Russia in the Mideast and the Land of Is

Scholars, practitioners and observers of the past and present of international relations in and around the Middle East recognize the importance of foreign involvement in the politics of the region. Among those major foreign powers who have intervened in the Middle East regularly throughout the modern period, Russia stands among the most significant but often the least understood. This odd dichotomy of power versus recognition has existed since the last quarter of the 18th Century.

This course provides a wide historical framework for understanding the role Russia has played throughout the Middle East in the modern period, with a particular focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict since the First World War, when the newly established League of Nations approving a British Mandate for Palestine. By design, that decision promised to set the stage for eventual sovereignty for both Jews and Palestinians.

We will study the continuity and changes in the ideologies, policies, actions and impacts of Russia’s successive regimes in this region starting in 1774, when the Russian Empire signed a foundational treaty with the Ottoman Empire, giving it for the first time a diplomatic and physical foothold in the Holy Land.

Through analysis of documents from the period, together with a wide variety of secondary sources from different sides of international interactions and conflicts, the course will analyze how Russia’s practice of foreign policy in the region evolved as its regime transitioned from an imperial autocracy to a revolutionary socialist state in 1917, to a short-lived democratic experiment in 1991, and finally to an illiberal democracy with the rise of Vladimir Putin.