ABSTRACT
After an absence of almost half a century from the political scene of the Muslim world, the USSR became aggressively active in the politics of the Dar ul-Islam in the 1970s. Seen in a global historical perspective, the existence of an important Muslim community in the tsarist empire has certainly been a handicap for Russian expansion in the Muslim world. It was only in the 15th and 16th centuries that the Moscow tsars trusted their Muslim vassals enough to use them as military commanders of purely Russian armies. The October Revolution opened a new chapter in the history of Russian Islam. It began with a short-lived and half-hearted attempt by the Bolshevik leaders to treat their Muslim comrades as equal partners and ended in 1923 with the Muslim national Communists opposing Stalin in a dramatic crisis. In 1923, a tight Iron Curtain descended, completely isolating Soviet Muslim republics from the outside Muslim world.
