Shoshana Keller. Journal of Women’s History. Volume 10, Issue 1, Spring 1998.
The Soviet campaign for the liberation of women in Uzbekistan consisted of two major components. The first was freeing women from Muslim social and religious strictures. The second was moving large numbers of women into the new agricultural and industrial workforce. This article focuses on the method and results of the first component. The Communist Party attempted to destroy by administrative fiat arranged marriage, bride-price, the marriage of young girls to adult men, the seclusion of women from public life, polygyny, and other customs. While the Soviets made significant changes in women’s status, particularly among the educated classes, in the end they failed to stamp out any of the traditional practices they had campaigned against. The liberation effort, while claiming to help Uzbek women, instead bound them in a terrible dilemma. Women found themselves caught between obeying the government, remaining loyal to their families, communities, and customs, and trying to realize their own desires in a bewildering sea of new opportunities. Ultimately, thousands of women became victims of the very forces claiming to help them.
No Soviet initiative caused as much violent upheaval in Uzbek society as the campaign for raskreposhchenie zhenshchin (the liberation of women). This was an enormous effort, of which there were two major components. The first began as an administrative assault (hujum) on Islamic tradition in 1927-1929 and continued at a less intensive level thereafter, attempting to free women from Muslim social and religious strictures. This encompassed not only unveiling women, but destroying traditional practices of arranged marriage, bride-price, the marriage of young girls to adult men, the seclusion of women from public life, polygyny, and other customs. The second component, beginning in 1929-1930, moved large numbers of women into the workforce, primarily on collective farms and in textile and food-processing factories. This article focuses on the anti-Islamic component of the Soviet women’s liberation campaign.
The Soviet government used the women’s liberation campaign as one of its primary weapons against Islam as a whole, never passing up a chance eapons against Islam as a whole, never passing up a chance to declare that Islam must be eliminated because it oppressed women. They also used the campaign as an effective tool to divide the clergy, and to pit family members against one another. While the Soviets achieved significant changes in women’s status, particularly among the educated classes, in the end they failed to stamp out any of the traditional practices against which they had campaigned so diligently.
Origins and Legal Underpinnings of Liberation
The organizations primarily responsible for carrying out the Soviet women’s liberation campaign were the Central Asian Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolshevik) (Sredazburo TsK VKP[b]) and its Women’s Section (Zhenotdel), the Zhenotdel of the TsK VKP(b) itself, the Zhenotdel of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan (KP[b]Uz), the Uzbek commissariats of Justice and Health, the agitation and propaganda departments of all of the above organs, and the Union of Militant Godless. The Communist Party and state apparatus of Uzbekistan nominally governed the republic, but took instructions from Sredazburo, which in turn was subordinate to the Central Committee in Moscow.
Efforts to introduce the new Bolshevik laws on women and the family into Central Asia began early, when a marriage registry office (ZAGS) was set up in Turkestan in November 1919. Party activists organized chapters of the Zhenotdel in the people’s republics of Bukhara and Khiva in 1923 and 1924, and founded women’s clubs in Ferghana the following year. The Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union issued a broad statement in February 1925 affirming the “rights of women of the Soviet East” to freedom from all forms of traditional and religious oppression and to full participation in social and political life. At the same time, such propaganda journals as Bezbozhnik u stanka (The Godless at the Workbench) and the Uzbek Kommunist began running articles on Muslim women’s liberation that emphasized the cruelty of Islamic “fanaticism” and the foolish superstition of mullas. In the face of powerful contradictory forces, however, these early attempts to promote liberation were tentative. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkmenistan discussed outlawing polygyny in 1925, only to decide that they had to work out party policy very carefully in light of “the principle of the necessity of allowing polygyny among national communists, in the first place among responsible workers.” In other words, popular support for polygyny was too strong, and the party too weak, for the practice to be eliminated by decree.
Soviet attempts to launch a women’s liberation movement were haphazard at best until 1926, when Sredazburo and the all-union Zhenotdel began planning for a campaign to unveil women. On 19 May 1926, Sredazburo’s Zhenotdel director, Serafima T. Liubimova, presented a report to the Executive Political Bureau “on party work concerning the liberation of women in Central Asia,” in which she outlined the necessity of the task and urged party organizations to begin serious work on educating women and bringing them into the government apparatus and labor force. Liubimova declared that Muslim women’s traditional lives were no longer compatible with the world around them: “The way of life (byt) which has been preserved until now is women’s slavery (qalim [bride-price], polygyny, seclusion, the giving of underage girls [in marriage]) etc., that is in contradiction to economics and hampers the movement among broad masses of women toward economic independence.”
The key to ending such economic and personal misery was to destroy the religious beliefs and customs that kept women in slavery. Liubimova gave several specific examples of how Islam oppressed women and men economically. The practice of sex-segregation discriminated against female laborers who wished to work as maids—Islamic law barred women from such work unless they were close relatives of their employers. Marriage in early adolescence and “mutilating birth practices” (kalechenie rozheni[ts]) led to such high mortality rates among women that, Liubimova claimed, the Central Asian population ratio stood at an average of 880 women to every 1,000 men. The practices of bride-price and polygyny thus placed an undue burden on poor men and perpetuated class- based oppression.
Liubimova’s comments reflected the long-standing Bolshevik insistence that women be freed from household duties to find liberation via employment. She considered even domestic service to be superior to leisured seclusion. In 1926, the Soviet government had not yet begun to recruit Central Asian women into the workforce on a large scale, and Liubimova’s thinking was based on Western assumptions that did not take into account Uzbek equations of seclusion with wealth, status, and virtuous modesty. This lack of awareness of deep cultural differences was an important factor in the disastrous course the liberation campaign was to take.” Liubimova was rather vague on how Islamic practices were to be eliminated, but she did state that it was important for the Uzbek and Turkmen republics to accept the “family-marriage codex and legislation on the illegality of social (bytovye) crimes” into their law codes.” The law was one of the most important and effective tools used in the campaign, since terms in prison and labor camps could be used to force people to change their behavior. Accordingly, in 1926-1927, Uzbekistan added several articles pertaining to social crimes to its criminal code, penalizing various forms of sexual intercourse with minors, the payment of bride price, male homosexual sex, and forcing women to marry against their will.
Oddly enough, Uzbekistan’s criminal code did not include polygyny among its list of social crimes, although the 1928 criminal code of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) did outlaw the custom, with attendant penalties of up to one year of “corrective labor” or a fine of up to one thousand rubles. A new article outlawing polygyny was not added to the Uzbek code until 1931; its penalties included deprivation of voting rights. This kind of delay in outlawing entrenched customs was not unheard of in Soviet Central Asia. In October 1926, the Turkmen Central Committee considered a law abolishing bride-price, but did not actually change its criminal code until May 1928. The legal codes continued to be modified over time, with clauses eventually added that made it a crime to prevent a woman from actively participating in society through such activities as going to school.
The task of implementing and enforcing these laws fell to the Uzbek Commissariat of justice. The agency began by using the new secular court system to give Muslim women more legal autonomy than they had enjoyed previously under Islamic law. Soviet law gave women the right to demand divorce under easier terms than did Islamic law, and women were much more likely to obtain a divorce in the secular Soviet courts than in the religious Islamic ones. In order to further guarantee female access to divorce through the secular courts, the commissariat issued a circular in 1926 that forbade religious courts from hearing any divorce cases. In March 1927, the commissariat also issued a general call to form a “united front in the offensive against survivals of the old way of life for the liberation of women,” no doubt in connection with the launching of the unveiling campaigns.
However, Zhenotdel workers found that giving Muslim women legal recourse was only part of the battle. Workers who monitored the secular courts to determine whether they were giving women fair hearings reported cases where women who had been assaulted by their husbands or male relatives either perjured themselves in court or refused to testify at all against their assailants. This phenomenon is widespread among battered women, in general, for complex psychological and economic reasons. For Uzbek women, the act of bringing Uzbek men to Soviet courts additionally opened them to accusations of disloyalty to Islam, to the family, or both. Many women pressed ahead with their charges, but a significant number of them halted prosecution rather than cut themselves off from family and community. Zhenotdel workers also pointed out that the manifest incompetence and indifference of many Soviet courts barred women from trying to prosecute their attackers.
The People’s Commissariat of Health played a role in attacking social customs by emphasizing the unhealthiness of veils, early sexual intercourse, and fasting for Ramadan. In April 1929, the Commissariat’s Special Commission for the Protection of Mothers and Youth produced a set of guidelines to aid doctors in deciding whether or not a girl was sexually mature. The guidelines stated that the average age for the onset of menses in Uzbek girls was 15 1/2, and therefore the legal age of marriage should be set minimally at age 17, preferably at 18 1/2. They also listed a series of minimal body measurements (height, weight, etc.) that a girl had to reach in order to be designated “sexually mature.” A short while later the commissariats of Health and justice sent a memorandum to Uzbek Komsomol (Communist Youth League) cells on enforcing the guidelines by 15 July 1929. The memorandum shows evidence that a compromise between Russian and Uzbek standards had been reached, because it listed the legal age of marriage at 16 years. Throughout Uzbekistan, the Soviet government set up hospitals and makeshift clinics to enforce the standards of sexual maturity and ZAGS was to register for marriage only those young women who had been officially certified mature.
The Assault and Its Results
The public face of the Soviet women’s liberation campaign was not the law codes but the massive propaganda storm launched in Uzbekistan in spring 1927. Sredazburo, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, and the Uzbek commissariats all had their own agitation and propaganda sections which devoted much, if not most, of their money and energy on propaganda aimed at women. The Union of Militant Godless strongly emphasized the issue at the all-union and republic levels; the Uzbek Godless journal Khudasizlar, published from 1928 to 1931, regularly ran articles on Islamic oppression of women. The head of the all-union Godless organizational section, Feodor N. Oleshchuk, urged using women’s economic cooperatives in “the East” as a means of taking women away from the influences of their husbands and clergy, and as good places for conducting intensive antireligious propaganda.
Liubimova and her deputies organized large public demonstrations against the veil, where women tore off and burned their veils in public, read political poetry, viewed plays and movies, and listened to lectures. The hujum, as the assault campaign against the veil was called, officially began on 8 March 1927, International Women’s Day. Gregory Massell summarized published descriptions of the day as follows: “On the morning of March 8, a massive outpouring of crowds of Moslem women was organized in major Uzbek cities. Led by Zhenotdel activists, and protected by police cordons, they marched in procession to especially designated city squares…. In all cases, the squares were reportedly outfitted with large daises, and decorated with flowers, oriental carpets, red banners, and placards with revolutionary slogans concerning the liberation of women. Military bands and native orchestras were provided to greet the female processions upon their arrival in the squares.” Zhenotdel leaders and other activists addressed the crowds with inspirational speeches and recitations of liberation poetry. They fiercely condemned the old Muslim order and lauded Communism as the path to women’s freedom. The demonstrations reached their climax when groups of veiled women mounted central stages, dramatically tore off their veils, and threw them into prepared bonfires. According to Massell, these brilliant stagings inspired thousands of women to burn their veils on the spot, then pour through the streets of the old cities yelling revolutionary slogans.
These demonstrations must have been both electrifying and terrifying for all concerned. Many Muslims were offended and angry—their values regarding sexuality and the social order publicly mocked and turned upside-down. The unveiling demonstrations, in conjunction with other aspects of the liberation campaign, touched off a firestorm of violence against women which did not die down for several years, and which cost thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of lives.
No reliable statistical reports summarizing the overall scope of the violence exist. The Soviet secret police (OGPU) produced a report on the rise of “terror in the village” between 1926 and 1928, which stated that the number of political murders had almost doubled during that time, but with the important caveat that their agents had not made a systematic catalogue of “terrorist acts,” and therefore the data provided were “subject to a certain amount of inexactness and incompleteness.” The OGPU’s incomplete statistics for eleven months of 1928 recorded one hundred cases of “political terror” and 104 cases of assault and murder connected with women’s liberation. In the majority of cases, women were victimized by their own or their husbands’ families.
The Uzbek Supreme Court reported that most homicides of women were due to either jealousy or the liberation campaign. From January 1927 to January 1928, the court investigated seventy-one cases involving sexual or social crimes and convicted 127 people. For 1928 and 1929, the Uzbek Commissariat of Justice estimated that customary crimes made up 7 percent of all crimes in the court system. They did not count the number of victims. The Tashkent Okrug (district) court reported thirty-eight cases connected with women’s liberation for 1928, thirteen of them murder. In June 1929 Emelian laroslavskii, head of the all-union Union of Militant Godless, estimated that around two hundred women had been murdered for unveiling, some of them hanged by bands of basmachi (Central Asian anti-Soviet guerrilla fighters). Ten years later, an article in the journal Antireligioznik estimated that 270 Uzbek women had been murdered in 1928 for unveiling.
The most comprehensive table on this topic, which shows the locations of homicides, numbers of victims, and the sentences handed out to perpetrators, was probably compiled in 1930. It, too, is incomplete, because it concerns only crimes that resulted in a death sentence. In fact, the table was most likely compiled as part of an effort to stiffen penalties for crimes against women, which normally had been punished by five to ten years’ imprisonment. The data conveys some sense of the pervasiveness of violence against women.
These numbers are all absurdly low, which the reports themselves, as well as outside evidence, make clear. Most customary crimes never made it to trial. A survey of six thousand case summaries of appeals for personal amnesty to the Amnesty Commission of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets (essentially the state parole board), between 1925 and 1935 reveals that just under I percent of convictions were for social crimes. However, this number does not include the hundreds of rape convictions, beatings, and murders of women listed in the summaries that were not explicitly tied to Islam or the Soviet women’s liberation campaign.
The deputy chair of the Tashkent Okrug court commented on the indifference of local courts to social crimes: “Concerning social crimes, only one case has come before the [local] court. This demonstrates that, despite the rise of social crime in the okrug and the necessity of resolute struggle against this evil, our regional people’s courts have not succeeded in proving themselves in this respect by taking those measures which would ensure that the social crimes which are springing up reach their chambers.” Often when a case was tried in court, the defendant(s) was acquitted or given a lenient sentence. The Khojent Okrug court saw three cases connected to the women’s campaign between April and July 1927. The court sentenced one man to two years’ imprisonment for forcing a woman into marriage, meted out six years for another man’s unspecified crime, and acquitted four of five defendants in the case of a woman’s murder (the death sentence of the fifth was immediately appealed). In one unusual case dating from 1932, a Russian chemist employed by the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) was convicted of “buying underage girls for his pleasure.” The Uzbek Supreme Court sentenced him to one year and six months in jail, but pardoned him almost immediately because Gosplan could not replace him and lobbied the court on his behalf.
One possible factor behind lenient court judgments was the decision by the USSR Commissariat of justice not to classify acts against women’s liberation as counterrevolutionary crimes. This meant that officials did not refer such crimes to the Uzbek SSR prosecutor’s office, but dealt with them locally, granting them lower priority than other cases of antiSoviet agitation. A more important reason for the courts’ leniency was that the judges themselves did not regard these offenses as particularly serious, despite the intensive pro-liberation propaganda going on around them.
On 25 July 1928, perhaps in response to complaints about the courts, the Central Executive Committee of Soviets (TsIK Sovetov) passed a resolution instructing the Commissariat of Justice to create circles of women prosecutors in the okrug-level courts that would systematically apply the 1926 Marriage and Family Code, and monitor the Soviet courts to ensure that they were “paying the maximum amount of attention” to exposing social crimes. TsIK Sovetov also instructed the commissariat to work out a more complete program of laws pertaining to the 1926 code. However, these measures to protect women’s interests did little to improve the situation.
At the spring 1929 Uzbek Congress of Soviets, a delegate complained bitterly of the poor performance of the courts regarding customary crimes. He said that not only was bride-price flourishing in his area, but that courts were unable to prosecute the crime effectively because no legal guidelines on what penalties to apply existed. Even more seriously, lack of knowledge of legal procedures had resulted in a man going unpunished for beating his wife to death for attending an International Women’s Day demonstration. Another delegate at the same congress urged that murderers and bandits should be executed at much higher rates than they had been previously, since many death sentences were ultimately commuted to ten years’ imprisonment. There was more to this rise in bloodthirst than just the Soviet women’s liberation campaign. It was also part of the wrenching upheavals of the First Five Year Plan and developing Stalinist terror. At the same time, there was a very real problem with trying to stop the wholesale murder of women. Despite many attempts at court reform, the violence had become so acute that it attracted attention from the highest levels of Soviet Central Asian government. Shortly after the Congress of Soviets, Sredazburo head Isaac A. Zelenskii urged that a special law be passed to protect unveiled women, illustrating his argument with grim stories of murder and assault in the Chimkent region that were related to unveiling.
In February 1929, the newspaper Uzbekistanskaia pravda lamented: “The murder of women has taken on a mass character. As of February 6, 70 people have been murdered. Social crimes are also taking place: qalim, giving girls in marriage, violence, rape of minors, etc.” In its own version of observing Women’s Day, the newspaper ran stories illustrating the murderous oppression women suffered under Islam. In late March came “For the Glory of Allah,” about a blind young peasant woman named Akhros, who was gang-raped as punishment for not being married to the man with whom she lived. This story was followed a few days later by “The Mulla’s Vengeance,” about two brothers who murdered Mariam Bikaia Rakhmonkulova, the wife of one of them, when she tried to apply for a divorce through ZAGS. One brother was executed, the other sentenced to ten years in jail. The article expressed horror that local village people had done nothing to either prevent the crime or turn the brothers over for punishment. State officials arrested the brothers more than four months after the fact. While these and similar stories had an obvious propaganda value through the illustration of the misogynistic violence of Muslim men, they were also probably true. By 1929, the violence had reached a point where Communist Party officials felt compelled to call off the “assault” for women’s liberation and pursue their goals by more subtle means. This did not change the fact that traditional Uzbek society was under siege, and that women who asserted their desires against tradition continued to put themselves at considerable risk.
Not only judges, but other officials ignored or tried to undermine regulations concerning women. Faizulla Abdullaev, a twenty-four-year-old member of the presidium of a Bukhara Okrug political committee, was convicted in 1929 of instructing the local ZAGS to approve illegal marriages (probably of underage girls). In addition, he apparently “publicly insulted” a female cooperative employee by firing a revolver at her. In another case, the deputy chair of the Uzbek TsIK went so far as to praise a group of men for killing an unveiled woman. He was immediately fired, but the attitude he expressed was common. In 1930, the Soviet court convicted a young policeman of marrying a twelve-year-old girl and gave him an unusually heavy sentence of five years’ imprisonment on the grounds that his job was to fight against such crimes. The chair of the Katta Kurgan village soviet was convicted in 1933 of helping marry off a girl by providing a false certification of her age, and of supplying “alien elements” with other falsified documents.
The myriad difficulties that senior Soviet officials faced in trying to coax or force their subordinates into implementing the liberation campaign were the product of a deep ambivalence, which sometimes spilled over into open resistance, at all levels of the Uzbek party and state bureaucracies. Even dedicated communists had a great deal of trouble adjusting to the revolution in social mores. A transcript of a 1927 party cell discussion of unveiling demonstrated that communists in the Old City of Tashkent were much more comfortable talking about unveiling women in principle than seeing their wives go unveiled. The women themselves refused to walk unveiled in the Old City because of the harassment they experienced. Party members who did not unveil their families or divorce their second wives continued to pose problems even after the liberation campaign was well established. Some commentators found the issue of polygyny particularly troublesome because it revealed Central Asian priorities and the ineffectiveness of Soviet propaganda. All-union Zhenotdel chair A. V. Artiukhina complained: “In the East it often happens that a husband, taking advantage of the still strong influence of the Shari’a, gives his wife a formal divorce via ZAGS and marries another. However, according to the Shari’a he is not divorced from the first wife and continues to live with her. She cannot marry anyone else—no one will take her. Men say [to her]: `Obtain a divorce according to the Shari’a, and then we will marry you.'” Artiukina perhaps was not aware that polygyny was not yet illegal in some parts of “the East.” Even Central Asian members of the Union of Militant Godless, who had theoretically shed the chains of religious prejudice, could not bring themselves to meet in mixed-gender groups in the first years of the campaign. Instead, the women would gather in one room of a house while the men shouted to them from another room.”, It was simply not possible for centuries of values and assumptions to be overthrown by decree within the space of a few years.
While eliminating such social crimes as bride-price and child marriage was a high priority for the government, published sources rarely referred to the precise details of these crimes. The Amnesty Commission rolls, however, provide a window into this area, and include some fascinating details on individual lives not available elsewhere. The amount of bride-price varied over time and according to the wealth of the family involved, as did the punishment it incurred. Shady Kurganov, described as a “middle peasant,” received a horse, a cow, and a lame bull as bride-price for his daughter in 1929. In 1931, a male peasant was paid fifty rubles for bride-price. Another received five thousand rubles in 1934. The same year, a man in Beshkent received one cow for his twelve-year-old daughter. And in an extreme case in 1936, a man sold his adult daughter to five different suitors within two years. Gul-Oi Kushmuratova’s starting price was three thousand rubles, fifteen sheep, one horse, and two cows. Husband number five paid only nine hundred rubles and 60 poods (1 pood = 36 pounds) of grain for her. The account of this case did not state how Kushmuratova left each husband so rapidly, nor the punishment her father Oi-Saat received. The case report noted that local party members were aware of what was happening, but did nothing.
In these cases, the degree of punishment imposed was determined in large part by the value of the goods exchanged, which in turn was determined by the wealth of the families involved. Prosecutors mainly concerned themselves with those who received bride-price, rather than those who paid. While dowry also existed in Uzbekistan, the custom was not as widespread as bride-price, and was not pursued as a crime. The case of Gul-Oi Kushmuratova was atypical, and probably should be regarded as a straightforward financial scam rather than as an example of Muslim intransigence.
The amnesty rolls also reveal something of the state’s priorities in prosecuting crime. The most striking aspect is that Soviet authorities showed very little interest in social crimes of any type, preferring instead to go after cases of theft, hooliganism, murder, and bureaucratic corruption. Of the relatively few social crimes that Soviet authorities prosecuted and appealed, the rarest was polygyny. This partly can be explained by the fact that the state did not outlaw polygyny until 1931, but even so it was mentioned as a factor in only one case out of 5,843 in 1929—before it had been made a crime in Uzbekistan. Even in the highest reaches of government, officials tolerated, or at least winked at, polygyny—as demonstrated by the early decision of the Turkmenistan Communist Party to allow polygyny among workers, and by the fact that Uzbek President Faizulla Khojaev had two wives, one Russian and one Uzbek.
The social crime that authorities pursued most vigorously was child marriage. Between 1925 and 1935, twenty out of forty-nine appeals of social crime convictions were for child marriage. The average age of the girls involved was from twelve to fourteen. Child marriage drew a harsher-than-average penalty of five years’ imprisonment, although it was not considered as heinous as murdering unveiled or activist women, which usually drew a sentence of ten years (there were thirteen of these cases in the decade surveyed). In the long run, however, Soviet prosecution failed to eliminate traditional social practices except in the Russianized urban areas, and even there they were not completely successful. In rural Uzbekistan, where the bulk of the population lived, Soviet policy drove old customs underground rather than eliminate them.
This became clear in 1935-1936, when the pressure against religious observance eased somewhat, spurring an immediate resurgence in customary practices. Mullas proclaimed a new era of freedom for Islam, attendance at the mosques and fasting for Ramadan noticeably increased, and women who had gone unveiled donned the paranja once more. Even such activists as the former chair of the Stalin village soviet, Achil-Oi Ruzieva, veiled themselves at least for Ramadan. It was not uncommon to find collective farms where all the women were veiled, including party and Komsomol members. The practice of child marriage either increased or, more likely, had never gone away. The Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del (NKVD) reported the following statistics to Uzbek Communist Party Chair Akmal Ikramov in spring 1936: “Thus, in 54 districts (out of 61 surveyed) in 1935-36 it was determined that there were 219 instances of giving underage girls in marriage and 172 instances of selling underage girls for bride-price, a total of 391 cases of giving away in marriage girls who had not reached the medical age of maturity.” Of the 174 people sentenced to jail for these crimes, a little over half (ninety-four) received sentences of two or three years, thirty-one were sentenced to five years, and five received sentences of eight years or more. The courts still did not consider child marriage to be a particularly serious crime.
Aside from the temporary relaxation of the anti-Islamic campaign in the mid-1930s, attacks against women continued because men’s attitudes about their honor and power changed very slowly. Many men could not adjust to the idea that they did not wield complete control over the lives of their wives, sisters, and daughters. In the Margelan, Lenin, and Sary-Assiia districts in 1936, men stabbed their wives to death for such acts as removing their veils, going to work, and socializing in public. Nor was this kind of violence limited to rural areas. In Tashkent, a policeman shot at a relative who took off her veil. Even when men allowed their female relatives to labor in factories and cotton fields, women could not work on an equal plane with men. Zhenotdel official Anna Nukhrat complained that men on the collective farms considered cotton picking by hand to be beneath them and that (male) chairmen or brigade leaders assigned women to such backbreaking manual labor while allowing men to drive the few machines available. Women had not been able to escape the vicious bind in which conflicting state and cultural demands put them. If they worked, they risked Uzbek male wrath on the grounds of either personal or cultural betrayal. If they did not work, the government could punish them as shirkers, which would hurt not only women but also their children. In any case, it is doubtful that most Uzbek women viewed the prospect of life in a textile or food-processing plant as truly liberating.
The Uzbek Commissariat of Justice conducted several surveys of local court performance in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and found the courts to be sorely lacking in their zeal to prosecute clergy and other religious offenders. The same situation held when it came to pursuing crimes against women. Courts in the Khorezm, Samarkand, and Namangan oblasts (provinces) lost crucial case files, bungled prosecutions, or halted investigations entirely for unclear reasons—a prosecutor in Samarkand dropped a case of child marriage because he considered it to be unimportant. The kinds of offenses that came before the courts had not changed very much in ten years. Most of the completed prosecutions were for child marriage; rape and murder received similar (low) priority. What was new was a category of crime known as “preventing women from taking part in society.” This category included preventing women from attending school or going to work outside the home. In June 1941, for example, the courts convicted a man under this code for trying to force his wife to wear a paranja and not talk to other men, and beating her when she refused his orders. In other words, fourteen years after the inception of the hujum, women were far from attaining the promised liberation. Real changes were made, to be sure, and in many towns and cities the veil disappeared altogether, but the Soviet campaign had made only a shallow impact on people’s beliefs.
Women’s Liberation and the Muslim Clergy
As part of the larger anti-Islamic campaign, women’s liberation succeeded in splitting the Muslim clergy. The Communist Party openly pursued a policy of creating antagonism between rival clerical factions, for which the changing status of women proved to be an ideal tool. The women’s campaign forced the clergy to stretch in previously inconceivable ways to accommodate new conditions, and started some of the mullas’ most creative and radical responses to the state’s anti-Islamic policies.
The majority of Muslim clergy fiercely opposed unveiling and other aspects of the liberation campaign, some directly equating unveiled women with prostitutes. Many clergy were arrested on charges of opposing women’s liberation (this included everything from privately criticizing it to murdering Zhenotdel activists), and a few went so far as to commit public suicide to protest unveiling. Conflicts over women’s status provoked some of the earliest conservative-reformist battles among official Muslim clerical organizations (called “spiritual administrations”). In summer 1926, an imam named Faziljan Maksum “raised a storm of protests among the population” against women’s meetings in Margelan and “was even forced to leave [the area] … for a time.” The account of this incident does not identify who forced him to leave, but it does imply a connection between Maksum’s exile and the Ferghana Spiritual Administration, which convened a public hearing in June on his “anti-Shari’a” expressions concerning the “woman question.” Public agitation represented a simple type of opposition for the Soviets to quash, however, despite the fact that the government was inefficient in its efforts to find and arrest offenders. The subtler forms of resistance, which included Islamic education and social pressure, proved to be much more difficult to counteract.
For every move the government made, the conservative clergy seemed to have an answer. When Communist Party officials set up zhenotdels in 1924 and 1925, the clergy fought back by organizing their own “zhenotdels,” which they dedicated to strengthening women’s faith in Islam. While Communist propagandists gave impassioned speeches on Islamic misogyny, mullas established private classes in their homes for women, teaching them about the importance of the veil and other religious tenets. In many cases, the mullas’ wives became active teaching women, in keeping with Muslim beliefs regarding sex-segregation. The message they enforced was that true Muslim women would not be seduced by Soviet blandishments, and that to remove their veils was to collaborate with the infidel rulers.
The reformist clergy threatened the communists by coopting the Communist program and using it for their own ends. Although most of the radical reform tactics, such as allowing women into the mosques with men and even designating women clergy, occurred in the Tatar-Bashkir areas, a significant segment of the Uzbek clergy supported an Islamic form of women’s liberation. A writer for the all-union agitation/propaganda organ Kommunisticheskaia revoliutsiia warned in 1929: “In order to save their position, Muslim clergy are allowing women into the mosque. In religious schools, they are introducing elements of exact science side-by-side with the Qur’an. Nowadays the clergy decides not to approach even the peasants with old, ossified dogmatism. In this sense, reformed religion is more dangerous than unreformed.”
Some of the clergy based their arguments directly on the Shari’a, drawing on minority interpretations of the tradition and particularly on Islamic reformist thinking that had begun in the nineteenth century. Their primary motive appears to have been deep personal belief that a less restrictive interpretation of Muslim law was not only possible, but desirable. In response to Faziljan Maksum’s antiliberation protests, Mulla Urunbaev wrote for the Spiritual Administration newspaper Ferghana: “According to the Shari’a according to the testament of Muhammed, women occupy an equal position with men before God. Women may pray five times a day equally with men, they may participate in social life. They also have the right, as men do, to visit [friends], go to the bazar, study, and receive an education. Women are even allowed to occupy such posts as judge of the Shari’a [qadi], mutawalli, and other [positions].” Some mullas supported unveiling so strongly that they offered to help the government with its campaign. An official Sredazburo journal, Za partiiu, described in italics a remarkable instance of this: “In Kanibad a mulla went to the district committee and told them at great length that there are [strands] in the Koran against the chachvan [face veil], that the chachvan is not required according to the law of faith. He even [gave] a written explanation with citations and references and left it with the committee. But in the committee they listened to him, laughed that a mulla would come out in favor of unveiling, and left it at that. No one took up this powerful weapon, no one tried to use this mulla.” While the author of this article was appalled that the committee had not seen fit to accept the services of the mulla, in fact the Sredazburo warned against such collaborations for quite some time. Communist officials feared that progressive clergy could gain influence over party organs by working with them, and thus ensure their own survival while corrupting Communism.
Other reforming clergy supported unveiling for reasons that had more to do with their struggle to retain political power than with personal conviction. Zakhretdin Aglyam of Tashkent reportedly chastised his colleagues for not taking the initiative in women’s liberation: “We, the clergy, must take the matter of unveiling women into our hands. But now the party has torn the initiative in this matter from our hands. We should have hurried with this business sooner, but now the party has shown the folk that religious people did not do [unveiling], but atheists. We should have acted completely differently; we should have carried this out in the name of religion. Now the masses think that the paranja was not prescribed by the Shari`a at all, and that the atheists have freed them from it. This is terrible.” Aglyam was not so much concerned that women were unveiling, but that the clergy had lost control and was being discredited in the process. His statement also implies that unveiling did enjoy some degree of popular support, at least in Tashkent. The growing Uzbek educated elite showed more inclination to adapt to Russian social legislation than the rural peasantry, who had little positive incentive to abandon their own customs.
The issue of women’s education formed another arena of violent conflict between Central Asian and Soviet social values. While technically nothing in Muslim law barred women from pursuing an education, literate women were exceedingly rare in nineteenth-century Central Asia. When the Russians introduced their Western-style native language school system in the late nineteenth century, they included a few schools for girls, but most Central Asian parents refused to send children of either sex to them. The new Russian schools and their secular Central Asian (Jadidist) counterparts appeared to inspire some response from the Muslim clergy. By 1925, the main Waqf (charitable endowment) Administration of Uzbekistan complained that teenage girls formed the “main contingent” of participants in religious schools and that “In Old Bukhara for every two Soviet schools there are 52 old-method women’s schools.”
Old Bukhara may have been an anomalous situation at best—even taking into account the strong possibility that the figures mentioned above were intended merely to convey a sense of scale rather than be an accurate census. The Soviet government put a tremendous amount of effort before World War II into improving women’s literacy levels, a massive campaign which has yet to be studied, but persuading Uzbeks to send their female children to school was slow, hard work. Clergy protested against girls’ education, and secular education in general, as fiercely as they protested unveiling. Many clergy felt, not without reason, that the children were being taken away from them and “made into Russians.” Parents, too, were often deeply angered by the new schools. When the Soviet government introduced the law on “General Compulsory Primary Education” in Turkmenistan in 1930, local peasants were outraged that schools educated girls as well as boys. In 1931, peasants set schools on fire in many districts of Turkmenistan, and the project proved to be largely a failure. The same year in Surkhan-Darya Oblast, Soviets surveyed the number of girls in school. One village soviet chair reported that not a single girl between the ages of eight and fifteen attended school in his village, which was not an unusual situation. Even by the mid-1930s, most girls in Uzbekistan left school beginning at the fifth and sixth levels, often because of betrothal or marriage. According to one study, in 1927-1928, female students made up 26.1 percent (34,735 girls) of the urban school population and 11.5 percent (6,235) of the rural school population. By 1938-1939, these figures increased to 42.7 percent (428,965) of the urban school population and 41.7 percent (337,174) of the rural. On the face of it, this signified a substantial improvement—but the study does not give figures for the general population of school-age children, which was undoubtedly higher than the number of children actually in school, particularly in rural areas. While the Soviets did succeed in raising Central Asian literacy levels considerably from nineteenth-century statistics, girls still lagged behind boys in overall educational level.
Summary
Communist Party activists used the issue of women’s oppression as an important tool to draw Uzbeks and other Muslims away from Islam. They argued that the veil and child marriage injured women physically and psychologically, that sex-segregation injured them economically, that lack of education and separation from general (male) society injured them intellectually, and that polygyny and other sexual practices were immoral. The government tried to impress its views on the populace through a heavy propaganda campaign, which encompassed public lectures, demonstrations, movies, plays, and newspaper articles. Officials also used the law to summarily enforce the new values, whether Muslims took them to heart or not. The imposition of Russian customs caught Uzbek women in a terrible bind, between remaining loyal to their religion and culture and obeying the state. They risked punishment no matter what choice they made, particularly because the results of their choices were publicly visible and symbolically weighted. In the late 1920s, Uzbek men were losing control over much of their economic lives, their children’s education, even the alphabet in which they wrote their language. Many of them clung to controlling the women in their families as a last bastion where they could be assured that they still retained some power. When the Soviets reached into the family as well, many men reacted violently, resulting in the beating, rape, and murder of thousands of women.
The campaign to liberate women both revealed and further exacerbated conflicts among the Muslim clergy. The majority fiercely opposed any change in women’s status, and encouraged or joined in acts of violence against women who unveiled or acted independently of men. This in turn allowed the government to hold them up for ridicule as fanatics who wanted to keep women in chains of dark ignorance rather than join the “modern” world. Other clergy supported unveiling, either out of personal conviction or political considerations—often feeling that they stood a better chance of retaining power by supporting a movement they could not stop in any case. The clergy who supported women’s liberation in turn revealed a split in the government, between those who wanted to use these mullas to further the campaign and those who feared that any collaboration with liberal clergy would taint the atheist credentials of the Communist Party. Ultimately, the anticollaborationist view prevailed, which provided additional motivation to exterminate the liberal clergy.
Religious beliefs, sexual mores, and family structures are intimate, deeply-rooted phenomena which evolve slowly over time and are extremely difficult to change by outside fiat, as the Russian colonial experience shows. This was true no less in Central Asia than in China, India, or Africa. The Soviets succeeded in improving women’s status in many ways: women were better educated, were able to work and move about publicly, and even attained (low-level) government positions. The veil eventually disappeared in urban and most rural areas. But these changes occurred slowly, not according to the timetable set for the grand assault launched in 1927. Even visible practices such as the veil persisted in rural areas until well after World War II, and polygyny and child marriage faded underground but never disappeared entirely.” This was due in large part to the profound ambivalence that even Communist Uzbeks felt toward the project, which communicated itself to the unambivalently opposed population. Social change can be achieved when a critical mass of people supports it, but when that support is lacking and the proponents of change are ambivalent, permanent change at a deep level is impossible. For Uzbek women, the changes that were achieved also came with a horribly high price.