Opening the (Muslim) woman’s space—The Soviet politics of emancipation in the 1920s–1930s

Abstract

The emancipation of the “woman of the East” constituted an important part of the Soviet cultural revolution campaign of the 1920s–1930s. This article has as its aim the exploration of the Soviet discourses and the practices of emancipation of the “woman of the East,” with a focus on the Muslim woman of the Volga-Ural region. I show that the Bolshevik attempts at transforming the everyday life of the “woman of the East,” in spite of their anti-colonial rhetoric, often followed the Russian imperial scripts and the logic of the civilizing mission. In contrast to Muslim modernism’s ideas on the compatibility of modernity with Islam, the Bolshevik secular and declaratively ungendered modernity aimed for the destruction of the separateness of male and female spaces and their conversion to the common space of the communist collectivity. However, the discourse on the special “backwardness” and “slave-like” situations of the Muslim woman contradicted these aspirations and led to her “Otherness” rather than emancipation and equality inside the Soviet system.