Languages of Loyalty: Gender, Politics, and Party Supervision in Uzbekistan, 1927-41
Author(s)
Northrop, Douglas
Abstract
Soviet authorities’ critical need to find sympathetic cohorts among Central Asia’s indigenous peoples helped make korenizatsiia (nativization) “the major expression” of Soviet nationalities policy in the 1920’s. Given the absence of self-proclaimed socialists and the scarcity of factories with an industrial workforce in Uzbekistan, Party leaders in late 1926 decided to substitute gender and family life for class, making Muslim women a “surrogate proletariat.” To pull women into public life, authorities in 1927 launched a hujum (attack) against indigenous customs considered oppressive to women, including polygamy and female seclusion caused by wearing heavy veils. In the apparent absence of class, the elimination of such gendered practices in the home emerged as a currency of political loyalty to the Soviet cause in Central Asia.
