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Summary:

"The roots of the Arab world's current Russian entanglements reach deep into the tsarist and Soviet periods. To explore those entanglements, this book presents and contextualizes a set of primary sources translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and/or Tatar: a 1772 Russian naval officer's diary, an Arabic slave sale deed from the Caucasus, an interview with a Russian-educated contemporary Syrian novelist, and many more. These archival, autobiographical, and literary sources, introduced by specialists and in some cases by pairs of scholars with complementary language expertise, highlight connections long obscured by disciplinary cleavages between Slavic and Middle East studies. Taken together, the thirty-four chapters of this book show how various Russian/Soviet and Arab governments sought to nurture political and cultural ties and expand their influence, often with unplanned results. They reveal the transnational networks of trade, pilgrimage, study, ethnic identity, and political affinity that state policies sometimes fostered and sometimes disrupted. Above all, they give voice to some of the resourceful characters who have embodied and exploited Arab-Russian contacts: missionaries and diplomats, soldiers and refugees, students and party activists, scholars and spies. A set of new maps helps orient readers amid the expansion and collapse of empires, border changes, population transfers, and creation of new nation-states that occurred during the two centuries these sources cover"--Publisher's description.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: reconstructing Russian-Arab worlds / Eileen Kane and others
• Witness to a new era: Sergei Pleshcheev's Diary of a Journey to Syria (1773) / John Randolph
• Extraterritorial entanglements: Russian Jewish migrants in Ottoman Palestine (1830s-1850s) / Eileen Kane
• Shiʻi worlds interrupted: Waqf and pilgrimage in Russia's South Caucasus (1863-1876) / Zeinab Azarbadegan
• An Egyptian teacher heads to St. Petersburg: al-Tantawi's Gift of the Wise in the Account of the Land of Russia (1840) / Suha Kudsieh
• With the Tsar's imprimatur: a slave sale deed from Russia's North Caucasus (1864) / Sergey Salushchev and Gokh Amin Alshaif
• Population transfer: negotiating the resettlement of Chechen refugees in the Ottoman Empire (1865, 1870) / Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky and others
• Russianizing Palestine: Vasilii Khitrovo's A Week in Palestine (1879) and the charter of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (1889) / Spencer Scoville
• Manufacturing Russian attachments to Palestine (1894-1903) / Elena Astafieva and Eileen Kane
• Orthodoxy across borders: maps of the institutions of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (IPPO) / Eileen Kane
• A reluctant native informant: Shakirdzhan Ishaev's journey to Mecca (1896) / Eileen Kane
• Quarantine politics and the hajj: Dr. Zabolotnyi's mission to the Red Sea (1897) / Eileen Kane
• Saluting Russia's Islamic modernists in the Cairo and Beirut Arabic press (1899) / Roy Bar Sadeh
• Russian and Soviet oil exports to the Persian Gulf (1903-1933) / Masha Kirasirova and others
• Memo to Stalin: Lev Karakhan's argument for establishing Soviet diplomatic ties with the Hejaz (1923) / Masha Kirasirova
• Soviet Muslims at the Congress of the Muslim World in Mecca (1926) / Norihiro Naganawa
• Arabic in the early Soviet Caucasus: Nadhir al-Durgili's The Delight of Minds in the Biographies of Dagestani Scholars (1920s-1930s) / Vladimir Bobrovnikov
• From Syrian Communist to Soviet Orientalist: Taha Sawwaf in the Comintern Files (1935-1953) / Masha Kirasirova and others
• Wartime schism in the Iraqi Communist Party: a coded letter to Moscow (1944) / Elizabeth Bishop
• Armenian immigration to the USSR from Arab countries (1940-1949) / Ara Sanjian

• The abandoned comrades: Egyptian Communists' please to the USSR (1953-1954) / Rami Ginat and Masha Kirasirova
• Revisiting Russia after fifty years: Mikhail Naimy's Beyond Moscow and Washington (1959) / Maria Swanson
• From Nazareth to Moscow: Kulthum ʻAwda-Vasilieva's "Happy Life" in Russia (1927, 1937, 1965) / Nicole Khayat and Maria Vologzhanina
• Statistics on Arab students in the USSR (1959-1991) / Constantin Katasakioris
• Should dormitory bathrooms have doors? Zakaria Turki's An Upper Egyptian among the Russians (1967-1972) / Margaret Litvin
• A Communist mourning icon: Mahmoud Sabri, Iraqi art student in Moscow (1960) / Suheyla Takesh
• Soviet Yerevan's outreach to Armenians in Lebanon (1967-1969) / Ara Sanjian
• Lotus magazine: Soviet-supported Afro-Asian literary transnationalism (1969-1970) / Rossen Djagalov
• No Soviet engineer to walk in front of an Egyptian one: Youssef Chahine's two High Dam films (1968 and 1970/2) / Ala Younis
• Soviet advisers in Egypt before, during, and after their "expulsion" (1972) / Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez
• Baʻthists in Baku: Iraq-Syria tensions come to the USSR (1975-1977) / Étienne Forestier-Peyrat
• Two Soviet responses to Frantz Fanon (1978-1979) / Philipp Casula
• Aeroflot routes to Baghdad: Soviet-Iraqi relations during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1981) / Steven E. Harris
• Aleksandr Yakovlev's notes from his conversation with the Kuwaiti ambassador to the Soviet Union (November 26, 1990) / Mark Kramer and others
• "The intellectual is a hybrid creature": Khalil Alrez's The Russian Quarter (2019) / Margaret Litvin.

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Contributors:

Kane, Eileen M., 1972- , editor

Kirasirova, Masha , editor

Litvin, Margaret, 1974- , editor

Languages:

English

Language Notes:

Item content: English

Other Related Resources:

Print version: Russian-Arab worlds (New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] — ISBN 9780197605769; LCCN 2022053516; OCLC Number 1352494121)

Subjects:

Russia — Foreign relations — Middle East

Middle East — Foreign relations — Russia

Soviet Union — Foreign relations — Middle East

Middle East — Foreign relations — Soviet Union

Arabists — Soviet Union — Biography

Arabic philology

Arab countries — Historiography

Genres:

Autobiographies

General Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Description based on: Online resource; title from home page (Oxford Academic, viewed on June 27, 2024).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (unpaged) : illustrations (some color), maps

Call Numbers:

DS37.5.O34 A3 2023eb

ISBNs:

9780197605783 (electronic book)
0197605788 (electronic book)
019760577X (electronic book)
9780197605790 (electronic book)
0197605796 (electronic book)
9780197605776 (electronic bk.)
9780197605769 (hardcover) [Invalid]

Library of Congress Control Numbers:

2022053517

OCLC Numbers:

1352870997