What were the horizons of anti-colonial communism in the 1920s and 1930s? And what was the role of the Soviet Union in shaping the political imaginary of anti-colonial communists? In 1928 Fu’ad al-Shamali, a tobacco worker and co-founder of the Syrian and Lebanese Communist Party (SLCP), traveled to Moscow as a delegate to the Sixth Comintern Congress. Six years later he published an account of the trip under the title Madha Ra’aytu fi Moscow (What I Saw in Moscow). At the time of al-Shamali’s trip, Syria and Lebanon were under French colonial rule that had just faced its most serious challenge to date in the form of the Syrian Revolt of 1925-1927. Imprisoned from December 1926 until January 1928 for communist activity and participation in the revolt, al-Shamali became the General Secretary of the SLCP in 1928 following his release from prison and directly preceding his attendance at the Sixth Comintern Congress. What I Saw in Moscow is unique in form and content. Written for an audience assumed to be at minimum ignorant of and more likely antagonistic toward the politics and lived realities of the Soviet Union, it is split between his own experience in 1928 and a fictionalized journey a bourgeois tourist named “Henry” takes to Moscow. Al-Shamali’s trip to Moscow was undertaken clandestinely from Lebanon against the dictates of the French mandatory administration. His published reflections on the trip are virtually absent from the historiography on Arab communism and Arab communist engagement with the Soviet Union. This absence is curious given al-Shamali’s account is likely the earliest published account of an Arab communist’s trip to the Soviet Union. In this paper, I provide a close examination and contextualization of What I Saw in Moscow and of al-Shamali’s focus on and depictions of gender, internationalism, and class in the Soviet Union. I suggest that his depictions not only reflect utopian visions of communist society, but also speak to his assessments of Syrian and Lebanese attitudes toward the Soviet Union in this period. Drawing on French colonial archives in addition to Arabic daily newspapers, I consider how al-Shamali’s vision of social transformation in What I Saw in Moscow mapped onto his party and union organizing efforts. I propose that al-Shamali’s text offers new ways of understanding the role of the Soviet Union in the political orientation of communists in the anti-colonial Global South of the 1920s and 1930s.