Stalinism on the Frontier of Empire: Women and State Formation in the Soviet Far East (review)

In 1937, at the height of the Soviet terror, a Communist youth league activist and wife of an official in the Soviet Far East wrote to a central newspaper to invite young women to volunteer to join her to help build socialism on the easternmost frontier of the Soviet Union. In the next three years, over 300,000 women volunteered, and about 25,000 were chosen to lend their skills and labor to the construction of farms, schools, administration, and industry of the Far East. They received the name "Khetagurovites," after the woman who issued the original call, Valentina Khetagurova. This deeply researched and exquisitely argued book uses the phenomenon of the Khetagurovites to explore a number of key issues in the history of the Soviet Union, and it makes major contributions to our understanding of state-building, empire, gender, and sexuality in the context of the Soviet experiment. Above all, the book successfully punctures arguments about a "great retreat" to a pre-revolutionary domesticity in the 1930s, and instead offers a compelling picture of women who enthusiastically seized the opportunity to test their mettle in difficult conditions and to contribute to the common effort of the construction of socialism.

The setting of the book on the "frontier of empire" permits Elena Shulman to explore important questions about the nature of the Soviet empire, which she argues was distinctive precisely because of the roles played by women. Unlike women in traditional colonial settings, they were not sent to the Far East in order to keep Slavic men from mixing with native women. (Mixed marriages, including Khetagurova's own, carried no stigma.) Women were sent because their labor was critically needed in this sparsely populated but militarily vulnerable outpost of Soviet power. Nor did they volunteer in order to find themselves husbands, although the harsh material conditions they found there pushed many into marriages that could provide convenient economic security. Shulman acknowledges the great paradox that these women who sought adventure and purpose in the Far East traveled parallel routes with the many thousands of victims of Stalin's purge, destined for the Gulag, and she notes with empathy that many of the Khetagurovites found employment in some of the Gulag agencies. She addresses squarely the question of support for this carceral regime, offering this case study as a way to understand whether the Soviet Union was "a weak system, with a despot ruling by force over a cowed population, or whether the regime made great headway in structuring individual identity and mobilizing thousands to expand state power across Eurasia despite obvious failures and abuses" (11-12). The answers are complex and ambiguous. Shulman does these ambiguities full justice in the six rich chapters that make up the book, but in the end, she argues for agency and empowerment rather than victimhood.

Following a magisterial introduction that addresses many threads of scholarship on these issues, Shulman opens her investigation with a synthetic chapter on women and Soviet power, creating a clear picture of the social milieu and political context that would produce Khetagurova's call. Another chapter, based extensively on documents from the Khabarovsk regional archive (along with wonderful photographs), sets the economic and social stage: building socialism in the Far East presented many of the same challenges that faced the constructors of Magnitogorsk and other industrial centers: Shulman perhaps exaggerates the uniqueness of the impact of harsh climatic and economic conditions on the response of workers sent to build: turnover, for example, was endemic everywhere in the USSR in these years.

A biographical chapter on Valentina Khetagurova herself contextualizes the heroine as a Soviet celebrity, whose elevation to stardom parallels in some respects that of the coal miner Aleksei Stakhanov. Shulman stresses the image of Khetagurova as an activist patron, who also emerged as a model of a successful Soviet marriage of equals. A chapter on the recruitment...