One of Iosif Stalin's survival tactics during World War II was to establish Islamic administrations that would support the Soviet state. Accompanied by his more famous embrace of the Russian Orthodox Church, this was part of Stalin's return to Russian imperial practices that had begun in the mid-1930s. This slim book discusses some of the essays and speeches by appointed Islamic leaders across the USSR, and analyzes samples of wartime poetry, letters, and memoirs by ordinary Muslims. Jeff Eden draws on Russian and Turkic-language archival documents, although he selects most of his texts from recent document collections and studies done by scholars in the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan, and the United States. The book ends with English translations of texts from Islamic, Buddhist, and Jewish administrations as samples of pro-Soviet religious propaganda. Eden argues that the war sparked “a modest but meaningful social revolution” (154) by pushing the state to sponsor religious institutions, although he does not establish causal connections between that and the prayers of soldiers at the front.
After summarizing the last twenty years’ of scholarship on Stalinist repressions of church and mosque, Eden discusses how Stalin eased pressure on the Russian Orthodox Church as soon as Adolf Hitler's invasion began. Stalin's rapprochement with Islamic clergy has never been as thoroughly documented, but the mufti of the Islamic Spiritual Administration in Ufa, Gabdrahman Rasulev, began publishing patriotic essays in the fall of 1941. Eden says that Rasulev met personally with Stalin after June 22, but neither he nor any of the sources he cites document a direct meeting. In June 1943, the Politburo approved creating a parallel administration for Muslims in Central Asia and Kazakhstan, led by the elderly Ishan Babakhanov. The heart of the book is a close reading of essays and speeches by these and other leaders, addressed to domestic and international audiences. These texts, like their Christian equivalents, are notable for the absence of communist ideology and use of traditional tropes like defense of the motherland. Strikingly, the muftis were allowed to depict a global Islamic community rallying against fascism, including the Ismailis who revered the Aga Khan (who lived in London). At the same time, Babakhanov emphasized the local sacred landscape of Central Asia, organized around Sufi shrines. The speeches provided a new space in which to envision a Soviet Islam.
Beyond rhetoric, Muslim communities received permission to open new mosques and begin limited publishing via the administrations. In 1944, a few men were allowed to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. These moves were manifestations of new levels of state control: communities donated money to the war effort and cooperated with police surveillance in exchange for a legal mosque, registered with the state Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults (CARC). After the war new permissions dried up, but the wartime mosques remained. Eden argues that these small freedoms strengthened a sense among Soviet Muslims that they had the right, as citizens, to expect things from the state.
The second section of core material focuses on personal writings by ordinary believers, unearthed from private archives. Many of these poems, letters, and memoirs illustrate the old principle that there are no atheists in foxholes, even Soviet ones. On the home front, the absence of men allowed women to take more public roles in maintaining observance, and Sufi zikr rituals were more widely and openly practiced in Daghestan. During and immediately after the war party officials were generally tolerant of this behavior, for reasons that are not as surprising, as Eden suggests. Amid the flood of demands issuing from Moscow, even in the 1930s anti-religious work was a low-priority burden to be shunned as much as possible. After the war local officials had no time to bother with learning the new regulations on religion, as illustrated by the disdain with which a female CARC official in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, was routinely treated. Eden's analysis of his texts would be richer if he had taken the time to account for their economic and political contexts. The war strengthened believers’ claims to rights, but that process had started with public discussions of the 1936 “Stalin” constitution. The post-war economic and demographic devastation made anti-religious work a lower priority than ever. These translations of rare documents into English provide an unusually intimate window into the Soviet war experience.
