Despite the KGB’s extensive penetration of and influence over the official hierarchy of Soviet Islam, however, the greater part of Muslim life remained outside the Centre’s control. It has become clear since the main Muslim regions of the Soviet Union gained their independence that Islamic practice during the Soviet era was much more widespread than was realized at the time - even if most of it took place within the home rather than at the small number of officially approved mosques. Male circumcision, for example, remained almost universal.19 As KGB reports complained, even Party and Komsomol (Communist Youth League) members saw no contradiction between their public profession of Marxism-Leninism and their private participation in Muslim religious rituals.20 There were many reports also of popular resistance to campaigns to promote ‘scientific atheism’. When, for example, an ‘atheistic corner’ was set up in School Number 2 in the Chechen town of Sernovodsk, it was destroyed by the children themselves, who threw the visual aids into the river. In 1973 the philosophy lecturer at the Grozny Institute of Higher Education was asked to give a lecture in the town of Nazran attacking religion. Fearing for his personal safety, the lecturer asked friends who lived locally to try to ensure his security. They replied that there was no need since no one would attend the lecture. No one did.21
Much of the strength of what Soviet officials termed ‘unofficial Islam’ derived, particularly in the northern Caucasus, from the underground mystical Sufi brotherhoods (tariqa) which as far back as the twelfth century had taken on the role of defenders of the faith when Islam was threatened by infidel invasion. Though the Naqshbandiya, founded in the fourteenth century and present throughout the twentieth-century Muslim world, were the largest Sufi brotherhood in the Soviet Union, the twelfth-century Qadiriya were the dominant group in the Chechen-Ingush Republic. The Qadiriya were more radical, more aggressive and more clandestine than the Naqshbandiya. The Naqshbandiya were chiefly concerned to preserve Islamic practice outside the constraints imposed by the state and official Islam, but showed little inclination to challenge directly the political and social dominance of the Soviet system. The Qadiriya, however, and in particular its most influential brotherhoods, the Vis Haji, were uncompromisingly hostile to the Soviet regime.22
Mitrokhin’s notes include varying amounts of detail from KGB files on operations against Sufi brotherhoods. In 1962 the KGB claimed to have identified the leader of the Qadiriya brotherhood as an ‘unofficial’ mullah named Auaev from the Borchasvili clan which had refused to do the work expected of them on their collective farm. The KGB arranged a show trial of Auaev and seven of his associates, who were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. At the prompting of the KGB, the official muftiate (Spiritual Directorate of Muslims) of the northern Caucasus solemnly instructed all believers to have nothing to do with unauthorized ‘sects’ (Sufi brotherhoods) and mullahs. Though the Centre was doubtless able to present the case as a significant victory, it can have had no illusions that the instructions of the muftiate would have any perceptible effect.23 The relatively mild sentence passed on Auaev is surprising. Other members of Sufi brotherhoods in the Caucasus arrested in the early 1960s were commonly sentenced to death on charges of ‘banditism’ .24 Given Auaev’s prominence, it is possible that the authorities preferred to keep him alive in miserable conditions and try to discredit him.
A further success recorded in KGB files was the shooting, apparently in the mid-1960s,25 of another leading figure in the Qadiriya brotherhood, Khamad Gaziev, who had been hunted by the KGB since leading an armed uprising in the northern Caucasus in the 1950s. Though the uprising was defeated and Gaziev forced underground, the KGB reported that he remained a charismatic leader who inspired his fanatical followers with the belief that he possessed supernatural powers. The KGB sought to undermine his reputation with an active-measures campaign in the north-Caucasian media which portrayed Gaziev as a criminal adventurer with no real commitment to Islam who used religion as a pretext for armed robbery and the murder of Soviet citizens. A KGB-inspired article on Gaziev entitled ‘A Blood-Stained Turban’ was published in all local newspapers, broadcast on radio and television, and read aloud in state enterprises and collective farms.
Eventually a KGB agent codenamed GORSKY penetrated Gaziev’s network and reported that he was hiding in the house of his ‘accomplice’, Akhma Amriev, in the village of Chemulg in the Sunzhensk region of Ingushetiya. An attempt to arrest Gaziev led to a shoot-out in which both he and his bodyguard were killed. The trial of Amriev and his wife, Khamila Amrieva, in the Sunzhensk House of Culture, carefully orchestrated by the KGB, was used to expose the ‘crimes’ of the Qadiriya brotherhood. The KGB organized meetings in Chemulg and other villages which had hidden Gaziev at which some of his relatives and ‘accomplices’, as well as official Muslim clerics, also carefully rehearsed, denounced him as a fraud and condemned the activities of the Qadiriya. The mufti of the northern Caucasus issued fatwahs containing similar denunciations. 26 The elimination of individual Sufi leaders, however, did little to undermine the movement as a whole. Their names were added to the long list of Sufi saints and martyrs.
Among the episodes which caused particular concern in Moscow was a mass Ingush public demonstration which began in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya-Ingushetiya, on the morning of 16 January 1973. The occasion was a particular embarrassment for the KGB since it demonstrated how badly it had misjudged the level of local discontent. As crowds filed into Revolution Square in the heart of Grozny, there was no initial indication of the trouble which was to follow. The garishly coloured banners carried the usual politically correct slogans: among them ‘Long live Soviet Ingushetiya!’ and ‘Long live Red Ingushetiya - the cradle of the Revolution in the northern Caucasus!’ The ceremonies began with the placing on the statue of Lenin of wreaths adorned with the usual red ribbons loyally inscribed ‘To Great Lenin from the Ingush People’. As the speeches continued, however, the authorities became increasingly anxious. Among those singled out for criticism by the Ingush speakers was the First Secretary of the Regional Party, Apryatkin, popularly known as tryapkin (‘rag’) or pryatkin (‘someone in hiding’) because of his reluctance to appear in public. To the horror of the local worthies, the meeting then demanded the return of land in Dagestan and northern Ossetia which had belonged to the Ingush before their expulsion in 1944.
At the end of the day, the demonstrators refused an official order to disperse. Fires were lit in Revolution Square, sheep were roasted and crates of vodka brought in. The meeting continued in freezing cold for three days and nights while speaker after speaker denounced the injustices suffered by the Ingush under Soviet rule. One of the former deportees described seeing his bewildered mother with a baby in her arms kicked out of her house in 1944 by a Russian officer. In exile in Kazakhstan the ground had been so hard that it was difficult to dig graves for the families who died of cold and starvation. ‘I am glad’, the speaker concluded, ‘that I saw this with my own eyes so that my anger will never fade away.’ According to the KGB transcript of the meeting, a woman shouted from the speakers’ platform:
We have no mosques. We opened a mosque in Grozny but the authorities closed it. But this does not stop us praying. We Ingush believe in Allah. He listens to us and will help us. When we were in Kazakhstan, we prayed every day and asked Allah to punish those responsible for our misfortunes. He heard us. One after another they died or passed from the scene - Stalin, Beria, Malenkov, Molotov and Khrushchev. We will continue to pray secretly every day.
Two senior Party figures, Mikhail Solomentsev, the Russian Prime Minister, and Nikolai Shchelokov, the Soviet Interior Minister, were urgently despatched to Grozny to bring the demonstration to an end. At a meeting of Party activists, Solomentsev berated the local leadership for its inertia and cowardice. The regional Party Committee was disbanded and the local KGB and police chiefs dismissed. Though Solomentsev declared that the Politburo wished to end the demonstration without violence, the demonstrators continued to refuse to dis
perse. In a show of force the square was surrounded by soldiers and the entrances blocked by troop carriers and lorries, but the demonstrators were assured that if they dispersed no action would be taken against them. A hundred or so KGB agents were sent to mingle with the crowd and persuade them to leave. Some did, but the majority remained. Fire engines then drenched the crowd with freezing water from their hoses, and a combination of soldiers, KGB units and militiamen drove most of the demonstrators from the square. About 400 initially stood firm in the centre of the square but were finally beaten with rifle butts and truncheons into buses to be driven to detention by the KGB. Other mass demonstrations in Chechnya-Ingushetiya took place in Nazran, Malgobek and Sunzhensk.27
The Centre ordered an immediate investigation. As when dealing with dissidents elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, a series of FCD illegals posing as outside sympathizers were sent to Grozny and other parts of Chechnya-Ingushetiya to make contact with leaders of the demonstrations. AKBAR, STELLA, SABIR, ALI and STRELTSOV were given Iranian passports, MARK, RAFIEV, DEREVLYOV and his wife DEREVLYOVA Soviet identity documents, KHALEF a Turkish passport, and BERTRAND a French passport.28 A year earlier BERTRAND, posing as a French archaeologist, had succeeded in winning the confidence of the leading Russian dissident, Andrei Sakharov, privately described by Andropov as Public Enemy Number One.29 In Grozny and Ordzhonokidze BERTRAND passed himself off as an academic from the University of Montpellier who had been invited by the Soviet Ministry of Higher Education to study the teaching of French and other foreign languages in the Soviet Union.30 DEREVLYOV was later tasked with trying to penetrate the entourage of Pope John Paul II.31
Based on intelligence from the illegals and other sections of the KGB, Andropov made a preliminary report to the Politburo in April 1973 on the reasons for the January unrest. He paid a grudging tribute to the efficiency with which the protests had been organized. The discipline and secrecy preserved beforehand by thousands of demonstrators had meant that no advance warning had reached the authorities. Andropov acknowledged frankly that the influence of the official Islamic directorate of the northern Caucasus was ‘minimal’: ‘As there are no official mosques, religious ceremonies are carried out secretly by believers.’ Real influence lay with the unauthorized mullahs who ‘do not stop believers joining the Party or the Komsomol as long as they remain true to the teachings of Islam. This they do.’
The KGB had successfully put pressure on many of the participants in the demonstration to make public statements of repentance. But, Andropov admitted, the vast majority of the population had been deeply impressed by the demonstration and were in favour of it:
The situation is such that [the January demonstration] could be repeated. The causes have not been eliminated. The local population is prejudiced against the Russians whom they hold responsible for all their troubles and misery. The expulsions in 1944 and the dominant influence of the Russians are the main causes of their hostility . . . There is also strong resistance to Russian culture and a feeling amongst the people that they do not want to mix with Russians. The palaces of culture, clubs, libraries, lecture rooms, theatres and other places of enlightenment are literally empty.32
The KGB believed that disciplined and secretive Sufi brotherhoods were present in every town, street and village of Chechnya-Ingushetiya. The only authority which the people respected was that of the religious elders. Disputes were settled in Islamic courts and Soviet law ignored.33 In reality, though the Centre refused to admit it, most KGB officers had given up hope of extending to the northern Caucasus much of the system of social control which they exercised in Russia. As a former KGB officer in Chechnya-Ingushetiya has since acknowledged, except when pressured by the Centre, the local KGB usually accepted the traditional system of justice administered by the Chechens themselves rather than insisting on the enforcement of Soviet law: ‘Otherwise, on the occasions when for some reason we really had to get a result, no one would even have talked to us.’34
The most visible sign of the strength of Sufism during the 1970s was continued mass pilgrimages, despite official attempts to prevent them, to the Sufi holy places which were particularly numerous in the northern Caucasus. Many pilgrimages were accompanied by religious songs and dances, often performed with a fervour which the authorities condemned as frenzy. A Soviet study concluded in 1975:
Collective fanaticism and religious exaltation may reach high levels of paroxysm when the pilgrims, believers and unbelievers alike, including the students, sing for hours the litanies of the zikr - ‘There are no gods but God’. Pilgrims come from everywhere, from the villages and the cities, and when they return home, they sing religious songs and behave as active propagandists of holy places.35
The KGB reported one occasion on which 40,000 pilgrims gathered at the tomb of the Sufi saint Hay Imam in Azerbaijan.36 Even the destruction of religious monuments did not always deter the pilgrims. When the Uzbek authorities blew up the holy rock at Parpiata, the Muslim faithful constructed a pyramid from the remains, which they continued to venerate. 37
Moscow’s concern about the loyalty of its Muslim subjects in both the Caucasus and central Asia was heightened at the end of the 1970s by the ‘Islamic revolution’ in Iran and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. In February 1979 Ayatollah Kazem Shari’atmadari broadcast from Tehran, ‘The Iranian people’s triumphant struggle constitutes a turning point in the history of world struggles and the best model to follow by the oppressed Muslim peoples of the world.’ As an Azeri Turk from Tabriz, Shari’atmadari probably had particularly in mind the oppressed Muslims of Azerbaijan.38 The KGB active-measures campaign to discredit Shari’atmadari, prompted by his appeal to Soviet Muslims, probably contributed to his disgrace three years later.39 In 1980 the Chairman of the Azerbaijani KGB, Yusif Zade, publicly denounced the ‘infiltration of foreign agents across our borders’ (an indirect reference to Iranian attempts to export the Khomeini brand of fundamentalism into Azerbaijan) and the ‘anti-social activity’ of ‘sectarians’ and ‘reactionary Muslim clergy’ (the traditional Soviet codewords for the Sufi brotherhoods and unauthorized mullahs).40 The Azerbaijani journal Kommunist declared two years later that the rise in unauthorized ‘religious activity’ was ‘a direct consequence of the political-religious movement taking place in Iran’.41
Reports from Azerbaijan and elsewhere in the Soviet Union42 blaming Iran for an increase in ‘anti-social’ activity by Sunni as well as Shia Muslims cannot be taken entirely at face value. The KGB invariably tended to see foreign conspiracy as a major explanation for outbreaks of ‘ideological subversion’ within the Soviet Union. A special department was set up in the KGB Fifth Directorate ‘to fight the ideological subversion from foreign Muslims and the activities of the Islamic clergy’, as well as ‘to expose the negative aspects of religious observance’.43 In September 1981 the Politburo adopted a resolution proposed by the KGB on ‘Measures to counter attempts by the adversary to use the Islamic factor for purposes hostile to the Soviet Union’.44 An FCD directive approved by Andropov a month later instructed foreign residents ‘to devise and carry out offensive active measures to eradicate the anti-Soviet actions of hostile Islamic forces abroad, to expose their ties with Western special [intelligence] services, to bring a halt to their anti-Soviet actions, and to expose the contradictions and disagreements amongst the leaders of the Islamic movement and to use them in active measures’. To achieve these tasks, it would be necessary to establish ‘permanent surveillance’ of leading foreign Muslims with ‘strong anti-Soviet views’ and to place agents in Islamic organizations of all kinds. A working group containing members of ten foreign intelligence departments was set up under the chairmanship of the FCD deputy head, Yakov Prokofyevich Medyanik, to draw up a detailed plan of action for the period 1982-85 to ‘counter attempts by the West to use the Islamic factor against the USSR’ .45
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