Soviet journalism is typically associated with straightforward political propaganda. Its high level of ideologization, while perceived as a shortcoming by the opponents of the USSR in the Cold War, was appealing to the activists of anticolonial movements who strove for politically engaged journalism and rejected the principle of journalistic objectivity as beneficial to Western colonialism. The basic assumption promoted by Soviet journalism - that it is impossible for journalists to have no ideological principles - allowed participants of anticolonial movements to think about journalism as an instrument in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle. My research is based on the dissertations written by Arab students of journalism in the USSR who explored the concept of “publitsistika” – a Russian word denoting a certain type of journalism that combined sophisticated literary criticism with ideologically progressive socio-political analysis. It stems from a journalistic tradition that provided social critique under the label of literature reviews in the condition of authoritarian pressure in such different societies as the French Republic of Letters of the XVII century or the XIX century Ottoman and Russian Empires (after Tanzimat reforms and the Great reforms of the 1860s respectively). It was institutionalized as a “theory of publitsistika” by Soviet scholars in the 1960s and taught to foreign students who started enrolling in Soviet universities en masse after WWII. I argue that Arab students in Soviet universities were drawn to this tradition because it provided them with a vision of a journalist as a politically engaged actor – an intellectual militant, a writer who is using their talent to engender mass enlightenment and spread knowledge helpful to building a new society. As a result, I unexpectedly uncovered a liberation potential in the presumably most ideologized sphere of Soviet life: this type of journalism was attractive to the Arab students because it offered a defense against the so-called “information imperialism“- the influence of the Western media and news agencies in the newly liberated countries. The reinforcement of subjectivity as inescapable in journalism in the Soviet media theory, as opposed to the dominant concept of “information neutrality” in Western journalism, enabled Arab students, who were influential public figures in their countries, to clearly establish their ideological positions and to define ideological struggle as an essential part of a public sphere.