Intimacy and Race in Late Soviet Central Asia

Abstract

Early studies of Soviet multinationalism focused on the foundational period of the USSR, when Lenin and Stalin committed to developing national cultures with the expectation that nationalism would exhaust itself and yield a truly international socialist culture. Adrienne Edgar’s book shifts the focus to the late Soviet period and the post-Soviet transition. She aptly illustrates how the paradoxical effort of trying to create a “Soviet people” while entrenching individual ethic nations within their own republics and imposing an official ethnic national identity on individuals continued to shape the lives of Soviet citizens until the collapse of the USSR. The focus of her work is interethnic marriage, which was often held up by Soviet social scientists as evidence of progress on the path toward internationalist socialist culture and as a positive contrast with bans on interracial marriage in force in many parts of the United States. Based on interviews with participants in ethnically mixed marriages, adult offspring of such marriages, and academic experts, Edgar shows that the lived reality was far more complex and intersectional than social scientists ever admitted. One of the book’s more provocative findings is the extent to which, in the last few decades of the USSR, Soviet citizens spoke about nationality in ways that were implicitly racialized. Although racism was officially condemned and was not part of what Edgar calls “the tyranny of the Soviet system of ethnic classification,” she shows that unofficial attitudes toward nationality seemed aligned with racialized experiences in North America, Latin America, and Europe (p. 118). Offspring of ethnically mixed marriages who fell outside dominant racialized national categories might be bullied at school, face difficulties getting married, experience distrust and suspicion from both sides of the family, be profoundly and hurtfully misrecognized by others, and endure the “What are you?” question. Edgar’s portrayal of the experiences of race, racism, and logics and practices of rationalization in the late-Soviet period makes several important contributions. Edgar’s analysis of racialized dynamics illuminated by interethnic marriages in the late Soviet context contributes to a growing historiographical conversation about how human difference was understood by Russian imperial subjects and by Soviet citizens, about how these understandings shaped different peoples’ sense of belonging over time and in relation to various social transformation projects, and to a specific literature on race in the Soviet Union as an unofficial category understood in terms of biology, inheritance, phenotype, civilization, culture, environment, geography, or a combination of these ideas.1 Like another recent monograph, by Jeff Sahadeo, Edgar’s use of oral histories to document informal and officially unacknowledged racializing trends helps explain the greater normalization of racial discourses in post-Soviet politics.2 Finally, the book’s focus on intermarriage, combined with its comparative and global approach, not only highlights what the Soviet Union had in common with other twentieth-century modern states but also raises many interesting questions about the intersections of race, gender, and empire, not all of which can be answered with oral histories data. A productive theme that emerges from Edgar’s comparative analysis of cultural and linguistic integration is how the Soviet process of Russification was differentiated by class (elites/non-elites) and by region. “Soviet” identity overlapped considerably with Russianness in the sense that Russian was the language of political, professional, and academic elites, and that those who identified strongly with being Soviet also tended to be attached to a common Russian language along with its literature, historical traditions, and popular culture. Russian was also the language of interethnic communication. Edgar’s focus on Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, two predominantly Muslim regions of Central Asia that became Soviet national-territorial republics in the 1920s and 1930s, underlines the importance of their different histories of conquest and incorporation into the Russian and then Soviet empire. Kazakhstan was ethnically and linguistically Russified to such an extent that ethnic Kazakhs were a minority within their own republic, while Tajikistan remained one of the least linguistically Russified of the Soviet republics. Consequently, in Kazakhstan it was more common for official and unofficial national identities to diverge when children of Kazakh fathers and Russian mothers might fulfill patriarchal expectations of adopting their father’s nationality but end up fluent in their mother’s native Russian. These examples of “ethnic identification without language” are fascinating in that they defied Stalin’s canonical definition of nationality as a historically constituted, stable community of people formed, among other things, “on the basis of a common language” (p. 179). They also illustrate the differentiated nature of the Soviet cultural project and the importance of imperial histories, which continue to shape language policies and other national-building considerations in the post-Soviet present. Another implicit comparison between Soviet interethnic marriage and other colonial or immigrant contexts becomes apparent through the lens of gender. Edgar finds that, because of the religious and cultural taboo against Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men which persisted throughout the Soviet period, the majority of surveyed interethnic marriages between Central Asian and European Soviet citizens involved Central Asian men (or Muslim men from other regions) and European (or non-Muslim) women. In this sense, Soviet experiences diverge from colonial contexts that facilitated white male sexual access to non-white women and produced reactionary concerns about racial degeneration and efforts to control the phenomenon. In the Soviet Union as well such unions flaunted official expectations that marriage between representatives of “backward” and “advanced” nations would help advance modernity. In many of the cases studies presented by Edgar, the women from “advanced” nations chose to join the more patriarchal societies of their husbands and accept their ostensibly “backward” cultural norms. They did so while often having to overcompensate for the Central Asian stereotypes about Russian or European wives being “excessively domineering within the family” (p. 149). For Edgar, this phenomenon illustrates the failure of Soviet propaganda to transform Central Asian gender relations during the last decades of Soviet rule. As such, it illustrates the continued operation of interwar dynamics of using the same symbols to construct nationality and backwardness in Central Asia. Edgar’s most frequent refrain, however, is to highlight the diversity of lived experiences of Soviet interethnic couples and individuals. For example: “Some members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan recalled a strict gender-based division of labor within their families, with fathers as breadwinners and decision-makers and mothers in charge of the home. … Other respondents recalled more creative and equitable divisions,” such as men concealing their help around the house because of cultural norms against men doing “women’s work” (pp. 105–6). Edgar’s reluctance to speculate about wider trends is grounded in a healthy skepticism about Soviet quantitative data, which suffered from Soviet state secrecy about demographic trends, including those examining intermarriage. Yet certain trends seem so powerful as to shape expectations about if not define the very experience of marriage itself. For instance, the economic scarcity and the demographic imbalance of men and women after World War II lowered women’s “expectations of emotional fulfillment in marriage”; this shift inculcated a new level of pragmatism captured by the advice that “any man who brought home a salary, did not drink, and did not abuse his wife was worth keeping” (p. 84). This demographic imbalance began before World War II because men were more likely to die in wars and purges and less able to endure starvation. Its intensification after the war, meant that women had trouble finding husbands, mothers brought up their children without fathers, and the birth rate was depressed. This imbalance may have likely shaped the meaning of marriage as far as it related to decisions about pursuing romantic love versus more secure forms of pragmatic codependence. The question of how the meaning of marriage may have changed over time seems all the more relevant when the emphasis shifts to intimacy. The terms “marriage” and “intimacy” are used interchangeably throughout the book, although they can often diverge. Intimacy might include a much wider set of relationships, either extramarital or same-sex friendships that become important when marriages are either statistically unlikely or emotionally unfulfilling. Slippage between “marriage” and “intimacy” also makes it challenging to grasp the analytical value of certain case studies, such as the one about a marriage between an ethnic Korean man and a Russian woman in which the husband described the wife as “just like her mother, an authoritative and loud woman … even little things sparked hysteria, screams, and wails,” and adds that “my mom never yelled at my dad.” Edgar presents this example as a “personality conflict intertwined with ethnic grievances,” but how the “personality” and “ethnic” intertwine is not totally clear (p. 88). Did the man’s hope for a wife who was less “hysterical” reflect a Korean stereotype about Russians, an example of broader Soviet Brezhnev-era misogyny, or the even wider pathologizing of female sexuality as hysteria? The notion that marriage and especially intimacy has a stable meaning is asserted most clearly in the methodological separation of recollections of “broader historical events” from recollections about marriage and family life that seem “more intimately personal and depend less on collective memory” (p. 13). Edgar concedes that personal recollections are “by no means immune to outside influences,” by which she primarily means the collapse of the Soviet state and the Communist party (p. 13). Undoubtedly, those transformations shape her interviewees’ recollections. Yet what about other dimensions of the Soviet, national, or more local sociopolitical context? What about the intellectual context and narrative forms that have been shown in other contexts to be linked with the rise of ideas about love and marriage, such as the novel and its linkages with ideas about romantic love and bourgeois marriage? Were the traumas caused by political repression, collectivization, famine, war, or cultures of abuse by mothers-in-law and other family members passed down from generation to generation not expressed in “less traumatic times” (p. 13)? Did this expression follow particular patterns or have its own history? How regionally-specific were these experiences? Considering the prevalence of post-traumatic intimacy issues might help further historicize Soviet expectations about intimacy and marriage, whether interethnic or not, and offer as yet unexplored ways of relating experiences in the Soviet Union to those in other contexts.