176 Chapter Five
suggested that pilgrims be told to bring no more Soviet currency than they
could spend while in the USSR.^65 Some Soviet officials began to express con-
cerns that the hajj transport was a drain on the country’s hard-currency hold-
ings, rather than a source of enrichment.
The 1927 hajj season had revealed the complexities involved in hajj trans-
port, and the enormity of the task of organizing pilgrim transport from three
foreign countries through Soviet lands. It had also revealed the potential
risks—economic, ideological, sanitary, and otherwise—of Soviet involvement
in the hajj. The Soviet state could have abandoned the plan for hajj transport at
this point. Instead, it committed greater resources to it.
Political concerns doubtless were central to this decision. Despite all of the
problems reported from the 1927 hajj season, there was also evidence that the
Soviet strategy was working, that Muslims returned home with positive impres-
sions of the USSR. In Sinkiang, for instance, the Chinese governor-general, Yan
Tsen Sin, increased efforts to block Muslims from the Soviet routes after the
1927 hajj season. Soviet consular reports from the region cited political and
ideological concerns on the part of the Chinese. Pilgrims had returned in
1927 with “favorable” impressions of their transit through the USSR. The
governor-general feared that their exposure to “new trends” in the USSR would
lead to the destruction of the old order in Sinkiang. His concerns extended
beyond the USSR: he also feared Muslims’ exposure to political ideas in repub-
lican Turkey. He tried to discourage the hajj altogether, enlisting local Muslim
clergy to warn Muslims against making the pilgrimage, and warning them
that they, too, stood to lose if Muslims moved away from the “true faith” in
Sinkiang.^66
In a sign of its endorsement of the plan for Soviet involvement in the hajj, in
April 1928 the Soviet state passed a new law, “On the Sea Transport of Hajj Pil-
grims from the Soviet Union to the Hejaz and Back.” Approved by the Council
of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom, the highest authority of executive power
in the USSR), this law stipulated that the transport of hajj pilgrims from Soviet
ports be carried out by Sovtorgflot on its own ships and on foreign ships that it
chartered, as well as on other ships flying under the flag of other countries that
had concluded agreements with the Soviet government.^67 This law suggests
both rising demand among foreign hajj pilgrims for access to Soviet routes,
ports, and transport, and the Soviet government’s desire to monopolize the
transport of hajj pilgrims from its ports. Apparently Sovnarkom hoped the
state could profit from hajj transport: the state stipulated that all hard currency
that Sovtorgflot made from hajj transport must go into Sovnarkom’s treasury.