EMACIPACIJA ŽENA ISTOČNIH REPUBLIKA SOVJETSKOG SAVEZA (1920–1930)
Women’s Emancipation in the Eastern Republics of the Soviet Union (1920–1930)

Summary/Abstract: This article analyzes the Hujum campaign (1920–1930) as a paradigmatic example of Soviet women’s “emancipation” in the southern and southeastern regions of Soviet Central Asia, understood simultaneously as a modernizing project and as a form of internal colonialism. Drawing on postcolonial feminist critique and the methodological framework of intersectionality, the article demonstrates that the gender subordination of Muslim women cannot be separated from complex relations of ethnic hierarchy, religion, class, and cultural domination. Through an analysis of primary sources (party resolutions, legal acts, propaganda texts, and memoirs), as well as relevant secondary literature, the ambivalences of Soviet policy are revealed: on the one hand, the formal expansion of rights and the creation of women’s institutions (Zhenotdel, clubs, literacy campaigns), and on the other, the violent “liberation” of women’s bodies (the removal of the veil) as an instrument of Sovietization, the destabilization of local norms, and the weakening of pan-Islamic identity structures. Particular analytical attention is devoted to the concept of the “surrogate proletariat” introduced by Massell, which explains why women of the East became a political lever in the absence of an indigenous industrial proletariat. The central research question posed is: “What did freedom mean for women in Soviet Central Asia, and what was its cost?”

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