The Hajj and Socialist Revolution 161They understood Mecca as a site where Muslim elites from around the world
gathered once a year, and attached great political and strategic importance to it.
They saw in the hajj an opportunity to cultivate broad Muslim loyalties and,
they hoped, pave the way for Soviet-led socialist revolution across Asia.
In practical terms, the annual hajj was a precious opportunity for the Soviets
to gather intelligence on Muslim politics across Eurasia, and the activities of
their political rivals, above all the British. Since the fall of the USSR in the
1990s, scholars have engaged in lively discussions about how, notwithstanding
its anti-imperial rhetoric and ideological antipathy to imperialism, the Soviet
Union was by many measures an empire.^12 For their part, European colonial
officials viewed Soviet involvement in Arabia this way, as essentially a continu-
ation of nineteenth-century imperial rivalries, a new kind of Russian imperial-
ism that had different ideological and political implications but encompassed
much of the same geographic space. British and Dutch officials regarded the
Soviet penetration of Arabia warily in the 1920s. They rightly feared it as the
pivot of a Soviet strategy to undermine their empires in the Muslim East, by
encouraging anticolonial movements among Muslims gathered in Mecca.^13
To penetrate Mecca and establish Soviet influence over the hajj, Chicherin
established a Soviet general consulate in Jeddah in 1924. He chose as Jeddah
consul general Karim Abdraufovich Khakimov, a Muslim Tatar from Ufa and a
trusted Bolshevik. Khakimov had joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918 and
served in the Red Army during its invasion of Central Asia. Valued by the
NKID for his linguistic abilities—he spoke Russian, Turkish, and Persian—
Khakimov had been sent abroad to open consulates in key areas of Soviet-British
competition. Before Arabia, the NKID sent him to Persia, where he served in
Teheran, Mashhad, and Rasht. Khakimov’s appointment to Jeddah made sense
given Chicherin’s goals: as a Muslim, Khakimov would have access to the Holy
City of Mecca, and, presumably, serve as an emissary of Soviet influence among
Muslims from around the world. In Jeddah Khakimov served alongside other
Muslim Bolsheviks who would be instrumental to Soviet diplomacy with the
Saudi state that emerged in Arabia.^14
Soon after he opened the Jeddah consulate, Khakimov began to receive peti-
tions from foreign hajj pilgrims, including many from China. Against the back-
ground of the protracted Husayn-Ibn Saud war in Arabia, which had broken
out in 1921 in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, lawlessness
reigned, no state power existed to organize and protect pilgrims from historical
predators, and pilgrims once again fell prey to thieves and Bedouin attacks.
Harkening back to the pre-Soviet era, Kashgar pilgrims from Sinkiang began