Forced Labor and Feminism: The Making of Progressive Social Policies under Soviet Colonialism

• In Event: Exploitation, Gender, and Social Policies

Abstract

The Soviet Union emancipated women in its imperial periphery through top-down cultural programs, political ideology, and progressive public goods between 1920s-1930s, with lasting legacies that continue to define the present-day post-Soviet politics. The regions most affected through a fast-paced imposition of new social institutions were Central Asia, the Caucasus, and agricultural Russia and Ukraine. However, the modern-day attitudes towards women in those areas of the post-Soviet Eurasia 30 years after the collapse are not egalitarian and there is significant discrimination with gender-based violence. What explains this short-lived legacy? Using extensive archival work, I find that the Soviet Union's emancipatory social policies in agricultural regions were tied to the need in labor force. Women were allowed limited emancipation and inclusion to participate in systematically underpaid and forced labor practices. In return, the government provided police protection, legal rights, literacy schools (likbez), daycare, and reproductive access. I test my evidence causally, by estimating the average treatment effects for key pro-women public goods and attitude outcomes in cash-crop intensive and non-agricultural areas. But the repressive and non-deliberative nature of these new social institutions created a gendered and non-participatory authority. The Soviet government pitted genders against each other. Only the most apt at forced labor mobilization and repressive enforcement were promoted, most of them and most often males. Their repressive capacity weakened as the system collapsed and a gendered backlash ensued. Without bottom up participatory and deliberative politics, the costly social policy legacies of the Soviet Union were short-lived. My research contributes previously unexplored and understudied explanations to the provision of pro-women and progressive public goods in non-democratic regimes, investigates their short legacy effects, and sheds light to why repressive societal remaking does not work.

Author

• Khasan Redjaboev, University of Wisconsin, Madison