Coerced Liberation: Muslim Women in Soviet Tajikistan by Zamira Abman. Toronto: University of Toronto Press2024. xii + 221 pp. $42.95 (paper). ISBN 978‐1‐4875‐5318‐0

It is well known among historians of the Soviet Union that in the 1920s, the Communist Party focused its “women’s emancipation” efforts on Central Asia, to underwhelming results but with violent short-term effects. The innovative element of Zamira Abman’s research is not in its retelling of the 1920s story for Tajikistan, but a combination of oral history interviews and extensive research in Tajikistan’s Communist Party Archive that offers the reader a window into a much less studied period in Central Asian gender history, the post-Stalin decades. In a work that spans the 1920s through 1980s, Abman argues that state feminism in its Soviet form had outcomes in Tajikistan that resembled those for women in European-colonized regions of North Africa. Without an indigenous women’s movement, Soviet liberation efforts faced a “legitimacy gap” (p. 8). Or, rather, legitimacy gap is one of several arguments that Abman proffers in seeking to understand why, in spite of much investment in education and many reiterated claims about the party’s dedication to women’s equality, women of Central Asian nationalities in the Tajik SSR nonetheless wound up in last place in every inter-republican comparison development metric, and in first place for birth rates. A second argument is that Soviet economic investment in Tajikistan emphasized agriculture, but not rural infrastructure, while lack of investment in industry left Tajikistan primarily rural. The ethnic Tajik population was minimal in cities, where girls and women were more likely to gain higher education, work outside the home, or join in party political activity. Abman tells stories from Tajik women who either were born in the city or managed to move there, who lived lives that she would not describe as fully Soviet, and yet that were far removed from Tajik village ways of life. A third important argument emerges from oral history interviews, wherein Tajik women who lived through the Soviet years repeatedly pointed to family and social attitudes that limited their prospects for pursuing education or leaving home for other reasons, noting that family and community members questioned the sexual morality of any girl or woman who tried to do these things. In other words, Abman’s women interlocutors stressed patriarchal values and structures as gendered barriers to opportunity. Abman writes: “Experiences of these rural Muslim women confirm that it was not necessarily the shortage of development or colonial nature of the Soviet regime in the rural Muslim periphery as some historians and experts in the region have argued that explain why rural women did not benefit under the Soviet system” (p. 66). That point is somewhat buried in a chapter on the “triple burden” of full-time labor for the kolkhoz, domestic chores, and childcare. Abman brings a wealth of women’s accounts, including the voice of Nizoramo Zaripova, who rose through Communist ranks and became a leading figure in the Tajik SSR government in the 1980s. Zaripova described the ways she had carefully monitored her own conduct while away from the village, the criticism her community raised when she returned from a Komsomol trip to Moscow, and her dependence on the village’s patriarchal leader to defend her reputation. “These women,” Abman notes, “had to fulfill their professional duties without breaching social norms expected of Muslim women” (pp. 51–52). This theme is more thoroughly developed in a chapter on being Muslim and Soviet, where Abman explores women’s stories of preserving religious observance against the pressures of Soviet atheist ideology, and of being expected to perform gendered norms of modest behavior even within professional workplaces. Through her research in the previously unused 1950s to 1980s archives and publications of Tajikistan’s zhensovety (women’s councils), as well as her oral history respondents’ discussions of the zhensovety, Abman shows that this voluntary and diffuse organization was known, present, and led by local women in rural areas, but that rural women faced significantly different challenges than did urban women. Urban zhensovet leaders frequently criticized the rural leaders for inaction and ineffectiveness, while rural zhensovet leaders articulated the emptiness of party and state promises of support for mothers, daycares, and better working conditions, and came to see urban zhensovet goals as burdensome impositions that lacked relevance to real rural struggles. This very readable, brief volume adds much to our understandings of gendered life in post-Stalin Central Asia, and the ways that the zhensovety shaped women’s expectations of and disappointments in Soviet promises of improvement.

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