Sunni Muslims were overseen by the Spiritual Directorate for Central Asia and Kazakhstan, the Spiritual Directorate for the European Soviet Union and Siberia, and the Spiritual Directorate for the Northern Caucasus and Dagestan. Shia Muslims were overseen by the Spiritual Directorate for Transcaucasia, though this establishment served Sunni Muslims as well. Lenin's rule In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, a highly influential text that shaped communist attitudes towards anti-capitalist struggles, and led to a policy of cultivating left-wing nationalists within the Muslim communities of the Russian Empire and in foreign colonies. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, the first Muslim All-Russian Congress was held in Moscow in May 1917, celebrating the end of Tsarism. Compared to the Christians (who comprised the state majority), Muslims in the Soviet Union were initially given more religious autonomy. This was in contrast to life under the tsars, when Muslims were suppressed and the Eastern Orthodox Church served in an official capacity in the Russian Empire, an erstwhile Christian state. On 24 November 1917, weeks after the Bolshevik Revolution, the Bolsheviks issued an appeal to "All the Muslim Workers of Russia and the East" under Lenin: Muslims of Russia… all you whose mosques and prayer houses have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled upon by the tsars and oppressors of Russia: your beliefs and practices, your national and cultural institutions are forever free and inviolate. Know that your rights, like those of all the peoples of Russia, are under the mighty protection of the Revolution. Lenin further oversaw the return of certain Islamic artifacts, such as the Uthman Quran (to the Uzbek SSR). Furthermore, some principles of Islamic law were instituted alongside the communist legal system, Jadids and other Islamic socialists were given positions of power within the government, and an affirmative action system called korenizatsiya was implemented to help local Muslim populations develop an ideological harmony with Soviet communism. In the Union Republics of Central Asia, all of which hosted overwhelmingly Muslim-majority populations, Soviet law mandated Friday as a legal day of rest. Basmachi movement Muslim national communism Left-wing socialist Muslims began to develop a distinct variant of communism (i.e., national communism), which continued in the Soviet Union until 1928. National communists believed that the fate of the worldwide communist revolution ultimately depended on events within Asia and not within Europe. They also argued that alliances