 Sultan-Galiev wanted to give Marxism an Islamic face.He argued that the Russian Empire had oppressed Muslim society apart from a few big landowners and bourgeois.He was, despite this attempt at synthesis, thought of by the Bolsheviks as being excessively tolerant of nationalism and religion and, in 1923, he was accused of nationalist, pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic deviations and he was arrested and expelled from the party.