Forging a Russian Hajj Route 93offering superior services and incentives for using these modes of transport.
The government had been trying this model since the 1880s, with limited suc-
cess, to control patterns of peasant migration within the empire to Siberia, and
channel it along a set route.^23 Russia’s consuls in Baghdad and Jeddah, the two
main sources on Russia’s external hajj traffic, also recommended this approach
of using “friendly measures” rather than force to persuade Muslims to take the
Black Sea routes, through the establishment of an “open pilgrimage” along
them. They suggested that the state introduce new domestic policies such as
easier access to passports and special facilities, services, and discounts to make
these the easier and more appealing routes. Only in this way, they argued in
their reports to the Foreign Ministry in the 1890s, could Russia pull its Muslim
pilgrims away from the land routes and onto state-supervised railroad and
steamship routes.^24 The second option prevailed. Starting in the 1890s, the
Ministry of Internal Affairs asked both companies to develop new service for
hajj pilgrims through Russia’s Black Sea ports.
ROPiT took the lead and began posting flyers in railroad stations across the
Caucasus and Central Asia in 1899 advertising new “combination tickets” for
Muslim pilgrims heading to Mecca. It sold these exclusively during hajj season,
and offered pilgrims round-trip service from their home regions to Arabia and
back. These tickets were designed to offer pilgrims more convenient, direct ser-
vice. “Combination” referred to the merging of rail and steamship service: tick-
ets were sold at a flat rate, for service on both means of transport, with the
trains scheduled to sync with waiting steamships in Black Sea ports. They were
modeled on similar ROPiT tickets for Orthodox pilgrims heading to Jerusalem.
To accommodate a variety of itineraries, ROPiT ships were scheduled to leave
from Batumi, Odessa, and Sevastopol.^25
ROPiT officials had good reason to expect to profit handsomely from hajj
transport. They had over a decade of experience transporting Orthodox pil-
grims to Jerusalem. And ROPiT had set up a network of agencies across Otto-
man lands, many in places where routes to Mecca and Jerusalem overlapped,
such as Constantinople, Izmir, and Beirut. And theoretically the hajj should
have been easier to organize than the Orthodox pilgrimage: it was performed
once a year at a set time, making it highly predictable, and its obligatory nature
made it reasonable to expect consistently high numbers of pilgrims. ROPiT had
also wisely created its new hajj service by building upon existing Muslim net-
works, and recruiting Muslims active in the hajj industry in Russia’s Black Sea
ports to work as its agents. In Odessa, for example, it hired the city’s mullah,
Sabirzhan Safarov, as its broker. As the leading Muslim official in the city,