Abstract:

In my research, the puzzle of systemic institutionalization of mass forced labor together with the provision of “progressive” public goods in a large non-democratic space in Eurasia. As such, I posit that the Soviets created policies targeting women in agricultural territories and then expanding on them to extract labor. Using original field archival research and text-as-big-data approach for over 15,000 archival files with 20 million words, I trace how the need in labor extraction for export-bound commodities resulted in progressive public goods provision beginning in 1920s. These conditions are unique to literature and the Soviet civil forced labor in agriculture was not studied before. The Soviet rural communities and agricultural periphery received significant investments and repressive protection not as a result of, but to enable forced labor, mostly among women. Labor extraction and public goods provision operated in tandem, delivering the state patriarchy that replaced the household patriarchy from 1923 to at least until 1991, in some territories outlasting the Soviet regime that created them. Many organizations that were founded to extract labor in exchange for public goods survive to this day. I statistically test their legacy implications with a natural experiment for over 100,000 households in nine countries in Europe, Asia, and the Caucasus, primary surveys of all district mayor assistants in and an original 1,200 household panel survey from Uzbekistan – the country that suffered the most from the Soviet-run forced labor in cotton industry. I investigate their causal mechanisms with 100 oral histories of women from six former Soviet countries. Results show sustained high demand for government among women, weak public goods effects, and fast-fading emancipatory benefits of the authoritarian progress. My research contributes to the puzzle of arrested development in many polities when progressive policies are non-democratic and has broad implications for the countries caught in transition in their paths out of communism towards free market, state-labor relations there, the political economy of gender and progressive politics in non-democracies, and authoritarian politics. My project improves our understanding of freedom by tracing the consequences of a particularly pernicious form of unfreedom — mixed-gender forced labor mobilization in authoritarian regimes — which has existed for millennia. It deepens our understanding of this institution by showing us that it did not have ideological roots as a root case as previously assumed, but economic (extractive) ones.