The article analyzes the role of censorship in the Russian Empire as a tool for controlling the printed publications of the Muslims of Siberia in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries. The source base of the study was archival materials of the Russian State Historical Archive, the State Archive of the Altai Territory and the State Archive of the Krasnoyarsk Territory and, as well as regulatory legal acts regulating the process of publishing printed materials in the Russian Empire. Based on the sources under consideration, it is concluded that at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, the number of Muslim printed publications in the territory of the Russian Empire increased. The Muslim population of the country is beginning to worry about issues related to the life of the Russian Ummah in the regions, as well as the participation of Muslims in the political life of the country. The activity of Muslims in the field of publishing, as well as events in the country at the beginning of the 20th century (the First Russian Revolution, the First World War) led to increased state censorship of printed materials. Special attention is drawn to the fact that Muslim publishing centers were formed in the Russian Empire. Thus, despite the fact that the Siberian region was one of the centers of Muslim culture, it did not become a center of book publishing. In the Muslim environment of Siberia, mainly handwritten texts were distributed, which were often anti-government in nature, which also required special attention from the authorities. One of the problems faced by the Muslim Ummah of the Russian Empire in organizing publishing activities is the financing of publications. The bulk of the publications were funded by the community itself. Since the community did not have enough financial resources for publishing, many of them did not function for a long period of time. In the Siberian region, the replenishment of literature, both of a periodical nature and books, occurred at the expense of publications coming from the central provinces. At the beginning of the 20th century, the government also supported the distribution of official periodicals for the Siberian region in order to introduce state ideas to combat the ideas of pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism that were penetrating the country.
Keywords: Islam, periodicals, censorship, Muslims, Siberia, state-confessional policy
DOI: 10.22250/2072-8662.2021.4.34-46
About the authors
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Petr K. Dashkovskiy – Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Head of the Department of Regional Studies of Russia National and State-Confessional Relations, Head of the Laboratory for Ethnocultural and Religious Studies; |
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Elena A. Shershneva – Candidate of Historical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Regional Studies of Russia, National and State-Confessional Relations, researcher at the Laboratory of Ethnocultural and Religious Studies; |