The question of Islamic Minorities in Russia during the October Revolution

The relationship between the Russian revolution and the Muslim peoples in the vast Tsarist empire is quite complex and feeds on centuriesof the Russian historical ethnicity’s distrust towards the non-Russian Islamic ethnic groups against the ethno-confessional privileges conferred on Russian-Orthodox element. Indeed behind the failure of reforming the assimilation of Muslims to other ethnic groups in the empire of the tsars there is a basic historical question, that from the beginning, or from Kievan Russia, there has been a clear identification of the sovereign with the divine investiture of his earthly mandate. This phenomenon was even more pronounced during the period of Moscovy’s birth when the city of Moscow was referred to as “the third Rome” by virtue of the fall of Constantinople in the hands of the Turks in 1453 and the concept of the translatio imperii affirmed by the Ortodox Church. Since then, the link between State and Church has become stronger and stronger until the tsar Peter the Great has decided to establish the Holy Synod by suppressing patriarchy