Red Army Prayers and Homefront Lyrics

This chapter offers a rare glimpse of Muslim devotional life in the war era and the immediate postwar years, drawing on sources such as Islamic war poetry, veterans’ remembrances, eyewitness reportage, Soviet agents’ dispatches, and letters to and from Muslim Red Army soldiers. It argues that it is possible to reconstruct not only some aspects of religious change that were particular to the war era but also to trace these changes into the postwar years. In other words, this chapter proposes that the war era is a turning point not only in Soviet religious policy—as many have previously argued—but in Soviet Muslim life more generally. These changes include the flourishing of Soviet Muslim poetry (much of it devoted to wartime experiences) and the increasing level of women’s participation and leadership in ritual life.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter reviews the two stories told in the book about Soviet Muslims in the Second World War: one about the devotional life of Muslim citizens, including soldiers, their families on the home front, and local religious leaders; the other about state dynamics. Regarding the effectiveness of Soviet religious propaganda during the Second World War, it offers summary thoughts connecting the resurgence of devotional life in wartime, the widespread perception that religiosity was now permitted by the state, and the state’s ambiguous, ineffectual approach to shaping religious policy. The chapter then places the book in the context of other studies of Islam in the Soviet Union.

Introduction

The Second World War was a period of “religious revolution” in the Soviet Union. The Introduction describes how this book, focusing on Soviet Muslims, approaches pivotal developments related to this revolution: the way religion was mobilized as a new tool of state propaganda; the way religious repression receded, and then changed shape; and the way Soviet Muslim communities responded to the dawn of unprecedented religious freedoms, some of which were shepherded by the state and some of which were achieved thanks to its incompetence or indifference. The Introduction then addresses debates on the biggest questions of all: Why did the revolution in religious life take place? What role did “popular” religiosity and public religious devotion play? Why did the Soviet state, just a few years after slaughtering religious elites by the tens of thousands during the Great Terror of 1937–38, shift dramatically toward religious tolerance?

Praying with Stalin

This chapter shows how Soviet Muslim leaders were called upon to rally their communities in wartime; how they articulated the fight against Hitler in Islamic terms; how they attempted to advance a platform of shared values and shared interests with the Soviet state; and how they used the novel occasion of addressing their followers to define communal religious identity in terms that, just a few years earlier, could well have earned these same elites a trip to the Gulag and a bullet in the head. At the heart of this chapter are several remarkable speeches, translated here from Uzbek, Bashkir, Persian, and Russian—each one a call to the war against Hitler issued by Soviet Muslim muftis in language that bridges Soviet wartime propaganda and classical Islamic rhetoric on “Holy War.”

The Setting

This chapter describes how in the 1920s to 1930s, the Soviet state attempted to eradicate religion by targeting the most visible forms of devotional life. Tens of thousands of religious elites were arrested and executed; holy objects were seized; and churches, mosques, and synagogues were converted into granaries, warehouses, and museums of “Marxist-Leninist Scientific Atheism.” Meanwhile, Soviet populations were inundated with anti-religious propaganda, as local branches of the state-backed League of Militant Atheists proliferated. The chapter goes on to show how in the war years, however, religious repression ceased. The arrest and execution of religious figures was almost entirely curtailed. A pivotal moment came in 1943, when Stalin invited three Metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church to a late-night meeting in Moscow and offered them a “new deal,” allowing for unprecedented religious freedoms.

Bureaucrats Bewildered

Using Kazakhstan as a case study, this chapter shows how the atheist officials charged with policing religion in the Soviet Union quickly lost track of the religious policies they were tasked with enforcing. Meanwhile, bureaucrats at local levels were often oblivious or even indifferent to those policies. Beyond the bureaucratic confusion and malaise, there was also significant confusion among officials over the very nature of Islam in the Soviet Union. What was the point of “registering” mosques, for example, if Kazakh Muslims, with their legacy of nomadism, did not need mosques? What was the point of monitoring mullas and other Islamic leaders when each Muslim is, according to tradition, ritually autonomous and self-sufficient? By showing the grey areas where enforcement met devotional practice, this chapter argues that Soviet Muslims were given a broad space for religious activity not only thanks to Stalin’s policies, but also through bureaucratic incompetence, indifference, and bewilderment.

Negotiating Stalin’s Tolerance

This chapter shows that wartime patriotism among Soviet religious populations was developed not merely through rousing speeches and policy concessions; it was developed by knitting patriotic activities and devotional activities together so tightly that it was not clear where one ended and the other began. By channeling traditional Muslim charity (zakat) payments into the war effort, for example, Muslim charity became both pious and patriotic; by weaving patriotism into the fabric of Friday sermons, visiting a newly reopened mosque allowed Muslims to embody and enact that line quoted so often by the leading muftis: “Love for country is a part of faith.” In short, the war era was an age in which Islamic devotion itself became—for some at least—an expression of Soviet patriotism.