Patriotic appeals of Soviet Muslim leaders to their coreligionists during the Great Patriotic War

Abstract

The years of the Great Patriotic War became the time of the USSR peoples rallying against the aggressors, where the heads of religious associations played a signifi cant role. The article analyzes little-known facts of the patriotic activities of Muslim leaders of the USSR. Due to the fact that the USSR government had been negative to Islam for a long time, many events concerning the relations between the Soviet state and Muslims were not widely publicized, and many documents had been kept secret for long periods. Therefore, when arrays of these documents were declassifi ed, researchers got the opportunity to detect and analyze them. Such facts and documents were of great importance for our article. We also found out that some of them were described thoroughly in a little-known modern literature of the latest times. The authors of the article show that the leaders of Soviet Muslims were fully patriotic from the fi rst days of the Great Patriotic War. The leaders of Soviet Muslims rallied Soviet citizens and revealed the true goals of the aggressors.