Russia looms large in the lives and imaginations of certain Arab writers, thinkers, and filmmakers. Arabic writings about what is now Russia date back centuries, including landmark works such as Ibn Fadlan’s Land of Darkness from the 10th century. Yet the past century brought a distinct fascination with Russia and the post-Soviet republics. Margaret Litvin’s Red Mecca: The Life and Afterlives of the Arab-Soviet Romance chronicles the generation of Arab students, travelers, authors, scientists, and others who made the Soviet Union—and later its successor states—their home from the 1950s to the present. Focusing on Arabic writings, the book captures the tensions between these migrants and the societies around them. Many of these writers exhibit a form of Bovarism, viewing Russia and the Soviet Union through an idealized, fictionalized lens shaped by Russian literature, thereby confusing literary imagination with Eurasian reality. They swing between the actual conditions of life in these republics and a kind of orientalizing caricature.
During the 19th-century Nahda, or Arab enlightenment movement, Egyptians and other Arabs began traveling to Russia to study modern sciences and learn how to modernize their societies. At the time, Russia was generally seen as another European or Western place—great in material terms, but limited in spiritual value. Muhammad Ayyad Al-Tantawi (1810–1861), an Egyptian teacher and close associate of the philosopher Al-Tahtawi, traveled to St. Petersburg to teach Arabic and became the first to write a modern travelogue about Russia. He praised its hospitality, advanced hygiene, and the sight of unveiled women mixing freely with men. Yet for Tantawi, St. Petersburg resembled Paris. Indeed, in 1905, after Japan’s victory over Russia, a Chinese traveler in Egypt was congratulated for a triumph over a Western power, having been mistaken for a Japanese person. However, as Litvin observes, a shift took place as more Arabs encountered translations of Russian writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Arab writers began speaking of the “Russian soul”; as Litvin notes, the emphasis on “soul” casts Russia as another East—a culture defined by deep spirituality rather than technical skill. For a generation of Arab intellectuals, Russia offered an alternative to the West. Many viewed the Soviet Union’s real achievement as attaining Western-style scientific and industrial modernity while preserving a timeless spirituality that the West had supposedly lost.
Most Arab students who went to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s were not Communist Party members, nor were they especially sympathetic to Soviet ideology. Many were sent by their own governments to acquire technical skills; some of those governments were openly hostile to communism. An entire generation of Arab leaders trained in the Soviet Union, including Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, and former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Yet among the students were those who admired and fantasized about Russian life. Egyptian writer and psychiatrist Mohamed Makhzangi, newly arrived in Ukraine when the Chernobyl disaster struck in 1986, wrote a short book about the accident and the crumbling Soviet edifice. He compared the USSR to an island upon which Sinbad the Sailor is shipwrecked in the Arabian Nights. Initially appearing as paradise, the island soon sinks beneath Sinbad’s feet. But skepticism about Soviet life did not produce a dispassionate view of the place: “as the Soviet dream sinks into the rolling sea, Russia’s ‘vast and noble’ landmass endures.” Makhzangi drew on Russian literature to invoke an enduring Russianness outlasting the collapse of Soviet rhetoric.
This imagined Russia recurs in the works of other Arabic authors. A central theme is the Russian girlfriend as a symbol of Russia’s spiritual essence. Litvin argues that while Russian women were often portrayed as sexually generous, like their Western counterparts, they were also seen as possessing greater spiritual depth, capable of enduring immense suffering and embodying a self-sacrificing femininity that Western women supposedly lacked. Because most Arabs who went to Russia were male students, the Russian girlfriend features prominently in Arabic “Soviet dormitory novels.” Syrian writer Fouad Samir Yazji’s novel Blue Volga, which follows several Arab male characters, uses the girlfriend as the only major Russian figure in the story. Natasha, a promiscuous woman, is described as “warm, maternal, spontaneous, quick to laugh, and literally worships literature (Pushkin’s statue).” Yet the trope also carries political weight. Makhzangi, drawing on Russian literature, responded to Russia’s expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022 by promoting pro-Russian conspiracy theories. He writes about a Ukrainian woman who dated a friend decades earlier, reimagining her as a Soviet woman who suffers, is likely appalled by the war, and has presumably remained innocent and fled. Later Arabic writers, however, would subvert these tropes, as the book explores.
Red Mecca offers fascinating insight into underexplored connections between Arab intellectuals and Russia. The relationship is complex, contradictory, and fraught with conflict, providing scholars with a framework for thinking about the intersections of fantasy and reality across cultures.
