158 Chapter Five
to Muslims to make the pilgrimage through Soviet lands. Odessa reemerged as
a hub of Eurasian hajj traffic as pilgrims again thronged the city to catch Soviet
steamships bound for Jeddah. These steamships were former ROPiT and Vol-
unteer Fleet vessels, now run by Sovtorgflot, the newly created Soviet mer-
chant fleet—they now bore names such as Ilʹich (Lenin’s patronymic) and
Communist, instead of Tsarina and Jerusalem. And in Jeddah, where the Sovi-
ets had opened a consulate in 1924, the consul began to offer support and ser-
vices to hajj pilgrims moving through the port.
Soviet support for the hajj was patterned on the tsarist model and built upon
the tsarist-era hajj infrastructure, but it was different in one crucial respect: it
was designed for transit hajj pilgrims—that is, foreign Muslims who made the
pilgrimage through Soviet lands, mainly from Persia, Afghanistan, and China.
It did not to extend to Soviet Muslims, and in the late 1920s Soviet officials
would struggle to block Soviet Muslims from making the hajj, and to isolate
them from transit pilgrims moving through the country during hajj season.
As in the tsarist era, the Soviet hajj campaign grew out of pressure from
below. In the late 1920s, foreign Muslims began to petition the Soviet state for
access to their old routes via the Black Sea. But the Soviets also became involved
in the hajj in support of pragmatic state agendas, as part of their broader efforts
to spread the revolution globally, and build socialism in the USSR. Officials at
Sovtorgflot, and in the Soviet ministries of trade and foreign policy, in particu-
lar, saw the hajj as a means to spread socialist revolution across Muslim Asia,
and generate foreign currency to fund Stalin’s ambitious project of industrial-
ization, launched in 1927. (The Soviet ruble was not convertible on the interna-
tional market.) In the late 1920s the Soviets would compete with foreign states,
above all the British and Persians, to influence, control, and profit from the
global hajj traffic.
Much has been written about the Soviet assault on Islam in Central Asia
during the 1920s and 1930s, including the destruction of mosques and medre-
ses, persecution of the ulama (religious elites), and the Soviet campaign to
unveil women (hujum).^4 However, as this chapter will show, together with their
domestic efforts to destroy Muslim social structures and remove Islam from
public life, the Soviets also quietly supported Islam for foreign Muslims, encour-
aging and supporting the hajj along now-Soviet routes and in Arabia. This par-
adox is consistent with the more nuanced picture we now have of early Soviet
religious policy. Recent studies have shown that Soviet antireligion campaigns
were neither total nor indiscriminate. They were instead carried out selectively,
and state interests shaped plans and policies toward particular religions.^5