Russian‐Arab Worlds: A Documentary History by EileenKane, MashaKirasirova, and MargaretLitvin, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 408 pp. 110. 00. ISBN 978‐0‐1976‐0576‐9

In their introduction to this stimulating collection of newly translated writings from two and a half centuries of encounters between Russia and the Arab world, the editors draw attention to the 2019 Syrian novel The Russian Quarter by Syrian novelist Khalil al-Rez. In it, a group of hybrid creatures—"humans, dogs, other animals and a giraffe"—gather in the Damascus Zoo during the Syrian Civil War (p. 12). Russian bombs may fall around the wildlife park, but inside the zoo, at least, the Syrian and Russian humans and animals exchange their life stories. The story of encounters between Russia and the Arab world, for al-Rez as much as for the authors of this volume, is one of hybridity and mutability, not the hard boundaries so common to area studies formations. Russian-Arab Worlds brings this point home through an unprecedented collection of thirty-four newly translated primary source documents, ranging chronologically from the first Russian naval mission to the Eastern Mediterranean in 1773 to al-Rez's ruminations on cultural hybridity in 2019. Along the way, readers learn much about quarantine politics and the hajj, the Armenian SSR's attempts to influence Armenian diaspora politics in Lebanon, and Soviet outreach to Arab Communists, socialists, and Ba'athists during the Cold War. Having assembled these thirty-four documents together, editors Eileen Kane, Masha Kirasirova, and Margaret Litvin identify several themes that characterize Russian-Arab relations over the centuries. One is that "religious solidarities are cultivated, not inherent" (p. 5). Following the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, the Russian Empire became entitled to extend extraterritorial privileges over its subject in Ottoman lands (including the Holy Land), and as the Ottoman state weakened in the nineteenth century Russia became ever more involved in facilitating "cross-border Orthodox religious solidarity" (p. 6). Several of the documents show, then, how the Russian Empire patronized Orthodoxy in Jerusalem in order to leave its imprint on the Holy Land. As the editors note, moreover, religious and national solidarities can be actively undermined by outside powers, too. When many Chechens fled Russian rule for the Ottoman lands, explains Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky in his contribution, the Russian and Ottoman governments worked closely together to disperse the refugees around the Sublime Porte's territories, lest they form "another Tchetchenaia" that could threaten either empire (p. 62). Other cases offer a more ambiguous picture, however, as Zeinab Azarbadegan shows in her contribution. When the Russian Empire conquered Shi'a-majority lands in what is today Azerbaijan, it strove toward a "bureaucratization of the clerical hierarchy"—no small task, given the orientation of Shi'a ulema there toward "madrasas in Ottoman Iraq and Qajar Iran" (p. 37). Here, Russia did indeed seek to cultivate religious solidarities with the Shi'a scholars of the Southern Caucasus, but in doing so it sought to break the powerful long-term connections such scholars had with their ethnic brethren in Qajar Iran, and with like-minded scholars in Najaf, Qom, Mashhad, and elsewhere. A second theme is that "in-between populations" have played an outsized role in forging Russian-Arab ties over the centuries. Some of the most prominent early Bolshevik diplomats for "the East," for instance, were Armenians, like Lev Karakhan, or Muslims, like the Tatar Karim Khakikov and the Kazakh Nazir Tiuriakulov (p. 8). Later, Soviet Central Asians became emissaries to independent Arab states, while the Armenian SSR acted as a phantom Ottoman successor state, attempting to perform its own diplomacy vis-à-vis Arab countries "with sometimes grudging approval from Moscow (p. 9). This pattern extended far beyond the Arab world: elites in the Azerbaijani SSR often took on a leading role in coordinating Soviet policy toward Iran, as did the Kazakh SSR toward Uyghur populations in the People's Republic of China. In short, much of what we commonly think of as a "Russian" or "Soviet" foreign policy was actually performed by subnational actors operating in the name of a larger Russian imperial or Communist power. Here, Russian-Arab Worlds bridges the gap between scholarship on Russia as a multinational empire and transregional history. A third theme, meanwhile, is that communism reconfigured existing Russian-Arab ties once more, but with often unintended consequences. Tens of thousands of Arab students came to the Soviet Union during the twentieth century, but a minority of them were committed communists; most were students from non-elite backgrounds who studied technical subjects or the creative arts, like al-Rez. Arab students' time in the Soviet Union often led them to reflect on parallels between the Arab world and Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union seemed to have allowed East Germans to atone for their Nazi past through intergovernmental friendship arrangements; "Political ideology," as Margaret Litvin observers, "is secondary to national dignity" (p. 247). Nonetheless, the very real Soviet-Arab social worlds forged during the Cold War have formed the affective bedrock for Russia's post-Soviet ties with the Arab world. As the editors point out, migration, inter-marriage, and Russian as a language of social mobility have underwritten Russia's relative prestige in the region. Here, there are deep continuities between the Imperial Orthodoxy Palestine Society, the Comintern, and more recent manifestations of Russian soft power outreach, such as the Russian-language school on Putin Street (!) in Bethlehem. Russian-Arab Worlds represents a major contribution to research on Russia's myriad encounters with the Islamic world—not surprising, since the scholars behind it have written some of the most innovative research in that subfield. Most university teachers of Russian history or Middle Eastern history have some awareness of Russia's ties with the Arab world, but primary sources in English on the subject have been scant. Now, with the many translated documents in this collection—including accompanying essays—educators have a rich selection of documents with which to teach these subjects. Skeptics might grumble that the book's chosen optic of Russian-Arab ties obscures the specifically inter-imperial character of exchanges between Russia and the other empires that have colonized Arab populations; or about the editors' decision to focus on Egypt and the Mashreq, leaving the Maghreb to the wayside. All the same, Russian-Arab Worlds will become a go-to reference to future scholarship on Russian and the Middle East, and it is an invaluable resource for teachers of both fields.