Women in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia

In the decades following World War II, the government maintained its careful approach to challenging patriarchy in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Local people were offered education and jobs in the cities, and once there they imbibed Soviet gender values. The influence of those values was strengthened by the continuing in‑migration of Soviet citizens from the European areas. This assimilative process brought about the transformation the government wanted, especially within the urban elite of professionals, managers, party officials, and their families. By the 1970s, most women in Baku, Tbilisi, Alma Ata, and Tashkent were educated, were working in the same sorts of jobs as women elsewhere in the Soviet Union, were having fewer children than their mothers’ generation–though more than Soviet women of European ethnicity–and were living healthier lives than their mothers had. They were also professing many of the same ideas about family life and women’s role in society as other Soviet women. These were substantial changes, particularly when compared to the much less advanced process of gender reform in nearby, culturally similar countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. Russian autocracy had once again demonstrated its ability to accelerate reforms for women.²⁸

In Siberia, government policies were less accommodating of local customs. The largest, most urban, and most prosperous peoples–the Buryats and Yakuts–managed the transition to Soviet values and practices most easily. Among the smaller tribes, Soviet officials pursued policies of forced assimilation that were much like those that the Canadian and U.S. governments had adopted toward indigenous people in the decades before World War II. They denigrated local cultures, forced nomads to become farmers, and took children away to boarding schools. Sexual contacts between native women and non‑native men also weakened native cultures; by the late Brezhnev years, more than 50 percent of the children in some Eskimo villages were the offspring of European fathers with whom they had no contact. The native Siberians were unable to mount effective resistance to these policies, because there were few places left to retreat to and more Europeans than ever to deal with. In 1979, native people constituted a mere 11 percent of the Siberian population, despite the fact that better health care had lowered childhood mortality rates among them. The results were similar to those in North America–rising levels of education and migration to cities, some economic success among collective farmers and herders, and among others high rates of alcoholism, alienation, and unemployment.²⁹

The peoples of the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia preserved some traditional customs, including patriarchal ones. Clan and extended family connections remained strong, providing support and entailing obligations. Muslim elders in the Caucasus and Central Asia enforced their remaining prerogatives, so that practices such as wife‑beating and arranged marriage continued, even though they were illegal and were occasionally prosecuted by Soviet authorities. The power of senior women persisted as well. In Turkmenistan, the most conservative of the Central Asian republics, Turkmen women continued to believe that bride price and dowry were important to cementing the relationship between the families of the bride and groom, and also to affirming the importance of parents, who made the payments and negotiated the marriage contracts. Once married, young Turkmen women moved in with their husbands’ families, and for the first year of their married lives they were forbidden to leave the house alone, eat with the family, or speak directly to their mothers‑in‑law or fathers‑in‑law.³⁰ Elsewhere in Central Asia women still wore veils in public and divided their homes into male‑only and female‑only spaces.

Caucasian, Central Asian, and Siberian women preserved other traditions as well. Older women among the Yakuts cherished the belief that their cows understood everything humans said to them, and so they talked to them as they milked and explained to them what was happening when the calves started to be born.³¹ Uzbek women cooked in clay ovens built into the floors of their city houses. Armenians embroidered centuries‑old designs onto table linens. They and the women of many other ethnic groups also taught their children the history of their families, passed on the proverbs and folk tales of their ancestors, and kept their people’s religions alive. In the Caucasus, most of the congregants of Georgian and Armenian Christian churches were female. Among Islamic peoples, mothers and grandmothers instructed their children in the Qur’an. Female shamans on the Pacific coast chanted the ancient invocations to ancestral spirits for healing; Buryat women taught their children about the Buddha.

Many observers believed that women played the key role in keeping native cultures alive, for cultural traditions could be practiced in the home, a place less subject to government inspection than the public world. “Women were expected to be the main identity markers, the primary repositories of ‘authenticity…,’ tradition, ethnic codes, and customs,” wrote Nayereh Tohidi of Azeri women.³² We saw this idea among Polish nationalists in Russia in the nineteenth century. It was an important theme in nationalism from the ideology’s inception in the eighteenth century and it is widespread today across Africa and Asia, as people adapt to the onslaught of foreign power and influence.