A reader who opens this book expecting the Arab world of 1969 — Nasser two years after the June defeat, the Ba'ath entrenched in Damascus and Baghdad, the fedayeen, the oil weapon — will be surprised to find that it ends in 1918, with British martial law being proclaimed over Damascus and the Arab flag hauled down at Beirut. Vladimir Borisovich Lutsky's Modern History of the Arab Countries is a history of the Ottoman Arab provinces from the Turkish conquest of the early sixteenth century to the collapse of that empire in the First World War. It closes on the exact threshold at which the modern reader assumes it will begin. That closing point is not an accident, and it is not a limitation. It is the key to what the book is, and to what it silently promises next.
The date on the spine is the least reliable fact about this volume, and the front matter says so plainly. Lutsky (1906–1962) did not live to see it published; the book appeared seven years after his death. It "consists of a series of lectures that took several years to prepare," and its editor, N. Ivanov, is exact about which years: "The present book is the fullest available version of the series of lectures delivered by Lutsky at Moscow University between 1949 and 1953." Where no verbatim transcript survived — the chapter on the French conquest of Algeria, for instance — the compilers fell back on a chapter Lutsky had contributed to the textbook Modern History of the Colonial and Dependent Countries (Moscow, 1940). Three younger Arabists, R. G. Landa, I. M. Smilyanskaya and M. S. Lazarev, prepared particular chapters for the press from his archive and from students' notes.
So the intellectual substance of this book is a late-Stalin-era university lecture course, built on foundations laid in the 1930s and 1940s and issued, unrevised in argument, in the détente-era jacket of Progress Publishers in 1969. Date the argument, not the printing. What we are reading is how the founder of Soviet Arabism taught the subject to Moscow students in the years around Stalin's death — and the book bears the marks of that origin honestly. There is no cult apparatus in it. Stalin's name does not appear once in 146,000 words. Neither "opportunism" nor "revisionism," the twin classifiers that saturate so much of the Progress catalogue, occurs a single time. This is not a catechism dressed as history; it is history, written by a man the introduction calls, without exaggeration, "the founder of the Soviet school of Arab historians."
That claim is worth taking seriously rather than discounting. Lutsky began lecturing on modern Arab history in 1936, at a moment when, as Ivanov notes, "the Russian classical Orientalists of pre-revolutionary days showed no great interest in modern Arab history." The book was produced by the Academy of Sciences' Institute of the Peoples of Asia, the successor to the old Institute of Oriental Studies, and it reads as what it is: a founding synthesis in a field that barely existed in Russian before its author made it. Ivanov is candid about the seams — "Some of its chapters and sections lack development," there is "no section on the social and economic history of Morocco" — the sort of admission a propaganda tract never makes about itself.
Take the measure of the research before weighing the frame, because the research is the larger part. Lutsky reads his sources, and he reads them in the right languages. The Egyptian chronicler al-Jabarti — the indispensable Arabic eyewitness to Bonaparte's occupation — is quoted directly on the French warships burning at Abukir and on the depredations of the occupying armies. George Antonius's The Arab Awakening (1938), still the classic account of the Arab national revival, is cited by page. Volney's Travels of 1784, Cromer's self-serving memoirs, the reports of the French savants of the Egyptian expedition, the British historian George Young, Bremond's book on the French mission to the Hejaz — the apparatus is that of a working historian who has gone to the documents. When Lutsky wants to convey what Ottoman decay did to the Egyptian fellah, he does not editorialise; he lets a French observer of the expedition speak: the peasant "sows the land with disgust, reaps with fear and tries to hide a meagre share of the grain from the grasping oppressors." This is the citation test that so many volumes in this series fail, and Lutsky passes it cleanly: his opponents and his witnesses are quoted and sourced, not merely characterised.
The Marxism here is likewise the real thing rather than an incantation. Lutsky uses Marx and Engels where they actually wrote about the region — the New-York Daily Tribune despatches on the Eastern Question, Anti-Dühring on Napoleon's cavalry, the Selected Correspondence on the origins of Islam — and Lenin's Notebooks on Imperialism (Collected Works, vol. 39) on the Fashoda and Agadir crises. He deploys them as analytic tools, not as proof-texts. His class reading of the Ottoman Arab lands — the tangle of state, waqf and private tenure; the sipahi fief; the multazim tax-farmer; the slow, uneven emergence of a commercial bourgeoisie in the shadow of a feudal-theocratic empire — is genuine social history, and much of it holds up.
And where the book is at its strongest, it is very strong indeed: on the European conquest of the Arab world. The financial strangulation of Egypt and Tunisia by Anglo-French bondholders; Disraeli's midnight purchase of the Suez shares with Rothschild money; the "European cabinet" of foreign controllers that reduced Egypt to "a colony of the Anglo-French bankers"; the crushing of Arabi Pasha's national movement in 1882 and the fastening of Cromer's proconsular dictatorship; the French wars against Abd el-Kader in Algeria and the "Algerian Commune"; the Italian conquest of Libya — this is powerful, largely accurate anti-colonial history, and Lutsky tells it with a controlled anger that the events warrant.
Lutsky also has a historian's instinct for the human texture of colonial rule, and a corrective eye for the figures the imperial record traduced. He rescues Khedive Ismail from the caricature of the spendthrift "Oriental despot" — Cromer had reproached him for "preferring the company of his coachmen and lackeys to that of European diplomats" — and insists, more justly, that "Ismail was an educated and energetic Egyptian statesman, a pioneer of capitalist development in Egypt," even while placing him squarely as a representative of a doomed landowning class. He restores Arabi Pasha, dismissed by "many bourgeois historians" as "an ignoramus," to what he was: "the son of a fellah," schooled at al-Azhar, a reader who followed the French Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento. And he tells the Denshawai affair of June 1906 — that emblem of the whole colonial relationship — in full: a party of British officers out shooting pigeons in a Delta village, a scuffle with the peasants whose crops they trampled, an officer dead of sunstroke on the road, and four fellaheen hanged and others flogged at the foot of the gallows for a murder that never happened. The passage needs no editorial heightening, and Lutsky gives it none; the facts do the work, and they did more than any pamphlet to turn Egyptian opinion against the occupation.
The climax is the carve-up of the Arab East during the First World War, and here Lutsky is on ground where the documentary record has only vindicated him. He lays out the double- and triple-dealing of the Entente with precision: the promises made to Sharif Husein through McMahon to raise the Arab revolt; the Sykes–Picot Agreement negotiated in secret ("secret talks were going on in the cool comfort of the Entente's ministerial offices") that partitioned the very lands promised to the Arabs into British and French zones; and the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, which Lutsky reads without conspiracy-mongering as a calculated imperial manoeuvre — Britain enlisting the Zionist movement "to justify the separation of Palestine from the Arab state." He quotes the Declaration verbatim and follows the machinery honestly, down to Balfour dismissing the exposed Sykes–Picot text as a "figment of a malicious Bolshevik imagination." The betrayal of the Arab revolt, the imposition of the mandate order, the planting of the Zionist project under British auspices: on all of this Lutsky is a reliable guide, and a reader will learn real history from him.
Two things deserve particular credit because they cut against the reflexes one expects. First, Lutsky does not exempt tsarist Russia from the indictment. Russian imperialism appears in these pages as one predator among the others: "The question of capturing Constantinople was also connected with tsarism's desire for hegemony in Europe"; tsarist Russia "supported the aggressive plans of the Bourbon monarchy" in the seizure of Algiers; and Sykes and Picot did their bargaining in Petrograd, because Russia was a full partner in the partition until the Revolution tore up its share. A Soviet historian could afford this honesty — tsarism was the ancien régime October had overthrown — but the honesty is real, and it makes the anti-imperialism even-handed rather than merely anti-Western. Second, on Zionism Lutsky is empirical and restrained. He treats it as a political movement instrumentalised by British strategy, gives the sober figures — a Jewish population of scarcely 90,000 in Palestine on the eve of the war, with only forty-three agricultural settlements among them — and does not reach for the demonology of the world-Zionist conspiracy that Soviet publishing was embracing at the very moment this book went to press. Set beside its own stablemates in this catalogue — Yuri Ivanov's Caution: Zionism (1970), Galina Nikitina's The State of Israel (1973) — Lutsky's pages read like the work of a scholar who died before that campaign began, which is precisely what they are.
None of this makes the book innocent of its politics; it makes its politics worth examining seriously. The organising idea of Lutsky's history is the progressive national movement, and the class he credits with carrying it is, again and again, the national bourgeoisie. Mohammed Ali's state-building reforms are "of a progressive nature" — Lutsky reaches for Marx's estimate of him as "the only man" capable of replacing the Ottoman turban with a real head. The Wahhabi movement is progressive not for its theology but because it "weakened feudal anarchy and Arabian disunity." The Egyptian wataneun, Arabi the fellah's son, the Young Tunisians, the merchants and liberal landlords pressing the Tanzimat forward — these are Lutsky's heroes, the bearers of a bourgeois-national advance against feudal stagnation and colonial subjection. It is a coherent, defensible schema for the period it covers, and for a "modern history" ending in 1918 it is largely unobjectionable: there was as yet scarcely an Arab proletariat, still less an Arab communist movement, to carry anything.
But the schema does not stop at 1918 in the mind of the reader Progress had in view. The choice to end the "modern history" (novaya istoriya) at the First World War is itself a periodisation with a politics. In the Soviet scheme, 1917 divides modern from contemporary history, and a companion volume of contemporary history would pick up exactly where this one lays down — with the mandates, the inter-war national movements, and the post-1945 revolutions. Lutsky's book is the prologue to that sequel, and it is built to hand off cleanly to it. Its final sentence is not an ending but a cue: the close of the war "opened a new period in the history of the Arab people, a period of struggle against British and French imperialism for the complete national liberation of the Arab countries." The hero is already cast — the anti-imperialist national movement — and the villain is already named. What is missing, structurally, is any warning about that hero's limits.
The seam shows most clearly in the book's treatment of 1917 itself. The moral pivot of Lutsky's whole narrative is the Bolshevik publication of the secret treaties in November 1917 and the Soviet government's "Appeal to All the Working Moslems of Russia and the East" of that December. This is accurate — the Bolsheviks did expose the Sykes–Picot text, and it was a genuine revolutionary act that electrified the colonial world. But in Lutsky's telling it also does ideological work: it makes Soviet Russia the redeemer of the Arab East, counterposed to the Entente's treachery, the deus ex machina of the anti-colonial story. Written by a man teaching in Moscow around 1950 and published in 1969 at the high tide of Soviet–Arab alignment, that counterpoint is the one place where the frame reads back into the history. The Arab liberation the book foretells has a natural patron, and the reader is meant to know who it is.
Here honesty requires a boundary. This book ends in 1918; it says nothing about Nasser, the Ba'ath, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, or the fate of the Arab communists, because none of it had happened when Lutsky lectured, and the mandate period itself lies a year beyond his last page. To convict him of silence on these things would be to convict him of not writing a different book. The proper criticism is not of what Lutsky omitted but of where his schema was heading — of the doctrine that this progressive-national-bourgeoisie framework became, once Soviet policy extended it past 1917 into the living politics of the Arab world.
For by 1969 that framework had a name and a policy: the "non-capitalist path of development," the theory of "national democracy," under which Moscow armed and courted precisely the Arab-nationalist regimes — Nasser's Egypt, the Iraqi and Syrian Ba'ath — as vehicles of an anti-imperialist, socially progressive advance. And here the tragedy the doctrine could not face is the one the Fourth International named as it unfolded. Those same regimes jailed, tortured and killed the Arab communists whom Soviet policy was simultaneously instructing to support them. Nasser's prisons; the Iraqi Communist Party — for a time the strongest in the Arab world — hunted underground by Kassem and then slaughtered wholesale after the Ba'athist coup of 1963. The class that Lutsky's history teaches the reader to see as the engine of liberation turned, in power, on the workers and the communists in its own countries. Lutsky did not live to see this; but the way of thinking his book so ably founds is the way of thinking that could not, in advance, explain it.
The counter-analysis was not a later wisdom. It existed, in the anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition, in the very years Lutsky was lecturing, and it was aimed at exactly the question his schema begs: can the national bourgeoisie of a colonial country carry the anti-imperialist revolution through to the end?
Trotsky's answer, in the concluding theses of The Permanent Revolution (1930), is the theory the Soviet volumes attack by name and never state. Thesis 2: "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." An "independent" bourgeois-democratic dictatorship in a colonial country, Trotsky argued, could only be of the Kuomintang type — turning, in the end, "entirely against the workers and the peasants." That was written of China in 1927. It reads as a forecast of the Arab East thirty years on.
And the Fourth International applied it to that East in real time. When the Free Officers took Cairo in July 1952 — while Lutsky's lecture course was still fresh — the movement's press read the coup with a class eye that events would confirm: "The coup d'etat of the Egyptian army therefore does not in any way constitute a revolution. The old institutions are preserved" (S. Munir, "The Military Coup in Egypt," Fourth International, vol. XIII no. 5, September–October 1952). The great anti-imperialist upsurge of 1951–52, Munir wrote, had "assumed a clearly proletarian character from the outset," only to be "led into a blind alley and suppressed." A decade later, an Arab socialist writing in the American International Socialist Review drew the balance sheet the "non-capitalist path" refused to draw: "The new Egyptian state is a capitalist state and the class in power there is the national bourgeoisie," and Nasser had "launch[ed] a witch-hunt against" the communists "including all means of propaganda and police terror" (A. Sadi, "'Arab Socialism' and the Nasserite National Movement," International Socialist Review, vol. 24 no. 2, Spring 1963). Sadi even quoted the Arab communist parties' own programme back at them — the call for "a national democratic state 'which does not represent one certain class'… which opens the way for a peaceful transition to socialism" — the exact doctrine, in the CPs' own words, that would leave the workers' movement disarmed before the regimes that were about to crush it.
This is the reading Lutsky's book cannot supply, and it is the reading it makes one want. His Modern History of the Arab Countries is honest scholarship on the making of the modern Arab world under the Ottoman and then the European yoke — reliable on the carve-up, sharp on Sykes–Picot and Balfour, generous to the peoples whose struggle it recounts. It is also the opening chapter of a story whose next installment Soviet doctrine was determined to tell as a romance of the progressive national bourgeoisie, and which turned out, for the Arab communists, to be a tragedy. Read Lutsky for the century he actually covers, where he is a trustworthy and often admirable guide. For what came after, and for why the framework falters there, read the tradition that was already, in 1952, watching the same events and refusing the same illusions.