Kandiyoti, Deniz. "The politics of gender and the Soviet paradox: neither colonized, nor modern?". Central Asian Survey, vol.26, no.4 (2007): 601-623.

Kandiyoti, Deniz. "The politics of gender and the Soviet paradox: neither colonized, nor modern?". Central Asian Survey, vol.26, no.4 (2007): 601-623.

• As the Soviet Union considered one of its great achievements to be the emancipation of women, and of Muslim women in particular, the return of many post-Soviet states to patriarchal identity and pre-colonial forms of gender expression represents a point of immense scholarly interest (602).
• The Soviet policy on women in the constituent republics is an contradiction, one the author terms the 'Soviet Paradox', b/c it attempts to force modernity through the emancipation of women while at the same type promoting a nationalities policy which stalled the formation of a common Soviet people and made oppressive practices -- really only common in the colonial era -- into 'cultural' practices intrinsic to certain peoples (602).
• The movement for women's emancipation in the territories of Turkestan began with the Jadid reform movement of the mid-1700s onward spread by Tatar intellectuals within the Russian Empire. These groups called for the better treatment of women in Muslim territories and for female education, engaging with many Muslim reform groups elsewhere in the world (603).
• The early Soviet Union faced many difficulties in establishing gender policy in former Turkestan, as it simultaneous attempted to craft local identities -- based on cultural practices, some of which were oppressive -- and destroy those local practices to create a new Soviet identity. The Soviet regime did target and destroy specific institutions, such as polygamy, child marriage, bride price, and sharia law (604).
• Attempts by the Soviet government to crack down on practices such as veiling and segregation were less universally successful. A campaign to end veiling started in 1927 and featured women publicly burning and proclaiming their liberation, but stopped in the 1930s due to violent reprisals against many liberated women (604). A case study from the TSSR shows that such efforts at forced desegregation were less successful b/c they could not be implemented w/o losing the key support for Soviet rule, poor and landless male peasants, most w/ patriarchal sensibilities (605).
• The reason that ethnic identity and associated cultural institutions became so important during the Soviet era was because the Soviet policy on nationalities locked populations into class and ethnic distinctions in a deliberate effort to divide and rule. These same created cultural divisions, however, later cemented the 'traditional' practices which the Soviet Union fought against by creating a dichotomy between Soviet identity and ethnic identity (606).
• Many Soviet policy further entrenched practices from the colonial period. The Soviet policy of importing labour from other Republics into cities reinforced ideas that turkic peoples belonged in rural areas and European peoples belonged in cities, defeating concurrent efforts to integrate urban spaces. Similar issues appeared w/ fertility rates, as Union-wide policies aimed towards increasing fertility only encouraged traditionally high birth rates in Central Asia (607).
• The issue of regional disparities in fertility between republics was only discussed in 1981, when decades of Soviet policy had already convinced Central Asians against moving out of rural areas and towards having large families. This trend might have began to reserve, except that glasnost reforms allowed local elites to fight these measures w/ additional capacity (608).
• Despite the Soviet attempts to atomize the individual and minimize the role of families in public life, the immense burden or Soviet bureaucracy made family connects and patronage networks even more important for navigating the Soviet system, again demonstrating a paradox within Soviet policy (609).
• Soviet labour policies ignored several gendered aspects of work, essentially ignoring household labour. The Soviet system strongly encouraged female participation in the economy, but because it was unable to provide labour-saving household appliances, left women with the majority of time-consuming household activities. This burden prevented Soviet women from taking high positions in public work, despite incentives to do so (609).
• In Central Asia, as elsewhere in the Post-Soviet world, there was a post-colonial rejection of Soviet emancipation policies and calls for a return to traditional families, including traditional gender relations (610).
• The resurgence of Islam in Central Asia brought another troubling dimension to the dynamics of post-Soviet gender relations in that area, as conservative and fundamentalist groups combined nationalism and religion in calls for a return to a 'traditional' society with a subordinate role for women (611).
• Although all the Central Asian government accepted Islam as a glorious part of their national heritage, most pursued policies to distinguish between 'good' Islam of the state and what they saw as negative trends in Islam that could be threatening to the post-independence regimes. In Uzbekistan, particularly, there is a distinction between national cultural practices -- such as hijab -- and foreign practices which are banned -- such as face coverings (611).
• The blurring of distinction between national identity, nationalism, and state-sponsored forms of Islam has restricted some rights of women in Central Asia, as conservative attitudes of gender have now been bolstered by nationalist arguments that they are 'natural', as opposed to the forced equality of Soviet rule. Decentralization to mahalla in Uzbekistan and oqsoqol in the Kyrgyz Republic also increase opportunities for sexism to manifest in policy implementation (612).
• The dramatic decrease in the rights of women and their representation and status in the public sphere in post-Soviet Central Asia can be partially explained by the retreat of the post-Soviet state from governing the private life where it once enforced gender equality, but that post-Soviet successor states lack the resources to do. This explanation is incomplete, however, without reference to the failure of Soviet policy which allowed traditionalist gender dynamics to remain as private mentalities during the Soviet period (613).
• In the contemporary period, the banner of gender equality in Central Asia has been largely taken up by international and Western NGOs and international organizations, promoting Western notions of gender equality and promoting the role of women in these countries (614). There is a danger, however, that the simultaneous promotion of other anti-regime values by these NGOs, such as individualism or liberalism, may paint gender equality as a 'Western' issue to be rejected by the 'Eastern democracies' of Central Asia (615).
• "During the colonial period, the Muslim reformers of Central Asia shared a common discursive universe with their counterparts across the Muslim world. Their calls for reform, which included a critique of local customs pertaining to marriage and the family, were broadly couched in the idiom of national renewal and progress. The Bolshevik revolution introduced a more radical agenda, making the onslaught against local tradition the cornerstone of the project of socialist transformation. Interpreting the nature of the break represented by Soviet policies for women’s emancipation in Central Asia has, not surprisingly, engaged the energies of numerous social historians. While some evaluated Soviet interventions as colonial intrusions, producing a defensive retrenchment around markers of Central Asian national identity, others either highlighted the similarities of Soviet policies to attempts at state-led modernization in other contemporary Muslim societies or conceded that they contained elements of both state feminism and imperial meddling" (615-616).
• Soviet policies in Central Asia were contradictory and promoted some forms of female empowerment, such as literacy and workforce participation, while strengthen other institutions which served to prevent full gender equality through the implementation of counter-productive labour and nationalities policy (616).
• The author predicts that by appropriating the cause of moderate Islam, the states of Central Asia will find themselves unable to create actual gender equality, as they need conservative Islamic legitimacy to prevent losing an ideological war to fundamentalist figures within Islam (617).