This article revisits the educational aid the Soviet Union provided to Arab countries during the Cold War and focuses on the training of students at Soviet universities. It investigates the political and economic premises behind the educational cooperation, the role of ideology, as well as the conflicting views and the reactions on both sides of the connection. It analyzes the forms the cooperation took over time and provides data on the students in the USSR and their specializations. The training of engineers, who constituted the bulk of the students, was a major objective of the cooperation. As it was reached, it allowed countries, such as Iraq and Algeria, to nationalize and develop their energy industry. Overall, against those assessments which have dismissed the Soviet-Arab civil cooperation and castigated Moscow’s impact on the Middle East, the paper shows that the Soviet scholarships benefited thousands of young people many of which came from modest families. It argues that the Soviet-Arab cooperation produced significant results in terms of human resources training, at the same time as it allowed the Arab countries to diversify their international cooperation.