Allah's Kolkhozes

The larger part of the Muslim population in the Soviet realm lived and continues to live in rural areas. Other than in many parts of the present-day world of Islam, alternative, self-segregated, often anti-establishment Muslim congregations emerged outside the big urban agglomerations of the former USSR. Among other factors of this emergence can be mentioned: the mass resettlements operated from the 1940s to the 1970s towards cash-crop growing lowlands; the tight limitation on the drift from the land by the Soviet authorities; the relative autonomy enjoyed by rural production units endowed with specialised economic profiles; and the liberalisation of religious practice in the wake of de-Stalinisation. Eleven case studies trace the transformations of Soviet and post-Soviet Islam within the former collectivised villages in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Inner Russia. The authors provide rich evidence for the close interplay between Soviet kolkhoz administrations and the religious personnel of Islam on the local lore. They show how this connection prepared the ground for the emergence of alternative Muslim congregations in already the post-Stalinist Soviet Union — long before the phenomenon became broadly visible during the boom of public religious practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s.