Drawing on extensive research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan, Douglas Northrop here reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. In Uzbekistan it focused above all on a massive effort to eliminate the heavy horsehair-and-cotton veils worn by many women and girls. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Bolsheviks saw as primitive and backward. The Soviets focused on women and the family in an effort to forge a new, "liberated" social order.This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Widespread resistance to the idea of unveiling quickly appeared and developed into a broader anti-Soviet animosity among Uzbeks of both sexes. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over indigenous practices of veiling and seclusion.New local and national identities coalesced around these very practices that had been placed under attack. Veils became powerful anticolonial symbols for the Uzbek nation as well as important markers of Muslim propriety. Bolshevik leaders, who had seen this campaign as an excellent way to enlist allies while proving their own European credentials as enlightened reformers, thus inadvertently strengthened the seclusion of Uzbek women—precisely the reverse of what they set out to do. Northrop's fascinating and evocative book shows both the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.
Douglas Northrop is Associate Professor of modern Central Asian studies at the University of Michigan.
Table of Contents
Introduction1. Embodying Uzbekistan2. Hujum, 19273. Bolshevik Blinders4. The Chust Affair5. Subaltern Voices6. With Friends Like These7. Crimes of Daily Life8. The Limits of Law9. Stalin's Central Asia? Conclusion
What People are Saying About This
Nazif Shahrani
In Veiled Empire, Douglas Northrop masterfully analyzes a wealth of archival information from Uzbekistan, made accessible after the collapse of the USSR, on arguably one of Stalin's most celebrated revolutionary campaigns in Central Asia. Veiled Empire is a path-breaking and highly sophisticated work that carefully unpacks the events surrounding what came to be a highly symbolic piece of female clothing, to explore much deeper contestations over power and identities and to demonstrate the limits of Soviet power as well as the pull of changing loyalties through time. It is a most welcome addition to the growing body of literature on the analytical history of Soviet rule in post-independence Uzbekistan.
Lynne Viola
"Veiled Empire is a tour de force of research, based as it is on a thorough and pioneering search of Moscow and Uzbek archives. Douglas Northrop's proficiency in languages and vast knowledge of several different historiographies make this a stunning achievement."
