“Forbidden“ Islam in Soviet Ukraine

Abstract

One of the least studied and documented periods of the existence of Islam in Ukraine is the Soviet period. In Soviet Ukraine, Muslims were present, as evidenced by the existence of mosques in several major cities, Muslim cemeteries, and a number of ethnonyms (for example, the suburb of Kiev called Tatarka). These were primarily the Volga Tatars, who constituted a significant, if not the largest part of the Muslims of Ukraine both in the pre-war and post-war periods — even after the transfer of Crimean region to Ukraine in 1954, as Crimean Muslims remained deported in Central Asia. Another group of Ukrainian Muslims were the so-called Polish-Lithuanian Tatars, who lived mainly in Western Ukraine. However, for the authorities of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic they did not exist. Muslims could not register a religious community and were forced to perform religious rituals illegally, at the risk of encountering oppression by law enforcement.

In my paper I will consider the phenomenon of Muslim communities in Soviet Ukraine, the features of their existence and religious life. I will show that, despite the actual prohibition of the existence of organised forms of Islam, Ukrainian Muslims continued to be part of a wider discourse of «Soviet» Islam, maintaining unoffcial links with the centers of Islamic life in the USSR. I will also touch on the issue of strategies for preserving ethnic and confessional identity by Ukrainian Muslims in the face of the threat of cultural and religious assimilation.

For the research, I used materials from personal archives, own field studies, interviews, local lore publications in local and republican press, biographical materials, as well as studies on this topic by Ukrainian authors.