Hi all,
Recently I've been reading about different schools of socialist thought for some research, and I came across some interesting information surrounding Islam in the Soviet Union. Russian Orthodox Christianity was actively suppressed but in the six majority Islamic ASSRs, Islam was permitted (if not outright encouraged) to be continued as a practise, with Muslims in the Soviet Union developing strains of thought such as National Communism and Islamic Socialism.
Why was Islam allowed to continue relatively unimpeded (until certain actions under Stalin) in comparison to the repression of other faiths such as Judaism and Orthodoxy? What was the reasoning of the Bolsheviks in permitting this whilst atheism was promoted elsewhere in the USSR?
Thanks!
Where are you getting the information that Islam was permitted in the USSR? I don't feel like I'm qualified enough to say there isn't a real grain of truth to that, but that isn't what I've gotten out of the broader picture of Islam in the USSR. The Bolsheviks were opposed to all religion, including Islam, and while Soviet law officially supported freedom of all religions, in practice there was a lot of action taken against religious leaders of a variety of types. The Soviet ideology also took an official stance of anti-racism and anti-cultural imperialism, and this policy wasn't all empty promises; the fact that "eliminating racism" was a stated goal of the Soviet regime did allow people within the USSR to advocate for their own rights within this framework.
The result of this was that the USSR considered itself to be in favor of minority cultures, but opposed to all religion, including minority religion. The difference between "religion" and "culture" is never going to be a clear-cut one, and it's worth noting that most of the people actually enforcing these laws and making decisions were Russians from a Christian background. When it came to minority cultures, they were looking in from the outside and trying to guess what was religion and what was culture, and what parts of culture were acceptable by this and other standards.
When it comes to Islam specifically, the issue of race and culture is hard to ignore; the Muslim nations of the USSR had been colonies of the Russian Empire, and even under communism they remained, effectively, under Russian control. Soviet Muslims were also often subject to discrimination based on their skin color, in addition to religious issues.
I know that the USSR relaxed the repressions against all religions during WWII, and that after the war there was a huge, terrifying wave of anti-Semitism which killed a lot of the Jews who took advantage of that freedom - Islam generally didn't face the same kind of generalized persecution post-war as Judaism, but there was the genocide of the Crimean Tatars, and even Muslims who didn't fall into that category of extreme persecution still wound up back in the same place they'd started out before the war. Back into the closet, so to speak.
I'm not a real historian, but these are the books by real historians where I got my information: Voices from the Soviet Edge by Jeff Sahadeo and God Save the USSR by Jeff Eden.