The Eastern International

 The Bolsheviks’ geographical imagination of revolution did not just include the “West” but also the “East.” And the “East” in two senses. The internal east of the former Russian empire, primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus.  And the external east of the colonized world–what we today call the Global South. Through the Communist International, the Soviet Union facilitated the creation of an Eastern International–a vast network of students, communists, and activists both Easts. These people became vital agents in the projection of Soviet power. They attended the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. And they trained to become anticolonial revolutionaries and shaped communist policy to colonialism and modernization. Masha Kirasirova traces the lives and experiences of these activists–Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian–in her new book The Eastern International Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire. The Eurasian Knot spoke to Masha about this under-explored history and how it continues to shape our understanding of colonialism today. Guest: Masha Kirasirova’s research explores the political, intellectual, and artistic linkages across Soviet Eurasian and Middle Eastern history.   She is an editor of Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties Between Protest and Nation-Building. Her most recent book is The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire published by Oxford University Press.