s work pushes readers to think broadly about the Bolsheviks’ interconnected attempts to address questions of empire at home and abroad.