Early Bolshevik Work
Among Women of the Soviet East
From Women and Revolution
issue No. 12, Summer 1976.
The triumph of the October Revolution in 1917, which dramatically,
transformed the lives of Russian women, wrought even greater transformations in
the lives of the women inhabiting the Central Asian regions which had been
colonized by tsarist Russia
The status of women varied, of course, from culture to culture and
within cultures, depending on social class and the nature of the, productive
process. But from the mouth of the Volga through the Caucasus and Turkestan,
from Iran and Afghanistan to Mongolia and northward to Siberia virtual
enslavement was the rule, although restrictions were of necessity less strictly
applied to women of the poorer classes—nomads and peasant women—whose labor was
essential. A certain level of trade and industry and a settled way of life in
the cities was a prerequisite for the luxury of strict enforcement of Islamic law.
It was not only the formal prescriptions of the Koran, but also local
customs codified in the religious common law (the Shariaf) and the civil
law (the Adats), which determined the situation of Islamic women. The few
partial reforms expressed in the Koran-the forbidding of female infanticide,
the restriction of polygamy, the recognition of limited property and
inheritance rights for women-were generally nullified by local Shariats and
Adats.
The practically universal institution ofkalym or bride price in
itself illustrates the Muslim conception of marriage as a purely commercial contract
having nothing to do with emotional bonds or personal commitments. In some
areas the bride's presence was not even required at the wedding. The purchase
price of the female commodity had already been negotiated between the families
of the bride and groom, and the wedding was merely a ceremony at which the
transaction was notarized. The marriage contract was subject to dissolution by
the husband at any time, and polygamy and child marriage were quite common.
Children too physically immature for marital relations were subjected to the
"horrible operation"—they were ripped open by a midwife to make
consummation possible.
Kalym bound a woman, often from childhood, to the
husband who satisfied her father's price. If she ran away, she could be
pursued as a criminal and punished by her husband or his clan. A runaway wife
might be punished by having her legs broken or by other barbaric tortures. For
a woman so much as suspected of infidelity, the appropriate punishment was
branding on the genitals with a hot iron.
For the poor, marriage by capture often replaced payment ofkalym. Once
she was seized, carried off and raped, the woman had no choice but to remain
with her abductor, since she had been disgraced and no other man would have
her. Even widowhood brought no freedom, because a wife for whom kalym had
been
paid was the property of the husband's family or clan and was bequeathed to his
brother. Suicide by fire was the only alternative according to the laws of Islam.
However, access to heaven was dependent on the will of the husband, and if cheated out
ofkalym by a wife's suicide, he was unlikely to invite her to enter
into paradise.
Rules demanding the veiling and seclusion of women had been introduced
into Islamic law with the conversion of the Persian aristocracy in 641 A.D. In
many parts of Central Asia the veil required
was not simply the yashmuk, covering the mouth, but the paranja, which
covers the whole face and body without openings for sight or breath. For
centuries many women have lived thus shrouded and imprisoned in their ichkaris
(segregated living quarters). A Yakutsk
The triumph of Russian imperialism in the 1880's brought few advances
in social organization or technology in the Muslim East. The wretched Russian
peasantry lived like royalty in comparison with the primitive peoples of this
area.
The tsarist government forced the agricultural villages to switch at
this time from food crops to cotton, and railroads were built to transport this
product to Russian textile plants. Following the railroad workers were women
who did not wear veils—Russian prostitutes. For a long time they were the only
models available to the Muslim nomads and peasants of the
"liberation" which Russian capitalism had bestowed upon women.
The October Revolution
Transforms Central Asia
With the victory of the October Revolution the Bolsheviks turned toward Central Asia in the hope of developing its vast and
desperately needed natural resources. The flow of these resources to the West was threatened,
however, by the fact that Central Asia was
from the beginning a haven for every sort of counterrevolutionary tendency and for
the retreating White armies. Bourgeois consolidation anywhere in this area
would have provided a base for the imperialist powers to launch an anti-Soviet
attack.
The extension of the proletarian revolution to Central
Asia , moreover, could become the example of socialist development
in an economically backward area which would undermine the resistance of
burgeoning nationalism in the East and inspire the toilers of other
underdeveloped regions the world over.
But immense economic and cultural leaps were required to integrate
Soviet Central Asia into a society revolutionized by the Bolsheviks in power.
Trotsky called the area "the most backward of the backward," still
living a "prehistoric existence." Indeed, the journey eastward from Moscow across Central Asia
was a trip backward through the centuries of human development.
The Bolsheviks viewed the extreme oppression of women as an indicator of
the primitive level of the whole society, but their approach was based on
materialism, not moralism. They understood that the fact that women were veiled
and caged, bought and sold, was but the surface of the problem. Kalym was
not some sinister plot against womankind, but an institution which was central
to the organization of production, integrally connected to land and water
rights. Payment of kalyin, often by the whole clan over a long period of
time, committed those involved to an elaborate system of debts, duties and
loyalties which ultimately led to participation in the private army of the
local beys (landowners and wholesale merchants). All commitments were
thus backed up with the threat of feuds and blood vengeance.
These kinship and tribal loyalties were obstacles to social progress
because they obscured class relations and held back the expropriation and
redistribution of land and other property. Poor peasants who stood to gain by
the equalization of wealth, hid the property of their rich relatives threatened
with expropriation. Blood vengeance enforced vows of silence, and Soviet
authority was undermined by conspiracies that served only the old oppressors.
Civil War
The Bolsheviks hoped that women, having the most to gain, would be the
link that broke the feudal chain, but this necessitated a great deal of
preparation, for the Muslim institutions, oppressive as they were, served real
social functions and could not be simply abolished. Like the bourgeois family,
they had to be replaced.
Lenin warned against prematurely confronting respected native
institutions, even when these clearly violated communist principle and Soviet
law. Instead, he proposed to use Soviet state power to carefully and
systematically undermine them while simultaneously demonstrating the
superiority of Soviet institutions, a policy which had worked well against the
powerful Russian Orthodox Church.
Extending this practice to Central Asia ,
the Soviet government waged a campaign to build the authority, of the Soviet
legal system and civil courts as an alternative to the traditional Muslim kadi
courts and legal codes. Although the kadi courts were permitted to
function, their powers were circumscribed in that they were forbidden to handle
political cases or any cases in which both parties to the dispute had not
agreed to use the kadi rather than the parallel Soviet court system. As
the Soviet courts became more accepted, criminal cases were eliminated from the
kadis' sphere. Next, the government invited dissatisfied parties
to appeal the kadis' decisions to a Soviet court. In this manner the
Soviets earned the reputation of being partisans of the oppressed, while the kadis were
exposed as defenders of the status quo. Eventually the kadis were
forbidden to enforce any Muslim law which contradicted Soviet law. Two Soviet
representatives, including one member of Zhenotdel—the Department of Working
Women and Peasant Women—were assigned to witness all kadi proceedings
and to approve their decisions. Finally, when the wafks (endowment
properties), which had supported the kadis, were expropriated and
redistributed among the peasantry, the kadis disappeared completely.
This non-confrontationist policy in no way implied capitulation to
backward, repressive institutions. It was made clear that there could be no
reconciliation between communism and the Koran. Although "Red
Mullahs," attracted by the Bolshevik program of self-determination and
land to the tiller, suggested to their followers that Islam was socialism and
vice versa, the Bolsheviks insisted that Soviet and Muslim law could never be
reconciled precisely on the grounds that the most basic rights of women would
be sacrificed.
The bloody civil war that pitted the Bolshevik state against
imperialist-supported counterrevolutionary forces devastated the young workers
state and threatened its very survival. During this period, when the Bolsheviks' capacity
to intervene in Central Asia was crippled, the
crude tactics employed by their ostensibly socialist opponents fueled
anti-Soviet sentiment.
In Tashkent , the railroad center of Central Asia , the governing Soviet was made up of Russian
emigres, many of them railroad workers, led by Social Revolutionaries and
Mensheviks. In an orgy of Russian chauvinism and self-indulgence foreshadowing
the policies of Stalinism to come, they expropriated the holdings of the most
respected Islamic institutions and stood the slogan "self-determination of
the toiling masses" on its head to justify the exclusion from the soviet
of native intellectuals and sympathetic mullahs, whom they labeled
"non-proletarian elements." At the same time, they collaborated with
former White officers. When the Tashkent Soviet began arbitrarily
requisitioning food from the peasants during the worst grain shortages of the
civil war, Lenin intervened to stop this. But the seeds of anti-Soviet
rebellion had been sown.
The Basmachis, tribal
and traditionalist elements (mainly Uzbek and Tadzhik), who were avowed enemies of the
Bolsheviks, served as a pole of attraction for the most sordid conglomeration
offerees dedicated
to the preservation of the status quo. When Enver Pasha of Turkey , who came to the region as an emissary
from Moscow , deserted to the Basmachis,
supplying the leadership and authority necessary to unify the warring beys into
a viable army of fanatical Muslim terrorists, civil war in Central
Asia began in earnest. Soon thousands of Muslims joined these
forces in the hills.
Few Central Asian women took the side of the Bolsheviks during the civil
war and few of these survived. The heroism of those few who dared defy family,
law and the word of the prophet was unsurpassed. One such woman was Tsainet
Khesmitova, who ran away from her aged husband while still a child and
served as a spy for the Red Army. Her husband's hired assassins eventually
caught her, cut out her tongue and left her beaten body buried neck deep in the
desert to die. She was rescued by a Red Army unit but was so mutilated that she
was forced to live out her life in a Moscow
Another was Umu Kussum Amerkhanova, the first woman activist of
Daghestan, who repeatedly escaped from the death sentences which the White Army
and her own countrymen sought to impose on her. Wearing men's clothes, she led Red
troops at the Daghestan front until the end of the war and survived to continue
the work of transforming the role of women in Central Asia .
Lifting the Veil of
Oppression
Bolshevik ability to intervene effectively in Central
Asia began with the end of the civil war and the transition from
the emergency policies of war communism to the stabilization carried out with
the institution of the NEP (New Economic Policy). The Turkestan Commission was
set up under the leadership of M. Frunze, a talented military commander, and G.
Safarov, a leading Bolshevik of Central Asian origins.
The detested emigres were recalled to Russia
The end of the war signaled the initiation of systematic Bolshevik work
among Muslim women. In the absence of native activists, it was the most
dedicated and courageous members of Zhenotdel who donned the paranja in
order to meet with Muslim women and explain the new Soviet laws and programs
which were to change their lives. This was an extremely dangerous assignment,
as any violation of a local taboo enraged husbands, fathers and brothers to
murder. In fact, the discovery of numerous dismembered bodies of Zhenotdel
organizers finally compelled the Soviet government to reinstate the death
penalty for explicitly "anti-feminist" murder as a
counterrevolutionary crime, although non-political murder (even murder
committed in vengeance against wives) received a standard sentence of five to ten years'
imprisonment.
Zhenotdel activists organized "Red Yertas" (tents), "Red
Boats" and "Red Corners," depending on the terrain. They
attracted local women by offering instruction in hygiene and crafts, by
providing entertainment and a place to socialize and by distributing scarce
consumer goods. Although the clubs were at first concerned primarily with
publicizing and explaining the new laws, they later became centers for culture
and education and waged a remarkably successful campaign to liquidate
illiteracy.
At the 13th Party Congress in 1924 an offensive was launched in Central Asia which was designed to bring women into
production and political life. Funds were allocated from central and local
budgets for assemblies of women's delegates and for associations to combat kalym
and polygamy. Plans were also made to form producers' and consumers'
cooperatives and to establish literary and hygiene circles and medical dispensaries.
The implementation of these measures continued to depend on the initiative
of a handful of Zhenotdel activists, for so deeply ingrained were the old
values that often even Central Asian Communists could not conceive of
substantial changes in the status of women, and the women themselves often
failed to report crimes against them to the courts. The response of local party
branches to the new measures ranged from open hostility and sabotage to passive
incomprehension.
The party locals in Daghestan, for instance, interpreted the law
abolishing kalym as an instruction to lower bride prices.
In some areas the party instituted fair price regulations: a young, pretty girl
from a well-to-do family might cost 300 rubles while a pockmarked widow was to
be priced the same as a hornless cow.
By 1924 Zhenotdel organizations had entrenched themselves in many areas,
and because of their influence and the changes in material conditions, Central
Asian women began for the first time to vote. This advance was facilitated by
the fact that the official summons each of them received from the party to
appear at the polls was regarded as a valid reason for them to go out in
public, thereby saving their husbands from ridicule.
Once at meetings, women were persuaded to run for office on the party
platform. At the same time, legal reforms and land redistribution gave them
rights under the law, and through producers' and consumers' cooperatives they
were able to acquire seed, tools and training, making it possible for them to
support themselves. These alternatives to economic dependency in marriage in conjunction
with the publicizing of divorce laws resulted in a marked increase in divorce,
initiated especially by child brides and second and third wives.
Stalinization
Had a balanced approach of training and education complemented this
liberalizing agitation, these new divorcees could well have become enthusiastic
pioneers of agricultural collectives and proletarian reinforcements for
industrialization. Their example would have been followed by married women as
well, with the incentive of increased family income working to neutralize the
hostility of their husbands. But at the January 1924 Party Conference, which
preceded the 13th Party Congress, the leadership, program and methods of the
party changed decisively.
The degeneration of the revolution after 1923 expressed through the
theory of "socialism in one country" and implemented through the
strangling of workers democracy in the Soviet Union ,
permeated and deformed all sectors of the government.
In an ominous prelude to the policies of the "third period,"
such as the forced collectivization of agriculture, the legal offensive against
traditional practices in Central Asia was
stepped up until the divorce rate assumed epidemic proportions. Although local
party branches protested the pace of the offensive and warned that it had
become "demoralizing to all concerned and a threat to continued Soviet
rule," Zhenotdel continued its one-sided agitation for women to initiate
divorce, until the Red Yertas, clubs and hospitals were filled with far more divorcees
than they could possibly handle. Under the impact of masses of women whom they
could not support, these organizations in desperation simply dissolved. In some
cases, they were transformed into brothels.
In 1927 the offensive was narrowed still further to a single-issue
campaign against seclusion and the veil known as Khudshum. First, party
meetings were held at which husbands unveiled their wives. Then on 8 March
1927, in celebration of International Woman's Day, mass meetings were held at
which thousands of frenzied participants, chanting "Down with the
paranja!" tore off their veils, which were drenched in paraffin and
burned. Poems were recited and plays with names such as "Away with the
Veil," and "Never Again Kalym" were performed. Zhenotdel
agitators led marches of unveiled women through the streets, instigating the
forced desegregation of public quarters and sanctified religious sites.
Protected by soldiers, bands of poor women roamed the streets, tearing veils
off wealthier women, hunting for hidden food and pointing out those who still
clung to traditional practices which had now been declared crimes (such as conspiring
to arrange a marriage for exchange ofkalym).
The Khudshum appeared to be a success on March 8, but on March 9
hundreds of unveiled women were massacred by their kinsmen, and this reaction,
fanned by Muslim clergy, who interpreted recent earthquakes as Allah's
punishment for the unveilings, grew in strength. Remnants of the Basmachi
rebels reorganized themselves into Tash Kuran (secret, counterrevolutionary
organizations) which flourished as a result of their pledge to preserve Narkh
(local customs and values).
Women suing for divorce became the targets of murderous vigilante
squads, and lynchings of party cadre annihilated the ranks of the Zhenotdel.
The massive terror unleashed against the recently unveiled women—which ranged
from spitting and laughing at them to gang rape and murder—forced most of them
to take up the veil again soon after repudiating it.
The party was forced to mobilize the militia, then the Komsomols and
finally the general party membership and the Red Army to protect the women, but
it refused to alter its suicidal policies. The debacle of international Woman's
Day was repeated in 1928 and 1929 with the same disastrous consequences,
exacting an extremely high toll on party cadre. Lacking Zhenotdel leadership
those clubs which had survived the legal offensive now disappeared.
By 1929 Central Asia was caught up in the general resistance of peasant
peoples throughout the Soviet Union to the forced collectivization of
agriculture dictated by Moscow Central
Asia was deferred. Not for another decade, when the productive
capacity of the planned economy had developed sufficiently to provide jobs,
education, medical care and social services on a scale wide enough to undercut
primitive Islamic traditions, did they begin to make substantial gains.
The Russian Revolution created the objective preconditions for the
liberation of women. But the consolidation of the Stalinist bureaucracy was
accompanied by a general reversal of significant gains for women throughout
Soviet society. Thus the oppressive family structure which the Bolsheviks under
Lenin had struggled to replace with the socialization of household labor was
now renovated as an economic institution by the increasingly isolated regime
which realized that the family provided services which the degenerated workers
state could not. In defense of the family, abortions were illegalized, divorces
were made much less accessible and women were encouraged through government
subsidies and "Mother Heroine" medals to bear as many children as
possible. In 1934, as if to sanction its physical liquidation in Central Asia at the hands of Tash Kuran terror,
the Soviet government liquidated Zhenotdel organizationally as well.
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