Russia and the Middle East 277
ing*, or who received funds from abroad for subversive pur-
poses.
Before the First World War the Russian Church had assiduously
cultivated the Orthodox Christian communities in the Levant,
attracting them by a richly-endowed educational mission which
established In Syria and Palestine 100 schools with 360 teachers and
some 10,000 pupils. After the Revolution the Soviet government
claimed the properties of the Russian ecclesiastical mission and the
schools, but the mandatory governments of the Levant States and
Palestine held that in view of its open persecution of religion in
Russia the claim was unreasonable. The properties were accord-
ingly administered by the mandatories, and most of the schools
lapsed for lack of subsidies from Russia. In March 1945 the Russian
Patriarch, recently set up in Moscow by the Soviet government,
visited the Holy Land in state, and celebrated a solemn liturgy at the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre which was attended by repre-
sentatives of all the oriental churches. It was reported in August
1947 that agreement had been reached on the recognition
of the Soviet title to property in Syria and Lebanon which had
belonged before 1917 to the Tsarist government or the Russian
Church.1
At the beginning of 1946 the Soviet Minister in Beirut offered
Russian support to the Syrian and Lebanese governments in their
efforts to get rid of the British and French occupying forces, and the
Soviet veto was exercised in the Security Council to quash an
American compromise-resolution, because it did not state that the
presence of these forces was a threat to international peace.2 Here
again no indication of collusion between the Soviet diplomatic
missions and the local left-wing movement has been published,
though it was unofficially stated in the summer of 1946 that Soviet
agents were spending large sums on propaganda. The conservative
Syrian Muslim population has been little affected by Communism,
and those attracted to it belong in the main to minorities: the large
Armenian communities in Aleppo and Beirut, urbanised Kurds and
Orthodox Christians in Damascus. In Beirut and other parts of
Lebanon the large class of semi-educated Levantines employed at
poor wages as teachers, clerks, mechanics etc. constitute, next to
the Persian Tudeh, the most vigorous Communist party in the
1 Bourse Egyptienne, 12 August 1947.
2 The World To-day, III (1947), 84.