Page 471 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

468 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Second World War to renew the earlier diplomatic ties which had been
abandoned in 1938, the Soviet government had observed a considerable degree
of caution in its approach to the Saudi regime, exempting it from the kind of

criticism to which governments of a monarchical or theocratic character were
normally subject. When it seemed, however, in the late 1950s that Saudi
Arabia was aligning herself with the ‘imperialist’ camp in the Middle East, the

tolerance formerly accorded the Al Saud and Wahhabism in general vanished.
Modern Wahhabism was accused of having discarded its ‘positive’ (i.e.
egalitarian) attributes, and of having forsaken its original mission to restore the
pristine simplicity of Islam. Instead, it had become a mere tool of the ‘feudal­

ists’ for the exploitation of the Saudi people, part of the wider conspiracy to
substitute religion for the growth of class feelings among the Arab masses. The
criticism intensified when the revolution in the Yemen in 1962 brought a

republican regime to power in Sana and the Saudis gave aid to the royalist
forces in the ensuing civil war. The anti-Saudi propaganda did not diminish
when Faisal succeeded his brother as ruler and instituted a programme of
reform in Saudi Arabia. On the contrary, it reached new heights when Faisal

organized the Islamic Pact in December 1965 as a counter to Nasser’s influence
in the Arab world. Pravda proceeded to denounce the Islamic Pact as ‘an

imperialist creation similar to the notorious Baghdad Pact, an instrument for
combating the Arab national liberation movement... a means of bolstering the
reactionary forces ... a spearhead against the spreading of socialist ideas in the
Middle East’.*

Much the same kind of hostility was evinced towards Kuwait in these years,
partly for ideological reasons but mainly out of political calculation. The desire
to preserve the influence it had acquired in Baghdad led the Kremlin both to
adopt a more or less neutral stand over the merits of the Iraqi claim to Kuwait

in 1961 and to curry favour with Qassim by vetoing Kuwait’s application to
join the United Nations. After Qassim’s fall in 1963, however, the Russians
responded favourably to an approach from Kuwait for the establishment of
diplomatic relations, consented to Kuwait’s admission to the UN and
appointed an ambassador to the shaikhdom in June 1963- Pragmatism had

smothered ideological misgivings. There was clearly more to be gained from
acquiring a diplomatic foothold in Kuwait (the only such foothold the Soviet

Union had in the Arabian peninsula other than that in the Yemen) than rom
indulging in denunciations of the Al Sabah’s ‘feudal’ and reactionary ru e on

the lines of that uttered by Khrushchev in 1964- r •
There was more to the Soviet Union’s veering and tacking over po icy

Arabia in the 1960s, however, than simply the growing ascendancy 0> prag *
ism. The Kremlin’s own ideological conceptions were in flux, 1 g
consequence of the challenge that had been thrown down by the C

• For .his quotation, as for much useful background information on .he ^opme™
concerning .he Arab world, I am indebted .o S.ephen Page’s excellen. study, Tfe USSK