| Publication |
2011.
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| Summary/Abstract |
SEPTEMBER 17, 2010 marks 20 years of the reopening of the diplomatic missions of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the Russian Federation (RF) on the ambassadorial level. People in today's Saudi Arabia still remember and value the fact that the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize in 1926 what was at then the Kingdom of Nejd and Hejaz. The foundations of business cooperation were laid in those distant times. It may sound odd today, but one of the key items of Soviet export to Saudi Arabia, before they had discovered major petroleum deposits there, was kerosene; and in the 1930s, Russian aviator Nikolai Naidenov and aircraft technician Maksimov were helping King Abdul Azis Ibn Saud with organizing the kingdom's air fleet. Regretfully, the tragic events in the 1930s in Soviet Russia dealt a crippling blow to Russian-Saudi relations. When the Soviet diplomats Nazir Tiuriakulov and Karim Khakimov were recalled from Saudi Arabia and subjected to political repression in 1937-1938, King Saud refused to receive any other Soviet plenipotentiary representative and, in 1938, diplomatic relations between the USSR and Saudi Arabia were frozen for many decades to come.
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