11. The Hujum, Unveiling and Collectivisation in Central Asia
1926-34
11.1 Introduction
The Sovietisation of Central Asia has become a hot topic amongst academics. New research has thrown up many items of interest but suffers from major drawbacks because too often the aim is to downplay any progressive content in either the state-sponsored campaign for unveiling or collectivisation. Reports of the Hujum or attack on the Muslim religion too often ignore the actual conditions under which the campaign was launched, presenting the Stalinist bureaucracy as the natural heirs of Bolshevism. The very real suffering of Muslim women during the first phase of unveiling is emphasised. Downplayed, or even ignored, is how the planned economy initiated a second phase which substantially benefited Muslim women within the Soviet Union so that, probably, most younger women welcomed unveiling. This chapter responds to this latest round of anti-revolutionary propaganda by presenting events in context, counterposing the contemptible actions of the Stalinist bureaucracy against the strengths of the Soviet system and the support it had amongst women of the east.
Central Asia was forcibly incorporated into the Russian empire between 1860-80 as part of tsarism’s eastward expansion. A largely nomadic and peasant society including Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Tajiks, spread across a sparsely populated agricultural expanse larger than the USA, extending from the Caucases to the border with China, and up to and including Siberia. In the absence of a state structure, the Muslim clergy played an essential role as educators, law enforcers and welfare providers. The clergy quickly accommodated to tsarism in return for an agreement not to encroach into its local power structures, religious traditions, and the Islamic family, including the practice of female seclusion.
Hostility within the population towards a remote and arrogant imperial power began to gather momentum in the first part of the twentieth century, when nearly 1.5 million colonists from European Russia moved eastwards and land disputes between locals and colonists became frequent. The Tsar’s order of 25 June 1916 to conscript Central Asians led to an anti-colonial insurrection. In reprisal, the tsarist army carried out an indiscriminate slaughter.[1]
After the February Revolution, the Provisional Government, fully imbued with the imperialist tendencies of the Russian bourgeoisie, continued to hold down the Asiatic peoples. The peasants and nomadic shepherds of Central Asia, the “most backward of the backward” in their struggle against the Russian colonisers, whose land-ownership condemned them to hunger and gradual extinction, were compelled to seek the most revolutionary class as their ally.[2]
Muslims across the Russian empire welcomed the October Revolution as offering greater religious freedom and national liberation (see Chapter 6.3). The conditions of women within these societies were raised at the Third Congress of the CI (8 July 1921), and a decision to take action was approved. Konkordiia Samoilova proposed – and the Women’s Secretariat of the Comintern agreed – that Zhenotdel should begin a transformation of the lives of eastern women by initiating economic activities that would take them outside the home.[3]
11.2 Zhenotdel and Muslim Women
There was a genuine and natural desire from the top of the Communist Women’s Movement, and down through the ranks of Zhenotdel to take the benefits of the Revolution, particularly those in the 1918 Code, to the most oppressed women in the Soviet Union, the women of the east. But this was not a simple matter, there were important local considerations.
At this time, there was widespread debate across the Muslim world regarding the position of women, did teaching girls to read and write break seclusion, should women – even if veiled – be allowed outside the home? In Turkey, the new President, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was on a mission to secularise the country and was actively encouraging women to work outside the home and adopt modern western dress. This produced a general feeling amongst Zhenotdel activists and party members that they were not sufficiently in the lead on this matter and that was an important factor in launching an unveiling campaign. Unfortunately, it was taken up by the bureaucracy in its own crude way, and for its own reasons.
Seclusion meant most women spent their lives within the family home of their husbands, only leaving occasionally and then accompanied by a male family member. Social mores prevented women from speaking to a man who was not a family member and so, in practice, only Zhenotdel activists could introduce them to Communist ideas. The result was that in Central Asia, very few women were members of the Communist Parties. In Dagestan, in 1923 there were 1066 CP members of whom forty-nine were women, and of these only five were local. In 1927, of the 12,401 members of the Uzbek Communist Party, only about 400 were women, and only about a dozen were Uzbek. A married woman recruited to the party would inevitably be divorced and lose her children.[4] She would be forced to leave her village and the only employment she was likely to find was doing party work. However, male party members, immersed in the local culture, were reluctant to recruit women and alienate their neighbours. They did little to support women recruits, were reluctant to employ them, and usually limited the jobs to washing and cleaning.
These social pressures posed a serious problem for Zhenotdel and in response it adopted a two-pronged strategy. At an April 1921 meeting of Activists Among Women of the East, Kollontai proposed that organising indigenous women in the East be a different process to that adopted in Russia. There were no workplaces in which to hold delegate meetings, nor could a man be present, so women in the Soviet East would be organised through women-only clubs which would attempt to connect with indigenous women, in the expectation that by meeting and discussing with women from other parts of the Soviet Union they would become conscious of their oppression and begin to act on their own behalf.
The Ali Bairamova club in Baku, set up with Azerbaijani women, was promoted as the model to follow. It had a wide range of facilities, including production of goods in handicraft workshops (sewing and wool spinning), literacy classes, and an extremely popular medical clinic. The latter was not an unimportant factor when we learn that Serafima Liubimova, Head of the Central Asian Zhenotdel from 1923-26 had found that due to child marriage and primitive, unhealthy birth practices, the mortality rates amongst women were so high that the Central Asian population ratio stood at 880 women to 1,000 men.[5] Crèche and other childcare facilities were provided for club members. However, these activities were initiated under the NEP and so had to be largely self-funded. The local party tops showed little interest in the club’s activities, and it was generally left to its own devices. By late 1926, Zhenotdel issued a report stating in “Uzbekistan alone over the last six months 71,000 women attended medical consultations in clubs”.[6]
In parallel, but as a secondary and more militant strategy, the local Zhenotdel attempted to utilise the new Soviet laws which fundamentally changed the legal status of women, to eliminate practices such as polygamy, kalym (bride-price), and child marriage, all of which were valid under Sharia and Adat (Common) law.
Zhenotdel attempted to have the local CPs participate actively in the campaign, but these practices were important economic props of the indigenous family structure. For example, polygamy ensured that there was enough labour power within a household to make handicraft work sufficiently profitable, enabling the family to be self-sufficient. Bride-price compensated parents for the loss of their daughter’s labour. Rather than gaining party support, Zhenotdel came into conflict with many local party tops who benefited from these practices, and it was soon told to desist.
Liubimova reported how Zhenotdel suffered a series of setbacks when attempting to represent women in the traditional Sharia and Adat courts, and even in the newly-formed Soviet People’s courts. For example, bride-price had been declared illegal in 1921, and Zhenotdel had attempted to have the ban enforced, but it had met strong opposition. In 1922 the CC of the Central Asian party instructed Zhenotdel “to desist from involvement in family legal disputes and instead to restrict itself to education”.[7] Zhenotdel bowed to party discipline and abandoned its defence of indigenous women in the courts. It has been argued that by leading from the front without the material base to support its actions, Zhenotdel was pursuing an ultra-left policy, but this cannot excuse the response of local party officials that Zhenotdel stop calling for adherence to Soviet laws.
In 1924, a series of Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs) were formally created in Central Asia. As the process of drafting legislation for the new republics began, Zhenotdel again asked the party to enact the laws banning polygamy, bride-price, under-age marriage and allowing women to divorce their husbands. To strengthen its activities, Zhenotdel doubled the number of paid organisers from 50 to 103. The number of indigenous activists increased from three to thirty, substantially improving the capability to reach local women. It also launched the Uzbek language journal Yangi Yo’l (New Life) aimed at a wide audience, with a young, Russian speaking, urban radical named Sobira Xoldarova as its editor.[8]
Simultaneously, it campaigned for indigenous women to exercise their rights under the new laws. Particularly shocking to local men was the suggestion that a woman might begin divorce proceedings without her husband’s permission, and that a mother could be favoured over the father in cases of child custody. These were matters of open, public discussion and the local Communist Party formally resolved: “that a stricter attitude to polygamy among native members of the party will be adopted, along with an insistence that they conform to the Party rules just as European members do”. But two years later polygamy and bride-price remained a serious problem; “in Uzbekistan alone there have been 283 cases of polygamy and 1,170 cases of bride-price among Party members”.[9] Polygamy tended to be more characteristic of men from privileged backgrounds, which suggests the same influx of the ‘better off’ into the party as had occurred in European Russia (see Section 7.5), had also taken place in Central Asia.
Zhenotdel championed the right to divorce both in Adat and Soviet courts, but it turned out to be a popular activity. It was claimed that “divorce is reaching epidemic proportions … everywhere second and third wives are escaping alongside young girls running away from arranged marriages”.[10] In 1925, within a four-month period, some twenty-five women were murdered because they obtained a divorce in the Soviet courts without their husband’s consent. Most, if not all, had been assisted by Zhenotdel which was encountering not just a lack of support from the local party but outright opposition and sabotage of its work. Indigenous women who responded to Zhenotdel were in physical danger, without support, facing homelessness and poverty.
Zhenotdel pushed hard for the allocation of land to women under the 1925 Land Reforms. Previously, a woman was required to be the head of a household to receive land so only widows qualified. Now for the first time, women were permitted to farm independently. Because of the general antipathy of the male population toward them, and the resulting social isolation, women who acquired land under the new laws had to pool their resources, share equipment, and assist each other with planting and harvesting to survive. They joined together in co-operatives to farm successfully, and Zhenotdel was an important facilitating factor. Two years later Zhenotdel reported, more than 1,500 single women had received land.
However, the debate on the new Family Code during 1926 raised concerns that not enough was being done for the women of Central Asia. The CC passed a resolution on 18 June 1926, ‘On the Work of Central Asian Party Organisations among Working and Peasant Women’ calling for an intensification of the struggle against feudal attitudes towards women. “Greater firmness” in this matter was necessary within the party itself. Central Asian communists were to prove, by personal example, and without further ado, that they had implemented Soviet legislation concerning female emancipation.[11]
At that time the NEP was party policy, and it meant a conciliatory attitude generally towards the landowning elements, who dominated most of the Eastern Communist Parties, and often acted to constrain Zhenotdel’s initiatives. It was the NEP that gave the Central Executive Committee of the Turkestan CP the confidence, in October 1926, to formally announce its opposition to divorce, and to introduce a number of far-reaching proscriptive measures and procedural obstacles that made it much more difficult for Muslim women to sue for legal dissolution of a marriage. First, unlike European Russia, divorce could now be obtained only in court, rather than via a simple declaration in the local registry office. Second, indigenous women suing for divorce were obliged to prove in court that they had not been induced to do so for their own or someone else’s private gain, i.e., collecting a second bride-price on remarriage. Finally, “inducement to divorce” was declared to be a criminal offence, and the Turkestan (Central Asian) Party Central Committee instructed Zhenotdel “to desist from involvement in family legal disputes and instead to restrict itself to education.”[12]
Moscow responded by instructing the Uzbek government to abolish Sharia and Adat courts and expand the Uzbek Criminal Code to ban certain traditional Islamic practices such as child marriage and bride-price. But local Soviet officials trod carefully, even though the young, poor, and landless male peasants, their supposed basis of support, were the people who had most to gain through ending bride-price. Customary law continued to dominate attitudes and influence the operation of the People’s Courts. Demands by Zhenotdel that indigenous women be recruited as judges met with only token successes and complaints against Zhenotdel were registered at the highest level of the party.
However, despite the limitations, there was a qualitative difference between the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks regarding women in society and that of western colonialists, the latter being long on rhetoric and short on action, showing little or no serious intention of transforming the Muslim societies they ruled. In British-ruled Egypt and French-ruled North Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, the debate on female oppression was primarily aimed at justifying European rule, rather than bringing about real change.[13]
11.3 The Launch of the Hujum
The Church, predominantly the Russian Orthodox, continued to function in the Soviet Union, but the urban masses, especially the youth, had turned away from it because of its support for the tsar during 1905 and 1917. Its main basis lay amongst the most backward, especially the older generation of peasants. For class-conscious Soviet workers, the Church was a relic of the past which was destined to wither away with rising material and cultural standards. This would, no doubt, have been the course of development had the isolation of the Soviet State been broken by the world revolution and the growth of the Stalinist bureaucracy prevented. We would have witnessed the fulfilment of the policy described in the ABC of Communism published by the Bolsheviks in 1920:
… the campaign against the backwardness of the masses in this matter of religion must be conducted with patience and consideration … To thrust atheism upon the masses would not assist but would hinder the campaign against religion. …the transition from the society which makes an end of capitalism to the society which is completely freed from all traces of class division and class struggle, will bring about the natural death of all religion and all superstition.[14]
It was this attitude that, in Central Asia, permitted Sharia and Adat courts to operate alongside the Soviet People’s Courts. Lenin wrote: “All modern religions and churches and every kind of religious organisation (are) instruments of bourgeois reaction whose aim is to defend exploitation, stupefying the working class”.[15] But in the same article Lenin made it clear that the Bolsheviks did not expect religion to immediately disappear, even after the working class took power. The new Soviet regime decreed the separation of church and state, but made no attempt to outlaw religion; all citizens had the right to carry on both religious and anti-religious propaganda. Church buildings were retained by the clergy with freedom of worship, association, meetings, and the right to seek converts.
The new Soviet regime adopted a conciliatory attitude to Muslim institutions. The 1918 ‘Decree on the Separation of the Church from the State’ separated schools from church control and placed schools very firmly in the hands of the state. However, the decree took time to extend into Soviet Asia.
Waqfs are Islamic charitable endowments often in the form of donated land, where the rent paid could support a mosque and its associated schools (madrassas). In August 1921, the Sixth Turkestan Party Congress made a distinction between cultural and religious waqfs, but took no action to rescind the latter’s charitable status allowing them to continue to receive large sums in waqf monies.[16]
By the time the Bolsheviks had gained control over Central Asia, after almost a decade of violence and disruption, many canals and irrigation systems had been destroyed or were only partly viable. The successful reconstruction of the canal system as part of the Soviet economy after the civil war was highly symbolic of the benefits that socialisation could bring. The land and water reform decree of 1925 in the Uzbek SSR was important for the debate on religion because it identified that in Uzbekistan somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of agricultural land was waqf, so waqf monies amounted to a substantial amount.
In December 1927, at the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin announced a coming major change in policy: more rapid industrialisation, and collectivisation of agriculture. The draft FYP proposed increasing taxation and other burdens on the kulaks, so there was a major concern amongst the party tops that church gatherings could act as a network for organising and legitimising peasant resistance. At the same Congress, Stalin demanded cultural backwardness be overcome and the battle against religion strengthened. In the event, peasants in the countryside who opposed government collectivisation policies often did so in religious terms, rallying round the priest against the brigades carrying out collectivisation (‘the horsemen of the apocalypse’), and with Stalin pictured as the anti-Christ. Organised religion increased fast amongst peasants, even those who had moved to the towns, where hundreds of new congregations were being registered.[17] The CC determined it was necessary to deal with religion in a more confrontational way and decided to actively promote atheism throughout the Soviet Union. This, of course, was not the approach of Lenin as witnessed by his clash with Kollontai over the Alexander-Nevsky monastery.
With the decision to accelerate the First FYP and force collectivisation, the anti-religious campaign went into top gear. New legislation was passed that severely restricted religious activities. In July 1929, the celebrated Shrine of the Iberian Virgin in Moscow – the holiest in all Russia – was demolished. Stalin appeared to believe that religion could be liquidated just as the kulaks were to be liquidated. The constitution was reinterpreted so that religious freedom was restricted to freedom of worship, not freedom for religious propaganda. Church publications, church social gatherings were all closed. Simultaneously anti-religious lessons were introduced into all schools. The main target of the anti-religious campaign was the Russian Orthodox Church, which had the largest number of faithful. Most of its clergy were arrested, sent to labour camps and many were shot.
The Hujum was one element in a general attack on religious practices across the Soviet Union. It was part of the drive to increase the control of the centre over elements in the indigenous social fabric who might stand in the way of the centre’s complete dominance. The Hujum was originally meant to be an aggressive campaign attacking all Muslim religious practices including polygamy, arranged marriages and kalym. The most visible symbol of these practices was the wearing of the veil. In Uzbek towns and villages women wore uncomfortable, full-body, long cloaks known as paranji and a thick coarse horsehair covering over their head and face, known as the chachvon, whenever they left their homes. Veiling was presented as an obvious public embodiment of the Muslim religion, the very linchpin of seclusion and the patriarchal family, the clearest and most public statement of religious belief and its oppression of women. The Hujum soon focused on the veil; it became synonymous with an attack on the practice of veiling, and was presented as an act to liberate women. The decision to launch a mass unveiling campaign originated neither from Zhenotdel nor the Sredazburo (Central Asian Bureau of the CPSU), but in the instructions from the CC in Moscow. In late 1926 two top party officials, both men, Isaac Zelensky, a Russian, and Manzhara, who was Turkic, were sent from Moscow to oversee the Hujum, to ensure it attacked traditional practices effectively and to prepare its launch in Uzbekistan on International Women’s Day (March 8, 1927).
Before 1927, Zhenotdel had not attempted to initiate mass unveilings, but with Artyukhina at its head it immediately accepted that unveiling was a decisive form of emancipation with Uzbekistan the test case. Zhenotdel leaders met immediately to discuss the decision. Liubimova voiced her strong opposition and was removed from her position as head of the Central Asian Zhenotdel within a couple of months. Anna Nukhrat replaced Liubimova and Zinaida Prishchepchik was appointed by Moscow to take over leadership of the Uzbek Zhenotdel. Prishchepchik was one of only two women appointed to the seven member Hujum Commission, the other being Tojixon Shodieva, an Uzbek woman editor of Yangi Yo’l. The co-option of Shodieva onto the Hujum Commission was meant to be a positive signal to those indigenous women who were seeking change; they might have been more impressed had the commission on unveiling been dominated by indigenous women not men.
The Sredazburo instructed party members that their wives and other family members were to take part in public unveiling events, the launch of which would be IWD rallies in the larger cities. A reported 10,000 women gathered at demonstrations throughout Uzbekistan on IWD to burn their paranjis. By May, the official count for Uzbekistan was 90,000 unveiled women. In fact, the great majority re-donned the paranji and chachvon the next time they left their homes. Most of the remainder re-veiled when they found themselves the target of a major societal backlash, ostracised, attacked and even victims of so-called honour killings. Kamp describes how in one area, the Zhenotdel delegate who persuaded eighteen women to unveil was herself murdered the following week. When questioned about the murder, a party member replied, “all unveiled women were prostitutes and respectable women would not unveil”. Fearing for their own lives, all eighteen women re-veiled.[18]
It is hard to imagine, today, the degree of poverty experienced by most women in Uzbekistan in the mid-1920s, and how appealing was the future being presented, literacy, paid employment, and a clean healthy home. However, as Zhenotdel activists soon found out, a millennium-old patriarchal society is not so easily undone and was intimately tied to the deprivation of women. As was said to be the case of one Muslim woman who responded by saying she would be pleased to leave off the paranji but had no other clothing.
At the Third Congress of the Uzbek Communist Party in the spring of 1927, party members were called upon to immediately, and without reservation, ensure the unveiling not only of women in their immediate family but also of all their female relatives. The practice of veiling and seclusion in a communist’s family was declared to be incompatible with continued membership.[19] However, despite its public declarations, the Sredazburo was reluctant to enforce either its own directives or Soviet family law. So many members of the local Communist Parties were believing Muslims, that the party drew back from expelling them. Many mosques were closed, but as a proportion of the total, far fewer than Orthodox churches. In Uzbekistan about sixty mosques still officially existed in 1941, but many others existed, unregistered and illegal, but tolerated. As with Orthodox priests many mullahs were arrested, deported and some executed. For example, in 1936 the Supreme Muslim Mufti of Ufa was ‘unmasked’ as a Japanese and German agent who had, allegedly, turned the entire Muslim Spiritual Administration of Ufa into a giant espionage network.
On 5 June 1927, the Central Committee in Moscow demonstrated its own equivocation on the woman question and its increasing conservatism by giving its support to the restrictions on divorce imposed by the Sredazburo and calling for “a serious study of the [divorce] processes connected with the disintegration of old family-structures.”[20] As a consequence, between the autumn of 1927 and the spring of 1929, any encouragement of female-initiated divorces was unequivocally withdrawn throughout Central Asia.
Hostility to unveiling was extensive. Muslim party members were unwilling to face down clerics warning of the divine retribution which would be unleashed because of their shameful actions in unveiling their wives. The Central Asian Zhenotdel now became of interest to the CC and the Sredazburo. It, rather than the party, was tasked with organising women to unveil, to launch a campaign to eliminate the hold of religion over them but was provided with no means to assist unveiled women who would, in their great majority, be thrown out of the family home and left destitute. The lack of any alternative economic and social opportunities was a major barrier preventing women unveiling. Zhenotdel’s women-only economic and social initiatives were about the only facilities available to enable them to work and live independently. In May 1927 there were a reported twenty-seven established and self-sufficient all-women Zhenotdel workshops in operation.
Amazingly, just as these lifelines were most needed by the women who had unveiled, the local party tops proposed closing them down on the grounds that they were too accommodating to the patterns of indigenous life. Standing reality on its head, they ruled that women-only shops were no longer required now women were unveiling. There can be little doubt that this directive contributed to the deaths of many of the 2,000 Uzbek women estimated to have been murdered between 1927-29 for unveiling – killings that often involved prior mutilation. And let us not forget, these would have been amongst the most progressive and courageous of the new generation of women.
Unveiling as part of the Hujum, in a hostile society with little or no support or protection given to the women who unveiled resulted in a tragedy. Ordered in Moscow by those who had little knowledge of local conditions, this was a deadly bureaucratic bungle. Artyukhina herself admitted that the Hujum was a failure, and pointed the finger at a bureaucracy who did not have the long-term interests of women at its heart.[21] The Hujum generated a backlash from the local population that resulted in the closure and abandonment of many Zhenotdel clubs and shops. In August 1928, Smirnova reported that attempts to introduce boys into girls’ schools in Uzbekistan, had not only failed to attract boys but had caused a collapse in the number of girls attending.[22] Fear of being associated with Zhenotdel grew and the numbers attending its events fell to a trickle. This was a sorry setback. Zhenotdel’s literacy campaigns and school initiatives had, in a decade, dramatically changed the situation. In Tajikistan, for example, the situation had changed from a female literacy rate of less than 1 per cent to one where a third of girls attended primary and secondary schools. Compare this to Britain’s and France’s record on the education of girls in the Middle East and North Africa which Arabs referred to as “the policy of making ignorant”.[23]
From 1927, waqf land was targeted, and the major source of the funding of religious schools was transferred to support state schools. The Uzbek Communist Party formally declared educational waqfs were state property and the clergy should be regarded as a “united reactionary mass”.[24] Yet it would take until September 1928 before an administrative order was issued for confiscation of all religious waqfs, after which repairs of mosques, and the employment of mullahs in madrassas were no longer funded by waqf revenues but by the donations of the congregations.[25] It was also decreed that surviving, self-funding, madrassas could only take pupils above the age of fourteen and must teach “Soviet sciences”.
As the social stresses and strains of the FYP increased, Stalin instructed the Society of Militant Atheists to issue, on 15 May 1932, a “Five Year Plan of Atheism”, the goal of which was that “not a single house of prayer shall remain in the territory of the USSR, and the very concept of God would be banished from the Soviet Union as a survival of the Middle Ages and an instrument for the oppression of the working masses.”[26] Unfortunately for the ‘Plan’, over the very period it was to be carried out, the bureaucracy strengthened the social basis of religion in the Soviet Union by imposing ever increasing miseries upon the masses. The famine of 1932-33, in which millions died, did more to strengthen the hold of the Church over the Soviet masses than could have been done by any amount of religious propaganda.[27]
11.4 Land Redistribution and Collectivisation
In Central Asia, Soviet control was not firmly established until after 1924. During 1925-29, land reform in central Asia redistributed large land holdings, usually owned by Russians, to poor and landless peasants. This had many similarities to the initial land distribution that took place in Russia at the end of WWI and was generally very popular. It was accomplished largely by redistributing excess land taken from the richest kulaks and absentee landlords. Many Red Army veterans and party members acquired land during this period and, using tactics learned in the Civil War, seized livestock, occupied the lands of rich peasants and farmed it. Nearly 90 per cent of previously landless peasants received land with many forming co-operatives, sharing food and work.
The Bolsheviks were in good standing amongst the peasants and the thin layer of intellectuals that existed, not only for promoting ‘Land to the Peasant’, but also for supporting the establishment of local schools taught by local teachers using the local language with its own alphabet.
Middle peasants, those with between one and three hectares, became the most populous category, making up nearly 40 per cent of all peasants. But these smallholdings were worked by hand, too small and too poor to afford even basic European-style agricultural implements.[28] Such small holders were encouraged to form co-operatives by inducements with credit in the form of cotton seed for planting, and grain or flour to feed the members’ families. The co-operatives tended to have a cow or two, and for poor families that meant a better diet for children. Later, collective farms offered more substantial inducements to join, particularly the security of being allowed to farm one’s own plot adjacent to the farm, unimpeded.
At this early stage, a gift of additional land from the state encouraged poor families to join together for greater productivity, though often their plots were not contiguous. Whatever the motives of the founders, the poor were drawn into the co-operatives by concrete benefits and would generally support the later forced collectivisation, even if shocked at the brutality of the process. Initially, no wealthy families joined the collectives. Later, they did join, but only after the state imposed swingeing taxes on farms outside the collectives, at a rate two and a half times that paid by the collective, and simultaneously restricted their right to hire labourers.
In Uzbekistan in the years from 1928-32, the number of collective farms increased from fewer than 1,000 to over 10,000 and the number of peasant households working on them from about 10,000 to nearly three-quarters of a million, over 80 per cent of all peasants. The farm animals of rich peasants were seized, and the former owners given the choice of staying with their animals by volunteering to join the collective farm, or risk being branded a kulak, put on a wagon and sent to Siberia. Uzbek agitators, mostly those who had acquired land in the initial redistribution, were an important component of collectivisation as their presence convinced many poor peasants to identify with the change in rural land ownership. However, as forced collectivisation proceeded, opponents came out into the open, killing agitators and collective farm leaders. The government responded by distributing weapons to its supporters and there was a period of disorder.
The famine of 1931-33 did not have anywhere near as great an impact on Uzbekistan as, for example, neighbouring Kazakhstan, which suffered the highest percentage of deaths of any ethnic group. This was because Uzbekistan was designated a cotton-producing region. By 1931, despite the shortfall in the grain harvest, Uzbek peasants who agreed to plant new varieties of high-quality, labour-intensive cotton were promised a 25 per cent increase in grain. Those who agreed to plant cotton on more than 70 per cent of their land holding were to receive a guaranteed grain allocation.
Though collectivisation began at different times between 1930 and 1933 in different regions of Uzbekistan, it was seen by many as a continuation, in a more extreme form, of the earlier popular land redistribution. Many Uzbeks experienced the change not as an imposition from Moscow, but as a local initiative supported by Moscow, creating a new social order, removing the traditional authority, the big landowners, and creating new structures with new, locally-elected leaders.[29]
11.5 Unveiling – A New Stage
The First FYP proposed the transformation of Central Asia into peripheral ‘national’ regions that would supply raw materials (primarily wheat, meat, and cotton) for Soviet industry.[30] With the FYP, the Hujum underwent a qualitative change in emphasis, the goal moved from unveiling as an attack on religion to unveiling as necessary for the training of “native women for industry … to make them into a female working class.” The wearing of a veil was now emphasised as a serious barrier to the successful implementation of the FYP, as preventing the recruitment of indigenous Uzbek women to work on collective farms. The supporters of government policy were called upon to take a stand in the fight against the Muslim religion because of its serious repression of women, to encourage women to wear healthier clothes to better enable them to be drawn into the developing economy. The dress codes of religious society had to be cast aside to meet the demands of mechanised agriculture. This was more than a change in emphasis, it was a qualitative change in the nature of the campaign and would have a huge effect on its success. Women who unveiled after 1928, would do so in a much more sympathetic environment and would receive material support – a job on a collective farm or small factory – after unveiling.
By 1929, Kommunistka was dominated by the drive to successfully implement the First FYP. In an article in January 1929, Nukhrat stated that veiling remained the main obstacle to women becoming part of the workforce. The role of unveiling in the context of woman’s double oppression was not mentioned. She correctly called for special protection to prevent attacks on unveiled women on their way to and from work, and to oppose the conservative attitudes among indigenous men who expressed open hostility towards women working in factories or on farms, but failed to mention protection of women from domestic violence.
Central Asian peasant and nomadic women were expected to transform themselves into part of the Soviet working class and to adopt habits in keeping with the new industrial programme. Zhenotdel activists in Central Asia were to draw peasant women into large-scale agriculture and teach them proper habits of work, including such basics as turning up on time, going to work even if the weather was bad, etc. By 1929 the litmus test for a liberated indigenous woman was not only unveiling, but also participation in ‘building a cultured society’. Women were expected to “learn how to deal with dirt in the home, with superstition, with illness and with ridding themselves of the darkness of their past lives”.[31] They were to be perfect housewives and perfect workers.
Kommunistka also changed its presentation of the campaigns leading to IWD and May Day. Now, the message was that economic targets should be met, indigenous women had to be won over to support the goals of the FYP: increased production, collective farms, and recruiting the best women activists to the Party. Instead of clubs, indigenous women were now to be prepared for working in the collective farms, factories and plants that were springing up all over Central Asia. Traditional culture was not conducive to industrialisation and had to be confronted and overcome.
Events at which women were to unveil were now scheduled to coincide with the opening of a collective farm and the offer of employment. The idea was that by combining the two, unveiling would be more attractive. As part of this process, party members who managed existing collective farms were to call meetings of all those working on the farm, at which women workers still wearing a paranji or chachvon would unveil so they could work more safely around machinery. Those opposed would be confronted and faced down. Many of the younger women were overjoyed at the relative freedom that collective farms and factories offered. To be outside the home, free of direct parental control, without the paranji or chachvon and in proximity to young men was an exhilarating experience. By 1937, women made up almost 80 per cent of the labour force in Tajikistan’s light industry.
Unveiling came about as two overlapping processes. The first was the launch of the Hujum by bureaucratic diktat, with little or no consideration for the women who unveiled, and were ejected from the family home with no financial support and even killed. The second was as a member of the workforce on a collective farm, with all the support that could provide, accommodation, food, pay and protection. No wonder so many women voluntarily discarded the veil after collectivisation.
The First FYP dramatically changed the public role of women in the Soviet East, breaking seclusion and creating new and active members of society. The concepts of women’s abilities were transformed, and small but important steps were taken; one that was often considered scandalous by the older generation was having a woman’s own name entered on the payroll as this broke her seclusion. However, the women’s domestic position was left largely unchanged. There was little progress in challenging gender ideals and roles. In official literature this tended to be hidden by the extensive use of ‘emancipation’, while referring only to women’s employment in collective farms and factories.[32]
Collectivisation enhanced one ongoing campaign that Zhenotdel was always keen to promote: the benefits of modern medicine. A healthy workforce was one goal of those enacting the First FYP. Overcoming the hold that traditional folk medicine – often totally unhygienic and harmful – had on the peasants was seen as subverting the influence of the mullahs and promoting Soviet values.[33] In this initial stage when medical resources were few and far between, introducing the importance of sanitation, with medical staff urging personal cleanliness and changes in social habits, had a major impact.
Initially, the indigenous population was served by itinerant medical teams, and as collective farms grew most introduced permanent clinics. Women were strongly represented amongst practising physicians, but few were Uzbeks. As part of the health initiative, week-long public health drives would take place in schools and workplaces, where healthcare workers attempted to raise public consciousness about health questions. Religion was singled out as having a negative effect on health and well-being. Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and other religions were criticised for promoting unsanitary practices that threatened the health of Soviet workers. Particular attention was paid to spreading anti-religious biomedical information among Muslim women, for example, the gynaecological problems that sprang from child marriage. The medics were able to back up their opinions by pointing to the substantial fall in infant mortality compared to pre-Soviet times, when over a quarter of children died before their first birthday.
Unfortunately, the intervention was not as successful as it should have been. The same failings that beset the FYP plagued the popularisation of health and hygiene. The plans were over-ambitious. Women were especially welcoming of maternity and neonatal care, but all too often promises were not fulfilled. Education on sanitation was important but the poorly-built and often half-finished cabins of collective farm workers rarely had any sanitation facilities at all. Personal hygiene education lacked both specialised literature and posters in the native language, and basic items such as soap were often unobtainable. Health centres had trained staff but lacked such basic facilities as running water. When a clinic or hospital opened, it took time to build trust in the local population. In the case of a hospital maternity ward in 1933, only six women received help to deliver their babies during its first year, and it took two more years of consistent work by the maternity staff to build community trust, after which it was assisting 200 women a year.
For women, collectivisation was a mixed blessing. They made up the bulk of unskilled farm labourers and while working outside the home could be an exciting and fulfilling experience, it would be in addition to their household responsibilities. The larger collective farms set up co-educational primary schools with compulsory attendance. At that time, few Uzbek daughters were allowed to leave home to proceed to higher education, yet, in the collective farms a far higher proportion of girls received schooling than in the areas outside. Mass education brought a steep rise in literacy for both males and females. With the wearing of the veil forbidden in schools, many Uzbek women grew up unused to the paranji and chachvon, the wearing of which gradually and steadily declined.[34] However, its use clung on in certain communities where it was viewed as an anti-authority symbol. Fundamentalists, funded by sources in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, have built on that and today, in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, there is considerable evidence of the return of bride-price, underage marriages, polygamy, the wearing of the veil, seclusion, and domestic violence.
In the context of Stalinist collectivisation of the 1930s, women found themselves without an organised voice. The entry of women into the workforce was not as liberating an experience as had been hoped for in the early days of the revolution. In Central Asia especially, women worked long hours in demeaning and dirty jobs, ghettoised in the worst sections of production and agriculture, but as Lenin had pointed out in The Development of Capitalism in Russia, being in paid employment and outside the home was tremendously progressive compared to what had gone before. Whilst the worst aspects of oppression were gone, women of the east had to shoulder the double burden of labour and family in a process dictated by the needs of Stalinist industrialisation and not a commitment to women’s emancipation. However, as Dickens has pointed out, despite the many negative aspects of their lives, Muslim women in Soviet Central Asia had a standard of living and a social status that was, generally, higher than anywhere in the Muslim world.[35]
In Central Asia, not even the most hardened bureaucrat could claim the oppression of women had ended, and after disbanding Zhenotdel, the Central Asian section continued as Zhensektor, literally named Women’s Sector, which was clearly a demotion in the hierarchy of the Soviet apparatus. The Zhensektory were to fight religious oppression of women as an unacceptable hindrance to the FYP. Under Nukhrat’s leadership, Zhensektor activists were to promote the line: “Only the building of collective farms brings peasant women actual liberation”.[36]
A parallel change was to designate the local Soviets rather than the Communist Party as “the main organisers of the female masses”.[37] This meant women’s concerns were being relegated to what was politically a distinctly inferior domain, given the Soviet’s increasingly ceremonial function and subordination to the party in all matters. The entire enterprise of female emancipation and mobilisation in Central Asia was being reduced to a secondary political plane.[38] The campaign for the unveiling of women was to free them to work in industrial plants and collective farms, and women’s delegate meetings concentrated their discussions and activities on how to meet production targets, not how to remove woman’s double burden. The net effect was to circumscribe sharply the scope of emancipation.
Endnotes
[1] See N. Pianciola, ‘Famine in the Steppe’.
[2] See L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution.
[3] See K. Samoilova, ‘Work Among Women of the East’.
[4] See M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union.
[5] See S. Keller, ‘Trapped Between State and Society: Women’s liberation and Islam in Soviet Uzbekistan’.
[6] A. McShane, ‘Bringing the Revolution to the Women of the East’, 2019, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, p. 111.
[7] A. McShane, ‘Bringing the Revolution to the Women of the East.’ PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2019, p. 148.
[8] See ibid.
[9] Ibid, p. 172.
[10] Quoted ibid, p. 95.
[11] See G. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat.
[12] A. McShane, ‘Bringing the Revolution to the Women of the East’, 2019, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, p. 148.
[13] See A. Edgar, ‘Bolshevism, Patriarchy and the Nation’.
[14] N. Bukharin, and E. Preobrazhensky, ABC of Communism. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/index.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).
[15] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Attitude of the Workers’ Party Towards Religion’, May 1909, LCW Vol. 15, p. 402.
[16] See B. Penati, ‘On the Local Origins of the Soviet Attack on “Religious” Waqf in the Uzbek SSR (1927)’.
[17] See L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
[18] M. Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan, University of Washington Press, 2006, p. 194.
[19] See A. McShane, ‘Bringing the Revolution to the Women of the East’.
[20] See G. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat.
[21] See A. Artiukhina, ‘From “Offensive” to Systematic Work’.
[22] See A. McShane, ‘Bringing the Revolution to the Women of the East’.
[23] A. Edgar, Bolshevism, ‘Patriarchy and the Nation’, Slavic Review, 65(2), 2006, pp. 252-72.
[24] B. Penati, ‘On the Local Origins of the Soviet Attack on ‘Religious’ Waqf in the Uzbek SSR (1927)’, Acta Slavica Iaponica, 36, 2015, pp. 39-72.
[25] See ibid.
[26] P. Dixon, ‘Religion in the Soviet Union: Part I’, Workers International News, 6(2), 1945.
[27] See P. Dixon, ‘Religion in the Soviet Union’.
[28] See B. Penati, ‘The First Steps of Collectivisation in the Uzbek SSR (1927-1929)’.
[29] See M. Kamp and R. Zanca, ‘Recollections of Collectivization in Uzbekistan’.
[30] See N. Pianciola, ‘Stalinist Spatial Hierarchies’.
[31] A. McShane, ‘Bringing the Revolution to the Women of the East’, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2019, p. 87.
[32] See A. Nukhrat, ‘Delegate Meetings in the East’.
[33] See P. Michaels, ‘Medical Propaganda and Cultural Revolution’.
[34] See M. Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan.
[35] See M. Dickens, ‘The Impact of Russo-Soviet Culture in Central Asia’.
[36] M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, p. 126.
[37] A. McShane, ‘Bringing the Revolution to the Women of the East’, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2019, p. 198-207.
[38] See ibid.