94 Chapter Three
Safarov had been working for years with foreign steamship companies to orga-
nize transport for hajj pilgrims. He had the know-how that ROPiT needed to
get its service started, and also claimed to have connections to Muslim commu-
nities that would allow him to advertise this new service. ROPiT hired him to
recruit pilgrims to its ships in exchange for a percentage of each ticket he helped
sell.^26
But while ROPiT’s service promised hajj pilgrims comfort and speed, it
glossed over many logistical and cultural issues. ROPiT could not have been
expected to know about conditions along the railroads, or to have the capacity
to deal with them. The Ministry of Internal Affairs, however, was well aware of
the hajj pilgrims’ problems on the railroads, from decades of reports from gov-
ernors across the empire. It had a good sense of the scale of the hajj, and the
multiple problems associated with it, as with any form of mass human move-
ment, especially one involving mainly poor people, inexperienced with travel.
The ministry was naïve to think that ROPiT’s new service alone could entice
pilgrims to these routes.
Global histories often portray the modern shift of hajj traffic away from tra-
ditional land routes and onto railroads and steamships as sudden, total, and
permanent.^27 But in fact the situation was not so simple. The flow of hajj traffic
persisted along the old land routes well into the modern era, waxing and wan-
ing for many reasons. In Russia, this had a lot to do with poor travel conditions
along Russia’s railroads. Russia’s railroads were notoriously unregulated and
uncomfortable, and the trans-Caucasian and trans-Caspian lines—those cre-
ated in the 1880s across the Caucasus and Central Asia, and used by most Mus-
lim pilgrims—were no exception.
For Russia’s Muslim pilgrims, the vast majority of whom spoke no Russian
and were poor, illiterate, and traveling long distance for the first time in their
lives, the journey along these routes could be exceedingly difficult, even fright-
ening and dangerous. Piecing together firsthand accounts of the railroads gives
a general sense of what this experience was like for Muslim pilgrims, and the
unique difficulties they faced compared to their Orthodox counterparts.
Some hajj pilgrims complained of being harassed by “infidels” along their
routes through Russia. In a memoir of his railroad journey from Central Asia to
the Black Sea, one Turkestani hajj pilgrim described an awful scene in the Ros-
tov railway station, where the local Russians mocked pilgrims for their turbans
and for praying openly in the station, and a fight broke out with the conductor
when the pilgrims could not communicate to him their destination. The police
arrived and locked up the hajj pilgrims in an empty room in the station.^28