Northrop, Douglas. Veiled Empire

Northrop, Douglas. Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Northrop discusses how the Central Asia helped Russia redefine itself as ‘European’ and ‘civilizing’ and continued to do so in the early years of the Bolshevik rule (p. 8). An attempt to discuss the interaction between the Bolshevik party and Uzbek society as “part of a wider narrative of European interactions with colonial subjects.” (13) Engages in an interaction with Slezkine who claimed that the Soviet Union wasn’t an imperial nation to argue that in the Central Asia it actually was: “One of my main premises, then, is that the USSR, like its tsarist predecessor, was a colonial empire.” (22) Looks at the Soviet policy as a construction of gender through power relations, which allows him to interpret resistance to unveiling of women (including rape and murder) as resistance to the regime and power, something that leads him to call his work ‘subaltern studies’ in Soviet history, to discover the “fundamental importance of gender in the functioning and legitimation of imperial systems,” and how this importance was reflected in the struggle over everyday practices. (30) Curiously, he argues (p. 44) that paranji became popular only in the mid-19^th century as a reaction to the Russian colonization and (as his language assumes) that women self-imposed it on themselves.

His seemingly big mistake is underestimation of the role of local activists exactly in the enforcing the unveiling; he doesn’t take it for granted that local women and Uzbek Bolsheviks could indeed internalize emancipatory ideas of Marxism and try to implement them in practice; he discusses two the story of unveiling as a two-side tory (power – society), which misses an important group of sincere local activists who incorporate Marxist critical theory in their everyday agenda, just like common actors of the social movements of 60s and 70s in the West. In this respect, this book says nothing principally new about the Soviet history. It gives lots of new factual data that is extremely useful, but the model it constructs is very banal: that of a mixture of post-colonial studies with Soviet studies. And he also unnecessarily focuses on the resistance – which was important, surely, but the story of resistance to tradition, an attempt of emancipation, was equally important, and he misses this story because of his desire to show this particular episode of Central Asian history as an imperial/colonial model. By doing this, he sanctions the patriarchal power structures.

Because what he calls ‘resistance’ is actually a struggle for power: the power of women, the power of economy, etc. He applies critical theory to one side of this struggle, the Soviet state, because he was taught to do it, but he repeatedly ignores (even those he doesn’t silence them!) that the other side was less about resistance to power, but more like a bid for power, an alternative bid for power. He forgets that there is no ‘natural’ position of women in any given society, that a woman (just like a man) is a field of struggle, while he de-facto regards the pre-hujum gender division as ‘natural’: he never pronounces it openly, but his very critical perspective on Soviet policies and the use of postcolonial theory to justify violence against women as ‘resistance’ is a very dubious exercise in an attempt to write a objective history; maybe, an indication of his own research position in this conflict on the side of whom he perceives as ‘subaltern’ would be a better idea than his distancing from this conflict, which leads to a very strong bias in favor of social power.