“Emancipation of the nationalka” – social and cultural politics towards ethnic minorities’ women (on example of the Volga-Ural region in the 1920s)

Abstract

The Bolshevik mission to implement a massive social, economic and cultural revolution in Russia did not only concern the expropriation of the exploiting classes and transfer of power to the working classes. It also had a serious concern for the liberation of women, who were to have equal rights in the new socialist society. For Soviet authorities in the rural areas, especially those inhabited by ‘national minorities’, women could be identified as useful allied for the new regime. The term ‘nationalka’ was coined to describe the female part of the national minority community. They were targeted due to their status as the most oppressed section of the community in those days. As such a raft of organizational forms were set up to conduct the liberation of women. This article addresses the social and cultural policies towards women, who moved from the category of ‘inorodtsi’ in the Tsarist period to ‘Nationalki’ or ‘the Female Toilers of the East’ in the language of early Soviet documents. An analysis of Soviet documents allows an examination of the evolution of these policies in the last half of the 1920’s, with a focus on the Ural-Volga region and the women of the Tatar and Bashkir communities. The aim of this is to uncover the specific problems and contradictions in Soviet policy. The ideas of Edward Said are utilized in analysis, with the concept of Orientalism being applied to the Russians. In this way the struggle to liberate women is revealed to carry much of the civilizing mission of the Tsarist period, bringing progress to a wild, exotic and barbaric East. Also utilized are the ideas of Foucault in the power relations inherent in such state-driven projects. Overall, the liberation struggle is shown not to be a mass movement but driven by specific state agencies that had been set this objective. That this mission was carried out with an orientalist mentality leaves important lessons for gender politics and work to support women in the developing world.