182 Chapter Five
Isolating Soviet citizens from transit hajj pilgrims was difficult, given the
variety of routes they took, and their large numbers. From Afghanistan crowds
of pilgrims crossed the border on foot or horseback. Locals greeted them at
border railroad stations such as Kushka. They offered to sell the pilgrims food,
and to buy goods and objects from them, including their horses. The hajj traffic
had thus generated illegal economic activity, beyond the purview of the state.^86
To address this problem, the OGPU in 1928 proposed streamlining pilgrims’
movement from Afghanistan and China into Central Asia along a set route, by
building an infrastructure along that route, complete with teahouses and lodg-
ing houses. Sovtorgflot made an agreement with the Commissariat of Trans-
port to have passenger cars waiting at all the necessary stations: Karasu,
Bishkek, Semipalatinsk, Ashkhabad, Baku, and Julfa. It also tried to organize a
state “buying up” (skupka) of pilgrims’ horses. Guides would be assigned to
escort pilgrims from border regions to Odessa, where they would go straight to
the khadzhikhane and from there to a waiting Sovtorgflot ship. The idea was
to keep hajj pilgrims moving along, so that “undesirable elements” would stop
gathering in these border areas to engage in illegal economic activity.^87
The Soviet hajj campaign ended abruptly in 1930, in line with global trends.
Soviet involvement in the hajj appears to have ended with the Great Depression
and the dramatic decline of hajj traffic worldwide that it caused. There is no
evidence that the Soviets ever again attempted a hajj campaign on a global
scale. This jibes as well with the xenophobia and isolationism of the 1930s under
Stalin. And some of the key architects of the Soviet hajj campaign perished in
the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, including Khakimov and Tiuriakulov.
This chapter has described the Soviet Union’s involvement in an interwar
colonial story from which it is largely missing in the historiography: the global
competition for influence over the hajj as part of the larger struggle among
twentieth-century ideologies of communism, imperialism, and nationalism.^88
No less strikingly, it shows that the foundations of Soviet global power—a story
often construed as having begun in 1945, when decolonization and accelerated
forms of globalization opened up new connections and possibilities for the
spread of Soviet socialism worldwide—were laid in part during the interwar
period, and upon inherited human mobility networks and the global structures
the tsarist government had built around them.^89