102 Chapter Three
It would have made a lot of sense for the Ministry of Internal Affairs to have
ROPiT and the Volunteer Fleet collaborate to develop new hajj service. But for
whatever reason, it did not do this. Instead the Volunteer Fleet developed ser-
vice in direct competition with ROPiT. In the early 1900s Volunteer Fleet agents
in Russia’s Black Sea ports and abroad began to gather information on the pos-
sibility of entering the market for hajj transport, largely by looking at ROPiT’s
activities. On orders from the Committee of the Volunteer Fleet, its agents in
Black Sea ports wrote a series of reports that answered basic questions about
pilgrims’ routes, the most popular Black Sea ports among Muslim pilgrims, the
hajj calendar, pilgrims’ itineraries, the kinds of ships they preferred to take,
typical rates charged by steamships, and so on.^44
Foreign Ministry officials were closely involved in helping the Volunteer
Fleet develop service for hajj pilgrims. The ministry ordered the Russian am-
bassador in Constantinople to inform arriving hajj pilgrims of the superior ser-
vices offered by the fleet’s ships, essentially getting him to work as an agent of
the fleet. And Russia’s consul in Jeddah, V. V. Zimmerman, played a key role.
He corresponded directly with members of the Committee of the Volunteer
Fleet in St. Petersburg starting in the early 1900s, and urged them to develop
new service for Muslim pilgrims from Russia’s Black Sea ports. In 1901 the
committee wrote to Zimmerman to assure him that its agents were researching
the opportunities available to the fleet.^45
Within a year, in 1902, the committee had gathered a picture of the situation
in Russia’s Black Sea ports from its agents there. They were not very optimistic
about the opportunities. They had gathered extensive data on the hajj traffic by
canvassing the ports and interviewing hajj pilgrims as they passed through, as
well as various officials involved in organizing transport and other services for
pilgrims. They found that about 18,000 hajj pilgrims would pass through Sevas-
topol and Batumi that year, and each would pay one hundred rubles for
steamship service. In Sevastopol, the city’s Ottoman consul and local mullahs
largely controlled hajj transport. For the Volunteer Fleet to break into this mar-
ket, agents noted, it would have to collaborate with a local company already
organizing the transport. They also suggested that the fleet study the IOPS’s
services for Orthodox pilgrims. Agents noted that Odessa had much less hajj
traffic than the other two ports (only about 800 to 2,000 pilgrims a year). The
city had no infrastructure to support the hajj traffic, and the local mullah, Safa-
rov, dominated the organization of this small-scale hajj transport. Finally, they
noted that the Volunteer Fleet would have trouble competing for hajj pilgrims’
business with ROPiT, which charged much lower rates.^46