06.10.2004

Islam and the Bolshevik body politic

What should be the attitude of communists towards believers? Socialist Workers Party member Dave Crouch discussed the lessons of post-revolutionary Russia in his contribution to the CPGB's Communist University 2004

The attitude of socialists to islam is being very hotly debated in this country at present, and for many of us this is a new issue that has not been studied and is not widely known among socialists. I personally became interested in this issue because I spent most of the 1990s living and working in Moscow, and I was stunned by the level of Russian nationalism and racism towards non-Russians, and towards the Chech-ens and the central Asian peoples in particular.

On the left we are accustomed to measuring ourselves against Lenin and the Bolsheviks, so we need to dust off this page of history and see what we can learn from it. To start with, you have to begin with Lenin’s writings on religion, understanding that Marxism is an atheist world view, but at the same time understanding that religion is not just the “opium of the people”, but also “the sigh of the oppressed”. The roots of religion come from people’s experience of powerlessness in capitalist society.

The Bolshevik Party and Lenin in particular were clear that atheism was not part of the party programme. You do not have to be an atheist to be a Bolshevik, and Lenin writes consistently in the early 1900s that we are absolutely opposed to giving the slightest offence to workers’ religious convictions. Ten years later, after the revolution, Lenin talks about the danger of anti-religious propaganda and about the need to be sensitive, so as not to drive people away. In 1918 he writes emphatically, advising the central committee to avoid everything that would give anyone cause to think that we persecute people for their religious faith.

This is consistent coming from a man who admitted to having admired Father Gapon, the priest who led the demonstration that sparked the 1905 revolution - Gapon turned out to be a tsarist agent. But Lenin was always very open to people with religious views. After 1917 we see an attempt to apply this approach to religion consistently. The decree to disestablish the church in December 1918, the nationalisation of religious property, putting churches to use as schools and so on - difficult to implement, given the strength of religious feeling among Russian orthodox christians - led inevitably to clashes with the Bolsheviks.

But at the same time, towards the non-orthodox and non-christian religions there was a real recognition of people’s religious rights. In November 1919, at a key turning point in the civil war, Trotsky published an extraordinary order allowing all evangelical protestants to refuse military service on the basis of their religious faith. Suddenly there was a massive growth in evangelical protestantism! But that, I think, is a very good example of the Bolsheviks’ approach to religion during the civil war.

On the question of islam, the Russian Revolution took place in a multinational empire, where about 10% of the population were muslims. It is important to remember that the word ‘muslim’ was so closely identified with a geographical area - central Asia and the Caucasus - that Bolsheviks at that time write about muslims as a nationality, so that muslim is a national rather than a religious label.

The revolution radicalised Russian muslims in the tsarist colonies and the first congress of Russian muslims took place in May 1917. There were 1,000 delegates, 200 of them women, who voted for an eight-hour day, abolition of private landed property, confiscation of large properties, equality of political rights for women, the banning of polygamy and purdah. This was at the very forefront of islamic political liberation, the first time we had seen anything of the kind, compared with the restrictions usually imposed on women in islamic societies at the time.

It is important to remember that there was a liberal, secular trend within Russian islam called the Jadids - a modernising tendency, which saw the clergy as holding back the islamic nations of the empire. They wanted to see women emancipated and religion taken out of education, modelling themselves on western European capitalism. This was a bourgeois tendency within islam, but, after World War I broke out, the very countries that the Jadids had been trying to model themselves on attempted to smash the Ottoman empire - at the time the only muslim state existing in the world. Western Europe dissolved into a bloodbath and the Jadids found that their model was wanting.

When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, large numbers of Jadids saw the Bolshevik revolution as the only alternative, the only hope in that situation. The Jadid leader, Abdul Fitrat, wrote in 1919 that the duty to drive the English out of India was as great as saving the pages of the Koran from being trampled by an animal, as great as driving a pig out of a mosque.

So the Bolshevik revolution and anti-imperialism began to be seen as a way of achieving religious rights. Big debates took place within Russian islam as a result. The so-called ‘red mullahs’ identified with the revolution and the ‘white mullahs’ with the other side and there was talk of the possibility of ‘islamic socialism’ - something which as Marxists we would reject. I have the text of a pamphlet which was circulated widely in central Asia in 1919 by a leading theoretician of islam, who was acting as adviser to the Afghan monarchy at the time. The pamphlet, picked up by British intelligence and translated into English, is called Bolshevism and the islamic body politic.

It contains the following passage: “Following on the dark long nights of tsarist autocracy the dawn of human freedom has appeared on the Russian horizon. Lenin is a shining sun giving light and splendour to this day of human happiness. The administration of extensive territories in Russia and Turkestan has been placed in the hands of labourers, cultivators and soldiers. Distinctions of race, religion and class have disappeared. It is time for us to send our children to Russian schools to learn the modern sciences, the noble arts, practical physics, chemistry and mechanics. Muslims, listen to this divine cry and respond to this call of liberty.”

The result was that large numbers of practising muslims joined the Bolsheviks. Estimates vary, but Trotsky in 1923 put the number of practising muslims in the Bolshevik Party in central Asia at around 15%. Other estimates put it as high as 50% and in parts of Turkestan it was 70% or 80%. The Bolsheviks’ attitude to muslims was very closely tied up with their approach to the national question as a whole. As a matter of Marxist principle, Lenin saw the importance of making amends for the crimes of tsarism in the former colonies - not just as a matter of basic justice, but also necessary to clear the ground so that class divisions in islamic society would come to the fore.

A programme of consistent and principled national liberation for the former colonies emerged - the setting up of autonomous republics within the former empire, often run by people who were out and out nationalists, but prepared to accept limits on their autonomy within the Bolshevik state. Nationalists and muslims went over to the Bolsheviks wholesale in 1919 and 1920. In Chechnya, for example, the Bolsheviks won over the head of a powerful Sufi muslim order who led the Chechen revolutionary committee, Ali Ahmed Metayev. Muslims in their tens of thousands fought with the Red Army against the whites. Moscow deliberately deployed native troops in the former colonies to fight them.

This was combined with a massive programme of what we would call today ‘positive discrimination’ or ‘affirmative action’ - korenizatsia, which means ‘taking root’. The idea was to encourage representatives of the local indigenous peoples to take on the running of their society in the most full and genuine sense. The Russian language ceases to dominate and there was a real effort to publish in the indigenous languages, to replace the use of Cyrillic with the Latin alphabet throughout central Asia. Russian colonists (Cossacks, particularly in the north Caucasus) were deported and the land returned the natives. Indigenous people were promoted to leading positions in the state and party. Native people were hired as factory workers over and above Russians - at a time when Russian workers in the colonies dominated whatever industry there was.

On the question of schooling and the law, there was a parallel system of islamic schools and sharia courts permitted by the Bolsheviks. Friday became a day of rest throughout central Asia. Sharia law was a major demand of the February revolution and in 1921, as things began to quieten down at the end of the civil war, a system of sharia courts was created throughout central Asia and the Caucasus. There was a choice between the revolutionary courts and the sharia courts. Judgements that contravened the practice of the revolutionary courts - for example, amputation as a punishment - were forbidden and decisions of the sharia courts on such matters had to go to the higher organs of revolutionary justice. Nevertheless, large numbers of people opted for the sharia courts and there was a battle between the two. The Bolsheviks did not just hand everything over to the sharia courts: they aimed to uphold the system of revolutionary justice and, for example, make it easier for women who might be subject to discrimination by the sharia courts to take their divorce cases and so on to the revolutionary courts instead.

Tsarism had banned and repressed the muslim religion over decades, so the Bolsheviks saw it as important to clear the ground, to restore religious rights and on that basis to pursue the class struggle in islamic society. It is worth noting that the veil had not been popular in central Asia until the tsar’s troops arrived in the final decades of the 19th century. Traditions of veiling - mainly among upper class women - then began to take root, although places like Tatarstan had no strong tradition of veiling whatsoever. To show their respect for people’s religious sensitivities Bolshevik women took to veiling themselves when they were conducting political work in the mosques and when muslim women addressed Bolshevik meeting, conferences and so on.

Of course Lenin was certainly not for the flowering of religion - quite the opposite. For example, in the famine of 1921 the Bolsheviks demanded that the orthodox church hand over its non-religious valuables so that they could be sold on the international market in order to buy grain to feed the people. The church, led by Patriarch Tikhon, refused and a battle ensued, resulting in the execution of 45 priests. Of course this and similar cases are always used by the right to denounce Bolshevism, so it is important to put them in the context of the Bolsheviks’ approach to religion as a whole.

Their Marxist approach began to be undermined in the course of the 1920s, as isolation produced its reaction. The desperation of large sections of the population following seven years of war and civil war, the outbreak of famine in 1921 - these are situations in which the drowning person clutches at straws and religious belief remains extremely strong. Attempts to undermine the influence of religion ran into brick walls time and time again. In the mid-1920s members of the League of the Godless, who had been trying to conduct atheist propaganda, became increasingly demoralised. But this was a result of material circumstances, not of some weakness on the part of the Bolshevik leadership in trying to combat religious ideas.

In these circumstances Stalinist reaction began to set in - the withdrawal of funding from sharia courts in late 1923/early1924; the cutting of subsidies for central Asia by the centre. This was, of course, the time that Lenin made his crucial warnings about the revolution drowning in a sea of Great Russian chauvinism like a fly in milk. Towards the end of the 1920s the Stalinist bureaucracy took up the slogan of hujum, which meant ‘storming’ or ‘assault’ in the three main languages of central Asia. The idea was that there needed to be an assault on islam in the USSR. This plan was evolved by Russian men (overwhelmingly), although also unfortunately supported by some leading Bolshevik women. Very few indigenous Bolshevik Party members were in favour of it.

One of the factors behind it was the search for cheap labour - segregation in islamic society was keeping women out of the labour force. In this context, the assault on islam was carried out under the slogan of ‘women’s liberation’ and women’s rights and built up to its climax at the beginning of 1927. The idea was that women, as the most oppressed and suffering part of islamic society, potentially had the most to gain from Bolshevism. On International Women’s Day 1927 the hujum was launched. At mass meetings women were called upon to pull off their veils and throw them onto bonfires. I believe that this is a grotesque distortion of Marxism. Inevitably there was a massive backlash against the hujum, which actually represented the first attempt at a top-down offensive by the leadership against the rights of a section of the population that had been won in October 1917.

It failed. Thousands of women were attacked on the streets of central Asia and the Caucasus for not wearing the veil. Women were raped and sometimes killed. This hujum was a million miles from Lenin’s idea that we are absolutely opposed to giving offence to religious conviction and that the way to undermine it is through developing the material conditions of society, not through a voluntaristic, top-down campaign by the state. The hujum was a harbinger of the Stalinist counterrevolution that was in full swing by 1929.
In my opinion the debate about religion and Marxism in 1922 had been about the soul of the revolution. Lenin’s last struggle with Stalin over the national question was intertwined with this question too. Stalin said there was a need for an NEP on the national question - a huge retreat on the Bolshevik national programme. Lenin, Trotsky and Rakovsky were all opposed to this. For them the Bolshevik position on national self-determination, just like the position on religion, was not just a tactic, but a matter of principle. Those in the party who regarded the Bolshevik position as tactical concessions to nationalism and religion were the ones who crystallised around Stalin.

As Marxists we can draw some strong conclusions. First, the Bolsheviks had a proud record of fighting for religious rights - a proud record crushed by Stalin. Secondly, in periods of social upheaval, muslims become radicalised and large numbers can begin to look for socialist solutions. We can expect that today, just as we saw it during the Russian Revolution. Thirdly, given the context of the debates about the hijab, the people who banned the veil in Russia were not the Leninists: they were the Stalinists.