Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Moojan Momen, Russia, bahai-library.com.
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Russia

Moojan Momen

1995

Russia. Area 17,078,005 sq. km. (6,592,110 sq.
ml.). Pop. 148,100,000 (1990). The present Russian republic is a part of
the much larger Imperial Russian Empire which after the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917 became the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Present-day
Russia is still, however, the largest country in the world in area. The
majority of its population are ethnically Russians (83%) but there are
large regions which are the homelands of other ethnic groups such as the
Tatars (4%), Yakut, Buryat, Chechen, Ingush, Chuvash, Bashkir, Daghestani,
Ossetian, Udmurt, Mari, Komi, and others. It is difficult at this time
to make any accurate statements about the religious composition of the
people of Russia since they are at present emerging from seventy years
in which all religion was repressed. Among those who are ethnically Russian,
the Russian Orthodox Church is the predominant religious persuasion. Some
of the ethnic minorities adhere to other religions: the Tatars, Bashkirs,
Chechens, Daghestanis, and Ingush are Muslims; the Buryats and Kalmyks
follow Mongolian Buddhism. Other articles deal with the Bahá'í Faith in
the various parts of the former Soviet Union outside Russia.

1. The Babi and Bahá'í Faiths and Czarist Russia.
Because Russia had a very strong diplomatic presence in Iran in the nineteenth
century, the first interactions between the new religion and the Czarist
government occurred at an early date. In the early nineteenth century,
a certain Mulla Sadiq had been prophesying the near advent of the Mahdi
to the people of Urdubad in Russian territory, near the Iranian border
(he was exiled to Warsaw where he died). His successor as leader of the
movement that he had iniated, Sayyid `Abdu'l-Karim Urdubadi, is reported
to have become a Babi and to have been exiled to Smolensk by the Russian
authorities, fearful of the possibility of disturbances among their Muslim
subjects. He was later freed and lived in Astrakhan (see "Azerbaijan").
Therefore, when the Bab himself was moved in 1847 to his imprisonment at
Maku close to the Russian border and close to the area that had been disturbed
by Mulla Sadiq's preaching, the Russian minister in Tehran, Prince Dimitri
Ivanovich Dolgorukov (d. 1867) insisted that the Bab be moved away from
Maku (Kazemzadeh; BBR 72). From 1848 onwards, Dolgorukov referred frequently
to the Bab and the Babis in the dispatches that he sent to the Russian
Foreign Office. In 1849, Dolgorukov sent several reports of the Shaykh
Tabarsi episode (q.v., BBR 92-5; "Excerpts"), and in 1850 he asked the
Russian Consul in Tabriz to make inquiries about the doctrines of the Bab
(BBR 9), as well as reporting the episodes at Zanjan (q.v., BBR 114-27;
"Excerpts") and Nayriz (q.v., BBR 108).
When the attempt on the life of Nasiru'd-Din Shah occurred
in 1852, Bahá'u'lláh was arrested as he left the Russian legation, where
his brother-in-law, Mirza Majid Ahi, was a secretary. Dolgorukov exerted
himself greatly to obtain Bahá'u'lláh's release, a fact that is referred
to in Bahá'u'lláh's tablet to the Czar of Russia. On his release, Dolgorukov
is reported to have offered to arrange for Bahá'u'lláh's exile to be in
Russian territory; but Bahá'u'lláh declined, preferring to go to Baghdad.
One further episode in Iran involving the Russian government
occurred when the Bahá'ís of Isfahan were being severely persecuted in
1903 and took sanctuary in the Russian consulate, with the encouragement
of the Russian consul Baronovski. However, the Russian consul then lost
his nerve and the Bahá'ís were forced to leave the consulate, many being
beaten badly by the mob outside as they did so. There must be many more
reports about episodes in Babi and Bahá'í history in the Russian Foreign
Office Archives but these have not as yet been researched.
Czar Alexander II was the recipient of one of Bahá'u'lláh's
tablets (see "Kings and Leaders, Tablets to"). A number of Russian scholars
were particularly active in investigating the Babi and Bahá'í religions.
N.V. Khanykov, Bernard Dorn, and F.A. Bakulin collected material in Iran,
while Alexander Tumanski (q.v.) studied the Bahá'í Faith among the Bahá'ís
of Ashkhabad, and Baron Victor Rosen (q.v.) was responsible for publishing
several of the writings of Bahá'u'lláh. Tumanski was responsible for the
publication of a translation of the Kitab-i-Aqdas (q.v.) into Russian.

2. Bahá'ís in Russia. From about 1884, Iranian
Bahá'ís began to migrate to the Russian territories immediately north of
Iran, to Ashkhabad and Baku in particular. Here they found a freedom of
worship and a freedom to build the institutions of their Faith which was
denied to them in Iran (see "Central Asia" and "Azerbaijan"). A small Bahá'í
community sprang up in Russia itself as well. One of the first Bahá'ís
was Izabella Grinevskaia (q.v.), although it is difficult to be certain
when she first considered herself a Bahá'í. She met `Abdu'l-Bahá in 1910
in Egypt and published plays and essays about the new religion. She was
a resident of St. Petersburg. There were also a number of Iranian Bahá'í
students and merchants in Moscow. Count Leo Tolstoy, the renowned author,
was very interested in the Bahá'í Faith and met and corresponded with Bahá'ís.
However due to the strict control on religion in Russia, the Bahá'ís were
not able to teach the Bahá'í Faith openly there.
For the first few years after the Bolshevik revolution,
the Bahá'ís, although attacked in the government press (BW 2:35), benefited
from the easing of some restrictions and were able to convert a few Russians
to the Bahá'í Faith. Local spiritual assemblies were formed in Moscow and
Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and a few other small communities arose in such
places as Oriyol (?Auriol, Iryul, Uryul, ??XXX) near Moscow, where Hasan
Bayk of Burda` in Russian Azerbaijan taught the Bahá'í Faith and succeeded
in converting eight families.
Eventually, however, the pressures against the Bahá'ís
and all religions intensified. In 1926, a Bahá'í visiting Moscow to give
a public lecture was arrested and a printing press used for the publication
of Bahá'í materials was confiscated. By 1928, there were extensive moves
against all the Bahá'í communities in the Soviet Union. The Bahá'í communities
made many representations to the government against these persecutions
but to no avail. Publications appeared attacking the Bahá'í Faith: I. Darov,
Bekhaizm: Novaia Religiia Vostoka (Leningrad: Priboi, 1930); and
A. Arsharuni, Bekhaizm (Moscow: Bezbozhnik, 1930); while the Small
Soviet Encyclopaedia published in 1933 denounced the Bahá'í Faith for
camouflaging itself as "socialism" and stated that it was one of the "fashionable
religious philosophical systems which the bourgeoisie uses in its fight
against the ideas of Socialism and Communism" (Kolarz 472). In 1938, numerous
Bahá'ís were arrested and some of the Bahá'ís from Ashkhabad and other
areas of Central Asia and the Caucasus were exiled to Siberia and elsewhere.
All communal Bahá'í activity in the Soviet Union ceased from this date,
although many of those remaining at home or in exile continued to hold
firm in their faith. Another wave of persecutions and imprisonments occurred
in 1948.
Throughout these years, the few remaining Bahá'ís in Russia
were isolated from the rest of the Bahá'í world. Mr. Bakhadin Orudzhev
(d. 1989) of Baku lived in Moscow from 1973 and isolated Bahá'ís were reported
in Penza and in a town near Leningard but there is little information about
such individuals. Although there were occasional Bahá'í visitors to Russia
such as Lorol Schopflocher and Muzaffar Namdar, they did not attempt to
contact the Bahá'ís there.
Shoghi Effendi made the opening of all of the Soviet Republics
in Asia a goal of the Ten Year Crusade (q.v.). But no Knights of Bahá'u'lláh
(q.v.) were named for these areas as it was found that there were already
Bahá'ís living there. The German Bahá'ís were given the responsibility
of trying to strengthen the Bahá'í community in Russia in 1963. During
the 1960s and 1970s, a small number of Bahá'ís visited the Soviet Union
as tourists but no attempt was made to teach the Bahá'í Faith.

3. Resurrection of the Russian Bahá'í community.
From 1979 onward, a small number of Bahá'í pioneers managed to settle in
Russia. Paul Semenoff and his cousin Kathryn Soloveoff, two Canadian Bahá'ís
of Doukhobor origin, arrived in Ivanovo to study Russian on 21 August 1979.
Soloveoff had to return after four months because of her mother's illness
but Semenoff stayed until 1981. At about the end of 1981, Mr. Muhammad
Nur at-Tayyib from the Sudan came to Leningrad, where he remained until
1988. He was joined in 1986 by Friedo and Shole Zölzer and Karen Reitz
from Germany, who all remained for short periods of time. Mr. Leif Hjierpe
of Sweden lived in Moscow in 1980-81. In 1982, Richard and Corinne Hainsworth
from the United Kingdom settled in Moscow, where they remain to the present,
and where they were joined by Andrew and Vivien Bromfield from Ireland
who remained from 1987 to 1993. Mr. Zaffarullah Nassim, a Bahá'í from Sri
Lanka, opened the city of Krasnodar to the Bahá'í Faith in 1987, and was
joined by Mr. Fondem from Ghana in 1989.
The first Russian to become a Bahá'í in this new phase
of growth was Miss Katya Zalenskaya in Leningrad in 1982. Anja Skreptsova
became a Bahá'í in Moscow in 1984; Dr. Natalya Konstantinova Belisheva
in Leningrad in September 1987; and Mrs. Irina Skladnova of Novgorod in
1987. In July 1989, Bahá'ís took part in a Peace Camp at Murmansk resulting
in five new Bahá'ís. Among others who became Bahá'ís in that early period
were Stanislav Koncebovski, who was the first to translate Bahá'í books
into Russian in recent times, and Maria Skreptsova, who was later elected
to the National Spiritual Assembly. By the end of 1989, there were some
twenty-three Bahá'ís in Moscow, six in Leningrad, twenty-one in Murmansk,
two in Krasnodar, and one in Petrozavodsk. In March 1990, Abbas and Rezvanieh
Katirai became the last Knights of Bahá'u'lláh (q.v.) to be named when
they pioneered to Sakhalin Island.
From December 1989 onwards, most of the growth of the
Bahá'í Faith in Russia was the result of organized groups of Bahá'ís from
Europe, North America, Japan, and elsewhere coming to Russia for periods
of a few weeks. The first such group came from Hawaii in December 1989
and resulted in five new Bahá'ís in Kazan. Since 1987, Lynda Goodwin had
been leading tours organized by the Center for US/USSR Intitiatives. These
groups would often have a few Bahá'ís in them. On 1 January 1990, a public
meeting on the Bahá'í Faith was organized in St. Petersburg in the course
of one such tour. Between February and April 1990, the South American Bahá'í
musical group "El Viento Canta" toured Russia, leading to Bahá'í converts
in Ulan-Ude and Severobaikalsk in Siberia. Many more organized groups came
throughout 1990-92, some staying in one place and others traveling to various
centers. In 1990, the Soviet American Cooperation Society was set up in
the United States (by Lynda Goodwin and Bill Mahoney) and NetEast was set
up in Canada to facilitate the flow of Bahá'í visitors from North America.
There were also groups drawn from all of the European countries and organized
by the German Bahá'ís. Of particular note have been native Bahá'ís from
North America and Greenland who have gone to the native populations of
eastern Siberia.
In April 1990, the Hand of the Cause Mr. Furutan (q.v.)
traveled to Russia and was present at the election of the Local Spiritual
Assembly of Moscow at Ridvan 1990. Further local assemblies were formed
later that same year in Ulan-Ude (August), Kazan (September), Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk
(September), Leningrad (October) and Murmansk (October). On 8-9 December
1990, the first conference of the Bahá'ís of the Soviet Union was held
in Moscow with representatives of thirty-five Bahá'í communities present,
twenty-three of these being in Russia itself. There were now over three
hundred Bahá'ís in Russia. By September 1991, there were some eight hundred
Bahá'ís in twenty-three local assembly areas and some thirty-eight other
localities.
In April 1991, the National Spiritual Assembly of the
Bahá'ís of the Soviet Union was formed at a convention held in Moscow.
But by Ridvan 1992, following the rapid political changes taking place
in the country, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Soviet Union was
replaced by four new assemblies. One of these was the Regional Spiritual
Assembly of Russia, Georgia, and Armenia. By Ridvan 1993, there were some
3,000 Bahá'ís in Russia with 40 local spiritual assemblies.
There has usually been good relationships with the government
authorities in recent times. The Regional Spiritual Assembly received,
on 12 April 1993, a registration certificate recognizing it as the central
institution of the Bahá'í Faith in Russia. Also of importance has been
the development of an increasingly strong relationship with the Parliament
of the Saka Republic (Yakutia) in Yakutsk, which was begun by Jens Lyberth
of Greenland and continued through the visit of Hand of the Cause Ruhiyyih
Khanum and her address to the Parliament in 1993.
See also: "Grinevskaia, Izabella"; "Rosen, Baron Victor";
"Tumanski, Alexander"; "Kings and Leaders, Letters to"

Bibliography. BW 2:30; 3:34-43. Graham
Hassall, "Notes on the Babi and Bahá'í Religions in Russia and its territories,"
JBS 1993, 5/3:41-80, 86. Mark Townshend, "God, come back to Russia," unpublished
manuscript. Notes from the archives of the Eastern Desk of the National
Spiritual Assembly of Germany, compiled by Gitta Schumann. F. Kazemzadeh,
"Two incidents in the life of the Bab," WO 1971, 5/3:21-4. "Excerpts from
the Dispatches written during 1848-1852 by Prince Dolgorukov," WO 1966,
1/1:17-24. Walter Kolarz, Religion in the Soviet Union, London:
MacMillan, 1961, pp. 470-2.

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