Paper long abstract:

Focusing on the close reading of the Soviet concept of 'Woman of the East', I recount how the former Soviet region has been historically implicated in the dynamics of race and coloniality of gender, and how those dynamics still reverberate in the form of palpably unjust social formations today. The Soviet state applied the concept of 'Woman of the East' to non-European, non-Slavic, non-white women from the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, the Far East and the North. I suggest a critical vantage point at this cultural construct in order to interpret 'Woman of the East' as a gendered racial category that brings together scientific racism and colonial technologies, Eurocentrism, the Russian Empire's ethnographic explorations, Marxist-Leninist imaginations, capitalist logics, and Soviet policies. Many scholars reveal the contradictions of the Soviet declarations of equality that in fact muted and erased non-white, non-European, non-Slavic people. As such, the Soviet state never fully disrupted the colonial legacies and racial discourses of the Russian Empire and European Enlightenment but combined them with new ideas about modernity, progress, and equality that produced specific forms of racialization. Therefore, I turn to Woman of the Soviet East in order to interrogate, reflect, and theorize possibilities for critical thinking about the entanglements of colonial, racial and gendered politics in the post-Soviet context. Specifically, I juxtapose the analysis of the Soviet books, monographs, and posters devoted to the concept of 'Woman of the East' with the exploration of the public debates (i.e. media, activist, scholarly) about the state violence towards women migrants from the former 'Soviet East' in Russia. After the collapse of the USSR, the amount of state and police violence towards migrants from the former 'Soviet East' increased significantly in Russia. Some scholars explain this situation as a derivative of the post-Soviet transition to capitalism and a model of "Europeanness" that is specifically hostile to those deemed non-European and non-white. In turn, I suggest that the post-Soviet politics of racialization are rooted in the Soviet ideologies and politics towards people from the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, the Far East and the North. Although the Soviet concept of 'Woman of the East' is not in use today, its legacies are still in motion and facilitate the gendered colonial tropes of thinking about the former 'Soviet East'.