184 Conclusion
quotas, and almost never grant them. Many countries have long waiting lists,
and Muslims often wait years for the chance to make the pilgrimage.^2
In addition to making the hajj a diplomatic issue with the Saudis, the Russian
government under Putin in the 2000s introduced new subsidies and state agen-
cies to support the hajj. Today Russia’s Muslims enjoy discounted flights to Jed-
dah during hajj season on Aeroflot, the state airline. They also have at their
disposal a government-created liaison office that helps them arrange visas and
transportation for the pilgrimage. Observers of this policy have argued that
Putin’s motives are mainly about security and economics—to monitor and
appease Russia’s Muslims, and to improve ties with Saudi Arabia, where Russia
has budding economic interests.^3
Putin’s very public cooperation with the Saudi government around the hajj
seems at odds with his close ties to the leadership of the Russian Orthodox
Church, and the image of Russia he often seeks to promote—as a country deeply
rooted in Eastern Orthodox traditions. But Putin’s political use of the Russian
Orthodox Church and his simultaneous involvement with the hajj is actually
quite consistent with Russia’s colonial past. Russia today, as in the late nine-
teenth century, is a multiethnic and multiconfessional state. Even after the dis-
integration of the Soviet Union in 1991 into fifteen separate states, six with
Muslim majorities, Russia remains home to large Muslim populations. Two
million Muslims live in the Russian capital of Moscow alone, making it the city
with the largest Muslim population in all of Europe. In terms of numbers, the
place of Islam in Russia today essentially mirrors its place in late imperial
Russia—it is the largest minority religion, second only to Orthodox Christian-
ity, with some twenty million Russian citizens identifying as Muslim, about
fifteen percent of Russia’s overall population.
Putin’s efforts to expand Russian citizens’ access to Mecca attest to the revival
of Islam in post-Soviet Russia, and, with it, state strategies for managing Islam
and integrating Muslims. Knowingly or not, Putin is building upon traditions
and policies toward the hajj that were forged more than a century ago under
tsarist rule, including the tsarist-era infrastructure upon which the Soviets
built global influence in the twentieth century, and which today undergirds
Russian political power in the Middle East.
Russia co-opted the hajj in the nineteenth century, using it as a mechanism
of imperial integration and expansion. I have argued, in contrast to scholarly
orthodoxies about Russia and other European powers in the late nineteenth
century, that Russia did not entirely fear Islam’s global dimensions as a threat
to its empire, nor did it solely attempt to contain and control Islam in its