Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance

Russia features prominently in the lives and minds of certain Arab writers, thinkers and filmmakers. While Arabic writings on what is today Russia go back centuries and include seminal works such as Ibn Fadlan’s Land of Darkness written in the 10th century, the last century has seen a distinctly different fascination with both Russia and Post-Soviet republics. Margaret Litvin’s Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance tells the story of a generation of Arab students, travelers, authors, scientists and others who made the Soviet Union and later post-Soviet republics home from the 1950s until the present-day. With a particular focus on Arabic writings, it captures the conflicts and tensions between the migrants and wider society. Many of these writers have a tendency to Bovarism, where they see Russia and the Soviet Union through idealised and fictionalised lens shaped by Russian literature, confusing it from real life in Eurasia. They oscillate between the reality of life in these republics and a type of orientalising caricature. 

During the 19th century Ennahda [Arab enlightenment movement], Egyptians and other Arabs began going to Russia to study and learn how to modernise and learn new sciences, but the general view of Russia was another place similar to Europe and the West. Great in material value, but little in spiritual value. Egyptian teacher and close friend of the philosopher Al-Tahtawi, Muhammad Ayyad Al-Tantawi (1810-1861), traveled to St Petersburg to teach Arabic and was the first to write a modern travelog of Russia. He writes glowingly about hospitality, advanced hygiene and writes approvingly about unveiled women mixing with men. But for Tantawi, St Petersburg is akin to Paris. Indeed, in 1905, after Japan’s victory over Russia, a Chinese traveler to Egypt finds people congratulating him for a victory over a western power, mistaking him for a Japanese person. However, as Litvin observes, a shift occurs as more Arabs come into contact with translations of Russian writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy among others. Arab writers start to talk of the Russian soul, ‘the emphasis on “soul” casts Russia as another East: a culture marked by deep spirituality rather than technical skills.’ For a generation of Arab writers, Russia was an alternative to the West and many viewed the real achievement of the Soviet Union as being achieving scientific and industrial modernity of the West, while unlike the West maintaining their timeless spirituality. 

BOOK REVIEW: Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine

The majority of Arab students who went to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 70s, were not members of a communist party nor particularly ideologically in favour of the Soviet Union. Most were sent to Russia and other Republics by their own governments to learn new technical skills, indeed some of these governments were hostile to communism more generally. An entire generation of Arab leaders trained in the Soviet Union including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, ex-Syrian dictator Hafez Al-Assad and former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But among the students who did go, there were those who admired and fantasised about Russian life. Egyptian writer and psychiatrist Mohamed Makhzangi who was newly arrived in Ukraine, when the Chernobyl disaster happened in 1986, produced a short book about the accident and the crumbling edifice of the Soviet Union. He likens it to an island that the Arabian Nights’ character Sinbad the Sailor is shipwrecked on. Initially seeing it as a paradise, the island quickly sinks underneath Sinband’s feet. But the scepticism of Soviet life, did not lead to a dispassionate view of the place, ‘as the Soviet dream sinks into the rolling sea, Russia’s “vast and noble” landmass endures.’ He draws upon Russian literature to appeal to an enduring Russianness outlasting falling Soviet rhetoric.  

This fantasy Russia appears in a number of writings by other Arabic authors. One key theme was the Russian girlfriend trope as representing Russia’s spiritual essence. Litvin argues that while Russian women were often depicted as sexually generous, like their Western counterparts, they were also seen as having a deeper spiritual depth, capable of enduring great suffering and possessing a self-sacrificing femininity, unlike their Western counterparts. As most Arabs who went to Russia were men and often students, the Russian girlfriend appears prominently in a subgenre of Soviet dormitory novels in Arabic. Syrian writer Fouad Samir Yazji’s novel Blue Volga, which follows the lives of different Arab male characters, uses the girlfriend as the only major Russian character in the novel. A promiscuous woman, Natasha, is also portrayed as, ‘warm, maternal, spontaneous, quick to laugh, and literally worships literature (Pushkin’s statue).’ But the Russian girlfriend trope does have wider political meaning too, Makhzangi, whose attachment to Russian literature of which he draws upon the trope, reacted to the 2022 Russian expanded invasion of Ukraine by pushing pro-Russian conspiracy theories. He writes about a Ukrainian origin woman, who dated a friend of his decades ago, but he creates a fictionalised version of her as a Soviet woman who suffers and is likely appalled by the war and who has surely remained innocent and fled. Later Arabic writers would however subvert these tropes as the book explores. 

Red Mecca offers fascinating insight into underexplored connections between Arab intellectuals and Russia. The relationship is complex, full of contradiction, conflictual and offers scholars a way of thinking about the intersections of fantasy and reality between cultures. 

BOOK REVIEW: The Blood Between Us: Syria After the Fall of Assad