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Paper abstract:

Being embroiled in an ideological battle against the West during the Cold War (1945-1991), the USSR wanted to prove the superiority of the Soviet system via exaggerated displays of its achievements. One much touted achievement was the creation of a society based on equality between women and men. In the Moscow-centric Soviet framework, it was the Muslim women of the Soviet East who were depicted as once being the most oppressed community of women in the USSR. Almost wholly illiterate and not gainfully employed beyond unpaid domestic labor, Muslim women needed emancipation primarily via literacy in the eyes of early Soviet authorities. For this purpose, the Soviet Union carried out the Khujum Campaign in the 1920s where women were both encouraged and coerced to cast aside their veils and uncover their faces as a precursor to formal education. As a result, this campaign had to be justified in later decades via a display of the newly emancipated literate “eastern woman” as a major success of the USSR. By the 1950s, the Uzbek SSR had started publicizing the achievements of this new cadre of Uzbek female intellectuals. Poetry allegedly composed by these new female intellectuals was particularly showcased by the Uzbek SSR to exhibit the success of Soviet statehood. As the poetry composed by Uzbek female intellectuals was quantitatively insufficient to demonstrate this success, Soviet authorities resorted to fabricating poems while attributing them to the new female cadre. In this way, new poets and spurious poetry were created by the Uzbek SSR.