Authors

Vassily Klimentov¹;  ¹ University of Zurich, Switzerland

Discussion

The study of Islam in the Soviet Union has been experiencing a revival during the last twenty years. The opening of the archives of the Soviet agencies tasked with regulating religion, including the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults/ Council for Religious Affairs and the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, and field research among (post-)Soviet Muslims led to the emergence of a new historiography. The appearance of other archives, including the Mitrokhin Archive in Cambridge, also played a role. In this context, historians have rethought the relation between communism and Islam among Soviet Muslims. Challenging the opposition between the two ideologies that had been postulated by the so-called Bennigsen School and readily endorsed by American Cold Warriors, this recent historiography has shown how many Soviet Muslims, notably in Central Asia, were able to reconcile the practice of Islam in the private sphere with public adherence to the tenets of communism. Otherwise said, it was acceptable to be both Soviet and Muslim or communist and Muslim. Many scholars thus argued that a form of convergence had emerged between Islam and communism and discarded the ‘Islamic threat’ to the Soviet state that the Bennigsen School had played up. Largely, the KGB and Kremlin’s under-conceptualization of Islamism as a force of disruption in the USSR and the picturing of this new ideology as being confined to the Soviet-Afghan War supported this argument. This article both continues this re-assessment by showing how Soviet Muslims were mobilised at the service of the Soviet state, including as KGB operatives in Muslim countries, and nuances it by highlighting that protest opinions remained strong in Soviet Muslim regions and the KGB continued to aggressively monitor Islamic scholars and leaders. Throughout the Soviet period, the concern that pan-Islamic ideas may contaminate Soviet Muslims – because many of them were not ‘sincere communists’ – remained strong among Soviet intelligence services. Suspicions lingered toward Soviet Muslims even when they acted as agents of the Soviet state abroad. In terms of sources, the article relies on the Mitrokhin Archive and on additional materials from Soviet archives and memoirs, and interviews with Soviet policymakers.