ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the repression of Islam through the pressure to secularise by the Soviet State. Thousands of clergy were ‘repressed’; mosques and their contents were destroyed; atheism was officially promulgated. Islam revised with the collapse of the USSR, but its general resurgence also led to schism and dissent, with Wahhabis in particular asserting a particularly strict adherence to the faith. This dissent evolved beyond theological dispute to violence; the spread of the Salafi fundamentalist movement caused further problems. Russian attempts to crackdown on what was defined as a terrorist problem were broadly drawn and sometimes mistaken. This tension between state and religion remains an issue in Dagestan.
