Schools and Professors Abroad: The Soviet Union and the Development of Post-Secondary Education in Asia and Africa
Abstract
As part of its new international policy toward the Third World since the second half of the 1950s, the
Soviet Union began developing a number of tertiary-level educational institutions in Asian and African countries. This article provides an outline of Moscow's activity in this field from India and Cambodia to Algeria and Mali. It examines the objectives of the Soviet Union and the receiving states, looks at the achievements and limits of their cooperation, and argues for the importance of these mostly technical training institutions in the development of the receiving countries. At the same time, this article explores the educational and cultural work of Soviet professors serving in these schools, showing that both these professors and the schools became part and parcel of the Soviet
Union's friendly ties with selected Asian and African countries.