11. The Hujum, Unveiling and Collectivisation in Central Asia¶
Core Argument¶
In the Sovietisation of Central Asia, a contested academic field, new research often downplays the progressive content of unveiling and collectivisation, ignoring actual conditions and presenting the Stalinist bureaucracy as Bolshevism’s natural heir. The suffering of Muslim women during unveiling’s first phase is emphasised, while the planned economy’s second phase, which substantially benefited them, is ignored. Central Asia was forcibly incorporated into the Russian empire between 1860 and 1880, with the Muslim clergy accommodating tsarism in return for non-interference in local power structures, religious traditions, and the Islamic family, including female seclusion. The October Revolution was welcomed by Muslims for offering greater religious freedom and national liberation. The Third Congress of the Communist International in July 1921 approved action on women’s conditions; Konkordiia Samoilova proposed, and the Women’s Secretariat agreed, that Zhenotdel should begin transforming eastern women’s lives through economic activities outside the home.
The Hujum was originally a general attack on Muslim religious practices, but soon focused on unveiling as the most visible symbol of women’s oppression. The decision to launch mass unveiling came from Moscow, not Zhenotdel or Sredazburo. On International Women’s Day 1927, 10,000 women burned their paranjis at demonstrations; by May the official count was 90,000 unveiled women, though most re-veiled after facing societal backlash, ostracism, attacks and honour killings. Between 1927 and 1929 an estimated 2,000 Uzbek women were murdered for unveiling. Zhenotdel was tasked with organising unveiling but given no means to support women thrown out of their homes. Local party officials proposed closing women-only workshops just when they were most needed. Artyukhina admitted the Hujum was a failure, blaming bureaucracy. From 1927, waqf land was targeted and religious schools’ funding transferred to state schools. With the First Five-Year Plan, unveiling shifted from an attack on religion to a requirement for recruiting women into industrial and collective farm work. After 1928, women who unveiled received material support – a job on a collective farm or factory. By 1937 women made up almost 80 per cent of Tajikistan’s light industry labour force.
Health and hygiene popularisation suffered from the same over-ambition as the Five-Year Plan. Maternity care promises went unfulfilled; collective farm cabins lacked sanitation; hygiene education lacked native-language materials; soap was often unobtainable; health centres lacked running water. A hospital maternity ward in 1933 assisted only six women in its first year, taking two more years to build trust before serving 200 annually. Collectivisation was a mixed blessing for women. They formed the bulk of unskilled farm labour, adding outside work to household responsibilities. Collective farms established co-educational primary schools with compulsory attendance; far more girls received schooling than outside them, and literacy rose steeply. Veiling was forbidden in schools, so many Uzbek women grew up unused to the paranji and chachvon, whose use declined steadily. However, it persisted in some communities as an anti-authority symbol, and fundamentalists funded from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have since revived bride-price, underage marriage, polygamy, veiling, seclusion, and domestic violence in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. Women lacked an organised voice under Stalinist collectivisation. They were ghettoised in the worst production and agricultural jobs, working long hours in demeaning conditions, shouldering a double burden of labour and family dictated by industrialisation needs, not emancipation. Nonetheless, as Dickens noted, Muslim women in Soviet Central Asia had a higher standard of living and social status than anywhere in the Muslim world. After Zhenotdel was disbanded, the Central Asian section continued as Zhensektor (Women’s Sector), a demotion. Its activists promoted the line that only collective farming brought peasant women actual liberation. Local Soviets, not the Party, were designated the main organisers of female masses, relegating women’s concerns to an inferior political domain. The unveiling campaign aimed to free women for industrial and agricultural work; delegate meetings focused on production targets, not removing the double burden. The net effect sharply circumscribed the scope of emancipation.