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Soviet Reform Projects on Emancipation of Muslim Women in Turkestan (1917–1924)

Student: Melentev Daniil

Supervisor: Vladimir Bobrovnikov

Faculty: Faculty of Humanities

Educational Programme: Historical Knowledge (Master)

Final Grade: 10

Year of Graduation: 2020

This study concerns the formation of gender emancipation policy of Muslim women in Soviet Turkestan. The concept of their liberation was elaborated by the central authorities in Moscow and Soviet officials in borderland Muslim regions of the RSFSR. Our investigation of discourse on female emancipation is based on documents, normative acts and narrative sources issued by the central Soviet institutions and individual feminist activists of the Comunist party. The focus is made on regional specifics and reaction of the Soviet Turkestan to the «women's policy» of Moscow. Particular attention is paid to transregional dimension of the Soviet emancipation projects, comparison of the Turkestani case(s) to those in the Caucasus as the other colonial borderlands of the former Russian Empire. The object of the study includes such directions of the early Soviet gender policy as family, bride price or kalym, elimination of teenagers and adult illiteracy. In addition, visual gender propaganda is examined though discourse analysis of posters in Russian and vernacular languages of Central Asian peoples in Arabic and in Latin script. The author argues that these visual sources reflect well successes and failure of the early Soviet gender policy aimed at propagating involvement of Muslim women in the building of material, legal, social and cultural foundations of forthcoming socialist society and state.

Full text (added May 14, 2020)

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