Interstice, Intersection, and Interaction: Transnational Approaches to Russian and Middle Eastern History
Panel 145, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, December 3 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Transnational frameworks and methodologies have recently moved to the forefront on agendas of historians whose interests stretch across the geographic and chronological spectrum of the profession. At first glance, these challenges to the notion of discrete and isolated national histories seem to entail less rethinking for historians of the modern Middle East than for historians of other regions. Indeed, historians' study of the supranational rule of local empires - most prominently the Ottoman - and the forceful presence of foreign ones - most prominently the British and French - has prevented some of the compartmentalization that has occurred in other fields. But, as elsewhere, focus on communities defined by national culture has obscured some of the more subtle interactions with neighbors on the peripheries of the Middle East. A focused transnational approach reveals the porousness of boundaries previously thought impermeable or simply understudied. This panel seeks out the interstices and transgressions of the northern border of the Middle East to understand local events and phenomena in the context of larger, trans- and inter- national processes.
Interactions and intersections between the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union and the Middle East lie at the heart of each of the four presentations on this panel. The papers cover overlaps in a wide range of spheres, from imperial policies in the borderlands to similarities in the characteristics of political ideologies, from cooperation in anti-Western economic development to the joint creation of a culture of antagonism towards the West. The sources drawn upon - in Turkish, Arabic, and Russian, and held in countries on both sides of the Black Sea - speak to a political culture that was not confined by language or geography. The panelists cover four successive chronological periods - late-Imperial, Revolutionary, Interwar, and Postwar - to show the depth and breadth of exchanges between Russia and the Middle East, but also in a way that raises questions about change and continuity. Each presenter individually offers evidence and arguments that allow us to understand subjects studied previously from a new perspective that illustrates the way they were shaped with events outside of national or regional boundaries. Taken together, the four presentations contribute both to the emerging understanding of Middle Eastern history in a transnational context more broadly, and in particular to the growing recognition of a geopolitical space that included both Russia and the Middle East.
Whereas Turkish liberalism is commonly studied in the context of a general – and implicitly Western – European model, liberalism in the late-Ottoman and early-Republican eras is better understood in comparison with its Russian counterpart. I seek to define Turkish liberalism in its proper historical context by exploring the works of Ottoman liberals from the Second Constitutional Period to the crucible of early Republican days. On either side of the Republican divide, liberalism did not form a homogenous movement with a single cohesive ideology and social philosophy. Instead, it was a somewhat awkward alliance of potentially divergent trends – a platform where Ahmed Emin, Halide Edip, Kopruluzade Fuad, Dr. R?za Nur, and Ahmet Agaev (Agaoglu) were able to find a common ground in their opposition against social conformity, arbitrary commands of the Young Turk regime and, later, the moral pressures of the new Kemalist community. This picture bears a strong resemblance to that of Russia, where liberalism was not a concession to popular democracy, but a fusion of legalist and classical-liberal principles that emphasized subjective rights and sought to safeguard them against government regulation and control.
I argue that Turkish intellectuals of the late Ottoman Empire saw liberalism as the closest approximation to the idea of Gesselschaft, representing a complex but potentially coherent view of man and social institutions. Turkish liberalism’s parallels with its Russian contermporay are crystal clear in the party manifestos of Prince Sebahaddin’s Ahrar Firkasi and the zemstvo liberals. Similarities between the Hürriyet ve ?tilaf F?rkas? and the Constitutional Democratic Party in Russia are equally intriguing. Modernity and progression from the liberals’ perspective were neither based on entirely euro-centric visions nor state-sponsored evolutionary designs, but a rational process of legal transformation that would last well into the 20th century. In contrast with the traditional approach of Turkish historians, I look at Russia and Russian liberals to demonstrate what was unique and definitive in Turkey’s experiment with liberalism.
In 1932, the cash-starved Soviet government shocked many foreign observers by offering an eight-million dollar loan to non-Communist Turkey. Ankara inspired similar incredulity when it accepted; the Turkish government had repeatedly expressed reservations about the political risks of accepting foreign financial aid and few expected that the Soviet Union would be chosen as the low-risk alternative. In their attempts to make sense of this episode, historians have invoked “pragmatism” and “sheer necessity” of national considerations, with the implication that international economic negotiations did not reflect ideas or ideologies that were transnational in scope. Even the most pragmatic of politicians, however, settles upon decisions from among options whose range is defined by an intellectual, and often ideological, appraisal of politics. My hypothesis is that Soviet-Turkish cooperation in 1932-3 should be understood as the product of a shared fear of Western political and economic power, a fear whose breadth and nature reveals a transnational phenomenon.
Indeed, the loan was not an isolated event but part of a series of interactions whose character sheds light on a set of ideas that drove both Soviet and Turkish politics. The loan was agreed upon and its conditions negotiated during two demonstrative visits: Ismet Pasha and a large delegation traveled from Ankara to Moscow in 1932 and Kliment Voroshilov journeyed with an equivalent entourage in the opposite direction in 1933. The visits coincided with the Soviet celebration of the First of May and the Turkish tenth anniversary of the Republic, and as such were marked by many public events and celebrations. The visits also provided the opportunity for academic and artistic exchanges, among whose products was a film that resulted from Soviet-Turkish collaboration. When Ismet and Voroshilov spoke of economic cooperation, they spoke of it as a challenge to the West. I look at this language and its origins, and trace its reflections in pageantry and film. The nature of history prevents us from knowing to what extent the Soviet and Turkish politicians believed in the anti-Westernism that they proclaimed when they announced the loan. Yet by taking their words seriously, I hope to show that anti-Western ideas were thought to hold, and indeed did achieve, depth and resonance across broad sections of both Soviet and Turkish societies.
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.
