Masha Kirasirova
As the Bolsheviks’ hopes for world revolution faded in the 1920s, Moscow remained the capital of the Soviet empire and of the international revolutionary movement. During the 1930s—which corresponded with the Third International’s “third period” (1928-1935) when alliances with socialists, social democrats, national reformists, pacifists were shunned and then the “Popular Front” (1934-1939) when such alliances were rehabilitated in the face of antifascism—the Comintern functioned as the main link between Moscow and such regions in the colonized world as Syria and Palestine with which the Soviet Union had no diplomatic ties. This paper focuses on the Comintern’s Eastern Section and its affiliated Communist University for the Toilers of the East (KUTV) to analyze how the nested Moscow-centered nationalism and internationalism facilitated ongoing interactions between external and internal political forces.
Building on new approaches to the Soviet purges—which have shifted the focus from high-profile cases of repression to the mass political panic that profoundly reshaped relationships in every institution and workplace—this paper uses denunciations and other KUTV and Comintern records to reconstruct how Arab and Jewish communists in Moscow used the top-down call for Arabization to remove genuine and imaginary political opponents. The policy of Arabization functioned as an analogue to the renewed Union-wide emphasis on “indigenization” (korenizatsiia). In the Comintern and at KUTV, however, it politicized the national differences between Arab and national minority students, especially Jews of Russian, Polish, and Middle Eastern background. It did so during a period of intensifying purges in Moscow and escalating tensions in Palestine. As Soviet and foreign citizens used the mechanisms of Soviet state repression to achieve a variety of political objectives, including ones outside Soviet borders, they continually redefined the regime of inclusion and exclusion in the communist international. They also exacerbated inter-ethic tensions within the communist parties of Egypt, but especially of Palestine, leading up to the split of the Palestine Communist Party into Arab and Jewish sections.