Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Its Islamic
World
From the Mongol Conquest to
the Syrian Military Intervention
Robert Service
Acknowledgments vii
12 Possible Futures 97
Index 113
Ack now l ed gm en ts
The idea for the book came from Charles Hill, and I am grateful
for his enthusiasm and encouragement. My thanks go to Roy Alli-
son, Jonathan Aves, Paul Chaisty, Peter Duncan, Bobo Lo, Norman
Naimark, Matthew Procter, Donald R ayfield, and Harun Yilmaz for
their advice on background literature. My wife, Adele, examined the
draft, and her suggestions resulted in many essential changes. Jona-
than Aves and Harun Yilmaz also read it through. I appreciate their
suggestions for amendments and insertionsI first knew Jonathan
and Harun as postgraduates, and it has been a pleasure to receive the
benefit of their professional expertise. I am equally indebted to my
Hoover colleague Michael Bernstam, especially for his thoughts and
recollections about the 1990s. My St. Antonys colleagues Roy Allison
and Eugene Rogan kindly offered helpful and incisive comments on
the final draft.
Russia has long played an influential part in its world of Islam,
and not all the dimensions are as widely understood as they ought
to be. A vivid memory stays with me from an episode in the honey
moon that Adele and I spent in summer 1975, when we arrived from
Iran in eastern Afghanistan and needed a taxi in Herat. The car
in which we traveled one sunny afternoon had the Russian sign
AMBULYANTSIA painted on both sides. The driver, when asked in
Russian, revealed that he had recently spent months in Moscow as an
exchange student. I had the distinct feeling, albeit unprovable, that
he was some kind of Soviet sleeper. Whatever the truth was, the
experience was evidence that Russiaor, rather, the Soviet Union
was not confining itself to diplomatic overtures in trying to spread
its influence to Muslim-inhabited lands thousands of miles from
viii Acknowledgments
Robert Service
April 2017
1
Russias Long
Interaction with
Islam
T h e Ru s s i a n e n c ou n t e r w i t h I s l a m wa s c l o s e
and problematic long before the twenty-first century. Eight hun-
dred years earlier, Russians as a people fell under the dominion of
foreign Muslim rulers. Nowadays the Kremlin dominates Muslims
in the Russian Federation, exerts a deep influence upon the Muslim-
inhabited states on its southern frontiers, and has lunged militarily
and politically into the Middle East.
The current moment in global affairs is dangerous for Russians
and the rest of us. Since the turn of our millennium, Moscow has
pursued a militant agenda in its internal and external policies. For-
eigners have been taken aback by the transformation, having become
accustomed to a Russia that came to the West as a needy supplicant.
Russia has confirmed itself as a great power even if it is no longer
the superpower of yesteryear. The pacification of Chechnya and the
2 russia and its islamic world
Muslim men to serve in work units behind the front lines. Immedi-
ately mullahs told everyone that the recruits would be sent against
fellow Muslims: the Ottoman armies. This restoked the fires of revolt
in central Asia as Muslim militants attacked Russian settlers, gar-
rison soldiers, and even Islamic dignitaries. Ninety thousand or
more r ebels were killed in the operation to pacify the region. It was a
bloody example of the intersection of internal and external factors in
Russias treatment of its Muslim subjects.
It was also the most serious uprising in the empire at war until
March 1917, when political demonstrations of workers and garri-
son troops overwhelmed the authorities in the Russian capital, now
renamed Petrograd. After learning that the general staff shared the
judgment of conservative and liberal political leaders that there
was no prospect of restoring order while he stayed on the throne,
Nicholas II felt compelled to abdicate. The liberal-led Provisional
Government took office, but it proved unable to prevent the collapse
of the economy and administrative order; workers and soldiers
councils (or soviets) came under the sway of Vladimir Lenin and
his communist party. In October, the communists seized power and
established a Soviet dictatorship, proclaiming the goal of spreading
communism around the world. Muslims, like every other social and
religious group, had already taken the opportunity of revolutionary
times to demand better treatment from the government regardless
of who headed it. The outlying regions seceded from Russia either
because of chronic hostility to Russian control or in rejection of the
communism that Lenin was striving to impose. Scores of regional
wars broke out. The peoples of central Asia and the north Caucasus
were prominent in declaring their independence, and jihadists were
among the militant forces.
But the Red Army had superior weaponry and organization. Once
it had achieved mastery in Russia, the borderlands were easy prey
for it. The communist administration was two-faced in the way that
it handled national and religious organizations. Its armed forces
Russias Long Interaction with Islam 11
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