The “East” as a Category of Bolshevik Ideology and Comintern Administration: The Arab Section of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East

Abstract

The Third International (or Comintern) transformed dynamics of anti-colonial resistance around world by linking communist activists in various countries with Moscow. As one scholar of postcolonialism put it, time, anti-colonial struggles could be articulated within a wider framework and, more importantly, could look to a major world power for organizational, material and military support. (1) The scholarship focusing on transnational exchanges resulting from this support, however, has largely failed to take into account notions of space as either an object or a problem. As Brigitte Studer has argued, tendency to treat space as a given, or as a mere fact, has led many scholars to confine themselves to national paradigm. (2) If we consider Comintern and Bolshevik support for anticolonial struggles more closely, however, spatial imagination of Moscow-based organizers appears to be both more ambiguous and contradictory. As early as 1917, in an effort to legitimize their revolutionary manifest destiny, party-state officials spoke of responsibilities of new socialist republic to awaken the peoples of (3) These statements, as well as their understanding of Russia's advantageous geographical location Europe and Asia echoed those voiced by 19th-century Russian intellectuals and politicians. (4) Yet their approaches to the also differed from Russian imperial versions in several key ways. Between 1914 and 1917, Lenin introduced oppressor/oppressed nations dichotomy into popular analysis of international politics both inside Russia and in broader world. By juxtaposing European colonial and Great Russian chauvinist oppressors against Eastern nations and peoples, his definition of imperialism explicitly linked revolutionary world struggle for socialism with revolutionary program on national question. (5) In domestic context, as Terry Martin has argued, greatest danger principle--the 1920s idea that great-power (or Russian) chauvinism posed a graver danger than local nationalism--reproduced hierarchical distinction between state-bearing and colonized peoples but reversed its valence by downplaying expression of Russian national identity and promoting national forms among formerly colonized nations instead. (6) Internationally, hierarchical distinction between oppressor and oppressed nations was further preserved and partially reversed, with Comintern assuming responsibilities for providing ideological and financial support to foreign anticolonial revolutionaries, including those considered most oppressed in East. In 1930s, as Russians were again raised to rank of first among equals in Soviet family of nations and as Bolsheviks assumed ever greater control over Third International, Soviet Union settled into its duty as liberator and leader of all of its different Easts. More so than the colonized world, individual nations, or any other category inherited from prerevolutionary political geography, it was the that came to be embraced by early Bolsheviks. A flexible and vague concept, it accommodated both revolutionary domestic program on national question and world struggle for socialism. For this reason, especially in formative period of many party and Comintern institutions, the came to be used for a wide range of political and propaganda initiatives. (7) In 1917, it allowed Lenin and Stalin to appeal simultaneously to toiling Muslims of Russia, Persia, Turkey, India, and Arab world. In 1919, it formed basis of Russian Communist Party's Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of Peoples of East as well as of Comintern's Eastern Section, Third International's center of communist organization outside Europe and North America. In 1920, idea of the played a role in discussions of national and colonial problems at Comintern's Second Congress and was then used to mobilize more than 2,000 delegates from Caucasus, Central Asia, Turkey, Iran, India, and other surrounding regions to attend a special Congress of Peoples of East in Baku. …