Moscow's Orienlalist Congress

...another time the Russians simply said...

...Whenever possible, students are then sent for one year to the country where that language is spoken...

...but the valuable conversations take place not in the congress hall but in the corridors...

...Particular importance was attached to the participation of Communist China...

...Their papers and reports will show what splendid progress the great Chinese people has made in science and culture...

...To write a book on Syria today, the Soviet student has to know the Arab sources and not just cut what he wants out of the Daily Worker or L’Humanite...

...The tone and tendency have not, it is true, changed much...

...Last summer the conference preparatory committee stated: “It is a matter of particular importance that Chinese scholars will take a worthy place at the congress...

...Students must put out their own news-sheets in their chosen languages and have intensive conversation exercises with their teachers...

...In the early postwar years Soviet Oriental studies declined...

...This field was left to the East Germans, whose contributions on recent history were as radical as they were primitive...

...THE ADDRESS OF the Oriental Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences is 2 Armianski Pereulok, a small street to the east of Moscow’s center...

...Many Western observers had refused to attach much significance to this tension...

...The big change came in 1955, a part of the general relaxation after Stalin’s death, when interest in the recent history of the East was encouraged...

...Although they all take courses in dialectical materialism and the history of the CPSU, there seems to be an essential difference between those students now graduating from Soviet universities and those who got their education in the ’20s and early ’30s at the “University of the Toilers of the East” and similar institutions...

...We do not doubt,” Professor Belayev, a leading Soviet Orientalist, wrote on the eve of the congress, “that this world congress will help to further the development of oriental studies...

...What in fact had happened was that Sino-Soviet relations had become more strained...

...Moscow, as well as Peking, wanted the victory of Communism: As to the best way of achieving this, there might of course be tactical differences, but none of principle...

...WALTER Z. LAQUEUR, who recently returned from a tour of the Soviet Union, is the editor of Soviet Survey...

...Their absence was a pretty severe blow for the hosts, who apparently thought it unnecessary to provide any explanations...

...But World War II thinned their ranks too...

...A couple of years ago there were a fair number of Chinese students in Soviet universities...

...This time, however, the Russians promised that topical questions—above all the liberation struggle of the Afro-Asian peoples—would occupy the center of deliberations, and that Soviet scholars would demonstrate “the invincible power of Marxist-Leninist theory as the methodological foundation of Soviet science...

...the number of those studying in the field was few...

...FIVE YEARS HAVE PASSED since the move to give high priority to Soviet Oriental studies and the new cadres are already at work, in Cairo and New Delhi as well as in Moscow...

...The “academics” got off more lightly...

...the ideological disputes, they contended, were not after all of so important a character...

...These of course were useful, but the main purpose was to establish trained personnel for practical assignments as quickly as possible...

...Normally the delegates deal with such questions as “Suffixes to the Accusative Case in the Uzbek Language,” “Work in Progress on the Coptic Manichaica...

...New, specialized periodicals were started and new books on these subjects began to appear frequently...

...if they had not been politically active, they were left in peace and continued as before to investigate the use of the particle ma in Chinese and similar studies, which seldom arouse excitement even in a totalitarian state...

...For the most part such congresses—and the Moscow one was no exception—do not discuss the cardinal problems of a subject, but listen to papers on subsidiary and highly specialized themes, of interest only to very small groups and sometimes of no interest at all...

...Of more recent origin is the intensive study of Indian and Afghan languages and literature and the first steps to start a school of Africanists, which appear to have been taken in close collaboration with East Germany, more advanced in the study of contemporary African questions than any other Soviet-bloc country...

...Books are being translated from the Chinese, but very few in comparison with English, French or German, and in quite small editions...

...Today it is the place where the training of academic and non-academic cadres is planned and...

...China will be the leader not only because it has three times as many people as the USSR, but because its blueprint for Communism is more radical and consistent...

...Of course, politics was never far from the scene, as in Mikoyan’s opening address (“In Uzbekistan there are five times as many students as in France . . .”), or in the exhibition at the University, which was to show foreigners how much progress had been made in Soviet Central Asia in the last four decades...

...In most cases the result was not, to put it mildly, highly convincing, though this was less the fault of historical materialism (which, no doubt, has a significant contribution to make to the study of African social and economic history) than of the immaturity of most Communist Africanists, too recently in the field to allow themselves the luxury of doctrinaire declarations...

...India, Africa, even to America, but one never hears of their going to China...

...But they were revolutionaries whereas their successors today seem to be concerned chiefly with their own advancement...

...In regard to China and India there was something to go on, but for the Middle East...

...The idea was not to turn out a large body of philologists and medievalists...

...The building is old and dilapidated, but Turgenev and Stanislavsky lived there, and in Tsarist times it housed the Lazarev Institute, the center for study of Oriental languages...

...In a number of Moscow and provincial high schools the teaching of Hindi, Urdu, Persian and Arabic was introduced, and hundreds if not thousands of young people are now bent on becoming experts on India, China, Africa or the Middle East...

...and there were no African specialists among historians or economists—the dark continent was left to a small group of anthropologists and philologists...

...The 1936-38 purges ended these activities...

...Sino-Soviet conflicts appear in the relations between Russian and Chinese Orientalists Moscow’s ORIENTALIST CONGRESS By Walter Z. Laqueur THE 25TH INTERNATIONAL Congress of Orientalists, held at Moscow University at the beginning of August, opened with great expectations: It was the first meeting to be held in the USSR and the Russians themselves had declared it would be unusual...

...If, in fact, the Sino-Soviet conflict were concerned with ideological questions alone, whether tactical or general, this assumption would be correct...

...Western observers awaited the appearance of the Chinese with great interest...

...At first it had been assumed that the Chinese would insist on their claim, but they were not there to do so...

...A great many Western participants expected it to be a purely political affair, and were therefore surprised when, as an American delegate put it, there were so few fireworks...

...Official Moscow still dismisses theories about a Sino-Soviet rift as “imperialist falsifications and wish-fulfillment dreams...

...There are some Chinese goods on sale in Moscow—chiefly cheap textiles and shoes—but fewer than one would have thought...

...the authors are still expected to produce useful and not “objectivist” work...

...The Japanese, too, followed this line, their delegation apparently heavily overweighted with Communists...

...a number of the younger and highly promising scholars of the Leningrad School (where, until 1950, Oriental studies were concentrated) lost their lives...

...THE CONGRESS provided an insight into questions connected with Soviet policies in Asia and Africa, as well as into Moscow’s technique of organizing international congresses...

...But it is highly questionable whether international scientific congresses really can have this effect...

...Practically none of them was concerned with contemporary questions and they had no journal of their own and only a few other publications...

...A Chinese film festival in Moscow last winter was a failure, and although a fair number of American and other Western films are now being shown in the USSR, none of the theaters, as far as can be ascertained, is showing Chinese films...

...The Chinese did not turn up...

...How would the relations be between Chinese and Russians, and between Chinese and other Asian scholars...

...That was not the fault of the Russians, who in this respect have only carried on the Western tradition, which has little to recommend it...

...In the African section a number of Soviet scholars and Communists from other countries set out to show that in studying African history the methods of historical materialism were far superior to any “idealist” or “eclectic” methods...

...now there are only a few and they keep very much to themselves...

...But the question was not answered...

...Occasionally, a paper by a non-Communist delegate was criticized along Leninist lines, but in only two or three instances did a foreigner criticize a Communist paper for one-sided political emphasis...

...When Mao Tse-tung said that the East wind was stronger than the West wind, Moscow may have thought it needed some protection from that East wind...

...Bobodzhan Gafurov, the leading Soviet orientalist (and at one time First Secretary of the Communist party in Tadjikistan) explained that among Western orientalists there were already two separate groups—those, allegedly a minority, who study the spiritual values of the East from a humanitarian point of view, and those, the ideologists of colonialism, who deny the achievements of the Eastern peoples...

...After a fashion, it is true, the Orientalists still went on, but apart from a few” professional colleagues in the USSR and abroad scarcely anyone took notice of them...

...The syllabus of the Oriental languages department of Moscow University provides for a first year program of 16 hours of weekly instruction in the structure and grammar of the language, and the student must study two Oriental languages and, in addition, either English or French...

...Until a little while ago the Chinese Communists were prepared to recognize Soviet primacy (and perhaps they still are), but they have already made it unmistakably clear that in the not too distant future leadership should and will pass to them...

...There are so many complications—Formosa, the Americans, and so on...

...but it is difficult to avoid the impression that the spokesmen themselves no longer quite believe their denials...

...At one time it was unofficially put out that the Chinese refused to regard Oriental studies as a separate discipline, and therefore had not come...

...in part, carried out...

...The level of the new books is somewhat higher than it was 10 years ago, when the few books and articles published were based almost entirely on secondary sources...

...It is not unusual for foreigners in Moscow to be asked by Russians what they think will happen when the Chinese have atom bombs...

...But apart from that, the Russians were more concerned to put up a show of respectability than to conduct propaganda which might well have missed its mark...

...Their presence means that, in the future, conferences of Orientalists will be truly international in character...

...Then there seemed to be a majority for the American invitation to hold it in the United States, but the Egyptians, supported by the Russians, held out for Cairo, and in the end agreement was reached on India, a choice received with general satisfaction...

...And perhaps that was all to the good, for it is more than doubtful whether such a debate would have served any purpose...

...The congress closed its proceedings with the usual resolutions, but behind the scenes there was a bitter fight to settle the meeting place for the next congress...

...The institutes were closed down, most of their staffs arrested and the journals ceased publication...

...or, at best, “The Indian Textile Industry in the 17th Century”—all no doubt of considerable interest to the specialist, but matters of more or less indifference to the general public...

...Soviet tourists go to Europe...

...Real progress has been made in the study of contemporary questions...

...But all the evidence suggests that it is concerned with something quite different, that it is the opening of the struggle for predominance in the Communist bloc...

...You know, the Chinese don’t like coming to international conferences anyhow...

...Since the beginning of the 19th century, there has of course been a school of Russian Orientalists, including scholars of world renown like Rosen and Oldenburg, Kratchkovski and Kokovtsev, Turayev and Bartold...

...Of the roughly 800 reports submitted to the 20 sections, only a few handled explosive materials—that is, Oriental history and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries...

...A Russian-language illustrated periodical published in Moscow by the Chinese recently suspended publication...

...The Russians don’t often do things by halves: Every possible encouragement was given to young scholars to enter the field...

...Moreover, another conference of Sinologues, which was also to have been held in Moscow in August, had to be abandoned on the pretext that not enough reports on research work had been received from the participants...

...The real value of such congresses today is that every two or three years they bring together specialists from different countries who can then talk to each other...

...neither the Party nor the State thought of them as especially important...

...Probably Moscow and Peking will work out a provisional modus vivendi, but close and enduring cooperation seems improbable...

...research institutes and academic faculties sprang up like mushrooms, not only in Moscow and Leningrad, but also in Baku, Tiflis and Tashkent...

...And they are convinced that it is in China and not in the Soviet Union that true Communism will be built...

...The Soviet press gives relatively little space to events in China and as for articles by Chinese journalists and writers, there have been none at all in recent months...

...Since 1954 Soviet Oriental studies have expanded greatly, and it is freely admitted that this is connected with the “decisive changes in world affairs,” particularly in Asia and Africa...

...The graduates of those times had far less command of the languages and far less knowledge of history and economics than do the graduates of 1960...

...Most important of all, the orientalists of the Orient itself—Soviet Central Asia, India and China—as well as those of Africa (which is considered part of the Orientalists’ field), would play a leading part for the first time...

...The great majority treated such themes as “The Arab Shadow-play of Mohammed Ibu Daniyat [an Egyptian eye doctor of the 13th century]” and the Soviet representatives were reasonable enough not to subject them to agitprop techniques...

...There are the classical, academic Orientalists, whose representatives were well in evidence at the recent congress, and who have done considerable work, particularly in Altai and Turkic languages and literature, a field in which there was an excellent Russian tradition...

...At the congress there were young Soviet specialists with a command of fluent Hindi, Arabic or Korean, but the Soviet program of African languages is less developed because of the shortage of qualified teachers...

...THE COURSE OF this dispute can only be surmised, but its effects are visible...

...Considerable stress is laid on he mastery of Oriental languages...

...The visitors from the West made every effort to keep political debate out, and even the Russians were on the whole concerned to do the same...

...And in the first 20 years of the Soviet regime there were research institutes and journals concerned with contemporary developments in Asia and the Middle East...

...Southeast Asia and Africa, a virtually clean slate had to be filled, and a good deal of care was given to this...

...At the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) in 1956 Anastas Mikoyan said that while decisions of world-wide significance were being made in Africa and Asia, Soviet Oriental studies were hibernating...

...Of course there were happy exceptions, but they were few...

...Recordings and tape recordings are used to assist accent and pronunciation...