Jeff Eden's "God Save the USSR"

Jeff Eden is Assistant Professor of History at St. Mary's College of Maryland. His books include Slavery and Empire in Central Asia (2018) and Warrior Saints of the Silk Road: Legends of the Qarakhanids (2018).

Eden applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War, and reported the following:

Readers who open the book to page 99 may wonder what the author had been smoking for the previous 98 pages. They are dropped into the middle of one of the strangest stories of the twentieth century: the unexpected, unprecedented alliance between Stalin's militant atheist state and traditional Muslim religious leaders—an alliance forged at the height of the war against Hitler. Stalin tapped Muslim leaders to rally their public to the war effort, and many obliged (some of whom had previously done time in the Gulag). These strange bedfellows produced a distinctive “Soviet-Islamic propaganda” in wartime, which included calls to a “jihad” against Hitler.

This bizarre alliance came after nearly two decades of brutal religious repression, during which tens of thousands of Muslims (as well as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and others) were “purged,” and thousands of mosques were seized, shuttered, or turned into barns. What did Soviet Muslim leaders get out of the deal with Stalin? Why would Soviet Muslim citizens pay any mind to religious leaders who had made a “deal with the devil”?

These questions are at the heart of the book, and page 99 answers them— the Test passes with flying colors here! On this page, we see how Muslim leaders used their new, state-backed platforms to negotiate new concessions for their communities, and to carve out new spaces for religious freedom in the atheist environment.

Here, we discover that zakat, a traditional Muslim form of charity that had been suppressed by Soviet authorities in the 1920s-30s, was revived in wartime, as it could be used (among other things) to raise funds for the Soviet Red Army. Charity and fundraising also took place during sacred holidays like Ramadan and Eid al-Adha, which Muslims could once again celebrate out in the open, without fear. As page 99 explains, “Some of the charity provided by local Muslims was redistributed by the government for the purposes of buying livestock for the [holiday] sacrifice. After the sacrifice, the meat of this livestock was provided to families in need.” It is a story stranger than fiction: in wartime, the atheist Soviet state used the great redistributive powers of its Communist “command economy” to provision devout Muslims during their Feast of the Sacrifice.

Learn more about God Save the USSR at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue