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Another Islamic Force Awakens in the Twilight : Soviet Union: The twin calls of <i> perestroika </i> at home and religious nationalism abroad are bringing the Central Asian Soviet republics into the geopolitical calculus.

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The world of Soviet Central Asia has long been a twilight zone for the West, at one time an exotic far-flung region redolent of the nomadic hordes of Genghis Khan, later sealed off from Western eyes for well over half a century by an Iron Curtain. But spectacular change, as everywhere else in the Soviet Union, has penetrated even to this area so remote from the West. Central Asia is stirring, affording us fascinating insights into what has been the uneasy coexistence of Russian and Muslim under some 70 years of rigid communist rule.

Soviet Central Asia can no longer be left out of our geopolitical calculus of the region. The Soviet Union’s Islamic empire is now a major new political factor looming between the Russian lands of the north and the Muslim nations to the south.

The world of Soviet Central Asia, encompassing the Muslim republics of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tadzhikistan, Kirghizistan and Uzbekistan, contribute to making the Soviet Union the fifth-biggest Muslim country in the world. Soviet Muslim Azerbaijan in the Caucasus completes the picture.

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As long as Soviet Muslims were relatively quiescent, as they have been under the iron fist of Soviet rule until so recently, the Islamic factor has not intruded heavily upon thinking in the Kremlin. In fact, the shoe has been on the other foot: For most of the last 70 years, Western policy-makers have worried about Moscow’s ability to manipulate ethnic and religious factors to the detriment of Islamic countries on the Soviet Union’s borders.

As early as 1917, the fledgling Bolshevik government in Moscow issued its historic “Appeal to the Muslim peoples of Russia and the East,” with the aim of spreading revolution throughout Asia at the expense of the colonial empires of Britain and France. Muslim revolutionaries were actively courted and many were impressed into the Soviet campaign to weaken imperialism through the spread of world revolution. Trusted elements among Soviet minorities such as Uzbeks, Tatars, Tajiks and others were sent abroad as active instruments to proclaim the “freedom of Islam” in the Soviet Union and the benefits of Marxism-Leninism. While suppressing Muslims at home, the Soviets sought to exploit these same groups in their contacts with Muslims overseas. Soviet agents infiltrated Uzbek, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen and Tajik communities abroad in the hopes of using them as fifth columns against neighboring Muslim countries such as Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan.

Astonishingly, the tide has turned. If once the threat of Islamic politics came through use of Soviet Muslim minorities against its neighbors, the threat now flows in the reverse direction. Enjoying ever greater amounts of cultural, political and religious freedom under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, these large Muslim populations are now for the first time able to look south to the external Muslim world for inspiration and ideas.

The intellectual ferment of the Middle East, including Islamic fundamentalism, is having a direct affect on Soviet Muslims. As these Soviet republics gain greater voice and freedom within the union, their nationalist sentiments are rising. They seek new allies. Islam has always been a major vehicle of political expression in the Middle East, and Muslim Soviet Central Asia will be no exception. Several of these republics are now in the process of establishing direct independent foreign-policy and trade links with their Muslim neighbors, and express renewed interest in their fellow ethnics over the borders.

It is little wonder that the Soviet Union therefore now sees its ties with Iran and Afghanistan in a quite different light than we do in the West. It is critical for the Soviets to win the good will of its Islamic neighbors, to gain their agreement not to fish in the troubled waters of the newly emergent Soviet Muslim populations. This rationale lies behind Soviet efforts to sharply improve relations with Iran, the one country potentially most capable of exporting its radical vision of Islam from Tehran to Tashkent.

For the same reason, Moscow is willing to have almost anybody except fundamentalists come to power in Afghanistan. A fundamentalist regime in Kabul with blood vengeance in its eye could contribute seriously to further ferment in a Central Asia that defines its own ethnic identity in opposition to ethnic Russian domination. Even the mealy-mouthed official reaction to the Salman Rushdie affair aimed first and foremost at the practical goal of not offending Muslims, rather than at asserting the rights of free speech and intellectual freedom.

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As Soviet Central Asia starts to come into its own, we in the West will need to think differently about the geopolitics of the region. The “old Middle East” that we knew will now extend north into Soviet territory. The politics of those Muslim republics in time will become integrated into the politics of the region to the south, as it once did in history before being swallowed up into the Russian czarist empire.

The balance of forces in Middle Eastern politics will be changing as these former colonies start to flex their muscles anew and enter the scene, perhaps taking directions we cannot now predict.

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