4 Introduction
term infrastructure I do not mean to suggest a static structure, but instead a
flexible, evolving system that changed dramatically over time, in line with the
tsarist regime’s growing understanding of the geography of hajj routes con-
necting Russia to Arabia, and hajj pilgrims’ ever-shifting itineraries and prefer-
ences for routes. Anchored by a constellation of Russian consulates located in
hubs of hajj traffic, and along popular Russian routes to Mecca, at its greatest
extent in the early 1900s it included outposts in Odessa and Jeddah, Bombay
and Baghdad, Constantinople and Karbala.
It might be tempting to think that the idea for Russia’s hajj infrastructure
came from high-level meetings of tsarist officials sitting around map-strewn
tables in St. Petersburg, and was decreed by the tsar. But this was not the case.
Instead, it grew out of improvised encounters between Russian officials and
Muslim pilgrims, both inside the empire and in spots abroad, and from Muslim
pilgrims requesting and in some cases demanding help from Russian officials
in making the hajj. Hajj pilgrims ultimately determined the geographic shape
the infrastructure took. As more than one Russian official conceded, pilgrims
themselves decided which routes to take, and whether or not to avail them-
selves of Russian services along these routes. And so this infrastructure was
very much in flux throughout this period, as railroad construction in Russian
and Ottoman lands reorganized the traffic and lured pilgrims to new routes,
and Russian officials studied the traffic to build new services around it.^5
Until recently, scholars tended to gloss over Russia’s 500-year history of rul-
ing Islam, and Muslims were often left out of standard accounts of Russian and
Soviet history.^6 This neglect stems in part from practical and ideological con-
straints on Cold War–era scholars, which made it nearly impossible to study
the history of Islam in the Soviet Union or its predecessor, the Russian Empire,
during the second half of the twentieth century. The Soviet government dis-
couraged work on the subject, and blocked foreign researchers’ access to
archives as well as travel to Muslim regions. Many Western historians, for their
part, accepted Soviet rhetoric about having eliminated religion, and pursued
other topics.^7 Neglected by scholars, Russia’s Muslims dropped out of sight:
they went missing from narratives of Russian imperial history, and featured
little in histories of Islam and European colonialism. Only since the 1990s,
when the USSR unexpectedly broke apart into fifteen separate nation-states—
six with Muslim majorities—have Russia’s Muslims “reemerged” as a subject of
scholarly study.^8
Taking advantage of newly opened archives and manuscript collections,
scholars in recent years have written works that offer important insights into