Moscow: ISAA Publishing House at Lomonosov Moscow State University, 2001, 420 p.

The appearance of G. G. Kosach's monograph became for me an important symptom of the fact that the problem of the communist movement in the Arab East is moving away not only from the sphere of taboo and strict censorship of the Soviet era, but also from the new, no less rigidly ideologically defined mythology of the era of "perestroika journalism".

The previous state of knowledge of the problem was determined by an extremely weak knowledge of the event side, a mass of discrepancies, contradictions, and lacunae. This is understandable: the conspiratorial nature of the communist parties ' activities did not contribute to the formation and preservation of an extensive database of documentary materials. At least, such complexes of sources that would be available to researchers. In this sense, the archives of various special services were and still are" gold veins", but they are unlikely to open up to scientists in ^the foreseeable future1. Access to the archives of the Comintern was even more strictly controlled. Researchers had to be content with scattered publications, mostly program documents, propaganda and propaganda materials, and rare memoirs.

The problem was so politicized that a calm and objective study of it seemed impossible in general, and especially in the USSR. Very often, speculative schemes were built up or a "figure of silence" was formed. During the Perestroika period, the analysis was replaced by primitive constructions, such as "gold of Moscow", "intrigues of the Comintern", etc. Their weak heuristic value did not lie in the fact that something like this did not exist-everything, of course, did. Only this did not answer the key question (for me, at least): why did the communist idea and practice, formed on a completely foreign soil, become accepted by Arab society, became its own, perhaps even organic? No amount of "gold" or "hand of Moscow" can explain how the communist movement, which was persecuted and sometimes subjected to monstrous repressions, was revived like a Phoenix bird after all the defeats, splits, and disintegrations. More and more people came to it, often paying for their party dues with their own sufferings, privations, and sometimes with their lives. What are often strong, extraordinary, bright personalities who can achieve a lot in other areas of life looking for here? Why did internationalist and atheist ideas find a response mainly in Muslim society, which was in the phase of struggle for national statehood and therefore experienced the sharpest national feelings?

G. G. Kosach's book, devoted to the initial, most difficult period for studying the emergence and development of the communist movement in the Arab world, provides a wealth of material for reflection on this issue. At that time, society was in a ferment stage, searching for strategies - and the problem of motivating the communist choice by a part of the elite seems to be the key one here.

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The author sees several complementary external and internal reasons that contributed to the emergence of the communist movement. First of all, it is the planned, purposeful activity of the Comintern, its large material, political, and intellectual resources. In addition, the rapid and contradictory development of the national movement in the Arab world after the First World War. The author convincingly shows how the search for a strategy of struggle for national liberation, on the one hand, and modernization, on the other, led some nationalists to the communist camp. In the new, Soviet Russia, they saw at the same time the affirmation of the industrial, modern hypostasis of the West and the denial of its imperialist, colonial essence.

G. G. Kosach notes a fundamentally important point - the huge role of representatives of national and religious minorities in the early stages of the process. Jews, Armenians, Italians, Greeks, and Lebanese Christians became the first ideologues, organizers, and leaders of communist groups practically all over the Arab world. The author explains this primarily by direct transplantation of the communist idea and practice by migrants from Europe. In the case of Palestine, which is most thoroughly discussed in the monograph, this is quite obvious. This is less obvious in Egypt and Syria. Here, too, the role of representatives of minorities was great, but they were mostly local residents. The particular activity of migrants is probably due to their greater Westernization and good familiarity with European political and ideological doctrines and practices than that of Arab-Muslims ^.2 Perhaps they saw the implementation of the principle of communist internationalism as a way out of the dangerous impasse that the region's minorities found themselves in during the era of militant nationalism.

The author focuses on the problem of the ideological formation of the movement, the development of the first Communists ' ideas about their own strategy and tactics. The author carefully traces not only the guiding but also the shaping role of the Comintern, its mercilessly cynical tactics of creating from the available "human raw materials" (according to the expression adopted in Bolshevik circles) ³, a "kind of revolutionary order" ⁴ , a disciplined, non-reasoning, purposeful instrument for carrying out the regularly changing "general line".

Relying on a huge set of Comintern documents (especially archival ones) that were first introduced into scientific circulation, as well as using a variety of sources in German, French, Arabic, Armenian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, which are extremely rarely found together in the work of one author, allowed G. G. Kosach to brilliantly cope with his task. Perhaps for the first time in Russian (and most likely in world) historiography, the mechanism of relations between the leading bodies of the Comintern and its national sections, with those who were called "fellow travelers"in the political jargon of that time, is so clearly described in detail.

However, such a wealth of material clearly creates serious problems for the author. His analysis and comments are often based on information that is well known to him, but not known to the reader. It's not about the possibility of verification - the author's conclusions are convincing. I just want to be as descriptive and narrative as possible. As an interested reader, it is very important for me to understand, in particular, what kind of people, how and why they joined the communist movement, what was the logic of their behavior, how their future destinies developed, what was the human environment, the style and nature of relationships in it. The experience of the fictionalized biography of one of the founders and prominent leaders of the Egyptian communist movement, Henri Curiel, created by the French researcher Gilles Perrault, shows how interesting and important this is for understanding the problem ⁵ .

Reasoning about what else the author needs to do is not entirely correct, like the actual requirement to write a completely different work. In this case, it is rather a wish for the future. The huge and unique material collected and analyzed by the author did not fit in one book. Why not continue it?

notes

¹ The history of the creation of Hanna Batatu's brilliant and, in my opinion, unique monograph is in this sense the rule that confirms the exception ( Batatu N. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary

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Movements of Iraq. A Study of Iraq's Old Landes and Commercial Classes and Its Communists, Ba'thists and Free Officers. Princeton Univ. Press, 1978).

^{Dyatlov V. I.} 2 Entrepreneurial minorities: hucksters, strangers or sent by God? Symbiosis, conflict, integration in the countries of the Arab East and Tropical Africa, Moscow, 1996, pp. 39-72.

³ See for example: Bukharin N. I. Problemy teorii i praktiki sotsializma [Problems of theory and practice of socialism]. Moscow: Politizdat, 1989, p. 168.

^{Bukharin N. I.} 4 Izbrannye sozdaniya [Selected works], Moscow: Politizdat, 1988, p. 35.

⁵ The book is published in French, English, and Arabic. I used the English translation: Perrault G. A Man Apart: The Life of Henri Curiel. L.: Zed Books, 1987.

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