2 октября состоялся доклад доцента (Assistant Professor) Нью-Йоркского университета Маши Кирасировой (Masha Kirasirova) "Beyond the Party Line: Soviet Cultural Outreach to the Arab Intelligentsia before and after World War II"

Доклад был прочитан в рамках очередного научного семинара Международного Центра истории и социологии Второй мировой войны и ее последствий

Soviet cultural relations with the Arab world may seem an unimportant topic for historians of World War II. As is well known, wartime preparations and fighting had shifted the party-state’s attention and resources away from world revolution and anti-colonial struggle. Yet, it was precisely during the wartime period that the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) managed to not only maintain its contacts with Arab intellectuals, but in fact to expand its operations and incorporate networks that had previously been under the sole jurisdiction of the Comintern. I argue in this paper that this expansion of cultural and political contacts occurred not because of any shift in Soviet cultural strategies but rather because of political factors external to the Soviet Union. As Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals rallied behind anti-fascist causes following the victory of the Free French over the Vichy government in the region in June 1941, VOKS continued to rely on the same formulas for working “in the East” that it had used since the organization’s foundation in 1925. Based on an assumed cultural similarity between the Soviet “domestic East” (Central Asia and Caucasus) and “foreign East” (Asia, Africa, Middle East), its export print media and exhibitions continued to highlight the former as a model for the latter. When VOKS decided to reward a group of Arab intellectuals for their dedicated wartime activism by inviting them in 1947 to tour the USSR, including Central Asia and the Caucasus, the visitors’ experiences in the Soviet East surprisingly and awkwardly highlighted the disparities between Arab and the Soviet Eastern cultures instead of their similarities. Although Arab intellectuals suppressed their negative observations in their later published books and articles about this visit, their reactions on the ground signaled to Soviet authorities that more expertise about Eastern culture, Islam, and other topics was urgently needed to support the growing postwar interests in the Middle East.

 

Masha Kirasirova is an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at New York University in Abu Dhabi. She has a doctorate from the New York University Joint Ph.D. Program in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.