Page 470 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Gazelles and Lions 467

national bourgeois governments as a preliminary to building the socialist
state.
So much for Soviet theory. By i960 the national bourgeois regimes which
had emerged as the successors to European imperial rule in Asia had consoli­
dated their positions and were, most of them, beginning to develop their own

kind of socialist state. More often than not this process involved the intimida­
tion or suppression of the local communist parties, a consequence w'hich
implicitly challenged (even if unwittingly) Soviet dogma that the transition
from the national bourgeois to the socialist state should be directed by the

communist party. For sound practical reasons - among them the weakness of
the local communist parties and the lack of working-class cadres in most Asian
countries - the Soviet government suppressed its ideological reservations and
continued to support the national bourgeois regimes. They were, after all,
accomplishing the Russians’ objectives for them, by their unceasing display of

hostility to the West and by their constant extension of state control over their
own economies. Thus, in the Middle East, the Soviet Union followed the
wholly pragmatic policy of supplying military, economic and technical assist­
ance to the military dictatorships which ruled over Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and later

Algeria, refusing to allow herself to be disconcerted by the deviations from the
doctrinally legitimate path to socialism which they represented.
The subordination of dogma to expediency in the conduct of Soviet foreign
policy was all too apparent, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, in the

Russians’ exploitation of the Kurdish separatist movement in Iraq from the
mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Soviet policy in Arabia in the same period
likewise demonstrated the secondary role assigned by the Russians to ideology
in the pursuit of their strategic objectives in the Middle East. A new treaty was

concluded with the Yemen in October 1955 in which the Soviet Union recog­
nized the full and absolute independence of Yemen and also the full indepen­
dence and absolute legal sovereignty of the king’. It seemed to matter little that
the king in question, the Imam Ahmad ibn Yahya, was an absolutist and
theocratic sovereign, utterly aloof from, indeed, immovably opposed to, every-
t ing the Soviet Union stood for. What mattered, as in the case of his father,

e Imam Yahya, with whom a similar treaty had been concluded in 1928, was
t at he was actively hostile to the British in Aden. Further agreements covering
t e supply of arms and economic aid followed in 1956 and 1957, their latent

purpose being to underwrite the campaign of harassment which the Yemenis
Vere conducting against the British along the borders of the Aden Protecto-
whi h^S J316 35 I^1’ a year before Imam Ahmad’s death and the revolution
i ic overthrew his successor, the Soviet propaganda machine was still grind-

unr°]Ut encorn^ums t0 ^e aged monarch, particular stress being laid upon his
Renting struggle against the ‘imperialists’ to the south.
incr1 C°ntrast’ Soviet attitude towards Saudi Arabia in these years became
easingly churlish. Although no serious attempt had been made after the