The Vaisi in Lithuania

Abstract

The article is devoted to one of the less known pages in the history of the Vaisi Movement (The Vaisi Godly Regiment of Muslim Old Believers) which revealed itself as a complex religious, social and political movement among the Muslims of the Volga region in the second half of the 19th and first third of the 20th century. Over the course of a half century (1860–1920s) the movement followed the path from an eschatological religious “sect” to a political party.
In the late 19th century, the Vaisovs came into being as a Sufi-inspired, messianistic movement which built up a “parallel” set of Islamic institutions in Kazan as well as in various rural areas of the Volga-Urals. After a long series of conflicts with the official Islamic clergy and with state authorities, the head of the sect, Shaykh Bahautdin Vaisov, was finally arrested and put into a lunatic asylum. Other leading members were exiled or imprisoned. After Bahautdin’s death, several of his followers claimed leadership. Under Vaisovs’s son Ginanutdin, the group turned into a still religious but more politically oriented movement. Standing in opposition to the Muslim bourgeoisie of Kazan, Ginanutdin chose to side with the Bolsheviks and was killed in the struggles of 1917. While this story is interesting in itself, it shows how a religious sect is transforming into a political party-like group. At the turn of the 1920s and 30s the Vaisi community essentially collapsed, and practically all of the movement leaders and activists living in the USSR were repressed. In Soviet times, the Vaisov movement was a taboo for its religious character as well as for its nationalist tendencies.
The presence of members of the Vaisi movement in the northwestern borderlands of the former Russian Empire is linked to one of the sons of Bahautdin Vaisov, Gaian. Having settled at the beginning of the 1920s in Wilna, Khodzha-Mukhammed Gaian Vaisov (1882–1940?) was engaged in entrepreneurship and took an active part in the life of Muslim communities in the Polish state. In the 1930s, he was one of the prominent leaders of the Muslim community (gmina) of Wilna; he participated in the work of Muslim congresses and distinguished himself by his broad charitable activity. The occupation of the Wilna region by Soviet forces and the repressions that followed evidently played a tragic role in G. Vaisov’s fate.