166 Chapter Five
Scholars of Soviet cultural diplomacy have so far focused on state efforts to
court Western intellectuals and elites in the 1920s. There was an Eastern aspect
to this diplomacy as well—and it targeted not just intellectuals and elites, as
Lashanovetskii’s report and relevant correspondence make clear. Before the
Soviet state established Intourist in 1929—and with it an official tourist indus-
try and infrastructure—Soviet officials would work to rebuild the infrastruc-
ture to support foreign hajj pilgrims in the USSR and along their global routes.
Soviets officials facilitated the hajj through the country to pull large numbers of
foreign Muslims into the USSR—ordinary people, most of them rural and
illiterate—and expose them to Soviet industry, culture, and society. Just as tsa-
rist officials had embraced hajj patronage to impress foreign Muslims favorably
toward the Russian Empire, the foreign policy dimension was central for the
Soviets, too. Sovtorgflot and the NKID were determined to influence foreign
Muslims’ hajj itineraries, and recruit them in large numbers to Soviet routes in
order to profit from them, but they also sought to design a journey through
Soviet lands that would instill in pilgrims a positive impression of the USSR.
The Soviet hajj campaign began in earnest in 1927, coinciding with the start of
Stalin’s industrialization campaign and the first Five-Year Plan. “Building
socialism” in the USSR was an enormously expensive undertaking, and one
paradoxically dependent upon foreign capital and capitalist expertise. Involv-
ing itself in the potentially lucrative hajj transport was one strategy that the
Soviet state tried among others—including tourism and the state’s introduction
of a hard-currency retail chain (Torgsin)—to raise foreign capital.^31 In a series of
meetings starting in 1926, Sovtorgflot proposed ambitious measures to build
new sanitary and lodging facilities across Soviet lands to support the foreign
hajj traffic.^32 In the fall of 1926 Sovtorgflot and the NKID began to reconstruct
the tsarist-era hajj infrastructure. The next hajj rituals were set to begin in Ara-
bia in June 1927, and this gave them several months to prepare.
Sovtorgflot first tackled housing. In 1926 it opened a khadzhikhane for hajj
pilgrims in Odessa, the port it had chosen through which to centralize hajj
transport. As in the tsarist period, pilgrims could take Soviet railroads directly
from Central Asia to Odessa, and there board Sovtorgflot steamships bound for
Jeddah. With permission from the Water-Sanitation Division authorities in
Odessa, Sovtorgflot took over an isolated building on the promenade above
Odessa’s port, No. 65 Primorskii Boulevard, and spent tens of thousands of
rubles renovating it. Workers equipped the building with showers, added steam