¹ In the Soviet academic system Orientalism is multidisciplinary, covering a wide geographical scope that includes the countries of North Africa, the islands of the Pacific Ocean, Soviet Central Asia, and Siberia. This essay concentrates on Soviet Arabists, but their fate in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately linked with their colleagues in the other subdisciplines of Soviet Orientalism.

² Literally, “eastern knowledge” or “eastern lore.” It is commonly translated as “Orientalism,” but in the Soviet period this did not have the same negative political connotation that the term has been given by Edward Said, since the major focus for Soviet Orientalism has been the national liberation struggles and decolonization in the Third World rather than the acquisition of empire. However, the term vosrokovedeniye might very well come to encompass Said's meaning now that the political direction of Soviet Middle East studies is changing.

³ The results of Vasil'kov's research were published in Ya. V. Vasil'kov, A. M. Grishina, and F. F. Perchenok, “Repressirovannoye Vostokovedeniye: Vostokovedi, podbergshiyesya repressiyam v 20–50–e godi” (Repressed Orientalism: Orientalists Exposed to Repression from the 1920s to the 1950s), Narodi Azii i Afriki (The Peoples of Asia and Africa) 4 (1990): 113–25;Google ScholarIbid., 5:96–106.

⁴ Leonid Borisovich Alayev was chosen as senior editor with twenty-one others participating in the journal's editorial collective. The collective's discussions on new directions for the journal were published in “Perspektivi Perestroiki v zhurnalye” (Perspectives on Perestroika in the Journal), Narodi Azii i Afriki 1 (1989): 5–19. The editorial round table evinced a certain amount of defensiveness about the reputation of the journal during the period of stagnation (Soviet terminology for the Brezhnev years), but Alayev began actively to seek contentious material to publish, much of which in the following two years concerned the modes of production debate. The journal has since undergone further reorganization and a name change in 1991 to simply Vostok (The East) signifying a move away from the political line of international solidarity and towards the idea of detached academic neutrality.Google Scholar

⁵ The figures cited here have been culled from the list compiled by Vasil'kov and published in “Repressirovannoye.”

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ lrina Mikhailovna Smilyanskaya, “Nekotoriye problemi noveishei istorii Egipta v trudakh sovetskikh arabistov” (Some Problems of Modern Egyptian History in the Works of Soviet Arabists), Arabskiye Strani: Istoriya. Ekonomika (Arab Countries: History, Economics) (Moscow, 1970), 211–37.Google Scholar Smilyanskaya wrote two other historiographical essays dating from this period, in which the issue of previously suppressed or banned authors was less central. In “lzucheniye v Sovietskom Soyuze istorii arabskikh stran novovo vremeni” (The Study of the Modern Period of the History of Arab Countries in the Soviet Union), Narodi Azii i Afriki 3 (1968): 78–88,Google Scholar she mentioned two Soviet Arabists executed in the Great Terror of 1937–38: Shami and Akselrod. The thrust of her remarks on Shami related to his theory of periodization for modern Arab history (beginning with the French Revolution and including the period from 1918 to 1934; i.e., for Shami, the French and Russian revolutions were universalizing factors in world history; see p. 79). She did not provide any biographical information to situate Shami or Akselrod politically, although most Soviet specialists would have recognized the subtextual significance of favorably citing previously banned authors. See “Opredeleniye v sovietskoi vostokovednoi publitsistike 1918–1919 gg. kharaktera revolutsii na Vostoke i rasstranovki sotsial'nikh sil” (The Definition of the Character of Revolution in the East and the Distribution of Social Forces in Soviet Orientalist Publicist Literature 1918–1919), in Sovremenaya istoriografiya stran zarubezhnovo Vostoka: Oktyabr' i natsional'no-osvoboditel'naya bor'ba (Contemporary History of the East Abroad: October and the National Liberation Struggle) (Moscow, 1969), 5–18. where Smilyanskaya mentioned Astakhov, who was executed in 1942, as one of the first Orientalists “in the post-October years clearly to formulate the basic problems of Orientalist research” (see esp. p. 6).Google Scholar

⁸ Davies, R. W., Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (Bloomington, Ind., 1989), 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹ See for example, Irma, Mikhailovna Smilyanskaya, “The Disintegration of Feudal Relations in Syria and Lebanon in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century,” in The Economic History of the Middle East 1800–1914, ed. Charles, Issawi (Chicago, 1966).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Smilyanskaya, along with Lutskii's widow, edited his final work, Natsional'no-osvoboditel'naya voina v Sirii (1925–1927 gg.) (The National Liberation War in Syria [1925–1927]) (Moscow, 1964). He died on 17 December 1962. Lutskii had been the head of Smilyanskaya's dissertation Committee in the late 1940s. One can assume that only after Lutskii's death and the preparation of his final work did Smilyanskaya deem it possible to write about political figures who had been close to Lutskii in the 1930s and had been executed.

¹¹ Vasil'kov, “Repressirovannoye”.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Aleksei Goldobin, Egipetskaya revolutsiya 1919 goda (The Egyptian Revolution of 1919) (Leningrad, 1958).

¹⁵ Smilyanskaya, , “Nekotoriye problemi,” 233.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Seiraniyan, B. G., “A. M. Goldobin i evo monografiya” (A. M. Goldobin and His Monograph) in Aleksei, Goldobin, Natsional'no-osvoboditel'naya bor'ba naroda Egipta 1918–1936 gg. (The National Liberation Struggle of the Egyptian People 1918–1936) (Moscow, 1989), 8. According to those who remembered the incident, the Western press that Goldobin referred to in the television broadcast was the French Communist party newspaper L'Humanité quoting Israeli press reports purporting that Egypt had suffered greater losses in the 1967 war than had previously been acknowledged in the Soviet Union. Note that even in 1989, Seiraniyan was still reluctant explicitly to say in print what had actually happened to Goldobin.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid., 10.

¹⁹ Shastitko, P. M., ed., Slova ob uchitelyakh: Moskovskiye vostokovedi 30–60–kh godov (A Word About the Teachers: Moscow Orientalists From the 1930s to the 1960s) (Moscow, 1988).Google Scholar

²⁰ Ibid. 3.

²¹ Konstantinov was one of those incredible individuals who assisted the Soviet war effort even while he was still interned in a labor camp. He used his specialist knowledge of Japanese to decode secret intelligence documents. See Chugrov's essay on Konstantinov in Shastitko, , Slova, 39.Google Scholar

²² Ludmila Merbart was an anthropologist and specialist in Indonesian and Malaysian languages. Her husband Alexander Merbart was an anthropologist and ethnographer. In 1910, she was one of only three women in all of Russia allowed to sit for university degree examinations. In 1914, she and her husband embarked on an anthropological expedition to India and did not return to Petrograd (Leningrad) until 1924. They were both arrested during the campaign against bourgeois specialists in 1930. Her husband died in a labor camp in 1932. She was released in 1935, but suffered another tragedy when one of her two children was killed at the front outside of Moscow during World War II. See Aliyeva's essay on Merbart in Shastitko, Slova.

²³ B. G. Seiraniyan, “V. B. Lutskii (1906–1962)—uchenii, pedagog, chelovek” (V. B. Lutskii [1906–1962]—Scholar, Pedagogue, Person) in Shastitko, , Slova, 326–43.Google Scholar

²⁴ I am indebted to Galina Udalova for allowing me to obtain a copy of her unpublished manuscript “Aleksandr Moiseyevich Shami/Ilya Naumovich Teper 1893–1938.” The manuscript was written in 1989 and was due to be published in 1991 by the Moscow Institute for Oriental Studies in a collection of essays on suppressed Arabists. As yet the publication has not appeared. The information on Lutskii appears on p. 16 of the manuscript.

²⁵ For a fuller discussion of this matter see Garay Menicucci, “The Comintern and Its Agents in Mandate Palestine and Syria” (paper delivered at the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 23–26 November 1991).

²⁶ My own research in the Moscow Central State Archives of the October revolution, F. 7668, op. I, delo 2865, 20 October 1935.

²⁷ lrina, Mikhailovna Smilyanskaya, “Moisei Markovich Akselrod (1898–1940),” NarodiAzii i Afriki 5 (1989): 123–32.Google Scholar

²⁸ Ibid., 125.

²⁹ Akselrod, M., “Sovremennii Yemen” (Contemporary Yemen), Novii Vostok (The New East) 28 (1930): 74–98.Google Scholar

³⁰ Smilyanskaya, , “Akselrod,” 129.Google Scholar Professor Wayne Vucinich stated: “Official critics accused the All-Union Association of Orientalists and Novii Vosrok (The New East, the journal of the association) of pseudo-Marxism and of course collaboration with apolitical academic Orientalists. They charged that Novii Vostok published inferior papers and book reviews in which authors were unjustly criticized.” Wayne, Vucinich, “The Structure of Soviet Orientology: Fifty Years of Change and Accomplishment,” in Russia and Asia: Essays on the Influence of Russia on the Asian Peoples, ed. Vucinich, Wayne (Stanford, Calif., 1972), 59.Google Scholar The campaign during the period preceding Akselrod's silencing aimed at proletarianizing Soviet academia and strengthening working-class ideology. See Sheila, Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War” in Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, ed. Sheila, Fitzpatrick (Bloomington, Ind., 1978).Google Scholar

³¹ Smilyanskaya, , “Ak selrod,” 127.Google Scholar

³² Akselrod, M., “Bor'ba partii v Egipte” (The Struggle of the Parties in Egypt), Novii Vosrok 15 (1926): 302–10.Google ScholarRafiq, Musa (Akselrod's pseudonym), “Diktatura v Egipte” (The Dictatorship in Egypt), Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn (International Life) 4 (1929): 37–51;Google ScholarIbid., 5 (1929): 56–68.

³³ Smilyanskaya, , “Akselrod,” 127.Google Scholar

³⁴ 1n the draft version of Smilyanskaya's manuscript, she provided a more wide-ranging psychological portrait of Akselrod than that which finally ended up in print, including his conformity to the pre vailing Stalinist sexual morality of the 1930s, which overturned the Russian sexual revolution of the 1920s. See Richard, Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, N.J., 1978), 346–91. In a letter to his sister, convincing her to postpone marriage, Akselrod wrote in May 1936: “But I repeat my idea—I am against early marriages. I myself committed such a mistake and therefore have the right to refer to my own experience. You know what I am talking about. Among our Soviet young people in my time and I think even now, there exists the idea that marriage is not necessarily a duty. Not to be tormented, we can divorce. Thank God we have the Soviet system! This is deeply mistaken. Marriage exerts a colossal physical and psychological influence on the individual, determining a certain way of life, and the break-up of a marriage is such a colossal trauma (to use the medical terminology) that in the end it cannot be cured. Marriage is a very serious matter, and it should be concluded in earnest, for a long time, with the possibility that it will be forever.” He further argued that for young women in the mid-1930s, students of the history faculty of which his sister was a member: “Ideas about temporary marriages, about the shallowness and superfluousness of marriage which are put forth under the guise of socialist morality are nonetheless not socialist ideas, but rather petty [sic] bourgeois anarchistic ideas. Marx, Bebel, Zetkin, and Vladimir Illich [Lenin] were proponents of monogamy and of the duration of marriage not only in words, but in deeds” (Smilyanskaya's draft manuscript on Akselrod, p. 4).Google Scholar

³⁵ The reference here is to the trial of Bukharin, which began on 2 March 1937. Bukharin must have been personally known to Akselrod through his wife's relationship with Lenin's sister, Mariya Ulyanova. Ulyanova was on the editorial committee of Pravda when Bukharmn was the editor in the 1920s. Bukharin was also the head of the Communist International when Akselrod was engaged in his work in the Arab world.

³⁶ Here again the reference is to Bukharin. He was widely known as the “beloved” of the party. Lenin in his famous “last testament” wrote that “Bukharin is not only the party's most valuable and biggest theoretician, he is also rightfully considered the favorite of the whole party …”Even when Stalin turned on Bukharin in 1929, he still pronounced publicly that “we love Bukharin, but we love truth, the Party, and the Comintern even more.” See Stephen, Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (Oxford, 1971), 152, 220.Google Scholar

³⁷ Smilyanskaya, , “Akselrod,” 131. In fact, Bukharin did defend himself in his final statement at the trial, although he admitted the charges against him. Akselrod could not have known the details of his final statement. Bukharin was executed on 15 March 1937.Google Scholar

³⁸ Smilyanskaya, , “Akselrod,” 126, n. 6.Google Scholar

³⁹ Ibid., 132.

⁴⁰ Udalova, “Shami”.

⁴¹ Ibid., 2–3. As of this writing, the Comintern, KGB, and some party archives are still inaccessible to researchers, but for entirely different reasons than stated by Udalova. Many party archives have been impounded in the wake of the dissolution of the party in the aftermath of the 19 August 1991 coup attempt in Moscow. On the other hand, the newly reorganized KGB has been selectively releasing previously secret documents to the highest bidder, who must pay in hard currency. Unfortunately, many personal archives are being sold in the same manner and honest scholars will be hard put to compete with the mass media conglomerates in Europe and the United States who are buying up some of the most sensational material.

⁴² The most detailed work on this subject is an unpublished doctoral dissertation by Grigorii Grigoryevich Kosach, “Stanovleniye kommunisticheskikh partii stran blizhnevo vostoka (Egipet, Palestina, Siriya i ivan–20–30–e gg.)” (The Founding of the Communist Parties in the Countries of the Middle East [Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon–1920s–1930s]) (Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party: Moscow, 1989).

⁴³ Hanna, Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, N.J., 1978).Google Scholar See especially the chapter on the beginnings of communist movements in the Arab East and the appendices. Jacques, Couland, Le Mouvement Syndical au Liban 1919–1946 (Paris, 1970); see p. 120 for Shami's role in founding the Communist party of Syriaand Lebanon.Google ScholarMusa, Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party 1919–1948 (London, 1979).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Udalova, “Shami,” 12. See also Batatu, , The Old Social Classes, 382–84, 1149–50;Google ScholarBudeiri, , The PCP, 16, n. 67.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Udalova, , “Shami,” 12;Google ScholarBatatu, , The Old Social Classes, 282;Google ScholarBudeiri, , The PCP, 16–17, n. 79;Google ScholarCouland, , Le Mouvement, 103.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Smilyanskaya, , “Nekotoriya problemi,” 220;Google Scholar Tareq Ismael and Rifa'at El-Said, , The Communist Movement in Egypt 1920–1988, (Syracuse, N.Y., 1990), 14, 29–30. Weiss married Charlotte Rosenthal, the daughter of Alfred Rosenthal, the founder of the first Egyptian Communist party. Charlotte was involved in contacts with Jewish communist groups in Palestine as early as 1920. She took part in anti- British demonstrations in November 1920 and was deported. British Colonial Office (CO), 733/141, 27.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Udalova, , “Shami,” 11.Google ScholarKillberg, Kh. I. wrote an important revisionist work on the Wafd and the Egyptian liberation movement during the period 1919–1924, Egipet v bor'be za nezavisimost' (Egypt in the Struggle for Independence) (Leningrad, 1950).Google Scholar Her work is reviewed in Smilyanskaya, , “Nekotoriye problemi,” 230–35.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Udalova cited Ode-Vasileva as a member of the PCP, but it is not clear from her biography if she was ever in Palestine in the 1920s (see Udalova, “Shami,” 11). She was born in Nazareth, Palestine, in 1892. She graduated from the Russian Palestine Society and taught at the seminary in Nazareth from 1908 until 1914. During World War I, she worked on the Russian front as a nurse and then in the Ukraine from 1920 to 1924 during a typhoid epidemic. In 1924, she was at the Leningrad Eastern Institute, which trained Comintern cadre, and it may have been here that she established contacts with members of the PCP. Central State Archives of the October Revolution, F. 7668, op. I, delo 2919, from October 1934 to 18 October 1935. Later, she collected Palestinian folk sayings and folktales and wrote the first Soviet Arabic language textbook, Uchebnik arabskovo yazika (Textbook of the Arabic Language) (Leningrad Eastern Institute, 1936). After World War 11, she was an Arabic literature professor at Leningrad State University and a specialist on the modern Arab novel.

⁴⁹ Udalova, , “Shami,” 3–9.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Batatu, , The Old Social Classes, 382.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Kosach, , Stanovleniye, 198.Google Scholar

⁵² Udalova, , “Shami,” 17.Google Scholar

⁵³ Ibid., 21. This aspect of Shami's sojourn in Lebanon and Syria is missing in the accounts of Batatu, Budeiri, and Couland.

⁵⁴ Central State Archives of the October Revolution, F. 7668, op. I, delo 2924.

⁵⁵ He wrote a number of articles for the Comintern, journal, The Communist International, among them: “The Class and National Struggle in Palestine,” 8 (1927); “The Military Danger in the Arab Countries,” 22 (1927); “England and Egypt,” 29 (1927); “The Political Situation in Egypt,” 237 (1927); “Towards a Breakdown of the Anglo–Egyptian egotiations”, 13 (1928); “England and Arabia,” 17 (1928).Google Scholar He also wrote an analysis of the Syrian Great Revolt, “From the Experience of the Syrian Uprising,” Revolyursionni Vostok (The Revolutionary East), 3 (1928).Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Smilyanskaya, , “Nekotoriye problemi,” 220–23.Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Batatu, , The Old Social Classes, 385-86.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Udalova, , ‘Shami,’ 30;Google ScholarBatatu, , The Old Social Classes, 381.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Udalova, , “Shami,” 41.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ See the Bulletin of the Information Department of the Profintern, Vostok i Kolonii (The East and the Colonies) 82–84 (24 November 1928), 44.

⁶¹ lnterview, June 1990, with Professor Arkadi Semenovich Kaufman, Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow.

⁶² Ibid.Professor Kaufman described Shami as honest, politically committed, and almost childlike in his sincerity. Students were aware of his past activities in Palestine, and the complexity of events there held a particular fascination for them at the time.

⁶³ Udalova, , “Shami,” 46–47. The debate between Shami and Nadab was carried out in the pages of Revolyutsionni Vostok: Shami, “Palestinskoye vosstaniye i arabskii Vostok” (The Palestinian Uprising and the Arab East), Revolyutsionni Vostok 8 (1930); Nadab, “Vosstaniye v Palestine i arabskoye natsiona lnoye dvizheniye” (The Uprising in Palestine and the Arab National Movement), Revolyutsionni Vostok 9 (1931); Shami, “Eshche raz k voprosu o palestinskom vosstanii” (Still Once More on the Question of the Palestinian Uprising), Revolyutsionni Vostok 10(1932). Even though Stalin had consolidated his power by 1929, such theoretical debates within a Marxist framework could still be found in many social science journals until the end of 1932.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Udalova, “Shami,” 79.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Ibid., 80.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 84–86.

⁶⁷ AS Batatu noted, there was indeed a British spy at a very high level in the PCP in the 1920s–pos- sibly in the Central Committee since the British intelligence reports contain verbatim secret communications only available to Central Committee members. See Batatu, , The Old Social Classes, 384, n. 91, n. 1149, n. 5. Shami could not have been the British agent since he was the victim of leaked intelligence concerning his trip to Aleppo in 1927 and his sojourn in Egypt in 1928. A British agent who submitted an extensive report on communist activities in Palestine is referred to in a Colonial Office communication as “Mavrogordato,” CO 733/141, 5.Google Scholar

⁶⁸ lnterview with Martin Roginskii, Leningrad, April 1990. I am grateful to Martin Roginskii for showing me his copies of his parents' death certificates, which he received from the Leningrad branch of the KGB in 1989. The number of women executed outright during the Great Terror was incomparably smaller than the number of men. Roginskaya's execution may have been used as a form of torture against Shami. Martin Roginskii was only seven years old at the time of his parents' arrest. He was then raised by a neighbor in the family's communal apartment in Leningrad and after that in an orphanage in the Urals. He did not learn of his parents' true identities until 1956, after the Twentieth Party Congress, when Lutskii began a correspondence with him informing him of survivors who had personal nformation on the fate of his parents. From that time, Roginskii persisted in making official inquiries about his parents' deaths until he received the official death certificates in 1989. Shami and Roginskaya were both officially rehabilitated in 1957, but their actual fates did not become known until recently. I am also grateful to Roginskii for letting me view the Lutskii correspondence.

⁶⁹ Batatu, , The Old Social Classes, 374.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Vasil'kov, “Repressirovannoye”.

⁷¹ Ibid.