Forging a Russian Hajj Route 103Zimmerman kept the pressure on the Volunteer Fleet. He wrote back to the
committee, urging it to introduce service to replace the awful service that
ROPiT was providing pilgrims. Writing from the vantage point of Jeddah,
Zimmerman seems to have based this judgment on firsthand encounters with
and eyewitness observation of pilgrims who arrived in Jeddah after taking
ROPiT ships. Zimmerman reported that as many as 16,000 Russian hajj pil-
grims passed through Jeddah every year, most of them having taken ROPiT
ships to Alexandria, and from Suez, Egyptian steamers to Jeddah. Zimmerman
reported that ROPiT was allowing pilgrims to stop in Constantinople for sev-
eral days but doing nothing to protect them: they were fleeced mercilessly by
their compatriots in the city, expat Tatar and Turkestani communities that had
organized to prey on the traffic. The ROPiT ships were bad: they didn’t have
enough space, were poorly ventilated, filthy, and lacked adequate provisions.
Pilgrims traveled for days without food. The ROPiT ships took pilgrims only as
far as Alexandria, where pilgrims were greeted by local ROPiT agents (the one
in Alexandria was a local Greek named Prasinos) who escorted them to the
train station for passage from Alexandria to Suez. The train ride was hell: pil-
grims were put on open platforms, and made to endure hot sun or punishing
rains during the ten- to fifteen-day trip, which took a long time due to numer-
ous stops. They next boarded “filthy, slow” ships from Suez to Jeddah. These
ships were in constant danger of crashing; the English ship captains steering
them were often drunk. Zimmerman told the committee that he had reported
all of this to ROPiT in St. Petersburg, but it had done nothing to improve con-
ditions for pilgrims.^47
In 1903, Zimmerman urged the Volunteer Fleet to take the leading role in
organizing hajj transport for Russia’s Muslims. This made some practical sense,
given that the fleet was looking for passengers to fill its ships. In 1903 the
trans-Siberian railroad had opened, and the fleet had lost much of its passenger
traffic to the new rail route.^48 Both Zimmerman and Russia’s city-governor in
Sevastopol pointed out that the fleet had ships standing idle in Sevastopol, and
urged it to use them for transporting hajj pilgrims. In response to this “agita-
tion,” the fleet’s committee relented. It ordered two of its ships returning empty
from the Far East, the Petersburg and the Saratov, to pick up pilgrims on their
way back through the Red Sea; as it happened, their return coincided with the
end of the hajj rituals in Arabia, so the timing was right. Things did not go
smoothly, however. The Saratov got tired of waiting for pilgrims in the port in
Jeddah and left without them. The Petersburg took 2,000 on board, and then the
problems began. There was a huge backup of ships in El-Tor for quarantine, and