The Easte Inteational: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire (Oxford Studies in Inteational History)

by: Masha Kirasirova (Author)

Publisher: OUP USA

Publication Date: 19 Mar. 2024

Language: English

Print Length: 336 pages

ISBN-10: 0197685692

ISBN-13: 9780197685693

Book Description

In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the inteal “East”–primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus–with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the “foreign East”–the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platform and shaped Soviet foreign policy to varying degrees thereafter. The Easte Inteational explores how the concept of “the East” was used by the world’s first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. Masha Kirasirova traces how this policy was conceptualized and carried out by students, comrades, and activists–Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian. It drew on their personal motivations and gave them considerable access to state authority and agency to shape Soviet ideology, inform concrete decisions, and allocate resources. Contextualizing these Easte mediators within a global frame, this book historicizes the circulation of peoples and ideas between the socialist and decolonizing world and reinscribes Soviet history into postcolonial studies and global history.

About the Author

Review The Easte Inteational merits reading by scholars and students of Soviet history, Middle Easte history, and the history of anticolonialism. ― The Russian Review
About the Author
Masha Kirasirova is Assistant Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is an editor of Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (OUP, 2023) and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties Between Protest and Nation-Building.