Soviet Islam: The Second Birth

The Left's Strategic Use of Islam in the West

In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks inherited a fractured empire, riddled with ethnic divisions and bound by centuries of religious tradition. Their Marxist creed was built on atheism and class struggle, which meant dismantling religious institutions seen as remnants of the old order. Churches were shuttered or turned into warehouses, synagogues desecrated, and clergy, Christian and Jewish alike, executed or exiled. Their influence was systematically erased. Yet Islam, which dominated Central Asia and the Caucasus, was handled in a different way.

Muslims under Soviet rule were vast in number, geographically dispersed, and deeply tied to their faith. The Bolsheviks knew that outright persecution would ignite uprisings capable of destabilizing their fragile hold on power. Moreover, Islam extended far beyond Soviet borders into British, and French, controlled territories, colonial rivals the Soviets were eager to undermine. As historian Hans Bräker observes, the early Soviet period up to 1927 was marked by a “relatively soft treatment” of Islam. Through policies of korenizatsiya (indigenization), Muslim elites were permitted to retain influence in local administration. At the same time, the Soviets infiltrated mosques and madrasas, engineering what became known as “Soviet Islam”, a hollowed-out, state-approved version of the faith. At the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, Bolshevik leaders Zinoviev and Radek even called for a “holy war” (gazavat) against Western imperialism, co-opting Islamic rhetoric to align Muslims with Soviet revolutionary aims.