1In 1932 in the Republic of Tatarstan, located eight hundred kilometers east of Moscow in the Volga basin, a sixty-five-year-old imam addressed a complaint to the Central Spiritual Directorate of Muslims (CDUM). [1] In it he described the treatment inflicted on him by the village Soviet, which had increased its unreasonable demands for tax payments. In mid-May 1931, the Soviet had demanded that he pay one hundred rubles within twenty-four hours. A few days later, its representatives had gone to his home, made an inventory of his property, and ejected him from his home with his young wife and children. They also refused to give him a copy of the inventory. The imam ended up paying, but the Soviet’s representatives returned, still demanding money. The imam then tried to defend his rights. He referred to an official bulletin that specified what taxes he as a clergy member had to pay. But he ran afoul of the Soviet representatives once more, who tore the bulletin from his hands and again came to his home and took his possessions and those of his young wife, as well as his stepdaughter’s cart, which he had received as a dowry for adopting her. Written in Tatar, the Central Spiritual Directorate of Muslims (CDUM) sent a Russian translation of this very detailed complaint to the Faiths Commission of the Central Executive Committee (CIK) of Tatarstan, which had been created a year earlier. [2] This petition [3] is primarily of interest here because of the reference it makes to legislation on faiths. It is emblematic of the use religious communities made of the law in the context of collectivization campaigns and a lengthy series of antireligious measures that aimed to take control of all that they possessed. [4]

2Under the Russian Empire, the institutionalization of clergy and particularly, in the case which is of interest here, of Muslim spiritual leadership, showed a particular approach to the relationship between the state and religions, which were deemed responsible for instilling moral behavior, social discipline, and submission to general laws. [5] Individuals were moreover administratively and legally identified by their membership in a confessional group. In proclaiming the separation of church and state in their 1918 decree, the Soviet authorities completely broke with this political tradition, with the result that socialism, its morality, and its social institutions had to replace the religious sphere. However, throughout the interwar period religion remained a structuring element of social issues, in spite of the struggle undertaken by the regime to promote atheism and convert believers into good Soviet citizens. [6] And yet, in the early days of the USSR, a proportion of “Orientals” were labeled as “Muslims.” Using a regional example, this study breaks with a historiography that too often focuses on the fight against the Orthodox Church, in order to map the Soviet state’s relationship with its multiple confessions. It details the forms that the institutionalization of religions took, and also the religious elites’ and believers’ resistance to or accommodation with Soviet power, so as to reveal in how a multiconfessional context shaped differentiated social dynamics.

3This was particularly the case in the “Muslim” Soviet Republics, where some of the early Communist leaders formulated a project to reconcile socialism with Islam. [7] Overall the Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan had a population mix of half Muslim Tatars and half Orthodox Russians. Studying the religious life of Tatarstan, which had 2.6 million inhabitants in 1926, allows us to refine our current understanding of the relationship between the Soviet state and religious institutions in the 1920s and 1930s. Beneath the repression of some clergy members, who were treated as class enemies of the regime, there was a web of social relationships that stretched beyond the purely religious dimension, in which identity, social, and political issues played an important role. The relationship between religious affiliation and ethnic identities means that we have to fit Soviet efforts to restructure the world of faiths and believers into wider social and political configurations. The focus on religious matters sheds new light on the question of relations between nationalities in the USSR after the Bolsheviks’ ascent to power. [8] In Tatarstan, conflict brought Orthodox Russians, who were assimilated via official colonial ideology, up against Muslim Tatars, who defined themselves as victims of Russian colonization.

Religious Life in Tatarstan, 1922–1927

4Under the NEP, religious life was framed by a set of directives. The 1918 decree of separation of church and state, as well as the memoranda that explained it, which were accompanied by the nationalization of church property and secularization of education, also stated that the state guaranteed religious equality and the opportunity for everyone to perform their religious rites freely. This protection was at odds with the campaigns that seized church property, the classification of clergy members as lishentsy (disenfranchised), and the persecution of religious leaders. The Orthodox Church, the official state religion of the empire, lost all of its prerogatives, and its foremost dignitaries, including Patriarch Tikhon, spent time under arrest.

5The USSR’s other faiths were initially less affected, especially in the “peripheral” territories, where the Bolsheviks did not have the same grip. At the end of the civil war, religious activity still remained largely unregulated. At the time of the campaign to seize the Church’s property in 1922, which was presented as a solution to the famine, an antireligious commission was formed in the Central Committee, the highest level of the party-state, to develop an overall policy on the subject. The political police was urged to play a role in controlling religious leaders and develop a strategy to create new schisms, in order to place religious reformers deemed most favorable to the Soviet government and holders of a certain social modernity (Obnovlentsy Orthodox Christians or Djadid Muslims) at the head of the religious movements. [9] The party and police bodies monitored to a greater or lesser extent the practices and personnel of religious organizations at the local level, especially once these organizations were gradually registered beginning in 1922. Religious associations were responsible for places of worship after their registration with the internal police (NKVD), with the community being compelled to guarantee their maintenance. At the time of registration, which required a defined quorum of members, the authorities verified the political profile of its president and its executive council; as a result of this, they excluded some individuals from these positions who previously had been identified as counterrevolutionaries or had faced prosecution. [10] This dual dimension of taking an inventory of material goods and checking the political and social profiles of individuals, who were nominally identified at the time of registration as members of a community of believers, was the key feature of the Soviet administration of religions.

6The measures to set limits on religious life at the local level cannot be appreciated without taking into account the broader political context, notably what contemporaries called the nationalities policy. This is particularly the case with regard to official efforts in Tatarstan to benefit indigenous populations, such as the recruitment of cadres, the development of vernaculars as public languages, and economic support to non-Russians, notably through agricultural policies aimed at the preferential granting of land to indigenous populations, took on a violent character at the local level. This was most visible in the struggle that the Tatar leadership of the Republic led for equality and improvements in the conditions of the formerly “exploited” Tatar, in keeping with the nationalities policy adopted by Lenin and Stalin; this took the form of tangible ethnic conflicts that pitted against one another Russians, who made up half the population of the Republic and the majority in the towns, and Tatars, the other half of the population, of whom 90% lived in rural areas. A report to the Central Committee of the USSR in 1924 criticized the Republic’s proactive turn towards “Tatarization,” which supposedly caused ethnic conflicts and an increase in crime among Russians, who had been squeezed out by the Tatars. [11] These very real tensions had an impact on the way in which Muslims and Orthodox believers accommodated Soviet rule and their stances on antireligious measures.

7Overall, although the period of the civil war and the NEP led to some weakening of the Orthodox churches, the Muslim religion fared a little better in a context where Soviet dominance was still uncertain in the “Muslim” territories. Figures on the numbers of religious buildings and clergy members vary greatly from one document to another. Within the borders of the future Tatar Republic in 1917 there were, according to different statistics, between 1,854 and 1,890 mosques and 650 to 696 churches; in 1929, 2,134 mosques and 630 churches were registered. In terms of clergy members, those of the Orthodox Church went from 2,250 to 649, while the Muslim “clergy” was comprised of between 4,000 and 4,015 people. [12]

8Due to the low levels of control over Muslim rural populations and the regime’s political desire to make a good impression, antireligious measures were less virulent in the Tatar countryside. For tactical reasons, policies towards Islam were especially tolerant. In Central Asia (for example, Turkmenistan), the nationalization of religious property was not initially extended to Muslims, preserving the pious donations of land or waqf system. [13] The Crimean Tatars demanded that they be given a legal statute guaranteeing the waqf. [14] In Uzbekistan, fully veiled women studied in Soviet schools. [15] A December 1922 report criticized the fact that in some regions the teaching of Islam was led by mullahs within these schools, [16] which attests to the existence of religious teaching in Soviet schools. Moreover, Islamic religious schools continued to operate. In 1924, a political-police memorandum specified regulations on religious education laid down in 1923 by the instructional commissariats: Muslim religious schools were allowed in the Uzbek regions of Turkestan, as well as in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Adjara. In the other Muslim provinces, religious education was permitted only in mosques for children who had reached the age of fourteen years or had completed the Soviet primary-school stage. [17] Furthermore, this teaching of religion was prohibited for Orthodox Christians, who demanded, as was the case in Tatarstan, equality and the possibility of organizing public religious education. [18] In Tatarstan the number of mosques remained the same and the Muslim hierarchy constructed and expanded a new institution, the muttavat (a woman even became muttavat); these developments took place under the aegis of the Central Spiritual Directorate of Muslims (CDUM), which was in the hands of reformers. Moreover, the Politburo also allowed the company Torgoflot to organize pilgrimages to Mecca; these could be carried out using a special route leading from the borders of the USSR to Jeddah, with the company also responsible for the provision of British visas. The only limit set by the political leadership was that the commercial offer of the pilgrimage to Mecca was not advertised. [19]

9In Tatarstan, the fortunes of faiths other than Islam and Orthodox Christianity were linked to local political arrangements. The Jewish community attempted to make use of the influx of Jewish workers in order to preserve and then reopen the synagogue of Kazan. It came up against requests from some of these new arrivals to transform the synagogue into a Jewish cultural center. The administration stressed the social and commercial affiliations of the old Jewish community in the region and set them against the emancipated, Sovietized Jewish workers who had recently immigrated to Tatarstan from the former area of obligatory residence in the western regions of Russia (the Pale). [20] The religious question was therefore posed in terms of the struggle between different sectors of the population, in which the youngest, the most Communist, and the more enlightened led the fight against religion, in particular through the Leagues of the Godless. The Catholic community had almost entirely disappeared as a result of the departure of Kazan’s Poles. [21] The Lutheran evangelists, meanwhile, tried to survive, mainly through one family, the Bütners. In the end, taking advantage of the Great Turn of 1929, the head of the family requested the closure of the community and its withdrawal from the list of clergy members. [22] In 1928, the Old Believers, divided into two distinct communities in Kazan that followed different rites, were ordered to come together in a single organization. In 1930, this was shut down, “due to a lack of space.” [23] In Udmurt, Mari, or Chuvash villages in the Tatar Republic, whose populations were generally considered to be animist, there were only hints of antireligious policy: the supposed cultural backwardness of these populations camouflaged linguistic and social barriers to their political inclusion. [24] Moreover, those who were considered to be pagans were supposed to be potentially more receptive to antireligious propaganda. Considerations regarding culture or civilization that placed people in a hierarchy on the way to modernization were combined with political struggle; the end result was that the practices used to control and repress different religions were highly differentiated.

10Some believers and religious leaders felt that the new socialist order gave them a place in the new society. Attempts to seek the protection or benevolence of the new leaders for the Muslim faith therefore mobilized the revolutionary rhetoric of the struggle against the social forces of the old regime. In their opposition to the disenfranchisement measures imposed on clergy, members of the spiritual leadership of the second district of the canton of Arskij emphasized that, unlike the Orthodox Church, they had participated in the revolution and they belonged to an oppressed nationality and a faith that had been repressed under the empire. [25]

11The nationalities policy also encouraged Tatar culture. Positive-discrimination measures at the village or Republic level had largely opened up social advancement to Tatars who had hitherto been left out of the region’s political life. [26] Since the correlation between Muslim and Tatar identities remained strong, the policy on national minorities came to be seen as a sign of tolerance toward Islam. In the 1920s, classification as a Muslim did not itself carry an exclusively religious meaning. It preserved a social and cultural content, implying a “racial” or “ethnic” meaning. Muslims were considered to be those who were formerly colonized, victims of the former Russian imperial regime, and receptive toward the Soviet emancipation project. Anxious not to offend the masses of the previously oppressed and “backward” nationalities, the central authorities therefore remained cautious in their antireligious measures against Muslims, and regular discussions took place between Muslim religious leaders and party leaders at the Republic and state level until the 1930s. [27]

12However, from the second half of the 1920s political-police and party reports began to express alarm at the development of Islam in Tatarstan. Emphasis was placed on the political and social consequences of this alleged rise in religion. Soviet propaganda agents came up against supposed religious proselytizing. The success of social aid provided by the Soviet assistance committees was compromised by the local economic influence of mullahs. It was noted with concern that Muslim social influence had strengthened in the villages. The Muslim population remained predominantly rural and teaching in the mosques was permitted in the same way as across USSR. Reports highlighted the influence of Islamic leaders on social groups that were coveted by the regime, such as women, young people, the poor, or demobilized soldiers of the Red Army. [28] In the still economically fragile countryside, possession of technical equipment allowed social influence to be assured. Muslim women met up at the homes of mullahs’ wives, especially at those whose homes were equipped with a milk separator, a piece of equipment that was still rare in the region. Household tasks and religious discussions mixed together in a social setting in which Soviet institutions were absent. According to party reports, Muslim clergy rented out their separators. Above all, they frequently offered credit to poor people who were experiencing difficulties. What made this even more of a formidable challenge for the Soviet state was the fact that Tatars and rural residents struggled to understand the workings of the welfare and employment offices, where the use of Russian was necessary to make use of the services.

13The weight of Islam in the villages, where Soviet power had little influence, had drawn attention from the beginning of the NEP, but the Republic’s authorities accommodated it, especially because their relations with the center were tumultuous. It was not until 1926–1927 that the Communist Party of Tatarstan decisively brought the Moscow Central Committee’s attention to the problems posed by the supposed strength of the Islamic movement. [29] The case of a mullah who headed the Komsomol political circle, situations where Komsomols operated in mosques, or where the children of mullahs spread religious propaganda at the Komsomol received much criticism and were seen as attempts to take advantage of the Soviet experiment. [30] The influence of “reforming” mullahs was considered to be more dangerous than reactionary mullahs, because they identified their activities with those of the Soviet polity and risked making adherents of people who were loyal to the new regime, Finally, the reports emphasized the risk presented by the spread to neighboring regions of mullahs trained in Tatarstan. The project of creating medressa, which was regularly presented to the local Soviet authorities, was definitively buried. [31] Moreover, the teaching of Islam in schools was the subject of much debate, initiated by the regional party leadership in 1927. In May 1928, the Politburo decided to close Islamic schools. [32] Soon after, interpersonal training around a few respected figures and the transmission of knowledge of Islam from the master to disciples was also suppressed. [33]

14Through this increased repression, reports by the political police recount active opposition to this policy: posters announcing antireligious spectacles organized during Ramadan were torn down, and demonstrations in opposition to the construction of Soviet schools spread. In addition, believers made a variety of demands: the return of mullahs’ political rights, full freedom of religious belief, the end of the antireligious propaganda and criticism of religious leaders in the press, and the abolition of heavily burdensome taxes on servants of cults. [34] In a letter sent in 1927, 476 Muslims from the Mamadysh canton proclaimed their support for the Soviet authorities, even as they criticized their intent to destroy “the Muslim religion” and declared that they refused to live without religion. They demanded the authorization of religious instruction with no age-limit restrictions outside of mosques and an alleviation of the excessive tax burden weighing on mullahs. [35] In the context of an agrarian crisis stemming from the end of the NEP and collectivization, the policy of fiscal and antireligious pressure bearing down on religious leaders strengthened considerably.

Collectivization, Dekulakization, and the Closure of Places of Worship

15In 1928, a series of inquiries was launched into the country’s religious situation. Based on the reports of 127 party organizations, the Central Committee became worried about the development of sects and Islam in the USSR. [36] In response, at the beginning of 1929 the Politburo issued a directive to intensify antireligious efforts. The decision was also taken to draft a new law on religious organizations, which was adopted on April 8, 1929, and remained in force until the USSR came to an end. The law put an end to all social entities run by religious organizations (credit unions, cooperatives, youth and women’s associations, kindergartens, study groups, excursions, and libraries). Religious education could henceforth only be carried out in private, away from public institutions, and was subject to authorization. The law made control of places of worship even more meticulous, with these now being governed by a series of very strict provisions. [37] A permanent commission on matters of faith was established within the USSR’s ruling bodies. During the Fourteenth Congress in May 1929, religion was designated as an enemy of socialist construction, with the press having already widely caught on to these accusations. [38] Collectivization offered a new opportunity to conduct a comprehensive antireligious policy aimed at clergy, believers, and religions’ material infrastructure, including not only churches, mosques, monasteries, and objects of worship, but also the supposed wealth of the servants of cults, who were quickly likened to kulaks. Restrictions on religious life and the increased control under which believers were placed by the 1929 law on religions were thus added to the dekulakization and taxation policies that hit clergy at the same time.

16One of the first manifestations of this antireligious campaign was the spread of closures of places of worship. The first decisions were taken by local bodies from 1929, outside any legal framework. The last monasteries were liquidated at the same time by order of the party. [39] A legal procedure was nevertheless quickly established to regulate the closures: the majority of the inhabitants of a district or village had to vote on the closure and the decision then had to be ratified by the Faiths Commission. The building was then entrusted to the local authorities, to be used for cultural purposes. Moreover, if a building was located in a place that was judged to be essential for a project of general interest, it could also be closed.

17The “illegalities” regarding the closure of places of worship are well documented in the archives, which sketch out local conflicts between Soviet officials (ispolkom, the village Soviet) and peasant communities. In urban communities, groups clashed according to political divisions that were intensified by ethnic and religious dimensions.

18In some provinces of Tatarstan, krjachens, “people,” made up of Tatars or Maris who were early converts to Orthodox Christianity, seem to have played a specific role. [40] Thus, in the village of Tsubutly, Muslims complained about the improper closure of two mosques, which welcomed some eight hundred “souls,” and made reference to the old antagonism between the Christianized krjachens and Muslim Tatars. [41] Elsewhere, Orthodox Christians emphasized the fact that only Muslim villagers had voted in favor of the closure of the local church. [42] These tensions between communities were relayed by the administration of the Republic. A report of June 1929 recommended the closure of a mosque in Kazan’s working-class district, to appease the Orthodox population of the city; [43] in May, in fact, two hundred people had met to denounce the fact that the Soviet authorities were closing churches but sparing mosques. [44]

19Villages were divided on the question of places of worship, a debate that added to the tensions caused by collectivization, dekulakization, and the formation of collective kolkhozy. In addition, famine, which raged once more in some regions of Tatarstan, created a fear that revolt would spread. The president of the Faiths Commission in Moscow, Smidovitch, stressed that the troubles caused by antireligious repression in Muslim villages was particularly disturbing. [45] An April 1932 report noted that the majority of complaints against abuses committed by local authorities were from Tatar villages. [46] Overall, while violent antireligious campaigns accompanied the collectivization movement and then the dekulakization decrees, revolts and uprisings often began on the occasion of the arrest of a priest, a mullah, or an imam. [47] In Kazakhstan major uprisings began following the arrest of a mullah; on this occasion the OGPU heard demands for the reopening of mosques and calls for a holy war against the Soviet regime. [48] The party leadership in Tatarstan rejoiced for its part that no coalition of discontent had arisen to unite Christians and Muslims. Modern divisions, between the Soviet authorities and their victims, had not yet overcome the older divisions between faiths and nationalities.

20The climax of the antireligious campaign that accompanied collectivization was a February 1930 Politburo directive demanding a fight against “counterrevolutionary elements” at the head of faith associations. [49] The assimilation of the faithful into the enemies of the regime was explicit here. On the ground, the quantity of letters by clergy requesting that they and the community of believers be removed from this category increased.

21Faced with this unrest, the February decree was canceled in May of the same year, and from March 1930 the Central Committee asked the central executive committees of the Republics to respond to complaints about religious affairs and correct “exaggerations and deviations” regarding closures of places of worship. [50] Despite conflicting guidelines, a collection of complaints by the Faiths Commissions was organized.

22The archives of Tatarstan’s Faiths Commission contain piles of requests for appeals, which provide us with information on both the reluctance of the authorities to submit to the instructional commissariat objects or buildings of patrimonial value (which were formally protected from expropriation) and the tendency of the Soviets to seize buildings, in particular to store grain, rather than turn them over to cultural activities. They also attest to the systematic attempt to destroy symbols, visible signs of religion in the public space, which took the form of internal conflicts in the villages and neighborhoods. Orthodox Christians complained about the ban on ringing bells and the seizure of them without waiting for the opinion of the district committee and without the expected repayment to the public purse. [51] In 1933 in Tatarstan, local regulations on bell ringing were implemented in connection with the introduction of the seven-day week, which led to bans on ringing or spontaneous seizures of bells. [52] And In 1937 firefighters and scientific institutions demanded an end to bell ringing; [53] the same year, executive committees of the party debated whether to allow or prohibit bell ringing in their villages. [54] Physical infrastructure that had allowed the organization of churches to be structured and had permeated the daily lives of believers—bells and minarets, ritual objects, documents certifying the positions of priests, mullahs, and imams—were seized and sometimes destroyed. [55] This disappearance of the sound of bells and muezzin calls profoundly transformed the aural and visual landscape of lands where a religious presence was gradually erased from the public space. [56]

23At the same time, the clergy found themselves at the center of repression campaigns. When they were not treated as kulaks and deported or executed, they faced a discriminatory policy of taxation from the local authorities, as demonstrated by the incident recounted at the beginning of this article. In March 1931, a secret document reported that astronomical sums were demanded from Tatarstan’s mullahs. [57] An unprecedentedly large dispossession campaign was undertaken with the objective of seizing the assets of mosques, including the rugs, land, and property of clergy members. Overall, between 1917 and 1934, in the Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan, 30% of mosques and 61% of churches were closed. A total of 61% of mullahs and 86% of Orthodox priests had disappeared by 1934. [58]

24Protests against the closure of places of worship or the fiscal harassment of servants of cults converged on the Faiths Commission.

Repression, Mediation, and Surveillance: The Cults Commission

25In March 1930, echoing the denunciation of the abuses of collectivization made by Stalin in his Pravda article entitled “The Vertigo of Success,” the Central Committee demanded an end to improper closures of places of worship, and the VCIK (Central Executive Committee of the Supreme Soviet), for its part, sent a secret memorandum criticizing “administrative exaggerations” to local bodies. [59] The Cult Commission’s work then began.

26In Tatarstan, the commission was formed by nine and then four members of the CIK (Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of the Republic). [60] At the local level, officials to the faiths were appointed, such as the krjashen Novikov, who spoke Tatar and Russian and was responsible for multiple administrative tasks: notarial business, secret correspondence, the house of Soviets, upkeep of lists of lishentsy, and so forth. [61] The churches requested the commission and, at times, it virulently acted against the executive committees of the party and the Soviets, drawing up a list of the names of those responsible for abuses and requesting their criminal prosecution. It notably demanded explanations for the operation of a racket run by a local leader of the OGPU that was directed at mullahs, [62] or for the actions of the Novo Pismenskij Soviet, which took three rubles from each religious service at the local church. [63] The commission exercised its role as regulator strictly: the vast majority of requests for closures of places of worship were returned to the executive committees of the party owing to irregularities. [64] It attempted to oppose village authorities in the event of illegal bans on religious practices, Ramadan, or the main Orthodox feasts; [65] it condemned seizures of ritual items, prayer rugs, or bells. It published an initial bulletin that brought together a series of laws on the issue of religion when various bodies complained about their lack of understanding of the applicable rules in this area.

27The openness that was reflected in the commission’s activities paradoxically took place in the midst of the collectivization campaign. The central authorities, worried by agrarian revolts, changed their political line in order to pacify. Taking advantage of these circumstances, believers and churches actively seized possible legal remedies to defend their religious activities. The Central Spiritual Directorate of Muslims (CDUM) translated the complaints it received from Tatar into Russian and sent them to the commission. The Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church also tried to protect its followers through formal letters which, although fewer in number, do exist in the archives. Both bodies readily referred to the Cult Commission’s legal bulletins.

28Nevertheless, the years of Stalinist terror resulted in an unprecedented repression of the servants of cults and the derailment of the mediation work carried out by the commission. By the late 1930s, the fabric of the churches had been totally destroyed. With regard to Tatarstan, the number of victims—clergy members or members of the faithful—who suffered as a result of the major campaigns of repression of the 1930s (dekulakization, antinationalist campaigns, the Great Terror), is still the subject of debate among historians. [66] In 1936, the CDUM leadership was accused of conspiring against the state; [67] during the 1930s, almost all Orthodox bishops faced repression. [68] The few dignitaries who escaped continued to turn to the commissions to denounce abuse, but they also began to denounce the spread of “false priests” or “false mullahs” in this context where existing religious institutions were being totally dismantled. For example, the office of a Tatarstan diocese asked the CIK of the Republic to systematically refuse the registration of incumbents for not possessing an episcopal certificate of their appointment by this or that church. [69] The effort to find an organized place for religious life came up against the fact that believers progressively and within a still vague chronology turned to clandestine religious activities.

29In the second half of the 1930s, the Cult Commission continued to compile complaints, though it very closely followed the changing policies of the party leadership, alternating between measures to restore a semblance of legality and virulent antireligious campaigns. The complaints received soon came to be criticized as signs of the arrogance of the religious. The Tatar commission sought to define the necessary density and ratio of churches, mosques, and clergy based on the number of inhabitants. The commission therefore encouraged mergers between parishes, and condemned cantons for having left open too many mosques. [70] In the district of Drozhzhanovskij, it became concerned about the sale of objects of Muslim worship within state stores and noted that there were still too many mosques (forty-eight in the district, compared with fifty-nine before the revolution). [71] This policy of statistical rationalization marks a turning point toward purely administrative stewardship of the issue of religion and the end of dialogue with religious communities and their representatives. From then on local authorities were asked to provide statistics of attendance at churches and mosques, preferably by age, without having to account for their compliance with the legislation on faiths. [72] The Cult Commissions were henceforth at the service of antireligious policy, notably through the collection of information to track down illegal religious activity.

30However, believers still continued to seek the protection of the state, particularly by referring to the constitution of 1936, which reaffirmed freedom of conscience in the Soviet Union and eliminated the lishentsy category. In the years 1936–37, thousands of letters arrived in Moscow to request the reopening of places of worship. In Moscow, the new director of the Cult Commission continued to denounce abuses committed by local authorities that led to further closures. [73] In a detailed 1936 report he made an appraisal of the number of closures of religious buildings, estimating that in the USSR, 28.5% of those that existed before the revolution were still active and that 17,857 clergy members continued to practice in the RSFSR. His report warned against the risk of abuses committed by administrations pushing religious practices into hiding. [74] In 1937, the USSR’s party leadership learned via a census that 57% of the Soviet population continued to hold religious beliefs. The decision was made to ban publication of its results. [75] Having failed in their mission to control and confine religious practices, the Faiths Commissions were dissolved in 1938. [76]

Conclusion

31The 1930s put an end to the semblance of political tranquility enjoyed by Muslim Tatars in the previous decade as a result of their status as former victims of Russian colonialism and their remoteness from urban centers. Furthermore, although during collectivization clashes and tensions continued to pit Russian Orthodox Christians against Tatar Muslims at the local level, this ethnic and “colonial” dimension to social conflicts disappeared in the second half of the 1930s. The magnitude and the radical extent of the repressive waves that followed led to a transformation in the USSR’s religious population, which was now unified in its fear of the regime and the Soviet state.

32Antireligious repression and the failure of legal remedies meant that religious practices became increasingly clandestine. Closures of places of worship spread and by the eve of the war they had virtually disappeared. In 1939, because of the killings, deportations, and defections, there remained in Tatarstan only eight hundred servants of cults. [77] By 1941, there were officially only fifteen churches [78] and, in 1947, only sixteen mosques were registered. [79]

33Institutions and political campaigns relating to religion tirelessly defined and redefined the contours of Soviets’ religious life in accordance with the major political concerns of the moment. Therefore, for example, the Soviet state allowed the more popular forms of religiosity, outside of the churches, to flourish for a while during War Communism. It even contributed to this phenomenon by dismantling the fabric of the churches, leaving the laity adrift. But it also supported religious institutions, through the Faiths Commission created in 1929 and, above all, from 1943, through the creation of Councils for Religious Faiths, which were attached to the Council of Ministers. The revival of the official churches during the Second World War allowed the relationship between the churches and the state to be redefined, particularly through the fight against “illegal” forms of religiosity practiced outside of churches. In Tatarstan, the representative of the Council of for Religious Faiths established lists of clergy members or places of worship that were classified as illegal. At the local level, the idea was primarily to track those who “lived well” from emoluments received for performing religious rites without paying taxes on them, namely those mullahs or muezzins who “illegally” practiced rites of circumcision on children, weddings, and funerals. [80] After the war, and in an ambivalent way, the religious authorities participated in this dual system of institutionalized churches and occasional protection of a parallel religious life, away from the eyes of the state.

34By assigning a place to the churches, the Soviet leaders were able to give believers the impression that they could live with the Soviet regime, especially in the 1920s. The mixture of terror and pacification allowed some Soviet citizens to believe that the system could guarantee them a normalized religious life, a belief that is evidenced by petitions for the reopening of churches. Nevertheless, the violence of the campaigns of the late 1930s brought about an unprecedented rupture in relations between believers and the authorities. Religious activity definitively left the public sphere; it became shameful, dangerous, and confined to private spaces. Hiding became the solution for believers. In the 1940s and 1950s, official religious authorities became increasingly attentive to this shift to clandestine religious practices.