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Abstract:

What did Kyrgyz women do when the Soviet regime arrived at the doorsteps of Central Asia in 1917 and began calling for socialist revolution? Some like Shairbubu Tezikbaeva and Zuurakan Kaynazarova enthusiastically joined the cause, both becoming one of the first female Kyrgyz deputies in the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1939. Their transformation from illiterate farmworkers into educated as well as politically active leaders served as a successful example for the ongoing Soviet liberation campaign that largely targeted non-Russian women of the region. Enacted as early as 1918, this state program sought to liberate the “woman of the East” (the so-called vostochnitsa) from her purported seclusion and eradicate centuries-old triple subjugation of class, religion, and gender.

My paper investigates this emancipation project, but it does this through the specific focus on the March 8th celebrations in Kyrgyz SSR conducted by the women’s departments (the zhenotdel) between 1927 and 1936. By tracing the social life of this international holiday in one nationalizing Soviet republic, it examines the ways in which local women activists interpreted, organized, and promoted the Bolshevik emancipation project. Like other modern holidays, March 8th represented not just the official values and goals of the state, it also served as an effective tool of mobilization and performed an important ritual of nation-building. I argue that for local women activists concerned with emancipation however, this particular celebration carried more than a symbolic and political function. In fact, the March 8th holiday acted as a tangible point of reference for measuring the revolutionary government’s success in matters of gender equality and women’s rights. It allowed local women activists a formal platform for voicing grievances over the emancipation project’s shortcomings, creating an opportunity to directly engage the state and sometimes negotiate their own ideas of gender equality.

To demonstrate this, my paper utilizes official and unofficial correspondences, newspapers and magazines, written by the zhenotdel activists of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, all held in the Central State Archives of the Kyrgyz Republic. The question of how local women found national expression under Soviet rule will shed crucial light on both the larger discussion of empire and the Kyrgyz story of local agency. My research thus draws from works by Adrienne Edgar, Douglas Northrop, Marianne Kamp, and Botakoz Kassymbekova among others, and contributes to the fields of colonialism and modernity studies, state-building, gender and women’s histories.

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This paper examines the practice of Komsomol anti-religious spectacles in Kazakhstan from the inception of the New Economic Policy to the turn to violent collectivization. In particular, it explores the differences between anti-Russian Orthodox spectacles like Komsomol Christmas and Easter and anti-Islamic spectacles like Komsomol Kurban Ait and Uraza Ait. Drawing on state and regional archives in Almaty and Semey, I demonstrate that anti-Islamic spectacles were of limited geographical scope and less intentionally provocative than their anti-Russian Orthodox counterparts.

Komsomol anti-Russian Orthodox spectacles in Kazakhstan began in 1922 and included sacrilegious displays such as mock liturgies and the burning of ikons, in addition to acts of violence against clergy. The subversiveness of Komsomol anti-Russian Orthodox activism was rooted in the insider knowledge of the religious tradition within which the Russian Komsomol Komsomol’tsy were reared. Despite significant swings in official encouragement, various iterations of Komsomol Christmas and Komsomol Easter would continue to be practiced in Kazakhstan through the 1920s, which testifies to the development of a self-sustaining anti-religious youth culture amongst Russian Komsomol’tsy. In contrast, Kazakh Komsomol’tsy did not carry out explicitly anti-Islamic spectacles until 1923. These anti-Islamic spectacles were of more limited geographical scope and did not include inflammatory mock religious rituals. Komsomol anti-Islamic holidays would disappear from the record from 1924 until 1929 when Komsomol Kurban Ait was revived as a means to combat the unapproved slaughter of livestock during the first five-year plan. The anti-religious activism of Kazakh Komsomol’tsy was inorganic and overwhelmingly dictated from the top. Unwilling or unable to participate in vanguard actions of cultural transformation, Kazakh youth were relegated to a secondary position within the Komsomol. Reexamining Soviet practices from a ground-level and comparative perspective can deepen our understanding of this critical period of transition in the history of Soviet Kazakhstan and Central Asia.

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This paper focuses on the Soviet authorities' attempts to introduce class policies in Kyrgyz nomadic society in the 1920s. At the time of the Soviet regime's takeover of Kyrgyz society after the Russian Revolution, the predominant identification marker among Kyrgyz was still lineage-based affiliation. In line with their class-based worldview, the Soviet authorities attempted to break down the lineage-based identity marker and supplement it with class consciousness. Focusing on the local elections in Soviet Kyrgyzstan in the 1920s, this paper argues that in a situation where the Bolshevik state lacked an industrial proletariat and an overall working class, they adopted an unconventional approach by exploiting pre-existing lineage tensions. That was achieved by supporting weaker (bukara) lineages against dominant descent groups (manap lineages) in local elections. Using archival materials related to the local elections and Sovietization policies from Bishkek and Moscow, this paper shows that increased intra-lineage tensions in the 1920s were not only the result of raised higher stakes for power competition as previous studies have argued, but instead, it was a competition between the weak bukara lineages supported by the legal provisions of the state and party and the officially castigated strong manap lineages. Aware that weaker lineage groups did not correspond to proper classes nevertheless, the Soviet authorities openly supported them as the lineage equivalent of the “oppressed” classes in the Kyrgyz nomadic context. The objective of elevating weaker lineages was to wrest power from dominant lineages by exploiting pre-existing tensions. To achieve this goal, the Soviet authorities adopted a two-pronged approach, employing both repressive measures against the most influential lineage chieftains and simultaneously promoting marginalized descent groups in Soviet elections. In the long run, the attempts to create lineage proletariats had lasting effects on the Soviet project in Central Asia. The fact that a self-proclaimed socialist regime promoted lineage stratification by exploiting the pre-existing hierarchies to further its cause ultimately contributed to the conservation of lineage identities in the region.

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This paper examines early Soviet “customary crimes” legislation in the interwar period, with a particular focus on its development in Kazakhstan. Early twentieth-century Kazakh activists addressed “custom” (adet-ghuryp) as a target for social reform, in conversation with wider global movements. After the formation of the Soviet Union, these reformist visions contributed to “customary crimes” decrees and laws. By the late 1920s, however, this legislation shifted from emphasizing “custom” as a marker of colonial disparities towards portraying it as the shadowy remains of a way of life that represented a threat to the viability and authority of the emerging bureaucratic state. Drawing from research into interwar Soviet archival and published sources, this paper argues that the change in Soviet legal terminology from “customary crimes” (in the 1924 RSFSR criminal code) to “crimes constituting survivals of the clan order (rodovoi byt)” (in the 1928 code) was not simply a matter of semantics. Instead, it marks a turn from previous (post)imperial reformist agendas to a repressive agenda that saw “custom” (and communities associated with it) as the shadowy remains of a way of life that represented a threat to the viability and authority of the emerging bureaucratic state.