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Introduction: Debating the Wartime "Religious Revolution" -- The Setting: From the Years of Repression to Stalin's "New Deal" -- Praying with Stalin: Soviet Islamic Propaganda of the Second World War -- Negotiating Stalin's Tolerance: Muslim Institutions in Wartime -- Red Army Prayers and Homefront Lyrics: Glimpses of Soviet Muslim Life in Wartime -- Bureaucrats Bewildered: Monitoring Muslims in Postwar Kazakhstan.

AbstractThe slave trade in nineteenth-century Central Asia involved hundreds of thousands of slaves, predominantly Persian Shīʿites, and stopping the trade was alleged to be a major motivating factor in the Russian conquest of the region. Nevertheless, Central Asian slavery remains little-studied and little-understood. In this article I will argue, first, that the region's slave trade was characterized by decentralized trade networks and by abundant inter-nomadic trade; and, second, that Russian efforts to end the slave trade by decree and through military force in the 1860s and 70s were not as successful as has often been assumed.