‘Islam’ and Soviet foreign policy

Abstract

The issue of relations with Muslim peoples has played a significant part in the foreign policy of the USSR in both the early revolutionary years and in the period since the middle 1970s. The objective reasons, internal and external, for this are ones that no Soviet leadership can avoid: the fact that on its southern frontier the USSR borders three Muslim countries Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and that their populations overlap with those on the Soviet side of the frontier; the impact, real and potential, of developments in the Muslim world upon the Muslim population of the USSR itself; the political roles which Muslim organizations and movements outside the USSR have played in regard to both the USSR and its foes, and, in particular, the potentially antiimperialist role which some Islamic trends could play. These factors alone invest the issues of relations with the Muslim world with major and enduring importance. Yet while this importance is indisputable, the precise impact of the Islamic issue upon Soviet foreign policy is far harder to assess. If at times it has been unduly understated, there has also been a tendency, particularly since the late 1970s, to exaggeration and inflation. On the basis of little evidence and much speculation, a new mythology has arisen. Part of this arises from the essential ist error, common to much writing on the Islamic world, of treating as a single political and social phenomenon, instead of taking particular Muslim countries and movements and examining each in its own right.1 Some of this myth-making also arises from the equally common confusion of conflating Islam as a religion with sets of social and cultural practices that are, assuredly, identi-