About a decade ago, a Russian B-list actor-turned-producer invited me for a drink to discuss his idea for a film, an action thriller set in Syria. Its protagonist, a Russian spy, was torn between fighting the Islamic State group and longing for his family back home in snowy Moscow. He needed a writer, and I immediately got the job. But this wasn’t due to my experience writing scripts for Russian TV shows, of which I had plenty, but because I had graduated from a Russian university renowned for its Middle East expertise. The fact that I could come up with dialogue and somewhat relatable characters was merely the cherry on top.
Unlike its archenemy in Washington, Russia has long prided itself on understanding “the region,” the term for the Middle East used by our faculty at Saint Petersburg State University, which was mostly made up of retired spies, diplomats and octogenarian professors. They came from a time when, in addition to weapons, their country exported ideology to counter Western dominance and regional monarchies.
For my elite university, the end of the Assad dynasty and Russia’s Syrian project was personal. By the time Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia late last year, I had long been out of school. But the cracks in Russia’s supposed mastery of the Middle East started to show by the time I was a freshman in 2002. Two years prior, two people who would be responsible for the utter devastation of Syria, Assad and Vladimir Putin, who graduated from the university in 1975, came to power.
Studies often emphasized the U.S.-Soviet rivalry in the Middle East. The region, we were told, was like a Gordian knot, but unlike the crude Americans who wanted to cut through it, we Russians needed to untangle it.
A robust exchange program with various institutions across the Middle East was in place, and the university had a streamlined process of turning its brightest students into members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, museum directors and world-renowned historians.
But it soon became clear that the university was not established to foster discussions on the future of the Middle East. The Russian president didn’t handpick rectors to raise free thinkers, and no one was there to advance new ideas. The reason every iteration of Russian history — imperial, Soviet and “democratic” — has kept the university running like an Ivy League institution, despite the country’s perennial disarray, is best summed up by the title of an exhibition opened last October in the Russian parliament, entitled “Saint Petersburg State University: 300 Years of Service to the Motherland.” The university produced the people who formed the core of the paranoid, repressive and security-obsessed Russian state. We entered the university with romantic notions about the Middle East, lapping up the myriad manuscripts and artworks that prerevolutionary Russia managed to snatch from Persia and the Levant. By the time we left, most of us had been transformed into loyal servants of the state. The system funneled talent into roles that served the Kremlin, leaving little room for personal choice or dissent.
Saint Petersburg State University was established 300 years ago by Tsar Peter the Great. A bona fide cradle of the country’s elites, its alumni include Vladimir Lenin, Ayn Rand and the composer Igor Stravinsky, along with eight Nobel laureates and a few heads of state. Together with its counterpart in the capital, Moscow State University, the school is listed as a separate item in the Russian federal budget, akin to weapons exports or the conservation of nature. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago, its board of trustees mirrors the sanctions list issued by the European Union and the U.S., which includes state officials and oligarchs responsible for Russia’s genocidal endeavor.
Attending the university was a personal decision: My family left the Soviet Union for the United States when I was in elementary school, and I returned to study in the same city and university as my mother and grandmother. At the time, the Iraq war was raging, and America’s involvement in the Middle East was the topic du jour. Though I enrolled at the School of History, I attended the so-called Oriental Faculty — now named, thankfully, the School of Asian and African Studies — and graduated in 2007. I was lucky to skip the “freshman year massacre,” when many students traditionally dropped out due to poor grades, an inability to learn the target language or because they were hazed by the faculty — not a rare occurrence for those in their first year of studies. The hazing, when we were berated and put down by the professors, stopped by sophomore year.
Studies also included an informal aspect — knowledge that wouldn’t be mentioned in textbooks. Americans were portrayed as having an uninformed approach to the region. The British, by contrast, were revered for their studies of the Arab world and their ability to operate in the region without resorting to carpet-bombing — at least in the second half of the 20th century. The Soviet Union was lauded for having managed to avoid being the country that drew up borders, extracted natural resources and intervened militarily when its economic interests were at stake. In other words, it was not a colonial empire, and thus enjoyed a degree of genuine affection across the Arab Middle East.
For all the manuscripts and theory, it was the practical knowledge of the region that made the school so interesting. It was understood that the Soviet textbooks we used were often obsolete, so the lectures on the Seleucids, Umayyads and pan-Arab nationalism were supplemented with semi-informal clubs run by professors and postgrads. There, we’d learn from people with firsthand experience in the field. We learned that it’s best to smile and play dumb with local officials, like border guards, and to haggle on the streets — where the word “no” is merely the start of a haggle. We were advised never to show the soles of our feet, cross our arms or give and receive anything with our left hand. In Syria, we were told not to fear raised voices, as arguments rarely escalate into fights, but in Turkey, things could get violent rather quickly.
Long before the end of the Assad regime, we were told that the Syrian army was inherently weak due to nepotism and an ineffective organizational structure. The army was run by poorly trained nephews of Syrian generals who, in turn, were nephews of Cabinet ministers, and no amount of Soviet military advisers — some of them alumni from our university — was enough to mount an effective defense against an Israeli attack. As one professor frustratingly put it, “All they do is drink tea.” The same applied to the armies of Egypt and the United Arab Republic in the second half of the 20th century. Of all the armies and guerrilla groups where Soviet military advisers were embedded, only the Viet Cong was widely respected by the faculty.
Studying the Middle East was a dream: Everywhere you went, you had the feeling of being special, even if the people you met knew nothing about Arab studies. Mikhail Piotrovsky, the illustrious head of St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum and a class of 1967 graduate, had an unwritten rule that anyone studying Arabic at the university, as he had, was entitled to a five-minute meeting with him. There were endless scientific conferences, some under the patronage of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Opening statements were delivered by some of the highest-ranking members of the country’s foreign service, sometimes by the foreign minister himself. The school opened doors — something most Russian universities could never accomplish. Where those doors led, however, was a different matter.
Outside its halls, the school gradually introduced its students to foreign policy experts and government officials — not by rubbing shoulders with them, but by simply being in the same room. The university always had a sort of spy unit within. The rezidentura of the KGB, the Soviet secret intelligence agency, functioned very much like an embassy. After returning from Germany, career spy Putin became the university’s assistant rector for international affairs. Officially, he coordinated the university’s relations with foreign educational and research institutions. Unofficially, it is widely understood that he served as the KGB representative at the university, monitoring its international activities and ensuring security in foreign engagements. The student body, especially that of liberal arts, was a pool of potential recruits: My grandmother, who was part of the class of 1939, participated in the Soviet invasion of Finland while my mother, class of 1970, was unsuccessfully approached by the KGB to pose as a tour guide and spy on French foreign exchange students and tourists.
By our senior year, students at the school began receiving offers to enlist with the FSB, the successor to the KGB, to work as military translators, or join the foreign service. Some went to work for front institutions, like the Russian Organization for Cooperation Abroad, while others, seeking heftier cash flow, entered the energy sector. Within a year or two, they were spread across the region: coordinating cultural exhibits in Ankara, building submarines in Bandar Abbas in Iran, and countering American influence in Tripoli. Even I, with my horrible Arabic, got a job as a translator on an oil rig in Egypt. All roads from the university led to serving the state, and even those pursuing academic careers ended up receiving presidential grants, sitting on government committees and councils or conducting archaeological work as part of Putin’s effort to restore Russia’s imperial status. A classmate of mine, an art history major, now roams the occupied territories of Ukraine with a military escort, searching for Scythian artifacts. He’s also overseeing the creation of a propaganda museum in Mariupol — a city where tens of thousands of Ukrainians were killed.
While not everyone from the school went to work for the state, the reality was that, for the most part, only the state could provide jobs for graduates with degrees in Arabic Studies, Urdu or pre-Islamic Persian art. On my trip to Iran in the mid-2000s, my university friends and I stayed at the Russian Embassy where some of their classmates had worked. I got to see the kind of life the school had prepared us for: You had to sign out every time you left the compound, living quarters were monitored by Russian foreign intelligence, and every locally hired janitor, plumber or gardener was likely an agent of the host country’s intelligence services. There were entire sections of the compound where you couldn’t talk at all. Former students had become loyal foot soldiers, and their lives were different now: They were second and third secretaries; they carried service and diplomatic passports; they missed the rain and St. Petersburg’s white nights in summer; they yearned for the sour taste of Russian rye bread. And they drank vodka — probably smuggled. An embassy worker joked that it came in a diplomatic pouch.
In Syria, Russians started to operate like an 18th-century colonial power equipped with night-vision goggles, extracting natural resources and intervening militarily when its interests were at stake. The latter came courtesy of private military company Wagner and its late leader Yevgeny Prigozhin. Its mercenaries would later be accused of numerous war crimes committed everywhere they were deployed. Men with guns came from all walks of life, but Wagner was more than just muscle: It ran political operations and intelligence gathering, and even had a diplomatic arm — to negotiate with the many warlords it serviced. By coincidence or not, Prigozhin’s office was just down the block from the school, and sadly, many of Wagner’s policy experts, translators and analysts came from the institution.
People who had once studied Africa and the Middle East out of genuine interest were now applying their knowledge to devastate the regions. Some justified their actions as service to the state, believing in glory to Russia, while for others, working with Prigozhin was simply a job. “How else would I get to work in Africa?” one of them told me. The school taught so much history, policy and tradition that it apparently forgot to teach us the basics: Mercenaries are bad, helping warlords kill impoverished people for diamonds is bad and working for a company that burns people alive — like Wagner did in Syria — is, without question, bad.
I visited Syria only once, in 2006, during my junior year. Aeroflot had a weekly direct flight from Moscow. When I landed, a representative from the Damascus-based travel agency I used was waiting for me on the tarmac. He took my passport and led me away from the other passengers. We passed through an empty diplomatic corridor; there was no passport control booth. My passport was handed back to me, already stamped.
I knew that drawing attention to myself — or looking like an obvious foreigner — was rarely a good idea, but it was especially unwise in the Middle East, as we were often reminded at the school — unless, of course, you were at a resort. So, before leaving, I spent hours studying photos of everyday life in Damascus, selecting a wardrobe that would help me blend in. My maternal grandparents were Jews — most likely Sephardic — from Kherson, a Ukrainian city by the Black Sea. I retained some of their Mediterranean features, and in Syria, most people assumed I was Lebanese. Unless I spoke, I didn’t get the tourist treatment. One afternoon, I was the only visitor in Palmyra, where I ate my lunch on a fallen portico. I visited the nearly empty Umayyad Mosque, one of the world’s greatest, had drinks in the old Damascus neighborhood of Bab Touma and climbed around the Crusader castle Krak des Chevaliers. The month-long trip went without a hitch. Almost.
At the airport, I was detained by border guards at passport control. My Arabic was good enough to understand what they told me: The mark in my passport was merely an entry stamp. I didn’t have a Syrian visa and had entered the country illegally. They took me to a room in the airport where three soldiers, armed with Chinese-made Kalashnikovs, were chatting over tea.
My flight was leaving in less than an hour; the next one wouldn’t be for a week. If I didn’t make it onto the plane, the mukhabarat (secret police) would eventually discover that, despite the two-headed eagle on my red Russian passport, I was an American Jew. In terms of consequences, that’s pretty much the worst a person could then be in Syria, second only to an Israeli Jew. One of the soldiers adjusted the strap on his AK. A thought raced through my mind: “If they shoot me, my mom’s going to kill me.”
Because of what it called “dual loyalty” — having close relatives in hostile nations and my non-Slavic heritage — I never received an offer to work for Russian intelligence. Still, I could request a phone call, reach out to my friends back in Russia, ask them to call their friends at the embassy in Damascus and have the matter settled before my flight took off. Making this call, however, would be the equivalent of applying for the job. I knew little about how Russian intelligence agencies operated, but enough to know that you never wanted to owe them.
A Syrian man in a suit appeared, gave me an assessing look — the kind intelligence agents give when they meet you. I remembered what they taught me about interacting with local officials: I slightly opened my arms, smiled, and explained to him, in broken English with a heavy Russian accent, that what happened was out of my control. I didn’t know I went through a “special airport line.” All I did was take pictures of mosques and Palmyra, I told him, and adored the portraits of Putin on the streets. I raised my hands in a handclasp: “Russia, Syria, sadeeq,” I implored, using one of many Arabic words for “friend.” The man rolled his eyes, said something to the soldiers, and they escorted me to the plane.
Every film treatment I wrote for the B-list actor-turned-producer seemed to infuriate him. The stories were based on what I knew about Russians on the ground: My protagonist was an alcoholic, he detested the place where he was stationed and his job, for the most part, was dealing with paperwork. I was paid for what I delivered but told I wouldn’t be needed anymore. I wasn’t the right fit, he said, because I was mocking Russia’s greatest sons. A few years ago, the Russian Ministry of Defense released the feature film “Nebo,” or “The Sky,” a propaganda flick about Russian pilots in Syria. The mass murderers who dropped barrel bombs on cities were depicted as heroes. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it, but I’m sure the production employed people from my school.I studied the history, I saw Palmyra before they destroyed it, and I never took anything with my left hand. I used to pride myself on understanding the Middle East. But seeing the region as a Gordian knot was still seeing it as an object, a puzzle to be solved, not a collection of people to be understood. And mine was still a colonialist perspective — just an educated one. And no matter how much I tried to differentiate myself from those who brought pain to the Middle East in the name of serving their country, I know I was much closer to them than to the people who tried to make life there better — or, at the very least, stayed away.
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