Abstract
This book addresses the Soviet state's attempts to use social engineering to convince the Muslim women of the Central-Asian Republic of Tajikistan to abandon their customs, especially their religion, in favor of atheistic socialism. The area that formed Soviet Central Asia, formerly known as Turkestan, was taken over by Tsarist Russia in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1920s under the USSR, it was divided into separate polities, of which Tajikistan, which became a Union Republic in 1929, was the smallest and the poorest.
This was an era when, under western influence, Middle Eastern/Western Asian states such as Turkey and Iran made a concerted effort to copy European lifestyles by ridding their countries of female seclusion and veiling. The Soviet Union played a similar role in its Muslim-majority republics as part of its drive towards gender equality that started in its Slavic regions before being spread eastwards. Here, the impetus mainly came from the outside and was part of the secularization project that viewed all religions as, in Karl Marx's well-known phrase, the unacceptable “opium of the people.” In Central Asia, the USSR notably failed in these endeavors, as devotion to Islam and local conceptualizations of gender were viewed as inherent in their cultures. This produced a significant resistance to Sovietization, especially marked in the sedentary republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In their most urbanized regions, women had been largely kept secluded in their homes, and, on those rare occasions when they left them, would be expected to conceal themselves from unrelated males in a long cloak or paranji along with a thick horsehair veil or chachvan that lacked even eye holes.
While madrassas, educational establishments that today mainly teach about Islam but that historically imparted secular subjects as well, provided instruction to boys, including on science and other non-religious subjects, some families tutored their daughters in their own homes. However, neither of these was recognized under Soviet modernization principles as a viable form of imparting knowledge, any more than indigenous forms of education in the global south have ever been accepted by the international community. The Soviet state replaced these with secular mixed-sex schools, significantly constraining girls’ participation in settings that put great stress on gender-segregation.
In its attempts both to demonstrate its forward-looking policies to the world and to show how it could potentially benefit Muslim-majority countries elsewhere, in the 1920s and 1930s, the state endeavored to encourage its eastern women subjects to participate in political activities and involve themselves in “socially useful labor,” which, just as in capitalist-based settings, meant labor that provided direct economic benefit to the state. Thus, the Soviet Union foreshadowed today's push by the United Nations to educate girls so as to bring women out of domesticity into paid labor, as well as to encourage their participation in political life. Its attempts to achieve these objectives have been documented by Zamira Abman.
Abman's book covers the period from 1924, which marks the start of deliberate attempts to modernize the USSR's Central-Asian subjects, to 1982, shortly before the start of Perestroika and Glasnost. These endeavors were carried out very much in line with the current insistence of the international community that the only acceptable approach to the modernization of Muslim-majority states lies in “emancipating” their women by bringing them into public life, if necessary, under duress. In Tajikistan this was strongly resisted by the majority, especially of the rural population, hence the book's title—Coerced Liberation. The book's main thesis is that the regime's aims were to benefit the state economically and politically rather than to promote women's wellbeing. However, the approach was neither systematic nor sensitive enough to produce real transformation. A small group of urban educated women who achieved high-level political positions could in theory have spearheaded a bottom-up movement of rural women. Preventing this was first the persistence of pressures to uphold local customs that dogged even the most highly positioned Tajiks, and secondly, the strong control from Moscow that placed significant barriers to initiatives from below.
Abman draws on hitherto unpublished archival materials, newspapers, and interviews with rural women and a number of the urban educated politicians mentioned above, supported by published literature on relevant aspects of Soviet history. It is divided into an introduction, six chapters, and an epilogue. Chapter 1 deals with the years 1924–1935 and focuses on what was known as the attack (hujum in Tajik) on local customs. During this time the Soviet regime was endeavoring to incorporate Central Asia into its ideological fold. An important element here was the attempt to liberate local women by forcing them out of seclusion and persuading them to abandon their veils, join the labor force, and accept modern education, especially for girls. The institution that led this was the Women's Department of the Soviet Union (Zhenotdel in Russian), the staff of which was largely Slavic. They employed multiple forms of propaganda, including lectures and group discussions, delivered to the population through women's clubs and in bath (hammam) and tea houses. The aim was to impart information on the new directives that supposedly brought gender equality to Soviet women and protected those in Central Asia from customary laws that facilitated child and forced marriage, polygyny, and other “backward traditions.” However, as the remotest and poorest of the union republics with the highest proportion of rural inhabitants, Tajikistan was particularly difficult to penetrate and its local population continued to view Soviet ideology as shameful, with both men and women particularly worried about its potential influence on their daughters.
Chapter 2 discusses the period from 1935 to the death of Stalin in 1953, the time when he was most active in putting forward his vision of the Soviet state. In so doing he abandoned the earlier liberation approach, instead supporting the family and high fertility while also pressuring women even harder into supporting the state's economic development. This pushed them into a double or even triple burden of maintaining the home and engaging in paid labor, along with other essential activities. In the rural areas where most local women lived, these included the labor- and time-consuming work of farming their family's individual plot of land. The same period saw the rise of female Tajik political figures, including those whose stories are told in this book. During this time those outlawed customs that had survived the earlier attacks were repressed more fully. Nevertheless, although rural girls were now being educated at the primary level, few completed secondary school or continued to tertiary education and Tajik women, irrespective of status, continued to be pressured to meet local expectations of appropriate female conduct.
The third chapter of Abman's text focuses on the triple burden of rural women in the post-Stalinist period from 1953 to 1982. This was a time when urban areas of Tajikistan were expanding opportunities for girls in education and women in industrial and white-collar employment, while their rural sisters remained immured in the countryside, with poor schools and minimal employment prospects outside manual agricultural labor. The production of cotton was of great importance to the Soviet state and Tajikistan was a major producer, which no doubt helped account for the pressures to keep workers in the fields. Girls were married young and expected to adhere to the norms of local conduct or else be shamed for deviance. The system of household registration (propiska in Russian) made it difficult to move from rural to urban areas although a few girls who managed to complete secondary school, most of them from families with absent fathers, were able to take up tertiary education and gain an urban propiska that positioned them favorably for gaining professional employment. Meanwhile, attempts to increase the size of the Soviet population that had been significantly depleted by the Stalinist purges and World War II brought the central government to offer “heroine mother” status to women with eight or more children, greatly improving their material circumstances. The response was highest in Central Asia, leading to significant population growth in rural Tajikistan.
Chapter 4 addresses the benefits of the Soviet system during the same period for educated urban women. It describes how despite their professional positions they were still expected to fulfill their roles as good Tajik wives and mothers, adhering to the appropriate customary rules. Among them were the high-level Soviet officials whose life stories are discussed in the book. Such women commonly spoke Russian and wore western clothing, both of which separated them from most rural women who only knew a local language and wore Sovietized traditional dress. The latter saw the educated women as immoral and some were even publicly accused of being unworthy to occupy an official position.
In Chapter 5, Abman deals with the same period and the way that women's organizations (zhensoviety in Russian), originally formed to transform rural societies from the bottom up, ended as top-down establishments in which the approach of the center was expected to be followed at all levels, from the state down to the grass roots. Pressures to engage with these organizations placed significant time burdens on women without achieving anything significant in the way of reform. The lack of good schools, the fact that few modern institutions existed in the countryside, and the dearth of child-care facilities meant that as late as the 1980s, most rural women still had little option but to carry out manual labor for their collective or state farms. Thus, the gulf persisted between the educated urban and the functionally illiterate rural women.
The final chapter of Abman's book, chapter 6, tackles Soviet pressures to abandon Islam, viewed as incompatible with socialism, and embrace atheism. It attributes the failure to achieve this to the fact that the Tajik population took it for granted that Islam and socialism could happily co-exist. Women and girls could therefore take pride in their prowess in cotton harvesting for which they would be praised by the Soviet state while continuing to uphold local customs and engage in religious ceremonies. These included fasting on Ramadan and marking Islamic rites of passage such as male circumcisions, weddings, and funerals. The state considered their faith a major influence preventing Tajik women from progressing in their education and the labor force. Slavic officials were thus unaware of the fact that it was actually local customary laws, rather than religion, that bound women to tradition. They also believed that it was solely the men who insisted on maintaining this when much of the pressure actually came from women. The Epilogue starts by summarizing the contents of the previous chapters. It ends with a discussion of the current post-Soviet era, noting the resurgence of religion and local customs despite many rural women having moved to the cities.
The overall picture of the Soviet attempts at social engineering of Central-Asian women, including those from Tajikistan, is nothing new. It has been discussed in a number of English-language publications. The importance of Abman's book lies in the original material presented, especially the archival data and the interviews with prominent Tajik women political figures from the Soviet era. These fill in some major blanks in the previous accounts, especially in providing additional details regarding how Soviet attempts at transforming the lives of women in Tajikistan played out and how and why they failed. This compensates for a lack of clarity in presentation as the background is not always well delineated, the chronology is not always indicated, and citations that refer to other places are listed as if referring to Tajikistan, while not all terminology is translated. This is likely to make it difficult at times for someone with no knowledge of the region to understand the situations under discussion. However, for the specialist in the area it is well worth reading. It is also welcome to have such a volume from a native of Tajikistan who grew up there and whose family experienced many of the events under discussion.