Mapping the Hajj, Integrating Muslims 65restricting the hajj in the interest of integrating Muslims, and maintaining sta-
bility in the region. They argued that government interference in it “could cre-
ate rumors unpleasant for us” among Muslims in the North Caucasus about the
“religious persecution of Muslims.”^55
In New Russia and Bessarabia—a broad swath of land north of the Black Sea,
encompassing today’s Moldova, southern Ukraine, and Crimea—the governor-
general, P. E. Kotsebu, also resisted the measure. Kotsebu’s position was in some
ways the most complex. Not only did he rule large Muslim populations in his
region, but also the northern shores of the Black Sea, where most of Russia’s hajj
routes converged. No other region of the empire saw as much hajj traffic at this
time. He initially complied with the 1872 order, but refused to do so the next
year, saying it was “inconvenient” to keep denying Muslims passports. By that
time the cholera outbreak in Jeddah was over, steamships were running again,
and passport requests to Mecca were growing. Increasingly, also, Muslims from
Turkestan were showing up in Odessa, the Black Sea port under his jurisdiction,
with documents from Kaufman, authorizing them to make the hajj. Kotsebu
ordered his officials in Odessa to grant passports in such cases, clearly out of
concern for maintaining order within his own re gion, and also to support
Kaufman’s ongoing colonization of Turkestan. To send them back to Turkestan,
he told the Ministry of Internal Affairs, would “decrease their respect for local
authorities that had allowed them to make the pilgrimage.”^56
Kotsebu saw the 1872 measure as counterproductive to his efforts to govern
Muslims, and get them to adhere to Russian laws and institutions. “Every new
restriction” on the hajj, he reported, “will only strengthen their desire to make
the hajj, and give rise to new efforts to get around the law.”^57 He also pointed out
regional patterns in problems surrounding the hajj. Muslims from his own
region were not the ones causing problems in Constantinople. Ignatʹev’s com-
plaints were almost exclusively about Muslims from the Caucasus, who were
numerous and poor and “burdening consulates in the East.” Hajj pilgrims from
Kotsebu’s region of New Russia, by contrast, were no trouble. Only small num-
bers of them made the hajj—about sixty to eighty annually—and they tended to
be affluent elites, who had their own informal networks for assistance, and the
means to make the journey, and therefore asked nothing of Russian consulates.
He also disagreed with Ignatʹev’s proposal to discourage the hajj by increasing
the passport fee and requiring pilgrims to make a one-hundred-ruble deposit.
Such a measure, Kotsebu argued, would have undesired effects. The fee was not
enough to deter pilgrims, but would be seen as an attempt to “restrict their
religion.”^58