Jeff Eden. God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War.

Abstract

In this enlightening and highly original book, God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War, Jeff Eden scrutinizes the experiences of Soviet Muslims during World War II. He successfully knits together the stories of a diverse range of Muslim peoples, including Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Kalmyks, Tatars, Tajiks, and others, to tell the story of how Soviet religious repression retreated and changed shape over the course of the war and how Soviet Muslim communities, both at home and at the front, responded to these shifts. For Eden, this period, which saw the reopening of mosques, the celebration of previously banned Islamic holidays, and the creation of officially sanctioned Muslim institutions (“muftiates”), represented nothing less than a “religious revolution” (1) in Soviet Islamic life, an event he sees as fomented simultaneously by religious Soviet citizens and the regime. Even within the context of an atheist state, he finds, Muslim citizens were able to carve out “a distinctly religious patriotism that they could present—or take for granted—as entirely compatible with Soviet ideals” (167).