Middle Eastern studies in the USSR

Abstract

The object of the present article is to consider briefly the development, scope and quality of Soviet writing on Middle East subjects. More literature on the Middle East is published each year in the Soviet Union than in any Western country and probably more than in all the Western world put together. But this literature has so far escaped systematic examination in the West, partly because Russian is not normally included in the linguistic equipment of Western orientalists, and partly because of the prevalent notion that Soviet orientalism is mainly concerned with propaganda and therefore not worthy of consideration by scholars. Russia's association with the Muslim world and with the Middle East is of longer standing and in some respects closer than that of any other European country. In the first place, Russia was herself under the domination of the Islamized Mongols for 250 years until 1480. The Muslim Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan became integral parts of the Russian state in the middle of the 16th century; and after the Russian conquest of the Caucasus and Central Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries the frontiers of the Russian Empire marched directly with those of Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan. In addition, the Muslims of Russia, now amounting to about 25,000,000, are culturally and to some extent ethnically and historically, part of the Middle East itself. Although, however, the affairs of its own Muslim nationals as well as of its Middle East neighbours were clearly of vital concern to the Tsarist Russian state, Asian and Islamic studies were not so widely recognized as a part of academic scholarship as in the West until the 19th century. Oriental studies then began to develop on conventional, or what Soviet writers call