Toward a Soviet Future?

Abstract What was the role of the Soviet Union in shaping the political imaginary of anticolonial communists? In 1928 Fu’ad al-Shamali, a tobacco worker born in Ottoman Mount Lebanon and co-founder and general secretary of the Communist Party of Syria and Lebanon (CPSL), traveled to Moscow as a delegate to the Sixth Comintern Congress. He had just been released from prison for participating in the 1925–27 anticolonial Syrian Revolt against French rule. Four years later he published an account of the trip under the title Madha Ra’aytu fi Moscow (What I Saw in Moscow). In this article, the author provides a close examination and contextualization of What I Saw in Moscow and of al-Shamali’s focus on and depictions of gender, internationalism, and class in the Soviet Union. Al-Shamali’s depictions not only reflect utopian visions of a possible communist society, but also speak to his assessments of Syrian and Lebanese attitudes toward the Soviet Union in this period. What I Saw in Moscow offers new ways of understanding the role of the Soviet Union in the political orientation of anticolonial interwar communists.