Applied Oriental Studies of Russia's Own Islam: From Orthodox Missionaries to Militant Godless and Wahhabis.

• Author: Bobrovnikov, Vladimir
• Position: ARTICLE - Report

Introduction (1)

Over the past ten years, evident progress has been made in the study of Orientalism in Imperial and Soviet Russia. A real breakthrough in this field occurred in 2005 and again in 2010-2011. In 2005, a heated discussion in the journal Kritika established different manifestations of Orientalism in Russia from the 18 (th) through the early 20 (th) centuries. (2) After the pioneering works of David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Vera Toltz, Michael Kemper and Svetlana Gorshenina, (3) nobody doubts that the academic schools of Russian/Soviet Orientology, centered in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, shared the general premises of philological and sociological Orientalism, according to Edward Said's classification, although they had deviations from the classical European model. Yet there are still numerous blank spots in the field. Regional centers of Oriental studies remain under-examined, and a mosaic palette of schools and disciplines in Russias Orientology is poorly presented in the debates of Orientalism. It is noteworthy that apart from philology and history, Russias Orientalism includes philosophy, ethnography, archeology, numismatics, area studies and political science. There was also an influential school of missionary Orthodox Orientology addressed to Old Believers, Muslims, Buddhists and different pagan faiths, and centered in Kazan until 1921. Its niche in the Soviet Union was taken up by militant and later scientific atheists. In addition, there were military and diplomatic translators from Oriental languages as well as experts in the Russian and foreign Orient in the structure of the secret police and the intelligence service of the imperial Ministry of the Interior and the Soviet Cheka-NKVD-KGB.

On these pages, I will examine the making of the intolerant discourse on Islam in Soviet and Imperial Russia by amateur and trained historians, philosophers and ethnographers, and attempt to integrate applied Oriental studies into the general debates on Orientalism. The focus is on the agents and networks of the state atheistic propaganda complex, as well as on its changing language, topics and messages. To some degree, the lack of previous attention to non-academic versions of Orientalism reflects their disregard by the imperial and Soviet academic schools of Orientology in Saint Petersburg-Leningrad that did not consider them worthy of "true scholarship," although the academics sometimes did their work for the state. It will become clear in this article that they much contributed to the development of Russian Orientalism over time. Chronologically, the article covers the whole period of Soviet anti-Islamic agitation from the late 1920s to the end of the 1980s. Special attention is paid to similarities and differences between the interwar and post-war atheistic discourses and practices. In addition, I discuss the relation of Soviet atheistic activities to late imperial Orthodox missionary work, and to post-socialist Islamic appeal (da'wa) in the region. (4)

Islamic Studies in Godless Associations

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Islam attained equal rights with the Russian Orthodox Church, but lost the protection of the new secularist state. (5) The Bolsheviks feared and hated religion, and declared it alien to the socialist polity. Already the famous decree of January 23, 1918, "On the Separation of Church from State and School from Church," proclaimed Russia a secular state, denied the legal standing of all confessions, and banned all instruction of religion outside private homes. From the 1920s through the mid-1980s, Soviet confessional policy swung from repression to relative tolerance, but the regime maintained a general hostility toward religion until the middle of the 1980s. (6) In order to honor the constitutional right to religious beliefs, and to avoid the impression that the Soviet state actively persecuted religion, the Bolsheviks charged allegedly non-governmental social organizations with the struggle against religion.

There were two All-Union umbrella associations of this sort in Soviet Russia. The first of these was called the "League of the Militant Godless" (Soiuz voinstvuiushchikh bezbozhnikov, or SVB). The ambitious and saucy name of the League corresponded well with the style and character of anti-religious propaganda in the turbulent and bloody interwar years. Its message was to deracinate all confessions; since 1929 the badges of League members have carried the slogan, "The Struggle against Religion is a Struggle for Socialism!" Nominally, the League existed for twenty-two years (1925-1947), although the campaign against religion was moderated on the eve of World War II and the League was not allowed to conduct a militant anti-religious propaganda from 1940 on. The most active periods of the SVB were the years of the Great Turn and the Cultural Revolution in 1929-1934, and then again in 1938-1940. In 1947, the SVB was replaced by the "All-Union Society for the Promotion of Political and Scientific Knowledge" (Vsesoiuznoe obshchestvo po rasprostraneniiu politicheskikh i nauchnykh znanii), which shortened its name to the "Knowledge Society" (Obshchestvo Znanie) in 1963. The latter survived the Soviet Union in Russia but lost its anti-religious branch in 1991. (7)

In some respects, both associations resembled each other. They were funded by the state and charged with helping to implement the Ail-Union state projects. Both associations were engaged in official propaganda work, whose forms included public anti-religious lectures, Sunday and people's universities, as well as exhibitions, broadcasting and documentaries devoted to major religious festivals and ceremonies. In addition, local departments of the SVB provided the state with statistical data on closed and still functioning mosques and prayer houses, holy places in the countryside. From 1923, League members specialized in atheist propaganda against Sunni Islam periodically consulted the Komsomol functionaries on the manners and customs of Muslim peoples to organize anti-religious carnivals on the days of religious festivals usually called "Komsomol bayram." (s) In the early 1930s, the SVB "ordered" ethnographers through the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to produce a lexicon of "Religious Beliefs of the Peoples of the USSR." (9) After the Second World War ethnographers helped district and village Soviets to introduce new Soviet festivals, such as First Furrow Day, (10) to replace the Muslim feasts with a new Soviet labor culture. Classical "philological Orientalism," as Edward Said put it, (11) in the activities of the Soviet godless associations, was reduced to a more sociological approach to Islam and Muslim societies.

The Knowledge Society inherited the science and atheism museums of the SVB, the first of which had been established in Leningrad in 1931. (12) It also built Houses of Scientific Atheism in Moscow, Frunze (today Bishkek) and Tashkent. However, the goals and activities of these associations differed. Militant atheistic propaganda was in the focus of the SVB but later was relegated to a single department of the Knowledge Society charged not so much with atheism but rather with the dissemination of modern sciences. It is noteworthy that there was but one philosopher among eight Soviet chairmen of the Society, the academician Mark Mitin (1956-1960), whose specialty was the criticism of bourgeois philosophy. The other seven chairmen represented the natural and applied technical sciences. (13) After the 1930s, religion was expelled from public life and considered less dangerous for the socialist building. Islam was partly legalized in regional muftiates and more tolerated by the Communist Party and state officials. The personnel of both associations was also different. Contrary to the SVB, the Knowledge Society recruited lecturers and other collaborators, not from amateur scholars and pre-revolutionary bourgeois specialists, but from graduates of the Soviet higher school, which had closer relations with universities and institutes in the framework of the Academy of Sciences.

One should not exaggerate the importance of the denunciation of Islam in the USSR. State-sponsored atheism represented only a part of Soviet confessional politics and scholarship. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the situation was extremely diverse. The state first acknowledged Islam, then attempted to eradicate religion in the late 1920s-1930s, moderated its atheistic activities on the eve of the World War II, and again legalized Islam in 1944 in the framework of the regional Spiritual Boards of Muslims supervised from Moscow. In the early 1960s, a new wave of anti-religious repression started. (14) According to the fluctuations of confessional politics, the scholarly discourse on Islam was changing. In the early Soviet period, Orientologists from V.R. Rozens school like Vasily Bartol's, their native collaborators and Muslim modernists (jadids), who took on positions in the newly established research institutes and universities, and even some "red Orientalists" regarded Islam as more amenable to modernity than Christianity and found revolutionary potential in it. (15) As a rule, scholars and professors from the former imperial universities and academic institutions as well as from the numerous research and educational institutes that appeared in the interwar USSR did not participate in atheistic activities.

From Soviet Orientologists to the Militant Godless

Where did the two godless associations recruit academic volunteers to "storm the heavens"? What kinds of tasks did they set them? The Teague of the Militant Godless and the Knowledge Society conducted anti-religious propaganda at the grassroots level. If the Soviet official statistics can be trusted, both organizations involved huge masses of the Soviet population. Just seven years after its creation, in 1931, the SVB claimed 5.5 million members, 2 million...