Drawing on two new resources for Middle Eastern women’s history—the archives of the Women’s Secretariat of the Third International (Communist Women's International) and the Communist University for the Toilers of the East (KUTV)—this talk will focus on a group of women from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria who traveled to study and work in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s. Facilitated by the Comintern and the proliferating communist parties in the Middle East during the 1920s, these migrations occurred immediately after the period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that one scholar has recently described as the “moment of genesis” of Mediterranean radicalism. The talk will thus consider how the establishment of organized communist movements affected communities of Mediterranean radicals, but also consider important continuities. How and why did these women come to study in the Soviet Union from the early 1920s to the mid 1930s? What kinds of expectations did the Comintern have of them as “women” and as “Easterners” both in Moscow and in their home countries? How did these women use such expectations to promote their individual and collective interests using the bureaucracies of this officially anti-imperialist party-state? In answering these questions, Comintern archives help to illuminate a long neglected non-European dimension of “the woman question” in Middle Eastern studies. The documents suggest a new point of comparison for scholars interested in how various nationalist and European colonial modernization projects used Middle Eastern women as an object. Particularly interesting are examples of women migrants from places like Syria and Egypt who were asked to participate in Soviet efforts to “liberate” women in domestic regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Such cases show unexpected connections between internal and external workings of the party-state in its efforts to “overcome backwardness” in domestic and foreign “Eastern” societies.