Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (review)

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Stalinist regime waged a tireless campaign for the radical transformation of Soviet society. In few places was this drive carried out with greater intensity than in Central Asia, a predominantly Muslim region along the Soviet Union’s southern borders. One of the most controversial aspects of this campaign was the Soviet effort to “emancipate” Muslim women, whom the Bolsheviks viewed as victims of a cruel, patriarchal society. Communist Party activists in the region urged women to throw off their veils, attend Soviet schools, and become party members. The regime in Moscow outlawed customs deemed oppressive to women, such as polygamy and the payment of brideprice. In Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia, Douglas Northrop argues that gender policy in Central Asia was central to the Bolsheviks’ strategy in the region. “In Uzbekistan,” he writes, women’s emancipation came to “exemplify the entire Bolshevik revolution” (p. 9). At the same time, he contends that indigenous resistance to the Soviet campaign was critical to the formation of an Uzbek national identity.

Northrop subscribes to the argument, first made by Gregory Massell more than thirty years ago, that Soviet officials viewed Muslim women as a “surrogate proletariat” in a region that lacked a true proletariat. Because of the absence of an indigenous working class in Central Asia, newly emancipated women were expected to become a major pillar of support for the Soviet regime. Like Massell, Northrop stresses the importance of gender policy and family life in Soviet strategy toward Central Asia, and he finds that profound native resistance hampered Soviet efforts to transform Uzbek society. Northrop’s research confirms some of Massell’s earlier conclusions, but Veiled Empire also makes important new contributions that deepen our understanding of Stalinism in the Soviet periphery.

Northrop is able to provide a much more textured and nuanced account of the unveiling campaign because he uses archival and indigenous-language sources that were for the most part unavailable to Western scholars before 1991. He conveys the concerns and aspirations not just of the activists from the zhenotdel (the Communist Party’s women’s division) but also of the ordinary Uzbek women who were the presumed beneficiaries of Soviet policies. Native women were trapped, Northrop shows, between the demands of their own patriarchal society and those of the new Soviet rulers. Whether they were veiled or unveiled, they faced criticism and coercion (although the Soviet regime, perhaps reluctant to impose “emancipation” by force, never formally outlawed the veil). Northrop’s argument about the role of Soviet gender policy in developing an Uzbek national identity is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his study. He maintains that the encounter with colonial rule solidified cultural practices—most notably veiling—that had previously been fluid and variable and thereby transformed them into symbols of the emerging Uzbek nation.

Northrop situates Soviet Uzbekistan firmly within the broader history of European empires and sees the unveiling campaign as typical of the “civilizing missions” of imperial rulers. Unlike historians who maintain that the Soviet Union was a modernizing state that treated all its peoples equally (and often equally badly), Northrop argues that Moscow’s rule in Central Asia was fundamentally different from its approach to the Russian population. He contends that the desire to transform private life was all-pervasive in Uzbekistan, where Soviet officials saw their task as more challenging because of essential ethnic and cultural differences between Uzbeks and Russians. In Uzbekistan, a wife’s veiled or unveiled status was taken as a key indicator of an Uzbek Communist’s loyalty to the Soviet regime—a litmus test that had no direct equivalent in European Russia. Thus, despite Soviet promises of national equality, Moscow’s perception of Uzbek “backwardness” and the hierarchical relationship between center and periphery justify the label “empire.”

Veiled Empire is an exceedingly valuable contribution to the little-studied social and cultural history of Soviet Central Asia...