While Lenin went some way to liberate the Muslims oppressed under the Tsar, it could certainly be said that Stalin reversed this progress. Dave Crouch writes in the ISJ, " Bolshevik policy from 1917 to the mid-1920s was radically different from the witchhunt that Stalin launched against Islam from 1927." Helene Carrere d’Encausse wrote about the steady closure of religious schools (Madrasahs) in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, as well as the persecution of religious leaders. The deportations of the Crimean Tatar Muslims were an act some refer to as 'ethnic cleansing'. The persecution of Muslim women was perhaps one of Stalin's worst developments - Crouch writes that, "the Stalinists began planning an all-out attack on Islam under the banner of combating ‘crimes based on custom’, focusing on ‘women’s rights’ and, in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, on the veil in particular." This was under the guise that it would 'harm party interests'. It seemed Stalin's 'collective' was quite the opposite. Let me stress - this was a complete betrayal of the Bolshevik's early years. Mikhail Frunze, the leader of the Red Army, when speaking to the First Congress of Turkestani women in 1920, explained that the veil was not contrary to Bolshevik values in any way. Northrop writes that as late as 1925, the main speaker at an Uzbek meeting stated, "A Bolshevik, moreover, had to ‘oppose the Jadids’ understanding of women’s liberation as throwing off the paranji and instead promote the complete political and economic independence of women’." Instead of liberating women, as intersectional communist movements should do, Stalin's rulings set women back in Central Asia. It wasn't all bad - for the men, at least. Ersahin wrote that “…Stalin set up four Muslim religious boards (Dini İdare / Müftiyat / Dukhovniye Upravlenia) in 1942 for Central Asian, Transcausians, Northern Caucasian and Russian Muslims." In a meeting with Albanian politicians, Stalin stated, "Nevertheless, the question of religious beliefs must be kept well in mind, must be handled with great care, because the religious feelings of the people must not be offended." Stalin certainly needed to keep Central Asia, a region dominated by Muslims, on the side of the USSR. This may go some way to explaining his occasions of diplomacy. For the most part, however, Stalin reversed Lenin's progressive nature on Islam - especially for the women.
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