WOMEN IN THE CAUCASUS, CENTRAL ASIA, AND SIBERIA

THE CAUCASUS AND CENTRAL ASIA

After the upheavals in Central Asia in the late ’20s, party leaders across that region and in the Caucasus proceeded cautiously with women’s emancipation. Their construction of Stalinist political and economic systems cut the power of local elites, disrupted kinship networks, and undermined the customary authority of senior males over junior ones, and in so doing weakened the ability of traditional families to confine their women behind veils and walls. Education for girls and women expanded, women were enlisted to work alongside men on the collective farms, and the party continued to preach women’s equality. Family law was brought formally in line with the Soviet code, but officials usually did not enforce prohibitions on customary practices such as bride price.

FIRUZA KERIMOVA (1906–?)

There were young women in the Caucasus who joined the Soviet emancipation project as enthusiastically as Pasha Angelina, Anna Egorova, and the Khetagurovites, in spite of their own fears and the resistance they encountered. Firuza Kerimova, an Azeri who lived near Baku in Azerbaijan, is an example. Like Angelina, she came from a family with radical views; her people, unlike Angelina’s, were prosperous merchants. Before the revolution they had supported the revolutionary movement; afterward they were pro‑communist. In the 1920s Kerimova ran a daycare center in her family’s home in Balahani, a city in the Azeri oilfields. Insisting on marrying for love, she chose a young official in the Soviet government, Agahan Kerimov. As the couple moved from assignment to assignment, Kerimova spread the call to emancipation among local women.

When the Five‑Year Plans began, Kerimova signed up to study engineering. In 1932, she graduated. “There are days that cannot be forgotten,” she declared in a speech at the graduation ceremonies. “Today is such a day for me. Not very long ago I wore the chadrah [a veil], but today they call me the oil commander, an engineer‑organizer.” Her euphoria faded when she began her new job. The men who were supposed to work under her command harassed her, at one point pouring oil on her head. “At first she cried a lot,” her daughter, Rabia khanum Sultan‑zade, remembered. “The workers bluntly told her, ‘This isn’t a place for a woman. We used to get the oil out without you and we’re going to keep doing it. You should stay home with your family.’”²⁸

^{Firuza Kerimova at her daycare center in the 1920s.http://www.gender‑az.org/index.shtml?id_doc=2081. Accessed December 1, 2010.}

FIRUZA KERIMOVA

Rabia khanum Sultan‑zade, Kerimova’s daughter, wrote this account of her mother’s first encounter with unveiling:

“Despite being quite young, my mother had been chosen a delegate to the First Non‑Party Congress of Azerbaijani Women [in the early 1920s]. Standing at the podium making an important speech, she did not notice the rapt attention of S. Kirov, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, who was sitting on the stage. The pretty, ardent girl with the burning turquoise eyes had wrapped herself in a chadrah [a veil]. Probably Kirov was trying to send a message when he came up to her during her speech and dramatically tore the chadrah off her and threw it into the audience, where the women tore it to pieces.

Scarlet with embarrassment and confusion, she stood on the stage, fingering her thick braids, and Anna Sultanova [a Zhenotdel leader], wise with experience, said, ‘Such a beautiful face shouldn’t be hidden under a chadrah.’ The euphoria in the hall passed, the women went away, and Mama sat and cried, ‘How can I go back to Balahani without the chadrah?’ In those days one could not walk down the streets of Balahani without a chadrah. And then Kirov gave Firuza a scarlet silk scarf.”

SOURCE: AZERBAIJAN GENDER INFORMATION CENTER (HTTP://WWW.GENDER‑AZ.ORG/INDEX.SHTML?ID_DOC=2081). TRANSLATED BY BARBARA CLEMENTS. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION.

Kerimova managed to win over some of the men by refusing an appointment to a managerial position and instead doing manual labor alongside them. When she felt that she had proved herself, she moved into the ranks of the engineers, and within a few years had become the first woman to hold a top administrative position in the Baku oilfields. More than seventy years later, her daughter’s proud story of her mother’s struggles and triumphs was posted to the Azerbaijan Gender Information Center’s website.

SIBERIA

In Siberia, the campaign to emancipate native women, which began in earnest in 1929, had the familiar components–outlawing bride price, dowry, and polygamy, publicizing the evils of traditional patriarchy, and encouraging women to exercise their new rights and take advantage of educational and employment opportunities. Because the native Siberians had a long history of negotiating with the Europeans and because their cultures were less patriarchal than those of Central Asia, reforms for women advanced rapidly.

Education expanded, as did women’s participation in the political process. Women eagerly enrolled in the teachers’ colleges set up to train Buryats, Koraks, Tatars, Yakuts, and others. Primary and secondary schooling for girls and women grew, as did literacy. Among Buryats, female literacy rates increased from 21 percent in 1926 to 66 percent in 1939. In that same year, girls made up 49 percent of Yakut elementary‑school students. Women’s involvement in politics expanded as well. By 1931 one‑quarter of the delegates to soviets in the autonomous regions of Siberia were female. This percentage was far higher than the percentage of female delegates to Central Asian soviets and to some Russian ones. Probably the long‑standing practice of Siberian women playing leading roles in their communities made politics less intimidating.²⁹

Collectivization struck very hard in Siberia. In that land of nomads, the popular reaction was even more outraged than in the Russian heartland, for collectivization meant not only turning animals over to the government but settling down to become farmers. The Buryats, the Turkic peoples of the southwest, and the Koraks in the far east killed their livestock rather than surrender it to the government. The reindeer herders of the far north and east and the mountain people of the Altai region retreated into still more remote areas beyond the government’s reach. After the worst excesses of collectivization receded in the mid‑1930s, Soviet programs of improving health care and education made some headway, and supplies of food and manufactured goods increased.

Increasing also was the migration to Siberia of Europeans, for the Soviet government worked as assiduously as had the tsarist to entice settlers to move east. We have already noted the successful Khetagurovite campaign. The establishment of an “autonomous region” in Birobidzhan, set aside for Jews, also drew immigrants. Tens of thousands of other women came to Siberia involuntarily in the 1930s, for another tsarist practice that the Soviet government continued was the use of the east as a place of imprisonment.

THE TERROR

From the beginning of communist rule, the party filled the jails it had inherited from the tsars with people whom it labeled “enemies.” It also sent such people into exile in remote areas or sentenced them to labor camps, as the tsars had done. The Soviet government under Stalin expanded the “enemies list” and hired many more police and jailers. The result was a police state comparable to Nazi Germany’s, but longer lasting. Only Stalin’s death in March 1953 brought this reign of terror to an end.

The Terror came in waves that swept up millions of people. They began in 1929 with collectivization, when unfortunates who had been branded kulaks were sent to the special settlements in the far north and Siberia. Local authorities then shipped more peasants accused of a variety of crimes off to labor camps throughout the 1930s. In 1934, the government criminalized workplace infractions such as lateness. Sodomy, which was not a crime in the early Soviet law codes, became one in 1933–34 and gay men (but rarely women) were arrested thereafter. In 1934, the police also began picking up communists who had criticized Stalin. The purge of the party grew into a full‑fledged assault on Soviet officialdom that peaked in 1937 and subsided in 1939. Thereafter, Stalinist persecution rose and fell spasmodically, according to the dictator’s whim. Anne Applebaum has estimated that as a consequence 18 million people served time in labor camps between 1929 and 1953.³⁰

This brutal repression had multiple causes. Stalin and his inner circle ordered and directed it, because they believed that they had to root out opposition to their policies. The peasants had risen up against collectivization; workers struck from time to time; ordinary people grumbled about the hardships of everyday life. They also flouted the government’s many rules, regulations, and directives. The black market flourished; factory managers falsified production data; orders issued by Moscow were ignored; party chairmen energetically feathered their own nests.

The leadership could not accept the fact that the system functioned only because people broke the rules. The five‑year plans were poorly conceived and executed, which led to manifold foul‑ups and privations. Without local officials filing bogus reports, without administrators burying demands from higher‑ups under heaps of paperwork, without workers stealing from the factories, without a black market that supplied communists as well as ordinary citizens, Moscow’s unrealistic directives and witless oppression would have driven the Soviet people to collapse or rebellion. Tragically, the fudging on the rules fed Kremlin paranoia. For it was easier for Stalin and his lieutenants to believe that disappointing economic figures and public discontent were the result of sabotage than to face the massive failures of their own leadership. They reasoned that arresting corrupt officials, malcontents, and scofflaws would remove real and potential “enemies” from the general population and frighten that population into compliance. As an added, and important, benefit, they could use the arrested people as a giant convict labor force. They did not care that the vast majority of those who fell into the net had done nothing to warrant imprisonment. Perhaps some of them even convinced themselves that there were millions of implacable foes out there working in secret to undermine them.

Gender ideas and practices affected Stalin’s Terror, as they had the attacks on the lishentsy. The great majority of the police and party officials who carried out the persecutions were men, although there were a few women among the purgers. The most notorious of these was Rozalia Zemliachka, a veteran communist who had shown her lethal side as a political officer during the civil war. Then she had ordered soldiers executed for desertion and had participated in ferocious assaults on non‑combatants in the Crimea. In the 1930s, she worked as an official of the government and party commissions that investigated accusations of wrongdoing. Zemliachka became notorious as a merciless inquisitor.³¹

Probably most of her victims were men. Eighty‑nine percent of those prosecuted in the late 1930s were men, and men made up more than 90 percent of labor‑camp inmates in the 1930s. In 1940, for example, there were 1,235,510 male prisoners in the camps and 108,898 female ones. The Terror targeted men because they held most of the leadership positions and because the authorities assumed that men, not women, threatened them. We have already seen such assumptions at work in the purge of the lishentsy and in police responses to the babi bunty. As in those operations, women were most likely to fall prey to Stalin’s Terror when their husbands did. After the authorities crushed a strike in the textile town of Vichuga in 1932, for example, they arrested only those women who were related to male strikers, even though many women had participated in the unrest. The same male‑centered selection process was at work when female peasants were exiled with their kulak husbands in 1930, and when the wives of arrested male communists were picked up in 1938.³²

The government was able to maintain the Terror for more than two decades because it had learned valuable lessons from the peasant uprisings against collectivization. Thereafter the police avoided direct assaults on communities, preferring to pick off a few people at a time and striking without warning, for the most trivial of reasons. Women were hauled away for gleaning grain without permission, for making derogatory comments about communists when an informer was nearby, for being a few minutes late for work, for taking a pencil home from the office, or for walking by a police station when the men inside needed more victims to meet their monthly quota of arrests.

The government also took great pains to disguise the scale of the Terror. Radio broadcasts and newspapers talked a lot about how the party was keeping the country safe by rooting out evildoers, but they did not say how many people were falling into the net. Victims were taken away in the middle of the night and locked up incommunicado. Prisoners were transported in trucks disguised as delivery vans or in freight cars. The bodies of the executed were buried, late at night, in unmarked mass graves outside the cities. People learned to ask no questions about missing neighbors or upturned dirt in nearby forests. If they were lucky, they could believe the government’s lies and go on with their lives.

When the NKVD, the agency charged with hunting down political enemies, turned its malignant attention to party members, those people proved to be as vulnerable as workers or peasants. Most took refuge in the official explanation that the police were hunting down enemies, and therefore that they, who had done nothing wrong, were safe. Inna Shikheeva‑Gaister, the daughter of imprisoned communists, remembered years later, “We believed all the slogans. They screwed our heads on any way they wanted. I believed everything–completely and sincerely…. I believed everything I was supposed to about the enemies of the people and about all the arrests!”³³

Fruma Treivas, who had once taken her status as the wife of a high‑ranking communist for granted, found her faith crumbling in the summer of 1937. “From our balcony,” she wrote years later, “we could see all the other balconies in the courtyard. If no one appeared for a while, and the balcony was sealed, it meant that those people had been taken away. What a state we were in! At night, when the vans [of the NKVD] would arrive, you would think, ‘Oh, God, are they coming for us or someone else?’ On the night of July 17, they came for us.” Treivas’s husband Grigori Vasilkovskii was executed in prison; she was sent to a camp for female relatives of arrested men.³⁴

WOMEN IN THE GULAG

The first stop on the journey to the camps was a prison where the arrested were interrogated, tried, and sentenced. They had no legal rights and no defense attorneys. The purpose of interrogation was to persuade them to sign a confession composed by an NKVD interrogator, and to incriminate others. Those who refused to confess were tortured. The trials that followed were perfunctory exercises, the main purpose of which was to pass sentences that ran from a few years for petty theft to death for those convicted of being an enemy of the state. Statistics on the number and gender of the executed remain fragmentary; it is probable that far more men than women met that fate.

After sentencing, the prisoners were loaded onto trains and taken to labor camps, collectively known by the acronym “Gulag,” that were spread across the Soviet Union.³⁵ Prisoners in the Gulag were required to work; indeed, they built some of the largest construction projects of the 1930s and they manufactured military equipment and consumer goods. Conditions in the camps varied. Those located in the western part of the Soviet Union were devoted to farming or light manufacturing. Prisoners there suffered from the chronic malnutrition that beset all Gulag inmates, but their work was less grueling and the climate easier than in Siberia or the far northwest. Women in the Siberian camps had heavier assignments. Hava Volovich, a Ukrainian journalist, later described her first attempts at cutting peat, which was used for fuel: “We were sent off into the bog to take off the top layer of vegetation. This layer was about eighteen inches thick and soggy with stagnant water. We had to slice it into pieces with our spades, then load it onto stretchers and, up to our ankles or knees in water, carry it forty or fifty yards off to the side.”³⁶

Female and male prisoners were usually separated in the Gulag. Women lived in separate camps or in their own section within larger complexes and worked with other women, under the supervision of male and female guards. They wore ragged clothing that did not keep out the cold or wet, worked with primitive equipment, lived in dirty, poorly heated barracks, and rarely got enough to eat. They also coped with abuse from guards and from inmates who were guilty of real crimes such as assault, murder, prostitution, and robbery. The so‑called criminals operated much as do gangs in U.S. prisons today.

Female prisoners were most likely to survive the Gulag if they were young and healthy, and if they did indoor jobs such as clerical work, cooking, nursing, and sewing. Gulag veterans also remembered that friendships with other female prisoners were crucial, because friends shared food and clothes and gave one another emotional support. Some of these friendships were probably physically intimate as well. It is impossible to say how common lesbianism was, because same‑sex love was so stigmatized in Soviet society that Gulag veterans discuss it only as deviant behavior engaged in by criminals.³⁷

Prisoners learned to take pleasure in simple things. “Our favorite pastime was storytelling,” wrote Vera Shulz, an actor from Moscow. “We would listen with bated breath, transported into another reality…. I heard stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Turgenev, Maupassant and others.” Tamara Petkevich, an actor in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg), remembered taking breaks from work in a hemp‑processing plant. “I shall never forget those moments. We lay surrounded by the fantastic moonlit night of Central Asia. It was as if we were floating in the clamorous sea of the steppe, which hummed with the rustling of sand and grass and the chirping of the cicadas. No one spoke.”³⁸

Survival required women to develop other skills common to concentration‑camp inmates. They loafed on the job or faked illnesses to conserve their strength; they made small treasures, such as spoons; they stole needles and other necessities. Some women moved up in the Gulag hierarchy by becoming leaders of their work groups or qualifying for the more skilled, less physically taxing work. These “trustees” sometimes collaborated with the authorities by informing on fellow prisoners. Women also traded sexual favors for privileges. Some became camp prostitutes, servicing multiple partners among the criminals and the guards. Luckier women managed to establish long‑term relationships with camp administrators. Some of the women who were sexually active became pregnant, a tragedy for them and their babies, most of whom died quickly in the camps’ poorly supplied nurseries.

Veterans of the Gulag believed that women coped better than men with its hardships, because they formed stronger bonds with each other, had greater disease resistance, and could get by on less food. Until the statistics on mortality rates within the various camps have been analyzed, it is impossible to know whether these perceptions were true. We do know that women were more likely than men to be assigned to less physically demanding jobs and to camps located in the more moderate climate zones. These facts alone could account for more of them surviving.

Women also rebelled. Occasionally groups protested, and from time to time, individuals escaped. The most persistent resisters were the so‑called “nuns,” some of whom were Orthodox nuns who had been arrested after the government ordered all the monasteries dissolved, others of whom were devout Protestants. These religious women took time off from work to pray, and some refused to work on holy days. Veteran revolutionaries, particularly Socialist Revolutionaries, also defied the guards. Sometimes the nuns and the Socialist Revolutionaries got away with such infractions; usually they were severely punished. A few souls remained so adamant that they were executed, a fate some seem to have courted. Other women committed suicide in various ways, the most common being simply to stop struggling to live. In the Gulag, despair was often fatal.

There were free women who worked in the Gulag. Female guards patrolled women’s camps, female administrators supervised the guards, and clerks and cooks ran offices and kitchens. In their background and training, these women were probably very similar to male Gulag employees, that is, they were from working‑class or peasant families and had elementary‑school educations.³⁹ Former inmates remember the female staffers as brutal, corrupt, and indifferent to the suffering around them. They often describe male guards and wardens in the same way, but it seemed particularly awful to them that women in authority could be as hard‑hearted as men. The memoirists seem to have underestimated the capacity of a prison system, particularly one as cruel as the Soviet, to deform the characters of the people it employed.

The Gulag also threw its shadow over people who never came inside its barbed‑wire fences. The NKVD rounded up children who had lost both parents to arrest. Liubov Stoliarova, the daughter of working‑class people in Khabarovsk, in Siberia, met this fate in 1937. “They took me to a reception‑distribution center in Kharkov [in Ukraine], where we lived for three months on starvation ration…. Since we were children of political ‘enemies of the people,’ they used to march us under guard with dogs.”⁴⁰ The centers served as collection points, where the children were sorted by age (thereby separating brothers and sisters). Older teenagers were sent to the labor camps, younger children to miserable state orphanages. As the numbers of such children swelled, the government set up special orphanages to hold them. Oftentimes the authorities changed these children’s names, with the result that relatives who came looking for them could not find them.

Adult relatives of arrested people endured the anguish of being separated from loved ones and not knowing whether they were alive or dead. They also labored under the stigma of being related to “enemies of the people.” Former friends avoided them. They had trouble finding or keeping jobs. Anna Egorova, the construction worker on the Moscow metro and amateur pilot, was refused admission to an advanced pilot‑training program in 1938 because her brother Vasili had been arrested. She did as many others did, and learned to lie about her personal history. She was fortunate in having valuable skills and a common name. So she managed to become an instructor at a flying club far from Moscow, where no one bothered to check her background.

Many wives, bereft of their husbands’ support and ostracized by people who feared to be associated with an “enemy,” endured enormous privation. The memoirs of survivors are full of stories of extraordinary pilgrimages over great distances to find food and avoid the authorities. Maria Novikova, whose parents were labeled kulaks during the collectivization in Belgorod, Ukraine, remembered, “How much suffering my mother endured all these years along with us! She dragged us through strangers’ houses, naked, hungry…. Three of us children died during those years of wanderings. When one would die, my mother would take the corpse and make the sign of the Cross, saying ‘Praise to You, O Lord, she’s not suffering anymore.’” Moving from place to place, Novikova and her daughter Maria stayed alive.⁴¹

Survivors also tell of mothers who, despite the odds against them, managed to be reunited with their children after they were freed from their own imprisonment. One such woman was Evgenia Ginzburg, who came out of the Gulag determined to record what she had witnessed. In doing so, she produced one of the great prison‑camp memoirs of the twentieth century.

EVGENIA GINZBURG (1906–77)

The daughter of a Jewish pharmacist from Moscow, Ginzburg graduated from Kazan University in the early 1920s. After teaching in a school for workers, she became a journalist and Communist Party activist. When the NKVD came for her in 1937, she was married to the mayor of Kazan, Pavel Aksionov, had two sons, and was working for a local newspaper. She was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for alleged contacts with “Trotskyites.” After more than a year in prison, Ginzburg was sent to Kolyma, an enormous complex of labor camps in the far east. Released in 1949 but required to remain in the area, she and her partner Anton Walter, a doctor she had met in the Gulag, settled in the city of Magadan. Ginzburg found work as a kindergarten teacher, adopted an orphaned girl, and reunited with her son Vasili, who had survived internment in an orphanage. She learned that her older son had starved to death during World War II.

Ginzburg had long intended to write about the Gulag. “The collection of material for this book,” she declared, “began from the moment when I first crossed the threshold of the NKVD’s Inner Prison in Kazan.” She described friends who helped orphaned children, and guards who were sometimes merciful, sometimes cruel. She told of reciting poetry in the freight cars that carried the prisoners east and of felling trees at fifty degrees below zero. She chronicled her “cruel journey of the soul” from “naïve young communist idealist into someone who had tasted… the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Ginzburg came through that journey able to affirm the possibility of good, even in the midst of consuming evil.⁴²

Unfortunately, she did not live to see her memoirs published in her homeland. In the 1960s, she circulated them in typescript among the intelligentsia, to great acclaim, but no Soviet press would touch them. Ginzburg finally sent them abroad, where they appeared as two volumes, Journey into the Whirlwind (1967) and Within the Whirlwind (1979). She died in Moscow in 1977. Her masterpiece was published in the Soviet Union in 1989.

World War II

On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler launched an army of 4 million across the Soviet border. The nation that had been ravaged from within for decades now faced an enemy more formidable and merciless than any yet imagined in the murky depths of Stalin’s paranoia. One‑third of those who enlisted in the Soviet military, some 8.6 million people, would die. More than 20 million civilians would perish too, from warfare, malnutrition, disease, and Nazi oppression. By the end of the war, 25 million people were homeless and 2.75 million veterans were disabled.⁴³ One‑third of the nation’s material resources had been destroyed, and the western third of the USSR, an area equal in size to the entire United States, had been laid waste.

The low point of the war for the Soviets came in the first six months of 1942, when German forces swept through Ukraine, wiping out entire armies. In the summer, the leadership and the nation rallied. By then generals had learned how to manage their enormous armies, officers were formulating new strategies and tactics to counter German attacks, and enlisted men had become battle‑hardened. Recognizing this rising competence, Stalin ordered that the political officers in the army be stripped of much of their power so that military commanders could lead more effectively. Meanwhile, the supply situation improved as Soviet factories, many of which had been dismantled and moved east beyond the reach of the invaders, churned out weapons and supplies. Aid from the United States in the form of aircraft, communications equipment, food, industrial raw materials, light trucks, and jeeps also began to arrive.

These improvements in organization, supply, strategy, and tactics were brought to bear in the fall of 1942 in the epic battle of Stalingrad. By January 1943, an Axis army of 290,000 men had been defeated. The next summer, the Soviet army scored a decisive victory in a huge tank battle at Kursk, in Ukraine west of Stalingrad. Although millions more Soviet and Axis troops and civilians would die before the Red Army received the German surrender in Berlin in May 1945, the tide of the war in the east had turned.

It was on the eastern front that German forces suffered their greatest defeats. This was an extraordinary achievement: the Soviet military, which had entered the war riddled with inefficiencies and reeling from Stalin’s purges, had defeated one of the best armies in European history. It prevailed because the Soviet system rose to the occasion. Stalin’s regime did not become gentler: the NKVD, though reined in, still went about its dirty work, and the recklessness of Soviet commanders produced far higher battlefield casualties than the Germans suffered. But Stalin’s agencies relaxed their predatory supervision, administrators at the regional and local levels applied the survival skills acquired in the 1930s to cope with the disruptions of war, and the people resolved to follow their leaders. This resilience, born of desperate necessity, led to battlefield victories and to considerable achievements in military production. In 1943, for example, 24,000 tanks rumbled out of Soviet factories; Germany produced only 17,000 that year. The disparities in 1944 were still greater. John Barber and Mark Harrison report that during the four years of the war, Soviet workers manufactured “100,000 tanks, 130,000 aircraft, 800,000 field guns and mortars and up to half a billion artillery shells, 1.4 million machine guns, 6 million machine pistols and 12 million rifles.” This output was roughly equal to that of Great Britain and was half that of the United States, which began the war with a more developed economy than the Soviets and experienced no enemy invasion.⁴⁴

Perhaps German arms production could not keep up with the Soviet because the Germans did not have as skilled a female labor force, for it was mostly women who built the Soviet tanks. They also kept the farms going and served as support troops in the military. In no other combatant nation did women play such a significant part in the war effort, so the most important contribution of Stalinist industrialization to the Soviet victory in World War II may well have been its preliminary mobilization and training of female workers.