Veiled Empire

Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia

Douglas T. Northrop

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501702969
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women—precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.

CHAPTER 1

Embodying Uzbekistan

In Bokhara the woman is described as conspicuous by her absence. No man ever sets eyes upon a lady not his own, for in the street she is nothing but a perambulating sack with a black horse-hair screen where her face is likely to be. The women live in a strictly separate part of the house, often having its own courtyard and its own pond. Only now and again one meets them at dawn or nightfall, stealing out furtively to fetch water. They shrink at the sight of a stranger and veil themselves in all haste. The children, of whom the usual quantity abounded, were suffering from sore eyes, a result of the allpervading dirt amid which they live and the pestering flies that take advantage of defenceless babies.

On the whole, women make the impression of children, and in the outlying districts, of savage children. They are inexpressibly filthy in the villages and are everywhere on a far lower social grade than the men. One may say that the highest woman in the land is inferior to the lowest man.

—American missionaries describing Central Asia, 1926

Pre-Soviet patterns of family life in southern Central Asia were neither universal nor unchanging—at least not until party action made them seem that way. Before 1927, and certainly before 1917, Central Asian Muslim men and women, adults and children, interacted in ways that varied greatly, both over time and from place to place. The cultural practices of everyday life, as expressed both within the family and between friends and neighbors, were undeniably and deeply gendered, yet at the same time remained multifaceted and fluid. Following the assertion of Russian colonial control in the mid‒nineteenth century, though, and particularly under Bolshevik authority after 1917, certain patterns of gender relations—and in particular specific forms of female dress and seclusion—were deemed to be “customary” and timeless. They were then used, often quite effectively, as national markers in early Soviet Central Asia.

For its own reasons the party encouraged this development, seeing the creation of indigenous “nations“as a progressive step in Central Asia. At the same time, however, the Bolsheviks’ remarkable success in creating distinct national identities quickly caught them on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, they had defined the new Uzbek nation in large part through its distinctive patterns of gender relations and customs of female seclusion, and especially through the heavy cotton-and-horsehair veils worn by Uzbek women. Yet by the mid-1920s they had also simultaneously declared these same practices to be primitive, dirty, and oppressive—a combination that had two serious consequences. First, the party had deemed the Uzbek nation in its current state to be by definition incapable of modernity or civilization, a judgment that led directly to the decision in 1927 to transform Uzbek society forcibly through its women. Second, this association of Uzbek national identity with social practices targeted for eradication was a gift to those who opposed Soviet-style reform, allowing them to portray themselves as defenders of the nation. The party thus inadvertently helped create a discourse of national­cultural resistance to its own women’s liberation policies.

The East and Its Women

The equation of Central Asia with its women was not new in 1917. The image of an exotic, often veiled woman had long symbolized Central Asia—indeed, the entire Orientalized “East”—in Russian and European eyes. This ideal type, the “Eastern woman,” was largely created by a series of Westerners who visited the region and, once returned safely home, wrote about what they had seen. Some of these visitors traveled to Turkestan, Khiva, Qöqon (Kokand), and Bukhoro seeking adventure; others, pursuing scholarly ends; and still others, aiming to further diplomatic or military agendas. Whatever their purposes, the books they published were popular, attracting eager audiences from Britain to Russia.

These writers drew a picture that was in many ways grim, showing a despotic, primitive, almost timeless Central Asia—yet one that was also alluringly exotic. As one put it, “the East is, and ever was from time immemorial, the land of the most striking contradictions.”1 The Russian observer Nikolai Muravev, writing in 1822 about Khiva, described its “Uzbegs” as lazy, careless, and “extraordinarily dirty.” Fathers ruled their children with an iron hand, he said, and life was governed by the dictates of religion. Unhappily, Muravev noted, the Uzbegs were “very low in the scale of enlightenment and education,” being ignorant of nearly every Western science.2 A generation later the Hungarian scholar Arminius Vámbéry, having disguised himself as a dervish to travel (he said) undetected, described the brutal tortures, ranging from starvation to eye-gouging, inflicted by the Khivan authorities in their zeal to defend religious law (see Figure 6). Apparently to underscore the shockingly barbarous character of the region, Vámbéry also included drawings of human heads being bought and sold.3 The depth of Eastern savagery was not to be doubted, Vámbéry asserted, or the power of its rulers: “In a country where pillage and murder, anarchy and lawlessness, are the rule, and not the exception, a sovereign has to maintain his authority by inspiring his subjects with the utmost dread and almost superstitious terror for his person; never with affection. Even those nearest to him fear him for his unlimited power.”4

Readers familiar with the work of Edward Said and other postcolonial theorists will immediately recognize the Orientalist tropes in these descriptions.5 Such writings frequently accompanied and underpinned colonial expansion, justifying European rule while serving as a means of (European) self-definition. The Central Asian East was seen as unenlightened and primitive, thus practically begging for the introduction of civilization and progress by a more advanced West (or at least by the somewhat more advanced Russia, which had expanded into Central Asia during the nineteenth century). At the same time, the people of Turkestan are depicted as being different from and less than European. History had passed them by: Central Asia was perceived as timeless and unchanging. In 1887 the British cleric Henry Lansdell declared the Kazakh steppe to be an excellent exhibit of how people had lived at the time of the Old Testament, having what he called a “primeval character.”6 At the same time, Central Asian Muslims could not really act as autonomous individuals, since their lives were said to be governed by an unchanging religious fervor. As a result, the details of how particular people thought—their differences and disagreements, the nuances and changes in how they perceived the world and their place in it—became unimportant, and received generally short shrift.

Yet European and Russian readers’ fascination with Muslim Central Asia ran deeper than knowing how Western travelers had, through clever disguises, subterfuge, and bravery, entered the domains of Oriental despots and lived to tell the tale. The very character of everyday life in the East seemed impossibly exotic and alluring, and these writers spent page after page chronicling the strange customs that shaped Muslim society. Of particular interest were the details of how women lived.7 As George Curzon explained in 1889,

Figure 6. A Russian view of Khiva: picture postcard of a Persian prisoner, nineteenth century. (Courtesy Anahita Gallery, Santa Fe, N.M.)

I have frequently been asked since my return—it is the question which an Englishman always seems to ask first—what the women of Bokhara were like? I am utterly unable to say. I never saw the features of one between the ages of ten and fifty. The little girls ran about, unveiled, in loose silk frocks, and wore their hair in long plaits escaping from a tiny skull-cap. Similarly the old hags were allowed to exhibit their innocuous charms, on the ground, I suppose, that they could excite no dangerous emotions. But the bulk of the female population were veiled in a manner that defied and even repelled scrutiny. For not only were the features concealed behind a heavy black horsehair veil, falling from the top of the head to the bosom, but their figures were loosely wrapped. up in big blue cotton dressing-gowns, the sleeves of which are not used but are pinned together over the shoulders at the back and hang down to the ground, where from under this shapeless mass of drapery appear a pair of feet encased in big leather boots.8

Female veiling and seclusion both illustrated and served as a metaphor for the generalized despotism that characterized the region. In the same vein as Curzon, Vámbéry provided an extended description of the secluded life led by the khan’s wives in their harem.9 Veils, harems, and polygyny served as powerful symbols, redolent of a supposed Eastern essence. Women—their dress, social customs, and particular restrictions—served as emblems of their society, both seductive and repellent; once one understood them, these writers implied, one would understand the East.

In the colonial context of tsarist Central Asia it is not surprising to find women being used as symbols of their people. Scholars have argued that cultural authenticity often inheres to the female sphere: gender and culture construct each other, and women are seen as markers of a society’s identity.10 But how much did these descriptions of an Eastern woman actually say about Central Asia? The authors who constructed this archetype were mostly non­Muslim outsiders—Russian, British, and Hungarian, among others. As such, their fixation with veiled women and harems as emblematic of an overarching, vague “East” reveals as much about themselves as it does about their supposed subject.11 The creation of this primitive, despotic, and exotic East as an Other—as something utterly unlike Europe—served largely as a means of self­definition. For Russian writers, too, the ability to paint ethnographic pictures of primitive Central Asians may have helped bolster a sometimes shaky sense of Russia’s proper place among the enlightened nations. Central Asia and its women provided Russia with a visible civilizing mission. As Dostoevsky put it in 1881, “In Europe we were Tatars, but in Asia we are also Europeans.”12

Virtually all of these writers were male, and some lacked knowledge of local languages. Vámbéry may never have been permitted inside a harem, and Curzon admitted that he never saw the face of a woman of reproductive age. Despite such restrictions, these writers nevertheless claimed expertise on the most intimate customs of Muslim life. Vámbéry, for example, dwelled at length on the local rituals of birth, marriage, and death, focusing especially on the roles played by women. He explained that such ethnographic observations mattered, because “Central Asia in this respect is wrapt in considerable obscurity. To attempt to dispel this darkness may therefore not be deemed superfluous; and, the savage Polynesian and Central African having resisted vainly the spirit of inquiry, we will in like manner raise the veil from the rude and suspicious œzbeg.”13 His choice of image here—the veil—is revealing. Most obviously, for Vámbéry and his fellow authors women represented a central site for the construction of knowledge about Central Asia, and thereby for the assertion of European scientific expertise and masculine power.

At the same time, as Sarah Graham-Brown has argued in her study of photographic representations of Middle Eastern women, it is striking to see the same tropes—especially the harem and veil—recurring throughout the accounts written by Western men decades and even centuries apart.14 According to Curzon, an Englishman’s first question about Central Asia was always to ask what its women were like; plainly there was (and still is) an element of the erotic in the fascination wielded by the Muslim East. The harem, to which nearly all access was banned, drew Western readers’ attention thanks to the sexualized mystery attached to it. By describing harem life, authors therefore permitted their readers a vicarious thrill in entering the innermost sanctum of the exotic East. (They also fixated on parallel phenomena, such as foot-binding in China, when they visited other parts of the East.)15 Similariy, the veil, both enticing and shocking to Western readers, remained a constant focus of attention. It served to demonstrate the power of patriarchal control over women and it raised a challenge to the imagination: these authors’ detailed descriptions of Central Asian women’s daily lives represented their attempt to solve the “mystery” of what lay behind the veil.16 Given that the point of female seclusion was to bar other men from knowing precisely that, such descriptions oered the reader an illicit thrill, promising vicarious access to the East’s most protected and erotic domain.

As far as conceptions of Central Asia and its women were concerned, in many ways the Bolsheviks’ assumption of power in 1917 brought few changes. At first, of course, other matters occupied party leaders’ attention, most obviously the need to fight and win a civil war. Yet when they did devote time to ...