Russia as a Crossroads of the Global Hajj 11The story I tell in this book reveals Russia’s involvement in one of the great
global migratory movements of the modern era. The hajj was the largest pil-
grimage in the world in the nineteenth century, as well as Russia’s single largest
pilgrimage.^18 And yet for all the attention scholars have paid in recent years to
Russia’s diverse migrations, the hajj is missing from this historiography, which
tends to focus on internal peasant migrations, and, to a lesser extent, mass
emigration from the empire in the late imperial period (mainly by Poles and
Jews).^19 The puzzling absence of the hajj from the historiography of Russia’s
migrations reflects broader neglect of Muslims in narratives of Russian his-
tory. To be sure, scholars in other fields—mainly Islamicists and anthropolo-
gists working in Europe, Russia, and Japan—have produced a robust literature
on Muslim mobility and networks of exchange and contacts in modern
Eurasia. As this work demonstrates, Muslims were among the most mobile of
Russia’s imperial populations; connected to coreligionists by networks of trade,
pilgrimage, and scholarship, they moved frequently across imperial regions
and borders. However, this body of scholarship is largely overlooked by
historians of Russia, and has yet to be integrated into the history of Russia’s
migrations.^20
By including the hajj in this history, we can begin to rethink some of our
assumptions about patterns of Russia’s migrations, and their effects on the
empire. As it turns out, migrations were not simply an internal issue for Rus-
sia; nor were migrations abroad necessarily permanent. The mobility revo-
lution in nineteenth-century Russia had transformative effects not only
on Russian peasants and Jews, but also on the lives of the empire’s Muslims
populations. With railroads reaching the Caucasus and Central Asia in the
1880s, Muslims living in these places gained sudden access not only to
Mecca, but to other parts of the Russian Empire and the world as well. Some
moved out of their home regions, and many more began to ride the rails and
explore the empire. These internal Muslim migrations raised questions
within the regime about what Muslims “saw”—what impressions they gained
of the empire—and prompted Russian officials to forge new ties with their
counterparts in other parts of the empire and the world, to assist them in
their efforts to integrate Muslims. Not all Russian officials saw Muslim
migrations as a problem—some, in fact, saw them in a positive light. Many
Russian officials saw the hajj not as a destructive but as a creative migratory
phenomenon, one that generated economic activity and opportunities within
Russia, offered ready-made connections to other parts of the world, and
opened up possibilities for the expansion of Russian influence and power in
the world.