As the conflict in Syria continues to defy a diplomatic solution, there are an estimated 30,000 Russian citizens living there , most women and children, Russian government officials estimate. This is an issue that Moscow has confronted before in the Middle East, when the collapse of Soviet-allied governments left Russian citizens stranded. But it has not faced anything on these proportions, or in the age of social media, when the plight of ethnic Russians could prove a serious embarrassment to Moscow.

“Based on the recent experience of evacuation from Lebanon and Palestine in recent years, problems always arise — though there we weren’t talking about thousands or tens of thousands of people, but several hundred,” said Yelena Suponina, a Moscow political analyst specializing in the Middle East. The task of evacuating Russians from Syria, she said, “would be 100 times worse.”

The Russian population in Syria is the result of an experiment begun in 1963, when the socialist Baath Party came to power. The Soviets provided education to top students from Asia, Africa and Latin America, throwing them together with Soviet classmates in work brigades and “evenings of friendship.”

The goal was to forge a global, pro-Soviet intellectual elite; the immediate result was weddings. Young women emigrated as the wives of doctors, professors and officials; “the Soviet side said farewell to them and essentially gave them up for lost,” said Natalya Krylova, a historian who has published widely on Russian populations in Africa.

Syrian-Russian unions were especially common — and not just for geopolitical reasons, husbands and wives said in interviews. Many Syrian men felt genuinely transformed by their time in Russia; they also sought to avoid paying a bride-price as is customary in the Middle East. Mahmoud al-Hamza, who met his wife, Nadezhda, in a Moscow park in 1971, said that in order to marry a Syrian, “you need an apartment, you need to pay money, you need to buy gold, and for a Russian woman you just need a wedding ring.”