Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in this course (particularly during the unit on ethnographers), but also more concretely with respect to tonight’s reading, is the Soviet relationship to facts. While it makes sense that the local party leaders might want to paint a rosier picture than actually exists in order to curry favor with the national party, it seems like the national party would have a vested interest in actually knowing what was going on on the ground. This seems particularly apparent in the Chust affair situation where the leaders were caught off guard when they likely wouldn’t have been, at least not to the same degree, had they had a basic understanding of the reality in the area. And yet, it seems like they weren’t even that interested in facts; Northrop notes that a party activist reported that in the town of 14,000 people, 9,000 of them were women and 10,000 of the women had unveiled – a mathematical and logical impossibility and a biological improbability that was only noted as “strange” without any mention of a follow-up (141). The secret police seem to have done a slightly better job with facts but Northrop mentions that that report is incomplete as well (145). What benefit could the Soviet leaders have gained through an inaccurate portrayal of the Uzbeks specifically and the USSR population more generally? Northrop makes a strong argument for why reports of the affair were played down in retellings, even in internal reports, but never really addresses the inaccuracies that led up to the affair.
On an unrelated note, I thought the discussion about the practical effects of changing conceptual ownership in the region was really interesting. We talked some on Tuesday about how veiling wasn’t actually an exclusively religious thing and the idea that association with Soviet power made unveiling less attractive for many Uzbeks then when they associated it with the jidads speaks to the real cultural relevance that veiling had. It seems like unveiling was a discussion people were willing to have when it was coming from the native population, but as soon as it became representative of Soviet influence and invasion it became a lot less palatable. Is there a way the Soviets could have used this kind of motivation-based malleability to their advantage in the region? Or was the association with Sovietness as important, if not more important, than the act of unveiling in itself?
A final, fairly incomplete thought: it isn’t clear to me what role women really played in the rejection of the hujum. Though some of it had a really, obviously patriarchal element like the woman who was kicked out of her house for unveiling or the field workers who were threatened with rape, there also seemed to be some women, like those who laughed at unveiled women, who were at the forefront of discouraging unveiling. Northrop explores this a bit more and comes to basically the same conclusion: some women were forced to veil and some women were in the business of forcing others to veil. This sentence struck me as particularly interesting, “The wives of Communists and factory workers sometimes led this mockery and indeed allegedly observed codes of female seclusion more strictly than other women.” (179) I don’t really have a specific question tied to this, but I’m curious what other people think about this or whether anyone has any idea why this might have been.
To your last point, it’s interesting that when Northrop outlines the collapse of the OGPU’s perceived coalition of allies he is able to clearly outline the defection of trade unionists, teachers, peasants, and some party leaders from the efforts of the hujum. But as you say, even though he lists “Uzbek women” as one of the perceived allied categories he is unable to come to a clear conclusion about their motives as a group. My question is, while “Uzbek women” is clearly a defined political group in the eyes of the Soviet state, does it make sense as a historiographical category? What do we then make of the voices of teachers who are women or peasants who are women (181-182)?
Something slightly related which I found quite interesting: “Rural Uzbeks specifically perceived Bolshevik demands that women unveil as a quid pro quo for the land redistribution of 1925-1926… In a conclusion deeply revealing of rural priorities, moreover, many poor peasants declared, in essence, that if unveiling was the price of Soviet land, then the Bolsheviks could have it back” (182-183). I think we’ve already tried a bit to approach this question, but why is that perceived exchange such a bad deal?
“Northrop makes a strong argument for why reports of the affair were played down in retellings, even in internal reports, but never really addresses the inaccuracies that led up to the affair.”
The author’s claim that anxiety was the motivating force behind the party’s large intervention in the construction of the narrative, to me, is not necessitated by the evidence they presented to us. It’s an interpretation based on the facts available. Sources I would be more convinced by would be like a journal entry, or at least a quoted admission in the articles along the line that the affair threatened to undo the very fabric of Soviet ideology.
“What benefit could the Soviet leaders have gained through an inaccurate portrayal of the Uzbeks specifically and the USSR population more generally?”
This question needs some parsing to be answered fully.
If by “inaccurate portrayal”, it’s meant of the Uzbeks feeling toward Soviet policy, then the “leaders”, I do not believe, would benefit at all. Soviet /officials/, or /agents/, however, could stand not to lose from distorting and obfuscating the facts. As we saw earlier with anthropologists who reported a net loss in population in the Kazakh region (if I remember correctly), there were severe expectations the party leaders had that if party agents failed to meet would warrant grave punishments. For Stalin and his administration, failure was not tolerated. So lying was a way for the hapless to save themselves.
On the other hand, if “inaccurate portrayal” is interpreted in the context of the damage control following the incident, then the Party leaders do benefit. The portrayal affects not just the party, but too those outside of it, and against it. Word of the incident would spread—but there is a huge difference between it being perceived as a rebellion and as a mobbing: the beginning of a movement, or an isolated incident.
Controlling the narrative undermines the Uzbek’s claim to legitimacy, and through this their sympathy factor, which in turn discourages repetition and imitation elsewhere beyond Chust. When combined with the complicated result of the trial, the affair spews a chilling effect that stifles future unrest. Thus the rollout of such policy like hujum becomes all the easier to manage.
I think that Soviet rule was based on ideologue and a Marxist understanding of history, so it was extremely difficult to approach cultures which had identifiable groups, motivations, and actions that did not adhere to the pre-existing Soviet understanding of reality. I base this claim on the fact that the OGPU and local party officials repeatedly insisted that the bois, clerics, and merchants were responsible while peasants were most supportive of Bolshevik rule. “many party members in positions of authority were unable to think what was for them the unthinkable, to see the depth and cross-class pervasiveness of anti-Soviet feeling manifest in these responses to the huium” (147). The appendix document shows this with its repeated claims that the anti-Soviet actors are “bois, clergy, merchants, and others.” I think that for Soviet leaders to acknowledge that action and events didn’t simply follow the class-lines or teleology that Marx or Lenin laid out is to admit that the founding ideas of that state were incorrect.
Also, did anyone else think it was nuts that almost the entire “Report on the Women’s Movement in Uzbekistan” was about unveiling and only a tiny paragraph tacked on to the end mentions the fact that women were being bought and sold?
Yes! I found the last paragraph staggering, especially with how casual it is in account. Odd to me how it’s framed as a locals issue that is being dealt with “insufficient energy”. I think that it’s crazy how Soviets would not utilize this more for political gain.
On your second point, I think that the association with sovietness was prioritized over the unveiling itself, especially before 1930. The author makes the point that the Soviets had been fearful that their women’s liberation effort would lose traction to the international liberation effort and/or the domestic liberation effort by the jidads. Therefore, the association with sovietness, rather than muslim roots, was a huge soviet victory, perhaps necessary, even if it did not immediately result in more mass unveilings.
Nevertheless, I find it odd that the soviets seem to be inconsistent on when to prioritize soviet values over others. As we read last week, Romani women were condemned for being too “sexy” and robbing soviet man of their proletariat motivation through their songs and dance. But when it came to sensationalizing the chust trial to a theatrical degree, writers found it imperative to keep the audience entranced with drama, sex, etc. Not to mention they produced photos of the litigation that included an all uzbek staff, which seems to be inconsistent with how they prefered Russian actors in Romani productions.
I think this book does a good job of demonstrating not only how Soviet officials perceived “facts,” but also how historians relate to the documentary evidence they leave behind. Northrop effectively critiques the sources he uses at several points, point out the flaws and biases of their creators. In Chapter 4, he talks about how he chose his sources, noting that so-called “facts” were often “overly analyzed, filtered, and processed” for many of the reasons we have talked over in class and in the preceding comments. (142) This disclaimer also functions to highlight that historians almost never work with objective “facts.” I think the analytical power from a good historical argument comes from intervening in what someone thinks they might already know about a subject. Part of Northrop’s intervention here–and for many of the authors we have read–seems to be pointing out the limits of documentation and attempting to reintegrate voices and perspectives that did not leave behind the same kinds of evidence. This gets at the heart of what it means to construct a culture. One of his main points in Chapter 5 was how the veil came to represent a shift from “customary behavior” to a “conscious act.” (208) The project of contrasting the agency of Uzbeks, particularly women, with the motivations of Soviet officials reads as an effective use of the evidence to which he had access. That being said, I wish he had been a little more clear in how he structured his chapters. When he talks about how previous scholarship examined Soviet cultural construction in Chapter 5, I feel this paragraph didn’t flow easily from the text immediately preceding and succeeding it, and would have been better placed closer to the beginning of the chapter.
Your first point really interests me and I find Jacob’s comment to be really interesting here, too, about the theatricality of Soviet response to the “Chust affair”. In thinking about why the Soviets were fudging facts and seemed to be constructing a sensationalized narrative, I think it all comes down to the lie of public life — Soviet officials made an example of the Uzbek resistance through putting on a show and going through the trial in the public eye. I’ve often been thinking about the divide between public and private here, and it seems obvious to say that the Soviets cared a lot more about public perception than they did the true motivations behind the Chust affair or resistance efforts. Though it is obvious, it is important and powerful. Through constructing a narrative that casts religious leaders in a bad light, the Soviet officials can condemn religion in a more subtle way and persuade other nations not to resist. Through controlling the narrative of resistance, they alter the motivations of the people on the ground to more successfully craft the type of compliance they want. In describing the Chust affair, they blame religion and class differences to support their movement to erase religion and make class the most salient thing to organize the “workers of the world”, as they say. I just see this inattentiveness to facts as a way to make the theatrics better and more sensationalized, but also so fit into their greater scheme that has more broad goals.