PART I

Central Asian societies and their gender roles in the early 20th century varied quite a bit, with major divisions between sedentary agricultural peoples and nomadic pastoral peoples, so it's hard to generalize for the whole region. However, the attempt by the Soviets to change gender roles in Uzbekistan is probably the most well-documented and well-studied instance - I'd recommend Douglas Northrup's Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia for a full study.

In the 1920s, the Soviets were in the process of (re)gaining control of Central Asia from the Whites and from local insurgents, who were collectively referred to as "bandits" or basmachi. The Red Army was able to effectively assert control over the areas that it dominated, but Soviet authorities faced major problems in terms of building local coalitions of people who would actively support (rather than passively accept) Soviet rule. A major obstacle was that during the Russian Civil War, Bolshevism in Central Asia was almost exclusively the domain of ethnic Russian settlers in the area, and a massacre of inhabitants in Kokand by the Tashkent-based Bolsheviks in February 1918 did not help matters. Local intellectual elites, especially in Khiva and Bukhara, were eventually allied to the Soviet cause, but were nevertheless treated with some suspicion. As the region was largely agricultural or pastoral, there was very little in the way of a local industrial proletariat for the Bolsheviks to build their base of support among.

Enter the idea of a "Surrogate Proletariat" (it should be noted that this specific term actually comes from historian Gregory Massell, writing in 1974). The Soviets attempt would attempt to use gender relations and women’s liberation as a “surrogate proletariat” to strengthen popular support for the Soviet regime in Central Asia, which largely saw Soviet rule as foreign, urban and atheist.

The campaign for women in Central Asia was mostly led by the "Women's Division" (Zhenotdel) of the Bolshevik party, which was a going concern until disbanded in 1930. One of the major members of this party organization that was active in Central Asia was Serafima Liubimova, and overall the female activists at work in the project tended to be ethnically Slavic, not local. Their attitudes were heavily influenced by pre-existing Russian attitudes towards “the East” and women in the region in general. It's not a stretch to call it Orientalist, as even Zhenotdel members saw Central Asians as lazy, careless savage and dirty, with women and their living conditions being the most potent symbol of this. The European “gaze” (much like among colonial Europeans in other Muslim-majority regions) especially focused on local women, the veil and harem, which were both enticing and shocking to Russian viewers, writers and readers.

A quick historic aside here: while sedentary Central Asian women had long worn different head coverings, the "veil" that most shocked and intrigued Europeans was known alternately as the chachvon or paranji, and was similar in many respects to the Afghan burka. However, it was not widely worn before about 1870, before which a hat known as the mursak was more common, and there was even a common belief in Central Asia that the wearing of veils was specifically a reaction to Russian conquest. It's also worth noting that veiling was practiced by both Muslim and local Jewish communities, was heavily skewed towards urban and more well-to-do women, and that along those lines Muscovite women had themselves practiced forms of veiling and seclusion until roughly the time of Peter the Great.

Anyway, back to the early 20th century. In the 1920s, Soviet authorities were busy engaging in "national delimitation," restructuring the political geography of Central Asia based on ethnography. Much of the ethnic delimitation was based on customs that Soviet authorities paradoxically considered 'primitive barbarities", so veiling with the paranji specifically meant a woman was Uzbek. This became a major feature as Soviet nationalities policy and korenizatsiya (the development of local Soviet elites) in the 1920s explicitly created a new Uzbek republic and nation, and ‘characteristic” veils were used to determine nationality (while ignoring veiling among local Jews and Roma). By 1930 a national consciousness was developing among Uzbeks, with veiling ironically being a means of policing the social borders between nationalities, with Russians defining themselves as “European” in contrast.

Soviet authorities tended to target very specific cultural practices as "survivals" that they found objectionable, both in sharia (which largely was the law in sedentary societies) and odat/adat (which was customary law among nomads). In the Uzbek case, the targets were qalin (bride-price), underage marriage, polygamy and veiling; for nomadic communities where veiling wasn't practiced, wife-stealing or returning a divorced wife to her parents tended to get swapped in. The authorities' stated concerns over these practices were that they kept women from education and productive labor, and even harmed health and demographics (seclusion, underage marriage and polygamy were considered means that syphilis was spread).

Such views overlooked a multiplicity of practices at the local level in pre-1917 period, as well as the role women played in upholding social customs (e.g. otins were female Islamic teachers who trained children in religious practices).

This was the backdrop for the 1927 hujum (unveiling) campaign, which saw mass demonstrations of women taking off and burning veils. There was a major international component to hujum as well, however - the Soviets were in fact trying to keep up with similar mass unveiling campaigns that had already started in Turkey under Ataturk and even Afghanistan under Amanullah Khan. The decision by party authorities to launch an "assault" (rather than slower attempts at change through Zhenotdel literacy clubs and workshops) was in part also a policy shift after it was felt that land reform and water rights reform in 1925-26 had not created sufficient enthusiasm among the local population.

The Sredazbiuro (Central Asian Bureau) of the Communist party selected March 8, 1927 (International Women's Day) for the start of the campaign, and expected it to be short. They were mistaken.