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Mirza Sultan-Galiev: The Communist-Muslim-Nationalist
The encounter of Marxist-Leninist ideology with Muslim societies is perhaps
personified most vividly in the figure of Mirza Sultan-Galiev, a Muslim Tatar
from the Volga region who had joined the Communist Party at the time of the
Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He went on to become a major figure in the
Bolshevik anti-imperialist movement. Sultan-Galiev urged formation of an “all-
Muslim communist party”—a near oxymoron—arguing that ethnic differences
among various Muslim peoples within the Russian Empire would be overcome
by their shared Islamic culture. He believed that Marxism could reach the
Muslim masses if given an Islamic face. He therefore envisioned a powerful
Muslim communist party which could promote communist revolution against
European imperialism across the Muslim world. Religion and ethnicity were
now becoming closely enmeshed.
Sultan-Galiev was himself an atheist, but he had studied the Qur’an and
Shari’a and warned Soviet authorities about the power and depth of Islamic
culture in Muslim life. He rapidly rose in the Soviet system to ultimately become
president of the People’s Commissariat for Nationalities and had a major voice
in nationalities policy under the direction of Josef Stalin.
Sultan-Galiev’s early belief in the Communist Party was based almost
entirely on his own impassioned anti-imperial hopes, in which he saw the
Bolsheviks, initially, as the only savior:
I now move to my cooperation with the Bolsheviks…. I go there
because with my whole spirit I believe in the rightness of the Bolsheviks’
cause. I know this; it is my conviction. Thus, nothing will remove it from
my soul. I realize that only some of the Bolsheviks were able to
implement what was promised at the beginning of the revolution. [But]
they were the ones who stopped [World War I.] Only they are striving to
return the nationalities’ fates into their own hands. Only they revealed the
cause of the world war. They also declared war on English imperialism,
which oppresses India, Egypt, Afghanistan, Persia and Arabia. They are
also the ones who raised arms against French imperialism, which enslaves
Morocco, Algiers, and other Arab states of Africa. How could I not go to
them? You see, they proclaimed words that have never been voiced since
creation of the world, in the history of the Russian state. Appealing to all
Muslims of Russia and the East, they announced that Istanbul must be in

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Muslims’ hands. They did this while English troops, seizing Jerusalem,
appealed to Jews with the words: “Gather together quickly in Palestine,
we will create for you a European state.”
But Stalin and the Soviet leadership ultimately rejected the idea of an all-
Muslim communist party as an unacceptable and dangerous compromise with
bourgeois nationalist forces in the Muslim community. Moscow insisted that
only a party based on the unity of “the proletariat” could lead such a movement
—even though a proletarian class scarcely existed among the agricultural and
mercantile Tatars. At this point, Sultan-Galiev saw the handwriting on the wall
and realized that the Soviet Communist Party would never share his vision. He
became convinced that Muslims had exchanged Tsarist oppression only for a
new kind of oppression under a so-called Russian proletariat; he now came to
believe that Tatar interests were not compatible with Russian imperial interests
and that Communism offered no freedom from imperialism, merely a new form
of it. Sultan-Galiev was eventually arrested by Stalin; he was executed in 1940,
along with many thousands of other Muslim-Turkic nationalists.
Sultan-Galiev was an outstanding example of a prominent communist
activist, theoretician, and important spokesman for the Muslim left. The events
that led to his denunciation, jail, exile, marginalization, and later execution
provided dramatic evidence of the “nationalist” character of Islamic culture
when confronted by European—even Soviet—imperialism. Indeed, the
phenomenon of Sultan-Galiev’s break with Stalin and his subsequent embrace of
Muslim nationalist interests was given its own nomenclature within the
Communist Party, “Sultan-Galievism,” that would forever invoke communist
fear of the latent elements of nationalism that existed within the Muslim
communities of Russia. “This, you see, is what happens when nationalism is
allowed to displace Marxist-Leninist ideology” was the refrain. And the Soviets
themselves had inadvertently pressed so hard as to turn Islam into an “ethnicity.”
US policies have done much the same in the Global War on Terror.
Thus, for all the revolutionary potential of the Russian Muslim community in
carrying a communist anti-imperialist message to the oppressed peoples of the
East, the experiment was a terrible failure: Muslims remained deeply hostile to
subsequent Soviet policies and Soviet oppression of Muslim Turkic culture. By
1926, Moscow had come to see Islam as a basically anti-Bolshevik force and
organized a Union of Militant Atheists to foster atheist propaganda among
Muslim populations and to remove all believers from positions of power. Soviet
official promulgation of atheist ideology and suppression of all religions

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constituted the greatest sin the Soviet regime could commit in the eyes of
Muslims. Muslims sought to protect and practice their religious rituals and
customs in an underground fashion; Sufi networks were instrumental in keeping
some knowledge of Islam alive during the dark years of Soviet rule.
Where Tsarist Russia had promoted religion as the basis of political and
social organization of the empire, the Bolshevik communists now dramatically
changed direction and sought to encourage narrowly defined ethnic groups as the
basis for organization of the Soviet Empire in a divide-and-conquer process.
Hence, instead of working with a broad Turkic ethnicity, for example, the
Soviets developed separate political republics for each separate Turkic language
—Uzbek, Tatar, Kazak, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Azeri, and so on. Ethnicity had now
become the tool by which to destroy the Islamic identity and possible pan-Turkic
nationalist ideas.
The Soviet struggle with Islam took on vivid new foreign-policy dimensions
with Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to shore up a new communist
regime there. Very quickly, armed rebellion spread across Afghanistan, fighting a
holy war in the name of Islam against the Soviet occupation. The West, and
especially the United States, lent major support to the anti-Soviet jihad that
succeeded in driving out the Soviets eight years later. Many Soviet troops there,
however, were themselves Soviet Muslim and felt some ambivalence toward
Soviet policies designed to crush an Islamic resistance movement. And later,
with the Soviet withdrawal in failure from Afghanistan, Afghan and foreign