Central Asian History - Keller: Soviet Central Asians 3

Liberating women

In the 1920s Russian communists were horrified by the condition of Central Asian women. Uzbek and Sart town-dwellers were completely hidden by the burqa-like paranji, polygyny and child marriage were widely practiced, illiteracy and poor health were everywhere. Party activists set out to completely change what it meant to be a Central Asian woman of any nationality. The first step was education, building on efforts that had begun with the Jadids and other modern reformers in the late 19th century. The Uzbek Communist government set up teacher academies, wrote textbooks, and built schools as rapidly as possible, but the task was enormous. Islamic and Jadid schools were allowed to exist and were even funded by the state into the late 1920s, because the money and personnel to create a centralized and multi-lingual Soviet school system just did not exist. Of the roughly 2000 Uzbek secular teachers available in 1927, 95% had only an elementary school education themselves. The academy in Tashkent for training women teachers graduated 14 out of 600 enrolled students in 1926. Starting in 1930, the USSR passed a series of “Universal Compulsory Primary Education” decrees, but the promise of universal education could not be fulfilled in any of the republics until the 1960s.

Communist activists set up women’s clubs, or in the Kazak steppes Red Yurts, to teach basic literacy and communist ideology. The state printed large runs of primary readers that emphasized the importance of girls’ education, and made it a crime to prevent a woman from attending school. Education was frustratingly slow and uncertain for enthusiastic revolutionaries, however. Literacy teachers in Turkmen villages could not get women to attend classes because there was no childcare, or simply no time. In Tajikistan women protested a factory daycare that they feared would “turn their children into Russians,” which was indeed the point (if one substitutes “modern communist” for “Russian”). Everywhere families, even those active in the government, withdrew their daughters from school at puberty to marry, both because that was traditional and because there were few economic and social alternatives. In 1926–27 fewer than 1% of Turkmen girls attended school; by 1930 the figure for rural girls had risen to 9%. In 1927–28 Uzbek girls made up 26.1% of the urban school population and 11.5% of the rural school population [Keller, 2006; Kamp, pp. 76–93].

Clearly more drastic steps had to be taken to destroy the backward cultures that kept Central Asian women oppressed. In the spring of 1927 the Uzbek Communist Party, lead by its women’s section, launched a shock campaign against the paranji, appropriately called “the hujum,” or assault. The hujum was grand theater, using public demonstrations of women throwing off their veils to show that the old social values were also being thrown off in favor of new revolutionary values [Northrop, pp. 69–101]. The unveiling campaign was accompanied by campaigns against brideprice, bride abduction, child marriage, the seclusion of women from public life, and polygyny. In Turkmenistan, where nomadic women had never been veiled, party activists targeted customs demanding young women’s silence and deference in the presence of elders [Keller, 1998; Edgar, pp. 221–260]. There were many problems with the way the liberation campaigns were carried out: poor planning, poor organization, and inadequate personnel marked every step. The most fundamental error was the incoherence of the entire communist program. The party promoted the right to freely express national cultures while simultaneously trying to destroy customs that people—women as well as men—regarded as essential parts of those national cultures. Marriage was a crucial mechanism for regulating relations between and within nomadic and settled groups. If clans needed to make an alliance, a marriage arranged between leaders’ families could seal the alliance. If one tribe had a grievance against another, bridal abduction might settle that grievance. If one family fell into desperate poverty, marrying their pubescent daughter off as the second or third wife of a wealthy older man who paid a nice brideprice might ease the family’s poverty. Since an individual’s lineage determined who he or she was, the marriage customs that produced that lineage could not be separated from questions of identity.

The communists assumed that marriage and other “lifestyle” (byt in Russian) practices were products of the capitalist order and should be easy to sweep away under socialism. However, they found that they could not both retain the political support of men and attack the family structure that kept men in a superior position. Even poor men and party members, who in theory benefitted the most from the revolution, fiercely rejected women’s liberation as an attack on their culture and beliefs. The campaigns led to widespread violence: men destroyed schools rather than let their daughters attend, or assaulted and murdered women who asked for divorce or unveiled themselves. After several years of violent and non-violent resistance, which coincided with the disaster of collectivization, the government gave up on assault tactics and employed quieter means. The state also carried out mass purges of all party organizations and sent millions of ordinary people into the Gulag system of camps, which eliminated most open resistance by the late 1930s. More than state repression, though, the factors that made the biggest difference in Central Asian women’s lives were education and time. The changes did not become widely apparent until the post-World War II decades. However slowly and unevenly, the Soviets continued to build schools, train women to be teachers and doctors, and modernize the economy. Urban women by the 1970s were living much like their Russian counterparts, and some attained real political power. Rural women (a solid majority of all women) experienced less change, as customs like polygyny were easier to continue on the collective farms. Central Asian women never achieved the kind of urbane sexual equality that early Bolshevik activists had dreamed of, but then neither did Russian women. They did, however, acquire a sense of themselves as individuals with the right to education and a certain degree of choice—over potential husbands, jobs, and values—in their lives. They have become modern: not unrecognizable to their ancestors, but with a profoundly different sense of who they are and where they fit into the world.

Creating Soviet Central Asians, continued

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Liberating women