ABSTRACT
Teachers of Arabic appeared in Russia in the early nineteenth century, but native Arabs start their activities in Russian high schools from the 1840s. Studying Arabic was necessary to support Russian diplomatic activities in the Middle East. The professors of Arabic in Russian universities and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs primarily came from the Christian Arabic world of Syria and Palestine. The cultural diplomacy of the Russian Empire, however, went beyond political targets, also influencing education, literature and other spheres of ‘soft power’. This chapter aims to show how educational processes in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were reciprocal: the schools of the Palestine Society provided national Arabic education to their pupils, and some graduates from these schools later became professors of Arabic and translators in Russia, some of them continuing to participate in Oriental studies and teaching in Soviet universities.
