Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Woman - Natsionalka-Sections - 3and4

Chapter 3
Revolutions of 1917 and the Bolshevik

Reforms of the Status of Woman
Abstract This chapter focuses on the changes in women’s status in Volga-Ural

region and in imperial borderlands as a result of the revolutionary changes in Russia
in and in the aftermath of 1917. The first part of this chapter addresses radicalization
of both question of women’s rights and the question on national self-determination
as a result of the Russian liberal-democratic revolution in February of 1917. The
second part addresses the Bolshevik politics in Volga-Ural region in the 1920s–
1930s and their negative effect on the local and national projects of modernity and
development. Disproving Russian perceptions about the supposed dependency,
ignorance, and passivity of Muslim and, more generally, inorodtsy-women, women
of the Volga-Ural region showed themselves to be agents of their own emancipation
under the period of revolutionary changes in the society. While the “colonial
wounds” of the nations from the borderlands including the Volga-Ural region were
at first formally and publicly recognized by the Bolsheviks, the politics of the new
government soon incorporated many elements of the former imperial governance.
Indeed the Bolsheviks’ declarations advocated universal progress, development,
and equality, but their political decisions in practice were guided by the principles
of “keeping control” and, at the same time, finding allies among the colonized.

Keywords Revolutions of 1917 Bolshevik emancipation politics

Anti-colonial Imperial borderlands Repressions
This chapter focuses on the changes in women’s status in Volga-Ural region as a

result of the revolutionary changes in Russia in and in the aftermath of 1917. The
first part of this chapter addresses radicalization of both question of women’s rights
and the question on national self-determination as a result of the Russian
liberal-democratic revolution in February of 1917. The second part addresses the
Bolshevik politics in Volga-Ural region in the 1920s–1930s and their negative
effect on the local and national projects of modernity and development.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 49

Y. Gradskova, Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Woman,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99199-3_3
50 3 Revolutions of 1917 and the Bolshevik Reforms of the Status …
3.1 The “Woman’s Question” and the Revolutions of 1917

in the Imperial Borderlands: Between Democracy,
Anti-colonialism, and Nationalism
While Russian women’s organizations, led by the Union of Equality for Women
(Soyuz zhenskogo ravnopravia), demonstrated in St. Petersburg demanding equal
political rights for women in connection with the end of the monarchy in March
1917 (Iukina 2007, 414–428), many other organizations and groups (including
national ones) expressed rather similar demands in many parts of the empire; their
demands, however, were not solely connected to the women’s franchise per se.
Indeed, different socialist organizations, for example, demanded work, better salary
and end of war. At the same time many national movements in different parts of
empire also questioned imperial politics and coloniality and included improvement
of the situation of women into the programs centered on the improvement of the
status of the nations. While the Soviet history did not study projects of the national
movements declared to be “nationalist”, the interest to the documents produced
around 1917 in the former imperial borderlands increased during the perestroika
period. Many of the documents were recovered, translated and/or republished.
Since that some documents describing the 1917 radicalization in the imperial
borderlands, such as documents of Muslim congresses, have been analyzed well
(Iskhakov 2004), others, such as those of the first All-Russian Congress of Muslim
women, received attention of the international researchers only recently (Kamp
2015). Still a lot of the documents proceeding from different parts of the empire,
like the documents of the First Congress of the Mari people and publications from
the press from 1917 have not received enough attention from researchers yet.
Furthermore, many documents and events of the 1917 are analyzed primarily in the
context of history of a particular nation and not in a comparative perspective. Thus,
in this section using the available documents and previous research I want to show
how the discussions on self-determination, modernization and solutions to the
woman’s question became radicalized in the Volga-Ural region in 1917.
The articles from the newspaper Kaspi,1 published in Baku in Russian,2 suggest
that many Muslims in Russia saw the liberal-democratic revolution of February
1917 as an important opportunity for self-government, autonomy, and progress of
the nation. For example, the decision of the Central Spiritual Office for the Muslims
(TsDUM) of Internal Russia, situated in Ufa, published by Kaspi on 25 October
2017, stated:
1
I was using a collection of articles from this newspaper preserved in the NART, from the personal
files of Şafika Gaspirali, Kaspi, 1917 (National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan, f.186, op.1,
file 77).
2
Kaspi is one of the oldest newspapers in Azerbaijan. It was published in Baku, in Russian, from
1881 to 1919 (in 1990 its publication resumed). The newspaper is now seen as important for
Azerbaijan’s nation-building, http://news.day.az/society/306655.html.
3.1 The “Woman’s Question” and the Revolutions of 1917 in the Imperial … 51
In free Russia, all the important organizations and courts will be based on a system of
elections; their members will be elected by the people through an equal, universal, and
secret vote. The people themselves will decide their future. That is why the participation of
the Muslims in taking decisions about their future is of great importance for them. (Kaspi,
25.10.1917)
While the new legislation issued by the Provisory Government in St. Petersburg
in March 1917 gave women the right to take part in the election to the Constitutive
Assembly and to the city and local councils, the Muslim women were strongly
advised to take part in the elections at all the levels. The idea was that the partic-
ipation of women as voters and as candidates would increase the visibility of
Muslims on the Russian political scene and would also increase the number of
obtained mandates. In order to eliminate doubts with respect to women’s political
participation, the decision of TsDUM referred to sharia:
Because the Muslim Sharia does not limit women’s political rights, in particular, their
active and passive electoral rights, thus, there is no obstacle to Muslim women’s partici-
pation in the electoral campaign from the Sharia viewpoint (Kaspi, 25.10.1917)3
Many articles published in Kaspi in 1917 discussed the importance of progress

and education and informed readers about new educational initiatives for women.
An article by Asad Mamedov Akhliev, published on 28 October 1917, reported on
the opening of a professional school for women in Baku. The event was described
as presided over by the high religious authority (ahund) Aga Alizade, as well as by
“our emancipated women-Muslims”: the school was opened by the Muslim
Women’s Charity Society. Aga Alizade is described in this article as defending
“cooperation of men and women” with the help of hadiths in his speech (Kaspi
28.10.1917). Another article, from 25 October, communicated that evening courses
for Muslims (men and women) were beginning in Kazan (Kaspi 25.10.1917).
Furthermore, publications show that Muslim women actively participated in
political and social life. Thus, the report on a meeting of the Muslim Commission in
Baku in September 1917 stated that its head, Ali Mardan-Bek Topchbashi,4 sup-
ported a woman, a representative of the Tatar Cultural-Spiritual Society from
Rostov-na-Donu, who travelled to the meeting in order to collect money for a
school and mosque for Tatar children in the city: “Up to now our Muslim women
did not collect money. But this woman made this long journey in order to collect
money for a school” (Kaspi 16.09.1917). In its turn the report from Crimea stated
that there it had been decided to organize women’s Muslim committees together
with men’s with the aim of
3
Many of the ideas discussed on the pages of Kaspi would be practiced in the Azerbaijan
Democratic Republic established in 1918 and crushed by the Bolsheviks in 1920.
4
Ali Mardan-Bek Topchibashi, born in Tbilisi in 1863, graduated from St. Petersburg University
and was elected as a Muslim deputy to the first State Duma (1906). He was the leader of the
Muslim fraction in the Parliament (State Duma) and the head of the Parliament of the Azerbaijan
Democratic Republic from 1918 to 1920. After the Republic was destroyed by the Bolsheviks in
1920, Topchibashi lived in exile, and died in 1934 in Paris.
…creating unity among all Tatar women, for their emancipation from century-long slavery
and in order to wake up the spirit of the mother-citizen of the free democratic Russia in a
Tatar woman, [the spirit] of the educator of the new generation. (Kaspi 15.08.1917)
Probably the most radical event for Muslim women’s activism in 1917 was the
First Muslim Women’s Congress that took place in Kazan in April (Kamp 2015;
see also Makhmutova 2006). The congress was attended by women from different
parts of the former empire (from St. Petersburg and Belarus up to Central Asia), and
the attendees voted to accept the resolution on the rights of Muslim women. In May
of the same year this resolution was also supported by the All-Russian Muslim
Congress in Moscow (Makhmutova 2006). The resolution of the Kazan congress
made important statements on gender equality: it declared political rights for
women, their right to divorce, marriage with consent, prohibition of bride money,
and also the right of women not to be secluded. And, as Marianne Kamp showed,
the All-Russia Muslim Women’s Congress in Kazan in April 1917 also referred to
Muslim law, to sharia, in order to claim women’s equal rights with men’s. It made
it clear 5 that these aspirations to gain certain rights would not endanger the Muslim
identity of the beneficiaries and would not have anything to do with attacks on
Islam by the Russian state. This resolution was one of the first stressing that women
had a duty to participate in the election to the Constitutive Assembly.
Furthermore, those elected by the Congress to be in the Bureau of Muslim
Women prepared a pamphlet calling on all Muslim women in Russia (“Muslim
sisters”) not to be passive in such a “historical time.” According to the pamphlet,
Muslim women had to become “full members of the society” in order to further the
national interests, and they “must not expect men alone to bear the burden of
building the foundation of our national future.” If the Muslim women would not
take away the “chains of injustice and oppression,” “our children, our young nation
never would forgive this,”6 stated the pamphlet (see more Gradskova 2012).
Declaring women’s rights for the sake of the nation and with reference to sharia
laws represented a rather widespread tactic that could be found in many documents
issued around 1917 by the Muslims (sometimes this discourse could be found even
in the documents from the first years after the Bolshevik revolution). Both Muslim
congresses that took place in the period between February and October of 1917 (the
first in May in Moscow and the second in July in Kazan) took the women’s
question seriously. Even though the general atmosphere in the second congress was
much more conservative than in the first one, its resolution still stated that “lack of
clarity with respect to the solution to the woman’s question in this historical
moment could damage our national and cultural movement.” Indeed, the “woman’s
5
Quoted according to Materialy i dokumenty po istorii obshchestvenno-politicheskikh dvizhenii
sredi Tatar, 1905–1917. Kazan: KGU 1998, 68–70.
6
“Obraschenie Tsentralnogo organizatsionnogo biuro musulmanok Rossii k musulmankam,”
20.06.1917. Quoted according to Sagit Faizov’s translation from Tatar into Russian, http://www.
gender-az.org/index.shtml?id_main=43&id_sub=120 (the document was last accessed and
downloaded in 2012). Translation of the document into Turkish is preserved in NART, f. 186, op.
1, file 32, p. 8.
3.1 The “Woman’s Question” and the Revolutions of 1917 in the Imperial … 53
question” was seen by the congress participants as a question that was important for
the “whole nation” and not only for women.7
Thus, together with the recognition of equality of rights in the political sphere,
documents from 1917 to 1920 insist on many other changes in the status of Muslim
women that would contribute to the nation’s well-being. For example, the
above-mentioned resolution from the Kazan Women’s Congress contained a
statement about the need for a health certificate confirming the absence of conta-
gious illness for groom and bride before the religious ceremony of marriage (nikah)
could be performed; it was explained as necessary “for the health of the nation.”8
Also, child marriages were prohibited, not so much from the perspective of
women’s rights, but in order to prevent unhealthy offspring (“sick children”) as an
outcome of such marriages. The Kazan resolution insisted on 16 years as the ear-
liest acceptable age for a bride (“in the North as well as in the South and in East”)
and demanded that the groom guarantee that he not take a second wife into his
house (but if he should do so, he should divorce and pay maintenance to the first
wife). Finally, the right of women to divorce in cases of “unhappy marriage” was
also justified not only in relation to “women’s suffering” in such marriages but also
to “bad conditions for children’s upbringing” in such families. The document also
presented popular enlightenment as an important task of educated Muslims: young
women should have the opportunity to study in high school; courses for women as
well as “organizations for improvement of practical and spiritual life of women”
should be created and Muslim clinics and kindergartens opened.9
Quite similar aspirations regarding progress and support for education can be
found in the documents that resulted from Mari social and political movements
from 1917. The Mari were probably experiencing even stronger pressure in relation
to Russification and Christianization than neighboring Muslim people, primarily
through the program for preparing teachers in schools where study of the Christian
religion and Russian language were central. Thus, preservation of the language,
pantheist religion, and customs was seen by Mari intellectuals as the most important
aim of their activity. This aim was reflected in Marla Calendar, a yearly literary and
advice magazine in the Mari language that began publishing in 1907 (Lallukka
2000, 395).
The First Congress of the Mari People, which took place in Birsk in July 1917,
was convened by Mari political activists and intellectuals and aimed to discuss the
most important issues for the nation (there were only 13 women among 178 del-
egates there). Among other decisions, the Congress made a resolution to open a
national museum dedicated to Mari culture, organize concerts and performances in
the Mari language, and defend the Mari religion through giving the status of priests
to the performers of the traditional religious ceremonies. The congress declared the
7
Quoted according to Materialy …, 88–89.
8
Quoted according to Мaterialy …, 68–70.
9
Translated into Russian by Faizov, http://www.gender-az.org/index.shtml?id_main=43&id_sub=
120.
need for the creation of a special foundation in support of cultural and educational
efforts of the central organization of the Mari (Pervyi vserossiskii 2006, 28) and
special Societies of Mari People (mari ushem) were created for local activities.
Furthermore, the document stated the importance of kindergartens and children’s
open-air playgrounds (a form of open-air kindergartens, ploshchadki) for the future
of the Mari nation, with the view that such kindergartens should be provided
“everywhere possible” (Pervyi vserossiskii 2006, 21). These kindergartens were
seen not only as places to provide better and modern childcare, but also places
where children could learn about Mari traditions and practice the Mari language. As
for educational activities for adults, according to the congress’s documents they
would include “evening classes, readings, lectures, conversations, excursions, and
village libraries (izby-chitalni)” (Pervyi vserossiskii 2006, 6).
Even though very few women took part in the congress, the decisions seemed to
take into account the importance of equal rights for men and women: the Mari
(male and female) had the right to change their religion only after reaching the age
of 18 (Pervyi vserossiskii 2006, 37); marriage was described as an undertaking by
two persons, who are at least 18 years of age, according to their mutual agreement.
Also, the congress prohibited bride kidnapping that was practiced in a part of the
region (Pervyi vserossiskii 2006, 38). With respect to education, the importance of
male and female teachers was stressed: “the male teachers and female teachers at
the present time can be seen as those who can best express people’s aspirations and
in the best way guide the cultural enlightenment” (Pervyi vserossiskii 2006, 44).
Based on the studied materials it can be concluded that the revolutionary
changes of February 1917 and the declaration of equality of former subjects of the
empire raised aspirations for modernization among national intellectuals and
politicians and led to the elaboration of national modernization programs by dif-
ferent nations, including those of the Volga region. The rights and education of
women constituted an important part of these programs.
3.2 From 1917 to the Great Terror
According to Francine Hirsch, the Bolsheviks “did not wish to just establish control
over the people of the former Russian Empire; they set out to bring those people
into the revolution and secure their active involvement in the great socialist
experiment” (Hirsch 2005, 5). The “state-sponsored evolutionism” proposed by the
Bolsheviks, however, is seen by Hirsch as “a Soviet version of a civilizing mission”
(Hirsch 2005, 7). Yet it is important to pay attention to the fact that during the first
post-revolutionary years the Bolsheviks were attempting to find allies among the
“people of the East,” first of all with the help of the outspoken anti-colonialism, but
also through cooperation with Muslim reformists. According to Adeeb Khalid,
taking jadids as temporary political allies in the Muslim parts of the empire, the
Bolshevik regime was “sending out teams armed with posters, newspapers, films
and theater to propagate the new political message” (Khalid 2007, 66–67).
3.2 From 1917 to the Great Terror 55
Indeed, the First Congress of the People of the East that took place in Baku in
September 192010 (soon after the Bolsheviks recaptured Baku and eliminated the
Azerbaijan Democratic Republic) pronounced against capitalism’s colonial politics.
The women’s section of the Congress started with a speech by a guest, a delegate
from Turkey. The representative of the Bolshevik center, Shabanova, in her speech
at the Congress insisted on the equality of rights, and the possibility for women to
use educational institutions and admission to employment (Minutes of the Congress
of the People of the East 1920), while the question of the hair scarf (chadra) was
stated to have the “least importance.”
Nevertheless, the First (1921) and Second All-Russian meeting for those
working among the women of the Orient (1923) for emancipation of natsionalka,
which took place in Moscow, had quite a different kind of participants and agenda.
Thus, among the 15 participants in the second meeting, 10 were Russian and Jewish
women, although only seven could speak the language of the women they were
working with (Materialy 1923, 5). While some of the participants at the meeting
saw the compatibility of Soviet institutions with the sharia courts (20–21), a speech
by Sofia Smidovich, the head of Zhenotdel, stressed the passivity and cultural
backwardness of the “women of the Orient.” It was because of this the Party needed
to “take them from the tenacious paws of religious and customary prejudices”
(Smidovich in Materialy 1923, 22).
The woman’s question in the former imperial borderlands was high on the
Bolshevik political agenda during the next years, and involving women of different
nations in the “work for revolution” was considered one of the important tasks to
further distribution of the Bolshevik ideas (Massell 1974). The biographies of
several women from the Volga-Ural region who were active in the revolutionary
transformation of life during the 1920s and early 1930s mainly confirm the idea
about involvement of some non-Russian women, who were socially and politically
active before 1917, in the work of transforming women’s lives after the Bolsheviks
took power. Even if a lot of data is missing, published studies and biographical
materials suggest, for example, that some of the women who took part in the
Congress of Muslim women in Kazan in April 1917 continued their activities later.
One of them was Zahida Burnasheva (1895–1977), a Tatar born in the Riazan
region, who completed the course of education at the school organized by Mukhlisa
Bubi (Gimazova 2004, 196) and started working as a teacher in the 1910s.
Burnasheva took part in the All-Muslim Congress of May 1917 as a member of the
Muslim women’s bureau (Faizov 2005, 26; Kamp 2006, 48) and became known as
a poet in revolutionary Russia (her poetry was translated into Russian in 1922).11
After the Bolshevik revolution, Burnasheva became a member of the Bolshevik
10
The Congress was organized by the Komintern and many of the delegates at the Second
Komintern meeting in Moscow (including John Read and Bela Kun) took part in the Congress in
Baku. Among the participants were delegates from Iran, Turkey and China and some other Asian
countries.
11
Burnasheva’s literary pseudonym was Hiffat Tutash. Her book Zora Yulduz was published in
Moscow in 1922.
party; during the 1920s she worked as a head of one of the first Central Asian
teachers’ schools for women (Kamp 2006, 86–88). One more example is Mariam
Zainullina (1900–198?), another former pupil of the school organized by Mukhlisa
Bubi (Gimazova 2004, 201). She joined the Red Army’s cultural department during
the civil war, worked as a teacher for many years, took part in the campaign to
eliminate illiteracy, and was a leader of a popular theater group.12
A Mari woman, Malika Afanasieva, born in the territory of contemporary
Bashkortostan, worked as a teacher, joined the Red Army during the civil war and
in the 1920s was the first head of the Commission for Improvement of Work and
Everyday Life of Women in Mari region (Zhenshchiny Mariiskoi 1968, 22). To
such women belonged also the well-known member of the special department for
work among women, Zhenotdel, Antonina Nukhrat-Matveeva (1900–1983), who
was born in a Chuvash family living in a Bashkir village and before 1919 worked as
a teacher in the Chuvash village school. (More will be said about Nukhrat’s later
work in the Commission for Improvement of Work and Everyday Life of Women
in Chaps. 5–6.) Finally, Rabiga Kushaeva, a teacher at a village school in
Bashkortostan and participant in the Bashkir National Congress in July 1917
worked as a Zhenotdel instructor in Sterlitamak in the early 1920s (Suleimanova
2006).
These examples are mainly consistent with the Antonina Nukhrat’s assumption
about Bolshevik supporters among local women. In her memoires she stated that
female teachers were particularly active in the Bolshevik cultural transformation
(Nukhrat 1930, 259).
However, the Bolshevik politics was destructive for national movements and
aspirations. The attempts to create independent national republics in the Volga-Ural
region were crushed by the Bolsheviks. The most important example, probably, is
the self-governed Bashkir Autonomous Republic created in 1917 under the lead-
ership of Akhmet Zeki Validi13 where the control of Moscow was re-established in
1919. The end of hopes for independent national government and hardships of the
expropriations and civil war made many families and many educated Muslim
women to leave the Volga-Ural region and to move to Central Asia, Turkey or other
countries in Europe and Asia.
Many women who were active in the movement for emancipation of the nation
and education of women before and during 1917 emigrated soon after the
Bolsheviks took power. One of them was Safika Gaspirali, daughter of Ismail Bey
Gaspirali, teacher and active participant in the Tatar women’s activism in 1917 (see
documents in Hablemitoglu and Hablimitoglu 1998). The collection of letters sent
to her that can be found in the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan shows
that while living in Turkey, for many years she continued to correspond with Tatars
12
Damira Zainullina, Mariam, http://history-kazan.ru/2003/03/maryam/.
13
Akhmet Zeki Validi (Validov in Russian documents) was proclaimed the leader of the first
Soviet Autonomous Bashkir Republic in 1917. After the autonomy of the Bashkir Republic was
limited by the Bolshevik center in 1919, Validi took part in the struggle against the Bolshevics in
the Central Asia and then emigrated to Turkey; see Salikhov 2002.
in Russia and abroad.14 Similar to many other Tatar and Muslim emigrants from
Russia, she saw in reforms realized in Turkey by Kemal Ataturk (see Chap. 8) some
form of realization of earlier jadidist ideas.
Among many negative effects of the civil war of 1918–1922 was a severe famine
that strongly affected the whole Volga-Ural region but was particularly vividly
described in documents from the Mari Autonomous District (MAO). According to
the pamphlet published to celebrate five years of the MAO in 1925, the experiences
of that period were connected to enormous suffering: “The nightmare of the famine
started to influence the psychology of the people. All kinds of crime appeared—out
of court judgments, suicides, and cases where mothers were ready to bury their
newborn babies alive” (Efremov 1926, 31).
After the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia and the republic was established
in Turkey in 1923, the space of Turkic cultural exchange experienced new chal-
lenges as well. Indeed, it was seriously threatened by the Bolshevik secret services
and endangered by the negative influence of Turkish nationalism 15(see Reynolds
2011). Furthermore, the Bolsheviks attempted to use the popularity of the ideas of
the Islamic thinkers from the Russian Empire abroad to improve their own image
among the Muslim communities and to spread Soviet influence.
Like the Russian imperial government, the Bolsheviks were suspicious of the
national intellectuals, especially Muslim intellectuals.16 The independent Muslim
press had already been closed down by 1917–1918 (Nasyrov 2006). One of the
periodical publications that was closed was Syuyum-bike, a popular women’s
magazine created in 1913. The new, Bolshevik, women’s magazine in the Tatar
language, Azat Hatyn (Liberated Woman) was created much later, in 1926, but it
was very different from Syuyum-bike in its content.
Still, the changes in the lives of non-Russian women after 1917 were partly
connected to further development of the pre-1917 discussions inside of the region
and nations and their radicalization after February 1917, while the presence of the
Bolshevik agitators for the emancipation of women in the early post-revolutionary
years seems to be rather limited. Included among the discussed issues was, for
example, the possibility of women’s prayer in mosques (see Numganova 2010).
One important change in religious life for Muslims of Central Russia after the
liberal revolution in February 1917 was the reorganization of the TsDUM in Ufa.
The institution had been established by the Russian administration in the late 18th
century with the aim of controlling Muslim religious life, and the 1917 changes to it
would continue to be important for the next 10 years. The department experienced a
certain degree of democratization after the February 1917 and, as a result of new
14
NART, documents of Şafika Gaspirali, f. 187/1/77.
15
The Anatolian Turks started to be more interested in building their own state than in cooperation
with Turkic people in other countries.
16
Those Tatar intellectuals who joined the Bolsheviks in the early post-1917 years but preserved
their views on religion and national independence were subject to repression rather early. The
prominent Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev (1892–1940), for example, was arrested in 1924
(Tagirov 2010), accused of pan-Turkism.
election procedures, Mukhlisa Bubi, former director of the school for girls in the
village of Izh-Bobia discussed in the previous chapter, was elected as the first
woman-qadi. Also, in 1922 Rizaeddin Fakhreddin, a famous jadid, researcher, and
writer, was elected as a mufti, a head of TsDUM (Useev 2007).
Fulfilling her duties of the TsDUM-member, Mukhlisa Bubi was very active in
defending Islam, religious schools and the Tatar language (Makhmutova 2003). She
defended the right of women to teach religion, among other things. The head of the
department, Rizaeddin Fakhreddin, supported these efforts. For example, according
to the newly published documents preserved in the secret police archive (OGPU),
Mukhlisa Bubi was asking the Bolshevik authorities for permission to hold courses
for women in the main mosque of Ufa, but received negative responses from the
Bashkir Executive Committee and Bashkir Ministry of Internal Affairs.17 In another
document, Mukhlisa Bubi (Bobinskaia) is described as claiming that women should
be allowed to teach in religious schools.18
Recently published documents of the Soviet secret police show that from the
mid-1920s the Islamic scholars (the Bolsheviks usually referred to them as “Muslim
clergy,” apparently viewing them as analogous to the Orthodox priests) came into
focus in the police reports as a potential threat to the Soviet transformation; in
particular, the connections among Muslims in different Soviet regions and abroad
were interpreted as pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism (similar to the accusations that
had been made previously by the authorities of the Russian Empire). Even if the
anti-Islam campaign was not so strong in the first post-revolutionary years, the
“Muslim clergy”—religious scholars, teachers, and members of the TsDUM—were
increasingly under the control of the secret police, and their international contacts
and travel became very restricted (see, for example, Guseva 2016).
Furthermore, the new Soviet politics in the sphere of education meant the closing
down of Muslim high schools (medrese) in Kazan, Ufa, Orenburg, and other cities
in 1918. The primary and secondary schools for Bashkir and Tatar children were
also forbidden to teach religion. However, recent studies of school education during
the first Soviet years show that, in spite of the Bolshevik declarations on education
being the state’s priority, during the 1920s many schools for children whose mother
tongue was Tatar or Bashkir continued to be financed and organized rather tradi-
tionally. According to Lena Suleimanova, in the mid-1920s about 11% of all the
schools in Bashkortostan were functioning thanks to money collected by parents
(the teachers’ salaries and school premises were paid for by this money)
(Suleimanova 2000, 30), and several former teachers of non-religious disciplines
from the Muslim schools continued teaching their subjects (Suleimanova 2000,
17
“Pismo muftiia R.Fakhretdinova v Prezidium VTsIK,” December 1927, Islam i Sovetskoe
gosudartstvo, vyp. 1, p.136.
18
“Qadi of the Central Spiritual Office, Mukhlisa Bobinskaia in her letter to the TNKP, asked in
the name of the Office that the decision about permitting women to teach spiritual knowledge
(verouchenie) in the religious schools and mosques be made as quickly as possible. She had
already asked for such permission some time ago, during her visit to Kazan.” 1926 (Islam i
Sovetskoe gosudartstvo, 2010, 3, 34–35).
136). Even if religious schools were prohibited, on the basis of the secret police
data, it is easy to assume that some of the ordinary schools were indeed able to
continue teaching religion to some extent. For example, according to OGPU data,
even in 1927 some cantons in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan had about 27–49 reli-
gious schools (“Sovershenno sekretno,”—“1927 god” 2003, 259). Another study,
focusing on Muslims (mainly Bashkir) of the Perm region, showed that drastic
changes with respect to religion started to occur at the end of the 1920s, when many
mosques were closed down or destroyed. At the same time, oral history material
collected by the researchers in Bashkortostan shows that, in spite of strict control at
schools, some families continued to follow Muslim traditions to some extent even
in later years.19
Unlike the Orthodox population of Central Russia, Muslim nations of the
Volga-Ural region did not experience a fully developed anti-religious campaign up
to the mid-1920s. While this difference was partly connected to their status of
former dominated people restricted in their religious freedom, it also was explained
by the Bolshevik expectations of development of the revolutionary movement
among Muslims outside the Soviet Union. During the 1920s the Bolsheviks con-
tinued to hope that the revolution would spread further, beyond the borders of the
former Russian Empire and among the Muslim populations in colonies of other
empires. First of all, millions of Muslims living in the British colonies were seen as
important potential allies. It made the Bolshevik politics towards Muslims rather
cautious and contradictory, in particular with respect to religious customs, including
use of sharia legislation in connection to family (see Massell 1974, 218–219).
This became particularly apparent in view of the participation of a big Soviet
delegation led by the head of TsDUM, Rizaeddin Fakhreddin, in the International
Muslim Congress in Mecca in 1926 (Sulaev 2007). The Soviet delegation, which
included eight members, was the second largest, after India, which sent 13 members
(Islam 2010, 71). In order to make its participation more visible, the Soviet gov-
ernment allowed Musa Bigi, a Tatar intellectual well known in the Muslim world,
who had already been arrested once and was under police control, to take part in the
congress. The documents show that the Bolsheviks only partly reached their goals,
and most of the issues discussed at the congress—about pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj),
regular meetings, charity, and the slave trade—are described in the police report as
“not very important” to the Soviet delegation (Islam 2010, 73). For Muslim
intellectuals from Russia, however, participation in the congress was the last big
international event where they could have direct contacts with Muslim authorities
and scholars from other parts of the world.
19
For example, teachers had to observe that children were eating at school, including during
Ramadan. At the same time, ordinary village people and even some kolkhoz leaders continued to
pray five times a day, ensuring that they were out of view of others (Gauzova and Selianinova
2012, 126).
Preparation for the congress in Mecca included the organization of a Muslim

congress in Russia (Ufa, 1926),20 and the published OGPU materials show that this
congress provoked a lot of interest among men and women in the Volga-Ural
region. Multiple mandates given to congress representatives in the village assem-
blies demanded freedom of religious education, opening of new religious schools
and courses, creation of a Muslim typography, and giving civil rights to mullahs.21
As for the Mari religion, it came to be seen as “not a proper” religion after the
Bolshevik revolution—similar to the period before 1917. For example, the reports
of the secret police almost never mention Mari “clergy” or religious ceremonies.
Their worship in the forest and tradition of making animal sacrifices were presented
in the Soviet documents from the 1920s mainly as indicating a “lack of culture” that
was supposed to disappear with more educational work in the region (Gradskova
2017). Still, a questionnaire created by the National Society for Regional
Knowledge in 1930 indicated that traditional (as well as Christian) religion con-
tinued to be an object of interest among the intellectuals and promoters of national
Mari culture and tradition (kraevedy).22 However, the Central Union of Mari,
created in the Congress of 1917 to carry out broader functions related to supporting
national development and emancipation, beginning in the summer of 1918, was
expected to dedicate itself only to cultural activities and soon was closed. The
leaders of the Union, such as the priest Pavel Glezdynev,23 had to change occu-
pation. Several of the activists for national rebirth, including Leonid Mendiarov and
Valerian Vasiliev,24 were arrested in the early 1930s as nationalists and Finnish
agents (Sanukov 1993, 78; Sanukov 2000).
The data collected by the secret police shows that the beginning of collec-
tivization led to a drastic decline in the economy of the region and, in some cases, to
20
“Dokladnaia zapiska o siezde musdukhovenstva i predstavitelei veruiushchikh v Ufe”
(Sovershenno sekretno 2001, 77–85).
21
Sovershenno sekretno, t.4—(1926), Chap. 2, 2001, 794; t.4—(1926), Chap. 1, 2001, 641, 548,
517, 303, 644. See also Gradskova 2017.
22
The questionnaire included questions on special forests and the number of animals offered to
Gods (Mariiskoe oblastnoe 1930, 8, 32). Along with these questions were others, asking about
abortions, cohabitations, and women activists.
23
Pavel Glezdynev (born in a Mari village in Bashkortostan in 1867 as Islamgarey Mindiyarov)
was baptized, changed his name, and became an Orthodox priest. Later, he headed an Orthodox
mission among the Mari and Udmurts. Glezdynev supported education of the Mari in their native
language and contributed to the development of the nation through his work as a teacher, writer,
and publisher. After the Bolshevik revolution, Glezdynev worked as a specialist in the local culture
and history (kraeved) up to his death in 1923. After his death, Glezdynev’s name was largely
forgotten and did not become a part of the Soviet historiography of the region, http://mariez.ru/
izvestnye-lichnosti/glezdenev-pavel-petrovich.
24
Valerian Vasiliev in 1917 was student of Kazan University.
famine. Together with repressions against religion, this led to peasants’ protests25
where women were not only active participants, but sometimes leaders. For
example, an OGPU report from 1929 describes how, when the protests against
closing down a mosque in one of the villages in Bashkortostan started, the red flag
was taken away from the village council while women organized an all-night patrol
around the mosque (Sovershenno sekretno (1929) 2004, 274). In the same year,
about 150 women with small children in a village in Tatarstan gathered around the
village council office demanding that a fine against the local mullah be dropped
(Sovershenno sekretno (1929) 2004, 362).
However, it was during the period of the great terror of the late 1930s when
defenders of national emancipation, as well as non-Russian women who were
active during the 1920s and early 1930s, experienced mass arrests, death and, often,
total erasure from the official Soviet history documents. The women included the
first Muslim woman qadi, Mukhlisa Bubi, who was executed in 1937 (see
Makhmutova 2003), and also, Amina Mukhitdinova (Makhmutova 2006, 216),
who in 1920–1921 was vice-minister of Justice in Soviet Tatarstan, and Abrui
Sayfi, the editor of the Communist woman’s magazine in the Tatar language, Azat
Hatyn, both arrested in the 1930s. Antonina Nukhrat, a representative of Zhenotdel,
was arrested in 1938 as a wife of the people’s enemy (she was released in 1947).
The same thing (arrest as a wife of the people’s enemy) happened to Khadia
Davletshina, one of the first Bashkir female writers and former Komsomol activist.
The repressions against non-Russian intellectuals, politicians, and activists of
women’s emancipation not only physically destroyed the potential energy of
multiple visions of emancipation, including anti-colonial ones, but also contributed
to deep and multiple erasures from descriptions of the history of emancipation, its
ideas, practices, and leading personalities. The great terror was an important con-
dition for unlimited and unchallengeable reproduction of the Soviet narrative on
Bolshevik emancipation of the “backward” natsionalka.
–––
Disproving Russian perceptions about the supposed dependency, ignorance, and
passivity of Muslim and, more generally, inorodtsy-women, women of the
Volga-Ural region showed themselves to be agents of their own emancipation. The
efforts of Tatar women in defending the nation, opposing Russification, building
schools, and petitioning the Muslim congresses about women’s rights contributed
to a change of gender norms inside of the societies of the Volga-Ural region and at
the same time challenged the imperial governance. As Marianne Kamp has noted,
the first All-Russian Congress of Muslim women that took place in Kazan in April
1917 was probably one of the most remarkable events of the revolutionary period of
1917 (Kamp 2015).
25
For example, the OGPU report from 1927 (Sovershenno sekretno (1927) 2003, 870) stated that
the number of people suffering from hunger was about 800 000 in Bashkortostan, and about 55
000 in the Mari region. The reports from Tatarstan and Bashkortostan from 1928 include a lot of
information about peasant revolts in different parts of the Volga-Ural region (Sovershenno sek-
retno (1928) 2002, 349, 308–309, 292).
The liberal and Bolshevik revolutions of 1917 were serious attacks on the
imperial order, as a result of which the Russian Empire ceased to exist as a political
entity. However, both revolutions were inspired by ideas of progress and devel-
opment. While the “colonial wounds” of the nations from the Volga-Ural region
were at first formally and publicly recognized by the Bolsheviks, the politics of the
new government soon incorporated many elements of the former imperial gover-
nance. Indeed the Bolsheviks’ declarations advocated universal progress, devel-
opment, and equality, but their political decisions in practice were guided by the
principles of “keeping control,” eliminating enemies and, at the same time, finding
allies among the colonized. From the mid-1920s, the claims of control over
non-Russian and non-white populations became stronger and were expressed
through growing anti-religious (anti-Islamic) campaigns, suspicions, and arrests not
only of the open opponents, but also of those national intellectuals who attempted to
cooperate with the Bolsheviks. Finally, in the 1930s, the forced industrialization
and collectivization of the region was accompanied and followed by the murder of
prominent intellectuals and endless economic dictates from the center. Women of
ethnic minorities, in particular, those of them who were active and visible during
the early Bolshevik campaign of emancipation of natsionalka often became victims
of the repressions.
Starting from the late 1930s, the word natsionalka mostly went out of use, while
the women living in the former colonial borderlands started to be presented as equal
members of the Soviet “family of nations.” Similarly to women in other parts of the
Soviet Union, women in the Volga-Ural region became involved in industrial
production, particularly during the Second World War. Non-Russian women were
expected to be members of the Communist Party and the Soviet organizations as
with the Russian women. Even so, women everywhere constituted a minority of the
party members, e.g., in Bashkortostan they constituted approximately one-third of
the party members in 1987 (Suleimanova 2006, 37–38).
As I said in the introduction, the emancipation of women of ethnic minorities in
the 1960s–1970s was usually presented as an example of the success of Soviet
politics. This simplified version of emancipation does not normally include a
detailed description of early Soviet anti-colonialism, nor is there any mention of the
pre-1917 activism of non-Russian women. The suffering of women as a result of the
Stalinist repressions, deportations and famine was also not discussed or acknowl-
edged during the Soviet period. The results of emancipation—expressed through
high level of women’s involvement in higher education and work for the socialist
industry (see for example Shakulova 1981) were presented as a unique Soviet
achievement, whereas the Soviet know-how for the emancipation of the “woman of
the East” had to be used in friendly countries only starting their post-colonial
reforms of women’s status.
The article on Kalmyk women published in 1977 is a good illustration of such a
presentation. Describing the hard life of the Kalmyk woman before the Bolshevik
Revolution, the article does not mention the forced deportation of the Kalmyks in
1943–1944 to Siberia, which led to the death of several thousands of people.
However, the article proudly declares:
The USSR is the first country in the world where the woman’s question’ is fully solved.
The research on how women became the active political factor is one of the greatest aims of
science in our day. The need to study the socialist practice for the solution of the woman’s
question is very big, particularly now when the Soviet experience in this sphere is widely
used by the young developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America” (Burchinova
1977, 58).
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Chapter 4
Informing Change: “Total
Hopelessness” of the Past
and the “Bright Future” of the “Woman
of the East” in Soviet Pamphlets
Abstract This chapter analyzes Soviet representations of women from former

imperial borderlands and representations of emancipation politics towards them in
the 1920s. I show how the image of natsionalka, a “downtrodden woman” in need
of emancipation, was constructed in early Soviet texts, and how this image was
connected to the glorious story of Soviet modernity created later. I also explore
what implications the story of the successful Soviet emancipation had for the
imperial/colonial hierarchies that were inherited from the period before 1917 and
for the respective identities of the Russian/European majority women and minority
women. What was happening when the nations from the former imperial border-
lands were approached by the new politics of culturalization? How were they
gendered, and what conflicts did it lead to? I explore such gendering in the cam-
paign to emancipate women of national minorities and transform the “backward
peripheries” on example of a special series of 28 pamphlets aimed at those working
for the emancipation of natsionalka and produced by the Institute for Protection of
Maternity and Childhood.
Keywords Ethnic minority woman Representation Soviet science

Soviet emancipation Sovietization 1920s
4.1 Introduction
This chapter analyzes Soviet representations of women from former imperial bor-
derlands and representations of the Soviet emancipation politics towards them in
the 1920s. I show how the image of natsionalka, a “downtrodden woman” in need
of emancipation, was constructed in the Soviet texts, and how this image is con-
nected to the glorious story of Soviet modernity created later. I also explore what
implications the story of the successful Soviet emancipation had for the imperial/
colonial hierarchies that were inherited from the period before 1917 and for the
respective identities of the Russian majority women and minority women.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 67

Y. Gradskova, Soviet Politics of Emancipation of Ethnic Minority Woman,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99199-3_4
68 4 Informing Change: “Total Hopelessness” of the Past and the …
Previous scholarship showed that the politics of culturalization and emancipation

realized by the Bolshevik “center” was a rather complex enterprise. Indeed,
although some strongly opposed the changes (see, for example, Northrop 2004),
some of the reforms of women’s status proposed by the Bolshevik center were
supported locally by different actors—from doctors, who long before 1917 had
been preoccupied with infectious diseases, to jadidist reformers (see Kamp 2006).
Furthermore, Irina Sandomirskaja has shown that the early Soviet cultural politics
were defined partly by intellectuals, including avant-garde filmmakers
(Sandomirskaja 2000, 10–11). Thus, practical realization of the emancipation of
natsionalka, as a part of the campaign for bringing culture to the masses and
transforming their everyday lives (byt), experienced complex influences of different
groups, including linguists (see Smith 1998), ethnographers (Hirsch 2005) and
filmmakers. At the same time, during the earlier period of the campaign, central
party control over the emancipation in the borderlands was hindered by problems of
communication, transportation, and human resources.
The declarations on equality of men and women, like similar declarations made
about equality among different nations, including former inorodtsy, enabled the
Bolshevik government to raise the number of supporters for the new revolutionary
ideals. At the same time, women were not immediately seen to be ready to enjoy
their equal rights or to share all the tasks involved in working for revolutionary
change. They were perceived as more “backward” than men and in need of more
“culture” and education in order to become the builders of socialism (Engel 2004);
women were also seen as needing help for their emancipation. The Communist
comradeship could include women mainly on the condition that they would become
similar to men, but at the same time, womanhood itself was defined in biological
terms, first of all through maternity. These contradictions, as we know, provoked
multiple identity conflicts among those women who shared the Bolshevik ideas and
started to participate in the political campaigns for culturalization (Goldman 1993;
Stites 1978).
But what was happening when the nations from the former imperial borderlands
were approached by the new politics of culturalization and emancipation? How
were they gendered, and what conflicts did it lead to?
In this chapter I explore such gendering in the campaign to emancipate women of
national minorities and transform the “backward peripheries” on example of a special
series of the pamphlets aimed at those working for the emancipation of natsionalka.
My analysis here is based on the perspective developed by Stuart Hall, according to
whom representation is connected to consumption and production of meaning as well
as to identity and regulation (Hall 1997). Analyzing Soviet propaganda publications it
is particularly important do not limit the study by the intentional meaning of repre-
sentation, but to pay attention to how the systems of representations—“different ways
of organizing, clustering, arranging and classifying concepts”—are constructed as
well as to “complex relations between them” (Hall 1997, 17).
The Bolsheviks understood that communication with non-Russian women could
not be achieved without some knowledge of the local languages, customs, and
beliefs; work among women in the borderlands had to be organized differently from
4.1 Introduction 69
work with women who were Russian peasants, factory workers, and workers’
wives. Thus, I am interested in how natsionalka’s education, work, family situation,
social activism, and interest in emancipation were evaluated by the “emancipators.”
To what extent were local efforts for emancipation (such as those described in
Chaps. 2 and 3 in connection to the Volga-Ural region) considered? How did the
organizers of the politics of culturalization and emancipation of women deal with
tensions and suspicions of the local communities towards the imperial center?
4.2 Series of Pamphlets on Women of Different Ethnic

Groups—Describing the Minority Women
As is well known, the Bolshevik leaders saw the spread of information, especially
visual information, about proposed developments as essential in order to achieve
modernization and also keep the population under control. Information about Soviet
laws, childcare, health, and new daily habits constituted the base of the propaganda of
kulturnost and of the new gender norms (see Kelly 2001; Kelly and Shepherd 1998;
Bernstein 1998). New forms of work were used to educate the masses, including
agitators’ visits to factories and villages, public readings of newspapers at factories
and clubs, mobile exhibitions, and posters. And obviously one of the most promising
ways to inform the masses about new politics and culture was through cinema.
A series of pamphlets under the common title “Working Woman of the Orient”
(truzhenitsa vostoka) was produced under the auspices of TsK VKPb (hereafter,
referred to as the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party
[Bolsheviks]) by the Institute of Protection of Maternity and Childhood (Moscow) in
1927. The main aim of the series was to provide information about local populations in
different parts of the former empire to doctors, nurses, Zhenotdel cadres, and activists
dealing with the education of natsionalka on hygiene and women’s rights, and to
prepare volunteers to work in different parts of the former empire. These populations,
and in particular “women of the Orient,” were seen as needing emancipation, or,
according to Laclau, constituted the predefined object of emancipation politics.
The series was to include 28 pamphlets, although I was able to find information
on only about 20 (see list at the end). They mainly include nations in the
Volga-Ural region, North Siberia, Far East, Caucasus, and Central Asia (Berger
1928a, b; Dobrianskii 1927, 1928; Ivanovskii 1928; Moskalev 1928; Shamkhalov
1928). At the same time, most probably due to the hope for an imminent
anti-colonial revolution in Asia, the pamphlet series was not limited to the nations
of the former Russian Empire, but also included Persia, Mongolia, Afghanistan,
China, and Turkey.1 The cover of every pamphlet offered an ethnographic style
picture of a woman dressed in traditional clothes. The pamphlet titles sometimes
1
In this case special attention was paid to the reforms of women’s status. See more on pamphlet on
Turkey in Chap. 8.
were made in a kind of the Orientalized graphics; each pamphlet was about 30–40
pages long.
In spite of the editors’ main interest in the protection of maternity and childhood,
the pamphlets’ content was not limited to questions of health and motherhood, but
embraced a rather broader perspective of social medicine, connecting health issues
with the organization of work, housing, education, and the gendered distribution of
power in the communities. It is likely that this very broad approach to the issues of
maternity was the reason for inviting scientists, mainly ethnographers and
Orientologists, to write the pamphlets. Some of the authors wrote pamphlets on
several nations, which probably implies that the Bolshevik center had only a limited
number of authorities available to write on the subject. It is important to note also
that later, in the 1930s and 1940s, some of the authors of these pamphlets would
become well-known Soviet ethnologists and specialists in Oriental studies. For
example, Evgenii Shteinberg (1902–1960), who wrote pamphlets about Chinese
and Tatar woman in the series, would become famous in Soviet Oriental studies,
and Nikolai Smirnov (1896–1983), who wrote two pamphlets, one on Kalmyk and
another on Turkish women, became known as a specialist in Islam and a participant
in the Soviet anti-religious campaign (Bobrovnikov 2011, 69; Smirnov 1929).
Some contributors to the series belonged to the older generation, and for some there
was no information available (for example, I. Stina, who wrote the pamphlet on
Bashkir woman). Most of the pamphlets were written by male authors, but a few of
the author names might be female.
What image of the main object of emancipation was created through the series?
How did the pamphlets define natsionalka (“the woman of the Orient”)? What
should the organizers of the culturalization and emancipation campaign know about
“Other” women, and why?
4.3 Territorial Expansion, Russification, and Forced

Christianization in the Pamphlets
The pamphlet about Bashkir women contains a sentence that typifies how women
from the former imperial peripheries were presented in the series: “A more hopeless
life than that of a Bashkir woman would be difficult to imagine” (Stina 1928, 24).
Usually such hopelessness was described in the pamphlets with reference to the
general context of the Russian colonization and the difficult past under capitalism.
First, however, the reader was introduced to the geography of the region fol-
lowed by an ethnographic description of the national customs. By this point the
pamphlets had started their critique of the “czarist policies”; even though the
pamphlets were dealing with the legacies of the Russian Empire, the imperial
politics were most often referred to as “czarist” or “capitalist” and only sometimes
“Russian.” Thus, the connection between “colonizers” and belonging to the Russian
nation was somehow blurred.
4.3 Territorial Expansion, Russification, and Forced … 71
The (Russian) imperial center was frequently accused of depriving the native
population of their land and of displacement—forcing entire nations to move to
places with harsh environments. For example, Udmurts2 are presented as having
quite a difficult life due to the harsh environmental conditions in which they lived—
an environment to which they had been located as a result of the Russian imperial
politics: “Among all the nations, the Finnish tribe, Votiaks, was forced by the
Russian colonization to move to the most northern part [of the country]” (Mikhailov
1927b, 3). The pamphlet on Bashkirs also states that lands where the Bashkirs used
to live were taken from them and were partly distributed among Christianized
Tatars, who were seen as allies of the imperial center (Steinberg 1928, 3–4). The
czar and the Russian capitalists were presented as the main perpetrators of these
displacements as well as of the politics of Russification and Christianization. For
example, we can read in the pamphlet about the Mari:
For many years the Mari preserved their customs and traditions. But they could not pre-
serve their independence and their land, they could not fight against the exploitation and
constant economic plunder that autocracy and Russian capitalism brought to the Mari
villages along with Russification and Christianization. (Mikhailov 1927a, 9)
This way of presenting the history of colonization implied that the Soviet state
and the Bolshevik revolution had the same enemies as the minority nations—the
capitalists. Thus, the dominated nations were invited to see the Bolshevik gov-
ernment and the agitators and health workers coming from the center as their main
allies and emancipators.
Criticism was also aimed at the Russian Orthodox Church and the imperial
government for repressing various non-Orthodox religions. Such accusations not
only added detail to the picture of people’s suffering, making the “colonial wound”
more visible but, to a certain extent (and only for a limited period) they legitimized
religions other than Orthodox Christianity. The czarist government, for example,
was accused of Christianization of the Kalmyks (Smirnov 1928, 4), and of sub-
jecting the Tatars, a Muslim people, to four centuries of “violence, persecution, and
mockery” while sending their children to the specially organized Russian schools
“where children of the natives had to be taught by the Russian chauvinists”
(Steinberg 1928, 8). However, even though forced Christianization and
Russification were condemned and local religions were partly legitimized in the
pamphlets through the acknowledgment of their past victimhood, they were
simultaneously denied any place in the future society organized on principles of
rationality and modernity. In the case of Tatarstan, for example, it was Russian
politics that prevented the development of Tatarstan “and created the way of life
there that was totally controlled by norms of Islam and Sharia” (Shteinberg 1928,
15). At the same time, many pamphlets provided short but quite colorful descrip-
tions of particular customs, such as summer festivals or ethnic dress and adorn-
ments; such descriptions were more in the tradition of ethnographic observation of
“alien cultures” than purely ideological critiques of religion.
2
The series addressed them by an older name, Votiak.
The pamphlet series often also stated that the native population resisted the
politics of the imperial center. For example, the pamphlet on Turkmen women
stated that Teke Turkmens were fighting against General Skobelev, the Russian
conqueror of Central Asia in the mid-19th century (Venediktov 1928, 15). In
another pamphlet, the opposition of the Buryats to the czarist government was
called “heroic” (Dobrianski 1928, 8–9). However, this resistance of the native
population was never shown to be so important that it could change the life of the
nation or could be compared to the Soviet emancipation of nations, and, even less,
to the Soviet efforts at culturalization. Thus, the series implied that, despite all the
heroic efforts at the local level, real freedom and cultural development could come
only from outside, and that the people of the (new) center were the ones that had
enough knowledge and power to bring it to the borderlands.
The series expressed an anti-imperialist sentiment and, while the Russian Empire
was the main target of the critique, other empires were criticized as well. For
example, the pamphlet on Armenian women stated that the Armenians had been
consigned to darkness and domination by the czar of Russia and sultan of Ottoman
Turkey (Khudadov 1927, 12). The pamphlet by Stusser on Afghan women
described their country as being attacked by two “predators”—the British imperi-
alists and (Russian) czarist government (Stusser 1928, 11). The way the series
portrayed the situation of Afghan women was similar to its portrayal of women in
the Russian imperial borderlands: the Afghan woman had a difficult life, worked
hard, and was the property of her family (Stusser 1928, 17).
At the same time, pamphlets describing women’s situation in countries outside
the territory of the Russian Empire, such as Turkey and Afghanistan, followed the
main patterns of the Soviet descriptions of reforms and indicated that modernization
and emancipation were welcomed and underway there as well. The pamphlet on
Afghanistan, for example, noted that the new emir had started reforms there by
placing limits on bride price and by making school education free for everybody
(Stusser 1928, 35). Turkey is shown as a victim of imperial war rather than as the
center of the former Ottoman Empire, and the reforms of the woman’s status were
also shown to be underway.3
4.4 Natsionalka as a Victim
While conquest and colonial exploitation were clearly presented as key causes for
the suffering and lack of culture in the nations as a whole, the situation looks more
complex when it comes to the descriptions of women. Even if “patriarchy” was
never stated as the main reason for women’s subordinate status, the texts indicated
that women’s subordination was due as much to the power afforded to the local men
based on “old customs” and “religious authority” as much as it was to the power of
3
I will return to this pamphlet in Chap. 8.
4.4 Natsionalka as a Victim 73
the Russian colonizers. Thus, several pamphlets, for example on Mari and Kalmyk
women, stressed that the women were working as hard as the men. At the same
time, the pamphlets often specified that women were doing a lot of care work,
which included care for men. For example, the work of the Kalmyk woman was
described as done “exclusively for serving the males in her family” (Smirnov 1928,
22). Furthermore, the pamphlets showed the natsionalka woman as responsible for
all domestic work and childcare. The pamphlet on Yakut woman stated: “Family
and children, children and the cows, this is a vicious circle that the cold, isolated
environment and Yakut customs create for her” (Dobrianskii 1927, 16). Finally,
several pamphlets stressed that, even if natsionalka worked very hard, her work was
not considered to be serious or productive.
The “woman of the Orient” was shown in this series in relation to traditional
customs and religious laws regulating marriage and family life. For example, the
text described how the Mari woman must abide by her father’s decisions and how
her future was dependent on bride price (kalym); also, bride kidnapping was said to
happen frequently in many parts of the Mari region (Mikhailov 1927a, 20). Further,
it described how the Mari woman would become even more dependent and sub-
ordinate after marriage: in her new family, for example, she would have to follow
an old custom according to which a woman must not show her feet and bare head in
the presence of older people (Mikhailov 1927a, 22). This custom was condemned
by the author of the pamphlet not only as depriving the woman of her rights, but, no
less important, as going against scientific principles of health care and hygiene. The
“backward customs” (or survivals—perezhitki) were thus presented as the main
obstacle to progress while the lack of rights for natsionalka was shown more as a
threat to (Soviet) modernization than as a problem of women’s lack of personal
freedom.
In some cases, however, the situation of natsionalka was described in terms of
her inclusion in the urban life and her adherence to European (meaning mainly
Russian in the context of the pamphlet) culture. For example, the pamphlet on
Georgian women stated that the “Georgian city woman, having lived with Russia
for a hundred years, has Europeanized so much that she is almost indistinguishable
from the Russian city woman” (Khudadov and Demidov 1928, 19). This positive
evaluation of the role of Russian culture in modernizing the everyday life of
Georgian women somehow contradicts the criticisms in many other pamphlets
about Russification’s destruction of the borderlands’ nations and cultures. At the
same time, this pamphlet makes explicit the Orientalist idea that is present in the
rest of the series—modernity is closely connected to the development of Europe,
and it is the Russian nation and Russian women who represent “Europe” and
“civilization” among the “women of the Orient.”
Interestingly, even though nations’ customs were presented as backward and as
contributing to discrimination against women, it was the laws of Islam that were
shown as limiting women’s freedom the most. Closely following European
Orientalist scripts, the pamphlets described Muslim women as subordinate, prac-
tically reducing them to slaves. The pamphlet on Tatar women, for example, stated:
“Similar to other Muslim nations, the Tatar woman is deprived of many freedoms;
social life and the possibility of obtaining an education or having independent work
is totally closed to her.” Even though the next sentence in the pamphlet implied that
the life of urban Tatar women had started to change in some respects during the last
years before the revolution (Steinberg 1928, 16), the pamphlet continued to focus
on lack of freedom, discussed bride price, and finally, compared a Tatar woman
with a “slave” (Steinberg 1928, 18).
Other pamphlets on Muslim women also supported these assumptions. For
example, the pamphlet on Azeri woman stated that the “lack of rights for women is
one of the most important principles of the Muslim religion” (Berger 1928a, 30).
Furthermore, the pamphlet on Bashkir women developed its description of
women’s limited freedom by referring to behavior expected of them after marriage;
for example, newly married women must not eat until all other family members
have done so, must not sit at the table with everybody else, and must not laugh or
speak loudly (Stina 1928, 19). Thus, the reader should understand not only that the
Bashkir woman lacked rights, she was also made fully submissive to her family,
who were in control of her body and emotions. Such control was implicitly
attributed to religion and was shown as much stronger than the social and religious
control exerted over Russian/Orthodox woman. The final description of control was
implied in a discussion on polygamy: “life is better when she is first wife and the
husband is young” (Stina 1928, 22).
It is interesting to note that the life of the Turkish woman was described quite
similarly to the life of the Russian Muslim woman from the Volga-Ural region:
“According to Sharia and to customary law that most of all reflects the economic
backwardness of the Orient, the woman is always seen as a lower creature, as a
thing” (Smirnov 1927, 22). While it is hard to say how much this rhetoric was the
result of the established Orientalist tradition and how much it reflected the new
Bolshevik approach to different nations, the similarity in the presentations of dif-
ferent groups of Muslim women as dominated mostly due to Islam seems to be the
common feature of European civilization discourse of the time.
The pamphlets did not discuss the subordinate status of the “enslaved” woman
solely with reference to her “enslavement” by her family and religion; as mentioned
earlier, the authority of science was frequently used to show that it was natsionalka
who embodied the most painful outcomes of the old regime’s politics. Indeed, the
pamphlets claimed that strenuous work and lack of rest and proper hygiene often
led to health problems for natsionalka. For example, it was mentioned that Mari
women often lost their sight as a result of learning embroidery from an early age
(Mikhailov 1927a, 17–19). In the case of Tatar women, “the horrible unhygienic
conditions,” traditional midwives (znakharka), and seclusion were said to con-
tribute to health problems (Steinberg 1928, 22). It was said that Chuvash women
had a low cultural level (malokulturnaia) and suffered from high child mortality,
trachoma, and unhygienic work conditions (Mikhailov 1928a, 36–37). These and
other examples placed natsionalka at the lowest level of the hierarchy created
around categories of progress and development, presenting them as exclusive and
powerless objects for emancipation efforts organized from outside.
4.4 Natsionalka as a Victim 75
The pamphlets in this series made almost no mention of any positive aspects of
non-Russian women’s situation, nor of the women’s own efforts to improve their
situation. Most descriptions therefore gave the impression that life for women from
the periphery of the empire offered almost no joy or happiness, contributing further
to the creation of an image of helplessness. There were some optimistic passages,
however, in several pamphlets describing life for women of the Volga-Ural region.
For example, the pamphlet on Udmurt (also known by an older name, Votiak)
women stated that, “Compared to women of many other nations, Votiachka enjoyed
a considerable amount of freedom” (Mikhailov 1927b, 17). Indeed, the Udmurt
woman was presented as responsible for the family budget and for making
important household purchases. Even her husband would ask her advice with
respect to important decisions. Bashkir women’s freedom was also mentioned in the
context of the special female feast held once a year—karagatuy (Stina 1928, 23).
However, neither the Bashkir women’s feast nor the Udmurt women’s relative
economic freedom were presented as freeing these women to the extent that, for
example, the Russian woman were free. Rather, they were described as exceptions,
for example, as one day of amnesty or one small area of power in lives otherwise
characterized by suffering and oppression. All this should make the (Russian and
urban) reader to feel sympathy and compassion towards victims of the traditional
customs and religion.
Furthermore, the jadidist movement for women’s education and women’s social
and political activism during the early 20th century, discussed in the previous
chapter in relation to Tatar and Muslim women of the Volga-Ural region, was
barely discussed in the pamphlets. The pamphlets’ approach to the life of nat-
sionalka was to equate it with the life of the “slave,” which did not allow them to
simultaneously present her as a participant in the collective actions for emancipa-
tion, nor as a socially active woman involved in charity and the education of girls.
Obviously the pamphlet about Tatar women could not avoid the topic altogether,
but it only briefly mentioned a few facts about the history of the jadidist movement
and Muslim women’s activism. It stated, for example, that the school for girls
organized by Mukhlissa Bubi was closed by the Russian government (Shteinberg
1928, 24), but it did not discuss the movement for education of Muslim girls,
jadidist ideas, school programs, or the importance of creating the school for female
Tatar teachers. Neither did it present Bubi as having an important role in the fight
for women’s rights. Even the All-Russian Muslim Women’s Congress that took
place in Kazan in April of 1917 was given only a brief mention—as an event
attended mainly by the “bourgeois intelligentsia” (Shteinberg 1928, 28). The short
passage about the women’s congress had to convince the reader of the
non-importance of the event: “It was obvious that resolutions taken at the congress
were expressed in unclear terms; they neither moved the cause of women’s
emancipation ahead nor improved the situation of working women” (Steinberg
1928, 28).
While the pamphlets portrayed natsionalka as lacking the ability and interest to
bring forward her own project of emancipation, it was not uncommon for them also
—consistent with the Orientalist scripts—to criticize her for her lack of morality.
For example, the pamphlet on Mari women stated that informal evening gatherings
of male and female youth—posidelki—“sometimes became the source of infectious
diseases and contributed to the development of bad mores” (Mikhailov 1927a, 24–
25). Similar gatherings were criticized in the pamphlet on Udmurt women: “Her
father gives her (the Udmurt woman) full freedom when she is not married” while
“posidelki are often the foci of the sexual libertinism that leads to the distribution of
syphilis and other illnesses” (Mikhailov 1927a, 18). Thus, the natsionalka women,
when they were not presented as “slaves” and “things,” were described as having
unlimited sexual desire and thus endangering public health and morality. Such
descriptions of savage sexual desires complemented the picture of the “enslaved”
woman and further contributed to the image of natsionalka as different from the
norms established by modern culture and science. Along with sexual promiscuity,
women from different parts of the former empire were criticized for exhibiting other
behavior that did not correspond to the ideal of the normative femininity that is
implicitly present in all the descriptions. Thus, the Udmurt women were criticized
for drinking alcohol and participating in the production of home-made vodka,
kumyshka (Mikhailov 1927b, 20), while the Turkmen women were reproached for
their lack of attention to their clothing and appearance (“only silver adornments
seem to be part of their coquetry”) (Venidiktov 1928, 32).
The series thus developed some arguments in support of the idea that natsion-
alka needed normalization with respect to both her body and her value system, and
that this could be achieved with help from outside—from Russia and from
European culture. At the same time, the category of natsionalka encompassed a
variety of different cultural traditions and backgrounds that were seen as “unim-
portant” because the main characteristics of such an identity were dependency and
lack of culture.
Despite their criticisms of Russian colonial politics and assertions about the need
to emancipate and bring culture to women of the periphery, it could be concluded
that the authors of the series are very much influenced by the existent stereotypes
about both “correct femininity” and “uncultured nations.” These stereotypes do not
leave enough space to allow the “Other” to have their own ideas and priorities, and
they contribute to the preservation of the hierarchies between “civilized” and
“backward” that were quite typical for all the empires (see Burbank and Cooper
2010).
4.5 Sovietization as Emancipation
The second part of each pamphlet was dedicated to the beginning of the “new life,”
showing how the women of all the nations were taking steps towards emancipation.
These steps looked quite similar among the different nations, as the pamphlets
described women and girls attending schools and courses, and women were visiting
maternity clinics and taking children to kindergartens. Many pamphlets also stated
the numbers of women participating in the work of the local councils (sovets), the
4.5 Sovietization as Emancipation 77
Komsomol organization; some also mentioned how many women of a particular

nationality were cooperating with the special department of the Bolshevik party for
work among women—Zhenotdel—as delegates, i.e. female activists. These num-
bers usually indicate that the majority of the activists were Russian women, but that
the situation is slowly changing in some places. For example, there were 1702
Russian delegates in the Mari Autonomous District in 1924–1925, 1106 Mari and
43 Tatar (Mikhailov 1927a, 40), while in 1926–1927 in Bashkortostan the Bashkir
and Tatar women constituted 76% of the delegates (Stina 1928, 33). Another
important indicator of the successful Sovietization was the growing participation of
women in different cooperatives and industrial workshops (artel). “The Chuvash
women are interested in artel” it was possible to read in the pamphlet on Chuvash
woman (Mikhailov 1927b, 35), whereas women from one of the Caucasian ethnic
minorities, the Kabarda, were said to be interested in learning more on the pro-
duction of silk, and on vowing technologies (Ivanovskii 1928, 39). The
Commission on the Improvement of Work and the Everyday Life of Women (see
Chaps. 5 and 6) was mentioned among the new Soviet institutions in the pamphlet
on Bashkortostan (Stina 1928, 37).
The small differences in the presentation of changes in the status of women of
different nations depended on how the hardships of women’s oppression were
described with respect to a specific region in the first part of each pamphlet. For
example, the pamphlets on Bashkir, Tatar and other Muslim woman stressed the
influence of Sharia laws, Muslim traditions and Muslim clergy. Indeed, the pam-
phlet on Bashkir women describes a conflict with Muslim clergy, and even includes
the destructive role that of the wives of the mullahs were playing:
Their agitation is very strong because they know the weak sides of every woman—her
relationships with family members and neighbors. They buy the trust of the uneducated
Bashkir woman with the help of gifts and attention to her and her children. Sometimes they
offer quite a significant amount of help in order later make her have doubts with respect to
the authority of the Soviet school, and to convince her of benefits of the mekteb (religious
school) (Stina 1928, 34).
In turn, the pamphlet on Tatar woman attempts to address the rich legacies of the
Muslim women’s activism before the Bolshevik Revolution, and to declare the
superiority of the Soviet politics:
The ladies and unmarried women from the Tatar bourgeois families were insisting on
reforms in the frames defined by the Sharia laws, but the female masses of Tatarstan refused
this program together with the traditional everyday life and religious prejudices (Steinberg
1928, 36).
In spite of somehow acknowledging the agency at least of some Muslim women

from the Volga-Ural region, the pamphlets continued to insist on a particularly
dependent status of Muslim women (Steinberg 1928, 36) and thus, claimed that the
changes had to start with the restriction of the power of religious authorities. Thus,
the pamphlets dedicated to the emancipation of many Muslim regions, described it
as starting with the abolishment of Sharia law, the price of brides, the kidnapping of
brides (especially in Caucasus—Ivanovskii 1928, 33) and polygamy.
In some other regions, the change of natsionalka’s dress was considered to be

particularly important. In Kalmykia, the first “decisive attack against the old life”
was described as the ban on wearing a bodice, a special tight leather garment
considered to be dangerous for women’s respiratory and reproductive health. The
pamphlet on Kalmyk women proudly reported that on April 20, 1921 the gov-
ernment of the Kalmyk Soviet Republic passed a law prohibiting the bodice for all
women and children (Smirnov 1928, 36).
Even if the situation of non-Muslim minority women is usually not described as
that of a “slave,” the process of transformation is still presented as quite difficult due
to a lack of culture and education. The Mari woman is described as “analphabet and
exploited” (Mikhailov 1927a, 33), but at the same time as not knowing her own
needs and requiring a special kind of treatment—“like a child” (Mikhailov 1927a,
28). Thus, the Mari woman from the Soviet pamphlets instead corresponded to the
image of the “noble wild,” who was not given the opportunity to show the best side
of herself due to harsh conditions. That is why the authors of the pamphlets con-
sidered it to be highly important to teach Mari, as well as Chuvash and Udmurt
women, about the usefulness of doctors, educational institutions, maternity clinics,
etc. (Mikhailov 1927a, b, 1928a, b). The educational efforts have particular
importance—the Chuvash woman should be helped with her “upbringing”
(vospitanie), whereas the Mari woman is described as unable to understand the
importance of education without “big preparatory work” (Mikhailov 1927a, 37).
Therefore, similarly to the case of Muslim women, the efforts of Mari to secure a
better education before the Bolshevik Revolution (see previous chapter) are fully
ignored.
Hence, the entire story on Sovietization and transformation presents the nat-
sionalka woman as an object of education and civilizing practices. The “new life”
supposed a learning about political participation, hygiene, childcare, reading skills,
and in some cases, about diet. Thus, the Kalmyk woman should learn about dealing
with milk products and vegetables, which should improve the Kalmyk family food
in general (Smirnov 1928, 41–43). However, the pamphlets also show that the
work that was organized from the Bolshevik center was not so easy: Mari women
were refusing to bring their children to “well organized and fully provided” nurs-
eries (Mikhailov 1927a, 38–39), and Kalmyk women were not responsive to an
alphabetization campaign because 80% of instructors could only speak Russian
(Smirnov 1928, 39). Finally a Russian head of Zhenotdel in rural Azerbaijan is
described as having to to wear a headscarf (chadra) outside the home in order to be
considered a “decent” woman (Berger 1928a, 33) and to be able to perform her
work there.
Based on this analysis, it is possible to conclude that in the description of the
Soviet transformations natsionalka continued to be gendered differently from the
majority women, as the “scientific” description of the changes in her life was
instead stressing her status as part of the nation. Consequently, the image of the
“Other” woman supported the normative image of the woman from the center,
thereby making the Russian woman an example of the “new Soviet woman.”
Furthermore, the pamphlets were giving women from the center the epistemic
4.5 Sovietization as Emancipation 79
privilege of collecting knowledge about the “Other” woman, in addition to

designing and realizing the plan for her emancipation. Indeed, as such, the con-
nections of modern science, the legal system and Europeanization to the imperial/
colonial way of thinking and the enactment of colonialism and hierarchies were
never discussed; most of the tropes and metaphors of colonial thinking continued to
be present in these pamphlets, which unanimously criticized colonialism.
—–
Despite all the anti-colonial rhetoric of the Bolshevik discourse on emancipation,
the new Bolshevik story of “bringing” culture and education to “backward nations”
and natsionalka in order to achieve “modernity” to a great extent followed the logic
described by Walter Mignolo as colonial. Indeed, the universal values of high
productivity, victory over nature, modern/European clothing, and medicalization of
the body were presented by the Soviet pamphlets as the only positive imperatives
for development. At the same time, the Soviet publications reinforced the old
racialized and gendered hierarchies by supplying them with new justifications based
on “scientific arguments” and making racism to be “invisible” (as used by Goldberg
2008) through claiming common bright future. Indeed, in the post-revolutionary
present (in difference to the distant Communist utopia) natsionalka or the “woman
of the Orient” was presented as too different from the majority of women: she could
not be expected to behave according to existing gender norms for “Soviet woman.”
According to this system of representations (Hall 1997, 17), the ordinary Soviet
woman did not have nationality and was constructed on the example of white,
Russian/Slavic and, formerly Christian, woman.
In particular, the Soviet slogans on “overcoming backwardness” of women and
nations could be easily detected as belonging to the global repertoire of modernity/
coloniality. According to Mignolo, some people “had no choice but to deal with the
fact that they have been classified as ‘barbarians’” so that other people could define
what civilization is (Mignolo 2011, 153). Thus, the Bolshevik modernizers, like
modernizers from other empires, needed this point of reference. Considering the
perception of Russia itself as a “backward” empire that had to “catch up” with the
West, this point of reference had special importance.
The pamphlets, in particular, were written in the name of “science” and had to
provide information that would help in organizing the work to be done among
minority women. However, the series demonstrates that prejudices about the
“Other,” viewed as enigmatic in some cases and as immoral in other cases, became
a part of the “scientific” descriptions. It is particularly visible, for example, in the
common descriptions of Muslim women’s position in their society as slave-like. It
is also apparent when women of some nations in the Volga-Ural region are
described as too sexually permissive. In spite of the critique of imperialism as well
as of forced Russification and Christianization, the series seems to further develop
the civilizing mission by portraying local customs as “backward” and unhygienic
and by presenting the Bolshevik center as the only actor capable of bringing culture
to the “remote corners” of the former empire.
References
Pamphlets Published in the Series “Working Woman of Orient”
Berger, A. (prof). 1928a. Azerbaidzhanka. Moskva: Institut okhrany materinstva i mladenchestva.

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Chapter 3

Revolutions of 1917 and the Bolshevik

Abstract This chapter focuses on the changes in women’s status in Volga-Ural

This chapter focuses on the changes in women’s status in Volga-Ural region as a

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 49

3.1 The “Woman’s Question” and the Revolutions of 1917

Many articles published in Kaspi in 1917 discussed the importance of progress

3.2 From 1917 to the Great Terror

Preparation for the congress in Mecca included the organization of a Muslim

Documents and Publications, 1910s–1930s

Burchinova, L. S. 1977. Zhenshchina-kalmychka v proshlom i nastoyashchem. In Politicjeskie i

Sanukov, Ksenofont N. 1993. K voprosu o razvitii prosvetitelskogo dvizheniia v Mariiskom krae.

Abstract This chapter analyzes Soviet representations of women from former

Keywords Ethnic minority woman Representation Soviet science

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 67

Previous scholarship showed that the politics of culturalization and emancipation

4.2 Series of Pamphlets on Women of Different Ethnic

4.3 Territorial Expansion, Russiﬁcation, and Forced

4.4 Natsionalka as a Victim

4.5 Sovietization as Emancipation

Komsomol organization; some also mentioned how many women of a particular

In spite of somehow acknowledging the agency at least of some Muslim women

In some other regions, the change of natsionalka’s dress was considered to be

privilege of collecting knowledge about the “Other” woman, in addition to

Pamphlets Published in the Series “Working Woman of Orient”

Berger, A. (prof). 1928a. Azerbaidzhanka. Moskva: Institut okhrany materinstva i mladenchestva.

Other Documents and Publications from the 1920s–1930s

Smirnov, Nikolai. 1929. Chadra. Moskva: Bezbozhnik.

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