12 Introduction
A study of the hajj also pushes the boundaries of conventional spatial fram-
ings of Russian imperial history. Historians of the Russian Empire often take
space for granted. They tend to approach their subject as a discrete territory
circumscribed by formal borders, the same Russia represented on a Cartesian
map, as though Russian history unfolded neatly, if improbably, within these
borders.^21 Such an approach is convenient, but it can make it difficult, if not
impossible, to see complex processes, phenomena, and cultures of contact and
exchange that transcended Russia’s formal borders. It also does not capture the
geographical complexities of Russia’s connections to and involvement in other
parts of the world in the era of globalization and mass mobility. It can even,
I would argue, reinforce a Cold War–era worldview that ahistorically separates
“Russia” and the “Middle East,” effectively concealing entire chapters of
tsarist-era history and contributing to powerful and false binaries of West and
East, Christian and Muslim, and so on.^22
Late imperial Russia’s borders, like those of other empires and states of the
time, were porous, largely unmanned, and thousands of miles long. Migrants
moved with ease across them, often undetected by imperial authorities, in pat-
terns and processes that connected Russia to other parts of the world in ways
that we are only now beginning to explore. Migrants were diverse, and they are
all deserving of our attention. Hajj pilgrims serve as particularly useful guides
across Russia’s formal borders, because their migrations were circular and peri-
odic (they happened at a set time of year, according to the Islamic lunar calen-
dar), and can thus be followed with relative ease.
By tracing hajj pilgrims’ routes and movements, we can begin to see empire
in a new way, spatially. Empire is a flexible term, and here I use it to encompass
a geographic space differently shaped and broader than the bounded territory
of the Russian Empire that we can point to on a map. It is useful here to borrow
analytical concepts and terms from the geographer David Harvey, who distin-
guished between “absolute” and “relative” space. Applying this theory to the
Russian Empire, we might say that the absolute space of the empire is that
contained within territorial borders, while its relative space is that produced
through migration and exchange, between Russian subjects and places and
peoples elsewhere.^23
The hajj is a point of entry into this relative space, and a chance to explore
little-known dimensions of how the Russian Empire was made over the nine-
teenth century. Tracing the history of the hajj reminds us that Russia’s late
imperial borders looked different to contemporaries than they do to us today:
they were often insignificant to those who crossed them (often unknowingly),