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.