These partnerships gave Moscow political advantages in its confrontation
with the West, but the Kremlin harbored hopes for the ideological as well as
political rapprochement of these Middle Eastern countries with the Soviet
Union. Kremlin ideologues sought to plant the Soviet version of social, economic,
and political development in the Arab world, and Moscow did its best
to facilitate this work. Governments in Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Algeria,
and Libya did indeed at various moments show interest in the Soviet model,
and some of them spoke favorably about Marxism. In the late 1950s and early
1960s, Soviet scholarship developed the concepts of “socialist orientation”
and the “noncapitalist development model,” which were supposed to explain
the reasons why Arab countries and others were drawing on the Soviet model
and make it look like an attractive path for the Third World.