Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to thank my friend and colleague Allen J. Frank, who has been an inspiration through all phases of researching and writing this book. Allen generously provided me with some of the book’s most illuminating sources, and he himself has been a source of motivation and enlightening conversation at every stage. He was also the first to read the completed manuscript and to offer invaluable comments and corrections.
I began writing this book while I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Cornell University’s Department of Asian Studies. I was kindly welcomed there by Dan Gold, Keith Taylor, Chiara Formichi, Erin Kotmel, Sheila Haddad, and many wonderful students. Two chapter drafts were presented at Cornell’s Bret de Bary Interdisciplinary Mellon Working Group, an unusually delightful academic workshop where I enjoyed the great company and suggestions of Benjamin Anderson, Raashid Goyal, Patrick Naeve, David Powers, Danielle Reid, and Aaron Rock-Singer.
Some of the material here was reworked into a “job talk” for the idyllic St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM), which I am now very fortunate to call my academic home. I never imagined a department as harmonious and convivial as our Department of History. Greetings and thanks to my SMCM History colleagues Christine Adams, Adriana Brodsky, Garrey Dennie, Chuck Holden, Sarah Malena, Charlie Musgrove, and Gail Savage. Many thanks are also due to Lucy Myers, Adrienne Raines, Kent Randell, Brenda Rodgers, and many other colleagues and friends who have made the college such a welcoming, supportive place.
Some material from Chapter 2 first appeared in an article published in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. This article was based on a talk I gave at a Harvard conference which I co-organized with Paolo Sartori. Thanks are due to Paolo, to the anonymous reviewers of the JESHO article, and to the other attendees of that memorable conference.
Several friends and colleagues have offered valuable advice and support for this project. Thanks in particular to Alfrid Bustanov, Devin DeWeese, and the anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press. I am also profoundly grateful to Brid Nowlan for her sharp-eyed, diligent work copy-editing the
manuscript. I have pestered many other friends and colleagues while working on this project, not with portions of this manuscript specifically, but instead with my caffeinated emails, memes, and dubious comic stylings, and I am endlessly grateful for their indulgence and camaraderie, which can be just as healthy for research morale as any specifically academic encouragement.
In my student days, several great teachers taught me the history of the Soviet Union and/or the languages spoken there. For these great gifts I want to thank Kagan Arik, Anna Bobrov, Bethany Braley, Devin DeWeese, Thaddeus Fortney, Malik Hodjaev, Chad Kia, Oleh Kotsyuba, Terry Martin, Natalia Reed, Ron Sela, Wheeler M. Thackston, and Dalia Yasharpour.
To all of my students, past and present: Being in class with you has been my greatest inspiration and one of the greatest joys of my life.
This book is dedicated to my grandfathers, who were both American veterans of the Second World War: Robert E. Eidelsberg (1921–1998) and Isidore “Irving” Hanin (1918–1991). Pvt. Hanin served in Japan and the Philippines. 1st Lt. Eidelsberg flew B-24 missions into Germany with the 458th Bombardment Group.
Finally, thanks to Ashley, the light of my life.
List of Abbreviations
AkadNkKaz The National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Almaty
AkadNkTat The Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan
CARC Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults
CAROC Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church
DUMSK Central Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of the North Caucasus
DUMZAK Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Transcaucasia
GARF State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow
HPSSS The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, Cambridge, Massachusetts
IIIPP Boltina, V.D. and L.V. Sheveleva. Iz istorii islama v Pavlodarskom Priirtysh’e 1919–1999: sbornik dokumentov. Pavlodar: EKO, 2001.
ISG3 Arapov, D.Iu., and G.G. Kosach, eds. Islam i sovetskoe gosudarstvo (1944–1990). Sbornik Dokumentov. Vypusk 3. Moscow: Mardzhani, 2011.
NatArchGE National Archives of Georgia, Tbilisi
NKGB People’s Commissariat for State Security
NKID People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs
NKVD People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs
OMSA Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly
PDDUM Akhmadullin, V.A. Patrioticheskaia deiatel’nost’ dukhovnykh upravlenii musul’man v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny Moscow: Islamskaia kniga, 2015.
PURKKA Political Administration of the Workers’ and Peasants Red Army
RGASPI Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, Moscow
RPTs Vasil’eva, O.Iu., I.I. Kudriavtsev, L.A. Lykova, eds. Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg. Sbornik documentov. Moscow: Izd. Krutitskogo podvor’ia Obshchestvo liubitelei tserkovnoi istorii, 2009.
RSFSR Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic
SADUM Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan
SNK Council of People’s Commissars
x List of Abbreviations
Sovinformburo Soviet Information Bureau
TsDUM Central Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Russia
TsUNKhU Central Administration for National Economic Accounting
VRGV Odintsov, M.I. Vlast’ i religiia v gody voiny. Gosudarstvo i religioznye organizatsii v SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny. 1941–1945. Moscow OOO “Favorit,” 2005.
VTsIK All-Russian Central Executive Committee
Introduction
Debating the Wartime “Religious Revolution”
During the Second World War, the brutal Soviet anti-religious repressions of previous years were ended, and Stalin tasked religious leaders from across the USSR—some newly released from prison camps—with rallying citizens to a “Holy War” against Hitler. Meanwhile, convinced that a new age of religious toleration had arrived, citizens of many faiths participated in what amounted to a revolution in Soviet religious life. Soldiers prayed on the battlefield; entire villages celebrated once-banned holidays; and state-backed religious leaders used their new positions not only to consolidate power over their communities but also to petition for further religious freedoms.This book recounts and interprets this “religious revolution,” focusing on Soviet Muslims from Central Asia, the Volga-Urals, and the Caucasus, millions of whom fought for the Red Army or labored on the home front to support the war effort. It is not a book about their fight against the Nazis, but rather about their religion in wartime—the way it was mobilized as a new tool of state propaganda; the way religious repression receded and then changed shape; and the way Soviet Muslim communities responded to the dawn of unprecedented religious freedoms, some of which were shepherded by the state and some of which were achieved thanks to its incompetence or indifference.
Notwithstanding popular myths about the triumph of Soviet atheism, for many citizens religious identity and devotion survived the brutal religious repressions of the 1920s and 1930s—as Stalin clearly realized, and as Soviet officials relentlessly documented, year after year, in panicked or exasperated secret reports. It was precisely the vitality of the religion that Stalin was hoping to exploit when he sought the aid of religious leaders—Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, and others—in calling citizens to war.1 While reviving and promoting religious institutions, the Soviet government established a two-pronged system of propaganda for the country’s Muslim “national minorities.”2 On the one hand, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) deluged Muslims with ostensibly secular literature lauding
God Save the USSR. Jeff Eden, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190076276.003.0001
the “friendship” of all Soviet peoples and their common cause in defending socialism; on the other, select Muslim elites were delegated the task of issuing a parallel, distinctly Islamic rallying call. In widely circulated speeches and fatwa-like pronouncements, these Muslim elites articulated the war effort in the language of classical Islamic struggles: the Qurʾan was quoted liberally; appropriate and familiar samples of hadith (the reported words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad) were deployed; Hitler was declared an enemy of Islam in particular, seeking to destroy not only the world’s Muslims but also their customs and sacred places; soldiers were declared “mujahids” (literally, “jihadis”). The war was called a ghazāt (“holy war”) and a jihad. Here is how the state-backed Central Asian Muslim leader Ishan Babakhanov rallied his public to war (in a speech translated here from Arabic-script Uzbek):3
In union with all the Soviet peoples, the Muslims of Turkestan and Kazakhstan have sent their own dear children to join the ranks in this general and sacred jihad (umūmī va muqaddas jihād), this holy war (ghazāt). And in the manner of fathers (atalarcha) they recite to them the noble fātiḥa and see them off, hoping with all their heart that they might defeat and destroy the enemy . . . . Every Muslim who sacrifices himself for God in the path of religion is a martyr (shahīd). And every single Muslim who slays the accursed and seditious enemy is a ghāzī and a mujāhid a warrior for the faith (dīn uchun urush qiluvchidur).
Soviet-backed Muslim elites such as Babakhanov were not appointed by the state to “revive” Islam but to channel and control it by tapping into religious currents that were already present in Soviet society. From the state’s perspective, “controlling” religion was an important step on the path to overseeing the destruction of religion. That final triumph was still far off, however: the very presumption, echoed repeatedly at the highest levels of government, that a significant market existed for this “religious propaganda” hints that top Soviet officials, including Stalin, believed their decadeslong, multifaceted atheist campaigns to have been a failure. This failure was not seen as an isolated problem; rather, it was enmeshed in the state’s often-lamented inability to vanquish all the benighted cultural “survivals” (perezhitki) of the pre-Soviet past. After the Nazi invasion, as Adeeb Khalid writes, “Stalin banked quite shamelessly on traditional sources of legitimacy for the war effort. The regime resurrected imperial Russian heroes, reinstated traditions of the imperial Russian army, and made peace with religion . . . it
suspended the persecution of religious observance. Churches and mosques opened again, and religious organizations had leave to convene again. The regime needed all the help it could get, and religious leaders proved loyal.”4
In the past several years, the emergence of exciting new sources has made it possible to study the impacts of these wartime developments in unprecedented depth. Compilations of wartime literature, digitized archival documents, published document collections, and local histories have revealed a world of religiously themed poetry and folklore; a rich devotional and ritual life; and the persistence of esteemed sacred lineages, unbroken, through the Soviet period.5 The emergence of a veritable library of Soviet Muslim literature from archives and private collections is such a recent, sudden phenomenon that the smooth integration of Soviet and Muslim themes in some of this literature retains the power to provoke a double take. Consider, for example, the thematic shift from taʿziya (Muslim ritual mourning, in this case) to the Communist Party in the following Second World War POW poem, translated here from Kumyk and dating to 1942:6
Oh, my life—the black, gray land,
This land will shroud me.
My brothers will suffer in their pure hearts, My sisters will don their black mourning shrouds, My dear mother, weeping, will find the grave, And my wife will find herself a husband.
My sister, Ilmu, will keep on mourning, And my friends will stand in taʿziya.
Long live, long live the Communist Party, Which will set this oppression on freedom’s path!
This poem was produced “privately” by a Dagestani villager, discovered years later by a Soviet folklorist, and never published in the author’s lifetime. There is much more where this comes from, and we will see further samples of poetry like this in Chapter 4.7
While “unofficial” Soviet Muslim sources such as letters and unpublished poetry have been coming to light, “official” government sources on Islam have been enjoying a well-deserved reappraisal. On the one hand, many Soviet-era sources on Islam, both bureaucratic and academic, are fraught with inaccurate assumptions, peddling—for example—paranoid fantasies about Sufi mystics conspiring to stage anti-Soviet uprisings.8 Others traffic in
tabloid-like falsehoods about the “primitive barbarity” of Muslim ritual life.9 It is easy to see, in other words, why the uncritical use of such sources has been lamented by leading historians such as Michael Kemper, who concludes that we should ignore not only such sources as these, but any source produced by Soviet non-Muslims concerning Soviet Muslims.10 On the other hand, while the touted uprising of wandering mystics never came to pass, the more mundane religious activities lamented by bureaucrats are often echoed by other kinds of sources, ranging from interviews to memoirs to petitions written by Muslims. Soviet “atheist sources,” moreover, can be read profitably against the grain by readers who are cognizant of their biases. These biases—like most “Soviet-speak” tropes—are rarely subtle and tend to be so formulaic that they are easily recognized. For example, as Devin DeWeese has described, in ritual practices painted by Soviet sources as pagan “shamanism” or “pre-Islamic survivals,” the savvy reader can effortlessly identify commonplace and longstanding Islamic traditions found all over the Muslim world.11
Finally, the line between “official” and “unofficial” sources can sometimes be blurry (an issue to which we shall return in Chapter 5). Take the sources produced by state-backed Muslim elites in wartime, many of which are showcased in the course of this book. Are these “official” sources? The Muslim elites in question were working for—or at least with the sanction of—a state institution, but their background and orientation is altogether different from that of the average Moscow-based atheist bureaucrat, and lumping the two together obscures more than it explains. Most of the Muslim elites tapped for wartime service by the Soviet government were “elders” from revered Muslim lineages, whose religious leadership and prestige dates back to the Tsarist period, and in many cases even earlier. Babakhanov, quoted earlier, was born in 1858 and served two terms in Soviet prisons; he was released from his second stint shortly before the war began. To say the least, he is a very unusual kind of “Soviet official.” The propaganda he provided was not, as we shall see, a “pure” product of Moscow, dictated to him from above; it was a negotiated discourse, a remarkable hybrid of Muslim and Soviet patriotism.
This book draws together a range of voices—“official,” “unofficial,” and somewhere in between. It also draws on sources in a broad range of languages: Russian, Uzbek, Bashkir, Tatar, Persian, Kazakh, and Kumyk. The effort here, however, is not to survey all of the available evidence on Muslim life in the war era, nor to produce a generalization about what constituted normative “Soviet Islam” at the time, much less over the course of the entire Soviet
period.12 My goal is more modest: to explore the dynamics of Muslim life and state policy in a pivotal four-year period by using evidence drawn from a diverse range of sources, including speeches, eyewitness accounts, memoirs, correspondences, agents’ reports, petitions, interviews, and literature.
Two major issues are beyond the immediate scope of the book, although they are deserving of further study. First, I have opted not to cover the important issue of Muslim populations deported from the Caucasus in wartime. Due perhaps to my lack of facility in most Caucasian languages, I have found fewer sources than I hoped to find concerning the religious dimensions of deportation, so I have omitted this broad topic. I hope to return to it again at a later stage, when I have found more sources. Second, while I include much material about Orthodox Christianity, the Soviet Union’s most prominent religion, I have opted not to cover the country’s many other minority religions, including Judaism, Buddhism, and many other varieties of Christianity (ranging from Catholicism to Renovationism).
While focused specifically on the dynamics of Muslim life, state policy, and propaganda, this book offers a new way of answering the most basic and controversial questions about Soviet religions in this crucial period. Why did the revolution in religious life take place? What role did “popular” religiosity and public religious devotion play? Why did the Soviet state, just a few years after slaughtering religious elites by the tens of thousands during the Great Terror of 1937–38, shift dramatically toward religious tolerance? Why did Stalin revive the Orthodox Christian Patriarchate in wartime, and establish multiple Muslim “muftiates” with official permission to pass fatwas and preside over a vast network of mosques? Addressing these questions at the outset, and in some detail, will help set the stage for many of the themes explored in this book.
Propaganda abroad
One of the most common explanations for the wartime religious revolution is also the most radical: the idea that the shift in Soviet religious policy ultimately had little whatsoever to do with the citizens of the Soviet Union, but was instead a propaganda campaign directed outward, toward foreign populations and their leaders.13 In the first years of the war, anti-Soviet propaganda abroad often focused on religious repression in the USSR— propaganda spread, for example, by the Nazis as part of a broader program
of promoting Germany as a defender of religious freedom. As David Motadel and others have shown, the Muslim world in particular was targeted with a robust Nazi propaganda campaign. Sketchy classified plans submitted on September 13, 1941, to V.M. Molotov, minister of foreign affairs, summarize the Soviet Union’s predicament, as well as the early game plan:14
To neutralize the anti-Soviet propaganda throughout the Muslim world which has been widespread in recent times, from Berlin and Rome, it would be extremely important for the Soviet Informbiuro, or the NKID, to carry out a series of activities:
1) Organize and conduct (for example, among the All-Slavic or Jewish [organizations]) a radio-meeting of Eastern representatives/Muslims/peoples of the USSR/Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmens, Tajiks, Tatars, Azerbaijanis, Lezgis, Chechens, Ossetians, with an anti-fascist appeal to the peoples of the East/Muslims/the whole world. The meeting could be held in Moscow, Baku, or Tashkent; and involve the writers Dzhambul, Lakhuti, and others.
2) Organize, for example, an address by Metropolitan Sergii/an address to all the Muslim believers of the world from the Muslim religious centers of the USSR. We already have three such appeals.
3) Along with these two activities, gather the above materials and hand them over, in accordance with the requests of Stafford Cripps, to the British Ministry of Information to be spread among the Muslims of the Near and Middle East via English propaganda channels.
Already in the first months of the war, in other words, Soviet officials were focused on the need to counter German propaganda with propaganda of their own. The surreal race was on between Hitler and Stalin to win the hearts and minds of the faithful, both at home and abroad. Neither side was above bending the truth to suit its purposes. The radio program alluded to in the classified document just quoted, for example, was a September 6, 1941, Axis broadcast from Rome directed at Soviet Muslims, in which they were warned of a fresh wave of purges on the horizon, including their imminent expulsion from Crimea (this propaganda “prophecy” came true for many) and the conversion of all Russian mosques into cinemas (this was a half-truth, at best).15 The plan to counter this Axis propaganda with Soviet propaganda was rapidly set in motion. Appeals by Soviet Muslim leaders—among other Soviet religious elites—were circulated not only among the country’s own Muslim
populations, but also abroad via the British Ministry of Information. Much of this propaganda hailed the Soviet Union as a bastion of religious freedom. Such Soviet “religious propaganda” would continue to be piped abroad for the remaining years of the war.16 These dispatches—to which we shall return in Chapter 2—invariably revolved around two points. First, they were calls to support the war against the Nazis, which was described by Soviet religious leaders as a “holy war,” as the Nazis were said to threaten religious freedom, religious communities, and the very survival of religion itself (whether it be Islam, Buddhism, or any other faith). Second, they were advertisements for the freedom and prosperity enjoyed by the faithful in the Soviet Union, championing the Soviet state as a catalyst and safeguard of self-determination among religious communities.
Both points are well represented in a 1945 appeal by the Soviet-backed Central Asian Muslim leader and jurist (mufti) Ishan Babakhanov to the Muslims of Xinjiang, which was at that time a Soviet-supported state called the East Turkestan Republic—home of the Uyghurs, as well as many Kazakhs and other Central Asian Muslim groups. This text is worth a close look, as it is a fine entry point into the peculiar and remarkable genre of “Soviet Islamic propaganda.”17
Babakhanov’s address begins by acknowledging that the Soviet Union has not enjoyed the best reputation as a happy home for Muslims. “On behalf of all Turkestan’s Muslims,” Babakhanov begins, “we appeal to the Muslim world with this letter that describes concisely our past and present [circumstances], such as they are, with the goal of dispelling various assumptions and notions about us.” The mufti then takes listeners on a whirlwind tour of Turkestan’s sacred Muslim sites, highlighting its holiest shrines, madrasas, mosques, and manuscripts. The “audio tour” leads listeners from large-scale marvels to small-scale ones—from shrine-complexes to books, and from the vastness of the sacred landscape to the modern libraries of the Soviet Union, which, Babakhanov explains, preserve such treasures as a Qurʾan written by the Caliph ʿUthman himself. All the while, Babakhanov seamlessly interweaves the story of religion and the story of nations: one especially valuable manuscript, the mufti notes, is written in a medieval Turkic dialect that was the ancestor of Uyghur as well as Uzbek—the idea being that Soviet Central Asia is a historical homeland to the Uyghurs too. “Turkestan,” he says, “has been for millennia—and remains—the sacred fatherland of the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Turkmens, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uyghurs, and Karakalpaks.”18
A lesson in history follows the tour of sacred spaces. “Before the Great Soviet Revolution,” Babakhanov explains, “we Muslims of Turkestan were disunited and scattered, lacking our own statehood. Under the banner of the Soviet government we united and established our free republics.” In these conditions of independence, Central Asians had thrived—both as modern Soviet citizens and as pious Muslims. Babakhanov blends the two identities into a smooth continuum:19
We now have schools of higher learning for any branch of the sciences, in which thousands of Muslim youths are studying. Shining forth for five hundred years on the threshold of the majestic madrasa of Ulugh Beg in Samarkand is a noble saying of our Prophet: “Striving for knowledge is the duty of every Muslim.” Only under the Soviet government is this [saying] embodied in life itself. Now we have our own doctors, teachers, professors, agronomists, engineers, officers, pilots. Turkestan’s Muslims have gained the opportunity to apply their skills in all areas of life, and to ensure their prosperity, while remaining firm in the clear faith of Islam.
This progress among Muslims, Babakhanov explains, is not just a byproduct of the Bolshevik Revolution but an ongoing process safeguarded by Stalin himself, protected by the Soviet constitution, and now shepherded by the official Soviet muftiates (religious councils, or “spiritual directorates”)— which Babakhanov presents as essentially independent of the state, a kind of parallel representative government for the faithful:20
Thanks to the constitution of the USSR, the basic law of our state, written by the blessed hand of the great and wise Stalin, we are the masters of our own policies, economy, culture, language, creed, customs, and private lives. Article 124 of the constitution of our state grants every citizen the right to profess whatever religion they please. The clergy and faithful of various denominations have their own Directorates and in matters of the exercise of religious rites the state does not attempt any sort of obstruction.
It is known to Muslims all over the world that the stewardship of Muslim religious activities in Turkestan is entrusted to the Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, elected in the great congress (kurultai) of Muslim clergy and believers.
Finally, Babakhanov comes around to the present crisis: the ongoing war against Hitler and his allies, who, he explains, wish “to destroy our home, trample our rights, humiliate and debase our religion, convert Muslims to Protestantism [sic], and leave barren our fragrant gardens, as the great irrigation canals built by the hands of the people flow—along with water, giving life and happiness to our people—with the innocent blood and tears of the elderly, women, and children.”21 The mufti explains that the Crimea, the Caucasus, and other regions have been devastated by the Nazi invasion, and, hailing the accomplishments of Soviet Muslim war heroes, he rallies his audience to support the war effort with a brief selection of Qurʾanic verses, including the famous lines, “Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed. Allah does not like transgressors. And kill them wherever you overtake them and expel them from wherever they have expelled you . . .”22 Noting the recent accomplishments of British and American forces, Babakhanov ends his war coverage on an optimistic note:23
The hour of victory against the fascists is near. To accelerate victory against the enemy, we servants of the Muslim religion pray to Allah every day, five times a day, in the mosques. We offer our appeal to all the Muslims of the world. The Hitlerites are the enemies of all freedom-loving peoples, and especially of Muslims. For that reason, we Muslim clergy living in the Soviet Union appeal to the Muslims of all the world to rise up against the wicked fascist enslavers.
Babakhanov concludes by returning to his point of departure: “Do not believe the various heinous slanders circulated about our country by our enemies and yours, may a curse fall upon their heads!”24
The existence of many such Soviet Muslim broadcasts directed abroad supports the hypothesis that outward-facing propaganda was a key aspect of wartime religious policy. These broadcasts continued, moreover, after the Nazis were driven from the Soviet Union. In May and June 1945, three top representatives of the USSR’s officially sanctioned Transcaucasus muftiate (Spiritual Directorate of the Muslims of Transcaucasia, DUMZAK) visited Iran at the invitation of an Iranian parliamentarian and shaykh al-islam. They visited no fewer than ten different Iranian cities, and their activities were carefully monitored all the while by agents of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The agents’ reports confirm that the three Soviet Shiʿa Muslim elites
were ideal envoys, diligently encouraging positive impressions of Muslim life in the Soviet Union, where, in their telling, the faithful enjoyed freedom of conscience and myriad opportunities for advancement. They arrived with gifts for Iranian elites, with pre-approved speeches, and with the remote supervision of I.V. Polianskii, the veteran Soviet anti-religious official then heading the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults (CARC), the main Soviet organ overseeing religions other than the Orthodox Church.25 The climax of their visit was a June 13 broadcast by the DUMZAK shaykh al-islam Akhund Agha Alizada, directed to all of the envoys’ co-religionists in Iran.
This appeal too is worth a close look, as it introduces other key motifs of Soviet Islamic propaganda, including the explicit argument that Soviet Muslim life had been untouched by religious repression; that the new statebacked Muslim muftiates had been (and remained) a “grassroots” initiative; and that Soviet Muslims, represented by their muftiates, enjoyed free exchange and free contact with Muslims around the world.
Though the war had ended, Alizada’s address begins with five impassioned paragraphs recounting the recent age of “unprecedented hardship and suffering” during which “flourishing countries have been destroyed, entire peoples have been exterminated en masse, the fruits of their labor looted and burned, innocent children murdered along with the elderly, women raped.”26 The Azeri shaykh al-islam describes how he and his colleagues had rallied Muslim troops in the Caucasus with appeals that were published both at home and in Iran. “Thank God,” he goes on, “that under the brave leadership of His Excellency Marshal Stalin, the treacherous fascists have been dealt crushing blows and unavoidable defeats on all fronts.”27 Among the veterans of this war included two of Alizada’s own sons, four of his close relatives, and many Muslim “Heroes of the Soviet Union” (the country’s highest honor for courage in battle).
There was another struggle left to fight, however: “After they had fulfilled their duty to humanity and to the Muslim world, we turned to Muslims in 1944 with another appeal, [this time] highlighting their obligations to their faith.” Muslims had been bringing these wartime Muslim leaders “religious questions,” and it was in order to satisfy their demands, Alizada declares, that he and his colleagues petitioned the Supreme Soviet for permission to create a muftiate. The initiative for all this, in his telling, came firmly from Soviet Muslims and their leaders; the Soviet government’s involvement was nothing more than consent. Alizada then introduces his “directorate” with a pure,
exquisite sample of the burgeoning art of Soviet Muslim propaganda—that seamless yet jarring amalgam of Islamic ethics, Stalinist “Friendship of the Peoples” motifs, and classic Bolshevik labor-heroism:28
The Directorate of Clerical Affairs is guided in its activities by the teachings of the Qurʾan and the authentic traditions of Muhammad. In special cases, emergency meetings of all members of the directorate are convened. Our directorate engages, in its functions, the kind of educational work that strengthens friendship and unity among the peoples of the USSR, elevates and mobilizes collective farmers for their spring planting, encourages diligent and productive labor, nurtures feelings of faithfulness to government leaders and administration, etc. The responsibilities of our directorate include assigning clerical leaders to various tasks, and the safeguarding of mausoleums and monuments dedicated to scholars and great figures of Islam.
Turning to questions submitted to the envoys by their Iranian hosts, Alizada introduces the primary personnel of his directorate before trafficking in some outright lies. “The manner of preaching in the [Soviet] mosques,” he says, “is almost the same as it is anywhere else. Our preachers read chapters from the Qurʾan and discuss the lives of scholars, imams, and prophets. In each raion, the oblasts have their own religious scholars and students in religious schools, and at the present time more than 50 Caucasian students are studying in Iran and at Atabat [in Iraq]. After finishing their studies, they can lead spiritual activities, with the permission of the government. Our mosques, religious schools, and meeting-places remain just as they were before.”29 In fact, nearly all of the religious schools in the territory of the Soviet Union had long since been closed, and hardly any had been reopened by 1945. Thousands of mosques had been closed. As for Soviet Muslims’ conspicuous absence from Mecca, Alizada blames “the particularities of the international environment” from keeping them away.30 The scarcity of Islamic books printed in Cyrillic is explained away by the fact that the Soviet Union has plenty of Islamic books in older scripts, and therefore “there is no need to reprint these books.”31 Nor is there any need to print, import, or translate the Qurʾan, since “There is not a single Muslim home in which one would not find several copies of the Qurʾan.”32 Alizada turns then to the Soviet government’s protection of religious freedom, territory covered in Ishan
Babakhanov’s address to Xinjiang’s Muslims—but covered here with a more brazen streak of “creativity”:33
I want to say a few words about freedom of religion and faith in the Soviet Union. The peoples of the Soviet Union have always enjoyed freedom of conscience and, in particular, in the Soviet Constitution, article 124 underlines the freedom of the conduct [of worship by] religious denominations. In the Soviet Union, religion is separated from the state and the state from religion. We, the faithful scholars, have always enjoyed complete freedom to practice our religious rites. In our country the call to prayer is read from the minaret every morning and evening.
Alizada next elaborates on the opportunities for secular education and advancement in the Soviet state, contrasting these circumstances with the Tsarist era, during which the “government did not pay any attention to Muslims, cutting off our path to the mastery of knowledge and science. Our life back then was dark and joyless.”34 Thanks were due to Jafar Baghirov, first secretary of Azerbaijan’s Communist Party, but also, of course, “to the great leader of all the nations, Marshal Stalin, who, without distinguishing between nationalities and religions, thinks of the happiness and well-being of all mankind. He casts his attentions upon all the people of the world, and in particular, his friendly attentions are drawn to the Iranian people—the ancient neighbor of our homeland.”35
Such was the message the Soviet government wished its Muslim leaders to bring abroad: that all was well for Soviet Muslims; that they had united to defeat Hitler; that the Soviet state had facilitated both their self-determination within their “independent” nations and the fraternity of those nations; that Muslims were permitted absolute freedom of religion, a freedom safeguarded by law; that holy places, manuscripts, and traditions were all well preserved; that the Soviet Union’s new Muslim muftiates had been formed completely on the initiative of Muslims themselves, for the sole purpose of addressing Muslim concerns and conducting embassies to coreligionists abroad, with no intervention from the government other than a benevolent, paternal nod of assent. There was not any repression of religion in the Soviet Union, nor had there ever been.
Amid the lies here, there are also some intriguing truths. Alizada tells his Iranian audience that some Muslim cemeteries are maintained, that customary prayers and rites for the dead are still performed, and that
periods of mourning—far more frequent than usual during the course of the war—are still marked in the traditional Muslim fashion. He mentions that most Muslims working in “secular” occupations came from religious backgrounds: “Almost all scientists of geology [for example] come from families in which, for generations, all members of the family engaged in religious activities. I myself come from such a family.”36 While the claim that religious life had never been negatively impacted by Soviet rule is a grotesque distortion, the shaykh al-islam’s claim that major aspects of religious experience had persisted in familiar forms rings true. As Alizada claims, and as I will show throughout this book, some strings had never broken, and they resonated in an old, familiar harmony into the war years and beyond.
Not all of the outward-directed Soviet religious propaganda was intended for faithful masses beyond the Soviet Union; some was intended to persuade particular world leaders of the Soviet Union’s benevolence toward religion. This became a matter of urgency in the war years, when retaining full support from Britain and the United States sometimes meant assuaging suspicions about Stalinist repression.37 A substantial proportion of the American public opposed the outlay of material support for the “godless” Soviet Union, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (an Episcopalian) was concerned enough to order the US Embassy in Moscow to research the status of the USSR’s religious communities.38 A particularly cruel strategy had been proposed by Harry S. Truman—then a senator in Missouri—in June 1941: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.”39
On the eve of the Tehran Conference of November 1943, Stalin surely felt the urge to dispel any hesitation on the part of his Western allies in working closely with the Soviets or in maintaining the flow of aid. At this conference, Stalin also wished to conclude negotiations to open a second front against Germany, led off by the Allied invasion of northern France—an invasion Stalin had been pushing for since the first months of the war.
Here, the timeline of events proves revealing, and further supports the hypothesis that outward-directed propaganda was a major element of the wartime change in orientation toward religion: the creation of the Soviet Union’s newly state-sanctioned religious institutions (including the Orthodox Christian Patriarchate and the Muslim muftiates), which was followed by a wave of speeches and broadcasts such as those described earlier, took place September–October 1943, just weeks before
