16 4 Chapter Five
It established prices for foreign passports and round-trip fare, which included
rail travel to and from Odessa, steamship travel with food, a five-day stay in the
khadzhikhane (lodging house) in Odessa, and quarantine fees.^23
Sovtorgflot officials spoke of a “revival” of the tsarist-era hajj infrastructure,
but it was more of a reconstruction. The Soviets had inherited the foundations
of this infrastructure—railroads, steamships, and a network of foreign con -
sulates—as well as a blueprint for organizing the hajj traffic, but in many ways
the Soviet hajj campaign had to start afresh. After more than a decade without
access to the Russian routes, pilgrims from Persia and other neighboring lands
had developed new itineraries and routes to Mecca. The Soviets would have to
develop strategies to lure them in large numbers back to the routes. And the
tsarist agents that had staffed the hajj infrastructure were now all gone, swept
from their positions with the regime change in Russia. They had taken with
them precious experience and knowledge about the pilgrimage and the dispa-
rate regions that now-Soviet routes encompassed. To staff their hajj infrastruc-
ture and organize pilgrims, the Soviets would need to find and recruit new
agents on the ground from Odessa to Jeddah, Constantinople to Afghanistan,
China to Persia.^24
The world had also changed dramatically since 1914. The collapse of Europe’s
land empires during World War I—the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian,
and German empires all fell—disrupted frameworks that had undergirded
global empires and facilitated long-distance migrations. New nation-states
were created from the Balkans to China in the postwar period, and, with these,
new political borders manned by modern border controls that interrupted
global migration flows. Eurasia, a region that encompassed former Russian,
Ottoman, Persian, and Chinese lands and had long been defined by human
mobility, became fragmented after World War I, divided by new states that
imposed controls over trade and migration.^25 Among other things, this new
order in Eurasia put new obstacles in the way of pilgrims, and pushed many to
seek alternate routes to Mecca.
The head of Sovtorgflot’s Black Sea Division, a certain Comrade Lasha-
novetskii, surveyed the scene from Odessa and raised many of these issues.^26
He predicted that it would take several years for the Soviets to attract large
crowds of foreign hajj pilgrims to the Black Sea routes. Optimistic officials had
estimated that Sovtorgflot could expect 5,000 hajj pilgrims on its ships in
1927—but Lashanovetskii doubted this. Sovtorgflot would have to retrace the
same path, with the same difficulties, of ROPiT and the Volunteer Fleet in their
time: small groups of pilgrims, and deficits, early on; then building a reputation