The History of Islam in St Petersburg∗

Abstract

Islam in St Petersburg, strange as it may seem to some, goes back to the very founda­ tion of the city. Its history is linked firstly with the local Muslim congregation and secondly with the academic, scientific and political institutions of the city as the capital of a huge state. Muslims were among those who first arrived to build the city.! In line with the declared will and the edicts of Peter I, manpower and resources from throughout the country were drawn in, and Muslims living in Russia at that time were no exception. They were obliged to supply workmen who were responsible for providing their own food, tools, horses and fodder. At that time, the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Muslim population of the Russian Empire consisted of Tatars whose lands had been conquered and had ceased to be a separate state in the middle of the sixteenth century. The Tatars who helped to build St Petersburg came from Kazan', Kasimov, Sergach, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara and Astrakhan' - in other words the whole Volga basin. D. Aminov quotes one of the early surviving descriptions of St Petersburg in the first half of the eighteenth century (by one Andrei Bogdanov): On the St Petersburg side there is an enclave called Tatarskaya. .. from Bol'shaya Nikol'skaya to Mytny Dvor. There used to be Tatar yurts here, which is why Bol'shaya and Malaya Nikol'skaya are called the Tatar streets. This is because from the beginning of the work on building the St Petersburg earthwork fortress, the Tatars were employed to cover it with turf and then to carry out all kinds of work with the artillery. It was not only construction workers from among the Russian Muslims who came to St Petersburg, but also merchants, artisans of various professions and people who had entered the service. The tsarist government also attracted Muslims to serve in the army and the navy, and in the lifeguards who protected the imperial family and palaces. Peter the Great and his successors waged successful wars of conquest around the Black Sea and in the Caucasus, and little by little Muslims from these regions too came to settle in St Petersburg. The number of Muslims in St Petersburg apparently never exceeded one to one-and­ a-half per cent of the population; but estimates of the Muslim population, whether permanent or transient, were never very regular or reliable. According to the census of 1869 there were 2,000 Tatars in the city; but this figure did not include the guards who had quarters there or sailors of the Baltic fleet, or, apparently, the inhabitants of suburbs with a significant concentration of Tatars such as Kronshtadt and Ligovo.