Russia as a Crossroads of the Global Hajj 15The Soviet regime, too, would embrace a similar position, when it came
to power in Russia in the 1920s. Like other revolutionary regimes, the
Soviets built their new state in part upon a past that they officially rejected.
To this end, the Soviets would begin to build their global presence by reopen-
ing hajj routes through Russian lands, and reviving the tsarist-era hajj
infrastructure.
The history of Russian involvement in the hajj that this book tells has been
overlooked up to this point, in part because it is hard to see, both in the mate-
rial life of the region and the archival record. Much of what we know about
Ottoman patronage of the hajj comes from the physical landscape. Working
across the modern Middle East, archeologists have reconstructed Ottoman
imperial hajj routes, and studied traces of the old infrastructures the imperial
government built along them. They have studied stone cisterns, ruined cara-
vanserais, fountains, and cemeteries to recover aspects of the material history
of the Ottoman-era hajj.^28 By contrast, few physical traces exist of the Russian
hajj. Unlike the stone-structure-lined hajj routes that the Ottomans created,
Russia’s hajj infrastructure was essentially a loose network of people and insti-
tutions, posted along railroad routes and aboard steamships; there were no
stone buildings erected; dead pilgrims’ bodies were thrown overboard at sea,
disappearing without a trace; and what few physical structures did exist (a
Muslim cemetery, in Odessa, for instance, where many dead pilgrims were
buried) were demolished in the 1930s as part of Stalinist modernization of the
USSR.^29
The subject of the hajj is also obscured in the Russian imperial archives.
Modern state archives tend to be both rich and deeply unforthcoming
sources on human mobility, and Russia’s archives are no exception. Because
nineteenth-century Russian state officials often shared an assumption of
immobility and firm borders as desired norms, the hajj, like other forms of
mobility, attracted their attention as a potential disruption to local order (as
well as a source of opportunities), and they produced mountains of docu-
ments about it.^30 And yet while copiously documented, the hajj is effectively
“buried” in the Russian archives, by categories of cataloguing that reflect tsa-
rist officials’ preoccupation with borders, local concerns, and sedentary pop-
ulations, and, later, Soviet archivists’ Marxist worldview.^31 Because the hajj
involved people moving through space, state sources also necessarily exist in
fragments.