The Hajj and Socialist Revolution 159The Soviet hajj campaign would be brief. It began in 1926 and was over by
1930, when the Great Depression brought about a sharp decline once again in
global hajj traffic. Yet however short lived, the hajj campaign is important in
illuminating the global dimensions and ambitions of early Soviet policy toward
Islam. The campaign was part of the broader project of Soviet cultural diplo-
macy in the late 1920s. Scholars have described how the Soviets welcomed for-
eign visitors to the USSR in the 1920s and early 1930s and organized tours for
them around the new country to cultivate a positive image of the USSR in the
world. This story has been told thus far with regard to Europe and the West, in
terms of the nearly 100,000 foreigners who visited the USSR in the interwar
years, among them tens of thousands of European and American writers, art-
ists, and scientists, who wrote indelible works about their impressions of the
Soviet experiment.^6 Less well known, however, are the Eastern dimensions of
this story. By opening Soviet hajj routes to foreign Muslims, and organizing
tours for them along set routes by Soviet transport, Soviet officials sought to
expose them to the marvels of Soviet culture, industry, and society, and in this
way plant the seeds of revolution across Asia. Hajj transport, then, was also part
of the Soviet project to “showcase the great experiment.”^7
“Let us turn our faces towards Asia,” Lenin famously proclaimed in the early
1920s, when the anticipated communist revolution in Europe did not happen.
“The East will help us conquer the West.” This call marked the start of Soviet
efforts to “liberate” Muslims in India and other parts of Asia from imperial
rule, and bring the Marxist revolution to them.^8 Having consolidated their hold
over the central lands of the Russian Empire after a protracted civil war, the
Bolsheviks next sought to recover and reclaim tsarist territories in Central
Asia.
Home to millions of Turkic- and Persian-speaking Muslims, Central Asia
was an important cultural and geographic point of entry into bordering Mus-
lim societies under British colonial and Chinese rule. The Soviets hoped to
make Central Asia a model of socialist transformation for Muslims across Eur-
asia, from Constantinople to China, at a time of great upheaval and political
flux across the region. They sought not simply to reconquer Central Asia, but to
bring the revolution to the people living there, a process that would involve
violence and the destruction of existing hierarchies and social structures. In
more conventionally colonial terms, the Soviets also saw Central Asia as an
important source of agricultural products and raw materials they needed to