Authors

Norihiro Naganawa¹;  ¹ Hokkaido University, Japan

Discussion

In the historiography of the Muslim communities in Russia’s empire, Astrakhan remains a blind spot between the Volga-Urals and the Caucasus. Placing this port city in the Volga-Caspian basin enables us to reveal otherwise obscured exchanges beyond the ethnic, confessional/sectarian, and state boundaries. Using Azerbaijani newspapers published in Astrakhan and Baku in the era of the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman revolutions, this paper explores how these dynamics of collaboration and contention began to undermine imperial rule in this most industrialized frontier of the Muslim world. In Astrakhan, the Tatar Islamic scholars, whose prestige derived from their education in Bukhara, embodied an authority buttressed by the Russian state and Tatar merchants; the contacts with their Daghestani counterparts also enhanced it. In contrast, Mustafa Lutfi Ismailov, a prolific Azerbaijani entrepreneur and editor of Burhan-i Taraqqi who once studied in Istanbul, emerged in fluid multiethnic Astrakhan by giving shelter to young dissenters of tradition and autocracy. Tatars could curtail Azerbaijani/Iranian activities with the help of state interventions, inciting a sectarian hatred against the Shiites. Yet horizontal social mobility made the state’s vertical control increasingly difficult. In Astrakhan and Baku, multiethnic peasants poured into the ports and oilfields, and radical youths sought refuge to evade police persecution. The state even spiraled out of control amid the multiethnic cholera riots and labor strikes. Moreover, the Iranian constitutional revolution excited Muslim youths and their Armenian and Georgian counterparts. It was in this crucible of multiethnic collaboration that the future Soviet leaders took shape.