My paper will explore the experiences of Arab students inside Soviet Union during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods. As the USSR expanded its cultural and economic relations with the decolonizing world, hoping to benefit from the anti-Western (“anti-imperialist”) potential in newly-independent Arab countries, university education became a preferred technology of its cultural policies. Soviet university programs were expanded to train hundreds of thousands of experts and so-called “national cadres.” In 1960, the Soviet Foreign Ministry established the People’s Friendship University (PFUR) (named in honor of Patrice Lumumba from 1961-91), which quickly became symbolic due to its size and popularity. According to a former dean at PFUR, Valeri Alekseevich Belov, by the year 2000, there were around 500 thousand graduates of the USSR in 150 countries. Using archives of the PRUR and the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education, I begin by discussing the PFUR project in context of other Soviet discourses of internationalism in the 1960s and in particular its cultural and political policies towards Syria and the UAR. What were deemed proper socialist values within these 1960s internationalist schools? How exactly were they inculcated? I then complement and compare the state-centric perspective that comes across in the archives of Soviet state and university institutions—including articles by Syrian students published in the PRUR student newspaper, Druzhba (“Friendship”)—with interviews with Syrian alumni who studied in those universities in the 1960s and 70s. The interview subjects include students from the PRUR, but also from technical colleges and other educational establishments in Moscow that were expanded in the late 1950s and 1960s to accommodate the influx of students from the Middle East and the rest of the “developing world.” The memories of these alumni begs the question: How did the foreign students (especially those from Syria and other Arabic speaking countries) imagine their roles vis-à-vis Soviet power, its propaganda, and experiences during their student days that was different from the way it was portrayed by the universities and popular media? I hope that a comparison of these two sets of sources will highlight a dimension of a Cold War political relationship that has been neglected by earlier studies of Soviet-Arab relations focusing on diplomatic history, military aid, and high politics.