Red Mecca

The first literary study of the Arab world’s Soviet entanglements, examining how Arabic writers have retold and reimagined their Soviet and Russian sojourns

During the Cold War, tens of thousands of Arab students journeyed to study in the USSR, drawn by socialism’s red beacon or simply the chance to study abroad for free. For these students, the Soviet Union was not an Evil Empire but a Red Mecca—a relatively free third space, far from home and away from the influence of the West. In this groundbreaking book, Margaret Litvin analyzes how Arab intellectuals understood and narrated their experiences of studying in the Soviet Union, particularly in Russia and Ukraine. Drawing on novels, letters, interviews, Soviet faculty meeting minutes, a student film, and other sources, Litvin reconstructs these Arab students’ lifeworld in all its political tension and human depth. She shows that, far from disappearing in 1991, the legacy of Cold War–era study abroad has offered rich material to twenty-first-century Arab writers, who use Russian or Soviet themes to explore minoritization, rigid gender identities, jihad, dictatorship, and war.

Tracing the unexpected trajectories of people, literary genres, and fantasies, Litvin offers the counterintuitive but illuminating argument that throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, Arab intellectuals have used Soviet educational ties to gain cultural freedom—and that this often worked in spite, not because, of policymakers’ plans. Combining cultural history and literary criticism, Red Mecca recovers a long-overlooked historical conjunction and shows how Arabic novelists have transmuted it into art.