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Paper abstract:

This paper examines the everyday lives of Kyrgyz women in rural Soviet Kirghizia in the 1940- 1950s. While scholarship frequently examines women’s experiences in the Soviet Union, Kyrgyz women are typically placed on the margins (if at all), and oral history in the region has been neglected. This paper presents and contextualizes interviews of thirty Kyrgyz women who lived in the Issyk Kul region during the period.

The paper argues that the familiar image of Soviet womanhood and femininity was not what Kyrgyz women experienced in their everyday lives. Born into and living in traditional and patriarchal Muslim Central Asia, they developed distinct daily coping skills and strategies that made them different to the Soviet norm. Their feminine experiences and identities were a result of being a woman balancing modern Soviet values with lived Kyrgyz traditions.

The reality of the lived experiences of Kyrgyz women was a response to political, social, and economic upheaval during previous decades. In addition to dekulakization in the 1920s and 1930s, Stalinist purges of the 1930s, and the Great Patriotic War, policies of rapid industrialization and collectivization posed significant challenges for ordinary people. Women, particularly, took the brunt of this time on themselves. These interviews, recording personal experiences that do not fit into official histories of the period, provide individual insights into how they responded, and how they remember, the turmoil of the era.