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- Convenor:
-
Claire Roosien
(Yale University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Shoshana Keller
(Hamilton College)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Theme:
- History
- Sessions:
- Sunday 17 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Long Abstract:
Soviet policies dramatically transformed the position of children in Central Asian society. In Soviet institutions, children were mobilized as political subjects in unprecedented ways; in Soviet policy and propaganda, children represented new conceptions of nationhood and civic participation. These transformations had long-lasting consequences for the societies of Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia, but they remain little understood in the scholarly literature. This panel aims to breach this gap, examining four case studies of children’s roles as objects and subjects of state intervention in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asia. Claire Roosien examines nurseries for the children of collective farm women in Uzbekistan during the 1930s. Despite insistence in the Party ranks that child care should be a major priority, in fact women tended to avoid child care facilities, and local-level administrators failed to prioritize them in their budgets. Roosien argues that, until the Stalin Constitution of 1937, child care was understood as a kind of cotton infrastructure, rather than a response to the needs of women and children. In the postwar period, Zukhra Kasymova shows, “Mother-Heroines” who raised enormous families became an official media phenomenon. Kasymova analyzes one outlier case: a professionally accomplished woman named Fatima Kasymova who also raised twenty children, including fourteen war orphans. Zukhra Kasymova argues that Fatima Kasymova’s case reveals an underlying tension between visions of Soviet modernity and patriarchal norms. Anna Whittington examines Central Asian school curricula in post-Stalin Central Asia, arguing that textbooks articulated new visions of belonging in the Soviet community. As Whittington shows, these textbooks reflect a latent tension between centering national narratives and submitting non-Russian nations to a subordinate position in official hierarchies. Meghanne Barker turns to post-Soviet Kazakhstan, focusing on cinematic representations of state-run institutions for the upbringing of children. The films thematize the failures of state institutions to care for the most vulnerable in Society, expressing anxieties about the long-term effects of adult neglect of children, such as social deviance. Overall, the panel shows the deep-rooted connections between care work, child welfare, and social control in Soviet and post-Soviet contexts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Sunday 17 October, 2021, -Paper long abstract:
In the Soviet Union, schools were one of the most fundamental and universal sites for training citizens. The country invested considerable resources for educating and preparing the next generation, a process was tightly bound with institutions of participatory citizenship and patriotism. The post-Stalin period saw several major curricular changes in Soviet schools. The most significant, the “Law on the Strengthening of the Relationship of the School with Life and on the Further Development of the System of Public Schools in the USSR” of 1958–59, ended the universal mandate on native language education and enabled parents to choose the language of school instruction for their children, with major consequences for native-language education in some republics, particularly Kazakhstan. Yet this was far from the only important reform. This paper also considers the introduction of local history and geography in 1959 and other smaller administrative changes in subsequent years, which suggested subtle negotiations of Soviet identity. This paper considers these reforms and changes from the perspective of post-Stalin Central Asia, drawing on textbooks and archival materials from the Kazakh SSR (and possibly other republics), showing that these curricular changes reflected larger changes in the conception of Soviet citizenship, particularly for non-Russian peoples. In particular, the paper focuses on the tension between all-union policies, which implicitly relegated non-Russian languages to a second class-status, and local initiatives, which centered national narratives within a larger all-union framework. As this paper demonstrates through cases drawn from Central Asia, changes in educational curriculum embodied and reflected the ambivalences inherent both to nationalities policy and the theory and practice of Soviet citizenship.
Paper long abstract:
In postsocialist cinema of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, we can find a steady stream of films depicting harsh conditions in state-run institutions for children, acting as repositories or incubators for deviant youths, with a particular focus on the cultivation of violent masculinities within such sites. Examples from recent years include The Tribe (Ukraine, 2014, dir. Slaboshpytskiy), Amok (N. Macedonia, 2016, Tozija), and No One’s Child (2014, Serbia, Rsumović). This presentation will examine post-independence films of Kazakhstan that thematize a lack of adult care, whether because children are partially or completely orphaned or because of placement in an institutional setting. The paper will compare portrayals of peer cruelty to which the un-cared-for child becomes vulnerable, and the psychological effects of both abandonment and abuse. The main focus of this analysis will be Darezhan Omirbayev’s Cardiogram (1995), Emir Baigazin’s Harmony Lessons (2013), Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s The Owners (2014), and Zhanna Isabaeva’s Bopem (2015). While Omirbayev’s earlier film contrasts in several ways from the others (and while each of these distinguishes itself in a number of ways), these films underline the failures not only of state institutions but also of communities to protect their most vulnerable, sometimes resulting in deviance, with youths seeking revenge on the social institutions that have failed it. They highlight anxiety about the effects on child development regarding the breakdown of the family. I consider these films in the context of post-Soviet Kazakhstan, where I conducted fieldwork within a state-run institution. The institutionalization of children deprived of parental care was generally seen as a necessary evil that needed eventually to be replaced with other forms of care. I argue that the films of Kazakhstan, in contrast with the abovementioned films of Eastern Europe, give further attention to the temporary or permanent breakdown of the family as a source of trauma.
Paper long abstract:
Fatima Kasymova—a Muslim chairwoman of the Engels “millionaire” collective farm in Samarkand province (Uzbek SSR), a graduate student at the institute of agriculture, also a Hero of Socialist Labor, a “Mother-Heroine” of 20 children (including 14 adopted war orphans), and a grandmother of 64, was an extraordinary example of postwar female success. However, unlike the famous Shomakhmudov family who adopted 15 multinational war orphans, Kasymova received relatively limited Soviet print media coverage. I argue that this disparity in publicity highlights limitations of the Soviet modernity discourse, both Russian and Uzbek. It highlights that post-WWII Uzbek society still remained traditional and largely patriarchal. In this society, Kasymova had been regarded as suffering from three disabilities: as a female, a rural dweller, and an ethnoreligious minority, and hence, was marginalized. Success stories like Kasimova’s were a perfect fit for women’s magazines like Sovetskaia zhenshchina (Soviet Woman) aimed at Muslim women of the foreign East, or O’zbekiston Hotin-Qizlari (“Uzbekistani women”) intended for local consumption, but not for daily news with extensive coverage like Komsomolskaia pravda or Soviet Uzbekistan. However, the very fact of Kasymova’s successful career path proves that the post-WWII integration of Central Asians into the Soviet norms was not a rigidly gendered (male-only) phenomenon, though the Soviet public discourse still did not have a proper language to incorporate these cases into a larger framework.
Paper long abstract:
Thus far, the scholarship on gender in Soviet Central Asia has focused primarily on the campaigns for women’s “emancipation” and unveiling in the late 1920s. But beginning with collectivization, Soviet policy around women in Uzbekistan turned toward mass mobilization for labor in the cotton fields. The imperatives of the cotton monoculture demanded that married women with children join the ranks of the young, often unmarried women who had been the face of the Hujum. In the early 1930s, to assist the mobilization of mothers, the Party-state vastly expanded the network of child care facilities in rural Uzbekistan, including long-term and seasonal nurseries and kindergartens. Accordingly, throughout the 1930s, child care was represented as a problem of cotton infrastructure, as well as a matter of women’s and children’s welfare. Child care brought together Soviet projects around education, collectivization, health and sanitation, and women’s “emancipation.” This paper examines early Soviet child care institutions on Uzbekistan’s collective farms, including their administrative structure, curricula, and the food and material culture associated with them. Many rural women utilized the services, while others resisted using state-run nurseries, which were often poorly staffed and lacking in resources. I argue that the campaign for childcare in 1930s Uzbekistan represented a new relationship between Central Asian women and the state and contributed to a changing distribution of labor in some rural families. This paper relies on archival work in archives in Moscow and Tashkent and extensive research in the Uzbek-language press, especially women’s magazine Yangi Yo’l/ Yorqin Hayot/ Yorqin Turmush.