Islam in Russia/ USSR
Tsarist Russia
• Until the mid 16th C Islam was tolerated
• Suppression began around the time of Ivan
Grozny in 1552 with the battle of Kazan and
continued through the reign of Katherine the
Great 1762
Methods of Suppression
• Assimilation
– Education and Military service
• Immigration
– Land grants for non-Muslims to create Muslim
Minorities through immigration
• Deportation
– Encouraged and forces migration to the Persian
and Ottoman Empires
– Circassian Diaspora; Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Syria
– Other Caucasian Muslims ended up in Iran;
Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Kabardins, Laks
Peter the Great
• Negative view towards
religion in general
• “Great Embassy”
• Modernization of Russia
through Westernization
• Russo-Turkish War
1686 – 1700
Peter sought to have
permeant sea access to a
warm water port and the
establishment of a modern
navy
The Great Game 1830 - 1895
• Russia wanted to
prevent the British from
establishing trade
routes into Central Asia
• British feared Russia
would consume India
• Afghanistan served as a
buffer zone between
Russia, Persia and
British India. Attempts
to control the territory
ended in failure.
USSR
• Muslims of Russia…all you
whose mosques and prayer
houses have been
destroyed, whose beliefs
and customs have been
trampled upon by the tsars
and oppressors of Russia:
your beliefs and practices,
your national and cultural
institutions are forever free
and inviolate. Know that
your rights, like those of all
the peoples of Russia, are
under the mighty protection
of the revolution
• Although actively
encouraging atheism, Soviet
authorities permitted limited
religious activity in the
Muslim republics.
• Mosques functioned in most
large cities of the Central
Asia
• Unlike the Russian Orthodox
Christian church, the
Muslims of the Soviet Union
originally encountered a
larger degree of religious
freedom under the new
Bolshevik rule.
Red Mullahs
• Stages of the relationship between Islam and the
Soviet authorities.
• Open mutual hostility replaced by obligatory
Islamic loyalty to the Soviet regime.
• Government succeeded in isolating poor and
landless peasants of Central Asia and the Volga
region from the prosperous Muslim leaders
• 'Red mullahs' adjusted to the requirements of the
time worked to synthesize it with the ideals of
socialism.
Stalin
• Under Stalin religion policy
changed. Mosques were
closed or turned into
warehouses
• Religious leaders persecuted
• Religious schools were closed.
• Soviets argued that the hijab
was evidence that the Muslim
women were oppressed, and
began to try and forcibly
remove it.
• As such it became more
popular
• Stalin's cult of personality left
no place for religion
Afghanistan Again: Cold War
• (1978) Saur Revolution,
anti communist
insurrection
• (1979–89) Soviet–Afghan
War
• (1989–92) Afghan Civil
War– collapse of
Communist Najibullah
government
• (1992–96) Afghan Civil
War
• (1996 to Present) Taliban
majority control
• US aids Mujahedeen
Rebels to fight Soviets
• Afghanistan becomes the
birthplace of al Qaeda
Islam in the age of Glasnost and
Perestroika
• Openness, restructuring
• Greater permissibility for religious
freedom
• Where Islam became resurgent in
Central Asia, nationalism arose in
the caucuses
• Muslim Majority; Dagestan, Adygeya, Chechnya,
Ingushetia, North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria and
Karachayevo-Cherkessia
• Soviet efforts to eradicate religious faith
• Official data to the effect that by the 1960s the
Soviet Union had become a land of mass unbelief
• research carried out in Central Asia, the Caucasus
after 1985 confirmed that 60 to 80% considered
themselves Muslims
End of the USSR
Caucuses
• Chechen Wars 1990s
2000s
• War in Syria
• Russia increasingly a
target of Jihadism
• Chechnya is a strong
jihadist recruiting
ground