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The Eastern International traces how the concept "East" (Vostok) was used by the world's first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. It highlights the roles played in this process by Jewish activists, Arab intellectuals, and Central Asian politicians and artists.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Eastern International in the Long Soviet Century
- Chapter 1: Anti-Colonial Dreams and the Territorialization of Soviet Power
- Chapter 2: A Bolshevik Laboratory for Revolution in the East
- Chapter 3: Arabization, Purges, and Terror
- Chapter 4: Muslim Tradition Forbids Reciting the Qur'an while Drunk
- Chapter 5: Decolonization and the Thaw
- Chapter 6: Scripting Central Asian Revolution for the Afro-Asian World
- Chapter 7: The Eastern International in an Age of Globalization
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
Summary
In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "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 Eastern International 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 Eastern 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.
Additional text
With The Eastern International, Masha Kirasirova has authored an important contribution to a growing historiography of books that connect Soviet history and Central Asian history with the study of the Middle East.
