160 Chapter Five
“build socialism”—to collectivize agriculture, build cities and factories, and
create a modern socialist state.
Predominantly Muslim and agricultural, Central Asia posed a unique chal-
lenge to Soviet efforts to spread the socialist revolution. Islamic elites held
entrenched power in the region, and there was virtually no working class in
Central Asia to excite to revolt. The Soviets sought to solve this problem by
developing a strategy focused on women, as Gregory Massell has shown. Draw-
ing on Western stereotypes about Islam, Soviet officials decided that Central
Asia’s women, as the oppressed class in society, were its weakest link and most
ripe for revolt. Women were deemed a “surrogate proletariat,” and Soviet offi-
cials launched a campaign that encouraged them to throw off their veils and
demand an end to their oppression. Using socialist rhetoric of egalitarianism
and emancipation to mobilize Central Asian women, the Soviets aimed to
undermine traditional Islamic hierarchies and destroy the social structure in
Turkestan. This destructive campaign caused violence against women and the
breakdown of traditional hierarchies, and allowed the Soviets to establish
power in the region by the late 1920s.^9
But Soviet ambitions in Central Asia extended beyond the borders of the for-
mer Russian Empire. In the 1920s the Soviets engaged in a low-grade war across
the region with the British, a kind of continuation of the Great Game, though
with new political and ideological inflections. The outlines of this story are well
known. Scholars have described how Anglo-Russian competition continued in
this period across Central Asia, involving British spies, communist revolution-
aries, White Russians, Muslim agents, and Chinese warlords.^10 Hajj pilgrims
were part of this story as well. In their quest to penetrate the “unenlightened”
masses of Muslims across Asia, and “liberate” them from colonial oppression,
the Soviets would co-opt the hajj as an imperial mechanism of influence and
control, as well as economic exploitation. They would do this largely by taking
over and working through the consular system that the tsarist government had
organized around the hajj traffic, including the constellation of networks across
northern Persia and western China, and those in Constantinople and Jeddah.
Soviet interest in the hajj began in the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs
(NKID), and was initially focused on Mecca. Interestingly, the Soviets valued in
Mecca what the tsarist regime had feared about it: they imagined it as a site of
conspiratorial political agitation and anticolonial scheming. “Getting to Mecca
is of crucial importance to us,” wrote Soviet commissar of foreign affairs Geor-
gii Chicherin in 1924.^11 Chicherin and other Soviet officials had identified Mecca
and Arabia as a crucial site in Soviet competition with the British across Asia.