Did Stalinism Weaken Patriarchy?
Which aspect of Stalinism had the most long-lasting effect on gender?
Central planners set wages low and productivity targets high. Firms readily hired more workers. This systematically raised female employment.
Propaganda championed gender equality.
Religion was crushed through brute force.
Forced deportations encouraged cultural assimilation.
Female employment is certainly higher in post-communist countries, and there was a lot of propaganda. Yet neither seem to have dislodged patriarchal ideologies. Post-communist countries tend to be much more sexist than comparable peers. The Russian Dumas remains 84% male.
As for brute force, it doesn’t seem to have stamped out underlying desire. Uzbeks just falsified their preferences and prayed privately. Now that persecution has rescinded, mosques are being constructed, religious vloggers attract millions of subscribers, and women are re-veiling.
So what about forced deportations?
Antonela Miho, Alexandra Jarotschkin, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya have a fantastic new paper suggesting that Protestant deportations promoted gender equality across the USSR. Places that received more Protestant deportees now have higher female labour force participation and lower fertility. This effect is strongest where deportees make up a larger share of the population.
Totalitarian communism is usually seen as gender norms being imposed top-down, Miho and colleagues highlight another important mechanism. Forced deportations led to horizontal cultural transmission.
More Protestant deportees in 1940 = more gender equality today.
N.B. this is a social-scientific analysis, not a normative justification of Stalinism.
Eurasia was culturally diverse
Back in 1897, long before the deportations, there was enormous cultural heterogeneity. Female labour force participation was universally low, but highest higher among Germans and Russians. Central Asian Muslims had a much stronger preference for female seclusion.
Soviet Deportations
In the 1940s, Soviet authorities sought to purge ‘anti-Soviet, alien, and suspicious elements’. Dissidents were forcibly deported to different parts of the USSR, and forced to stay put. Within that defined settlement, they could move freely, interact with locals, and attend the same schools. Deported Germans, Crimean Tatars, and Meskhetian Turks were thus forced to remain in place until the end of the USSR.
Miho and colleagues’ figure below shows that female labour force participation, female leadership in firms, and pro-gender-equality attitudes are ‘below the regional averages in localities with the lowest share of Protestants among deportees and are above the regional averages in localities with the highest share of Protestants among deportees… A one standard deviation increase in the share of Protestant deportees also leads to a 1-percentage-point increase in the probability that an average firm in this locality has a female director’.
Prior cultural closeness seems to encourage assimilation. Miho and colleagues find that Protestant deportees had a stronger effect on local Russians than Central Asians. This is an important contribution to studies on ‘Contact Theory’. Mixing and mingling may be mediated by prior affinity. People are more likely to make friends and learn from others who they perceive as relevantly similar.
Did deportations spread Muslim culture?
Actually no. Muslim deportations had little effect. That’s probably because:
Germans were relatively well-educated, so may have commanded prestige bias,
Under the USSR, female employment was economically advantageous.
So it may have seemed more beneficial to emulate educated Protestants.
What about endogeneity?
Were Protestants deported to places that were already female-friendly?
Using the 1897 census, Miho and colleagues show that a locality’s female labour force participation and female literacy are unrelated to the subsequent composition of deportees it receives.
My qualitative research backs this up
Last December, I undertook a month’s research in Central Asia. A young Kazakh woman shared her family story of repression and multiculturalism.
“My great-grandmother survived the 1930s famine. It was horrendous… They grew up in Karaganda, close to the gulag. Political prisoners from the USSR were sent there. Gulag prisoners were released in 1954 but they had to stay in Karaganda… Almost everyone at their school was Russian, German or Korean. There’s a huge Korean theatre. Shops sell Korean food, it’s extremely multicultural.
There are two gay clubs in Almaty, there’s more freedom to do anything. And there’s strong religious tolerance. Muslim and Orthodox leaders celebrated Easter together in Karaganda... For us, this is normal. It is not from the state, it comes from the people”.
My grandmother would hold up a shot of vodka and say - without irony - ‘Happy Eid!’. She was a paramedic, my grandfather was a surgeon. They met on the job. My family is full of working women, who’ve used opportunities to advance themselves… If there was an opportunity, they took it… Compared to Uzbeks and Tajiks, women had more mobility and flexibility”.
In Uzbekistan, more liberal interviewees sometimes emphasised their personal connections with other ethnicities. In Sang village, an elderly Uzbek teacher shared that she had started wearing short-sleeved dresses like her Russian colleagues. One of her friends - a 66 year old former accountant - similarly recalled her enjoyment of socialising at work:
Jews, Germans, Tatars, and people from many nationalities all shared lunch, each bringing their national dish.
In Uzbekistan, I had ten research assistants - to facilitate access their trusted different networks across the country. My research assistant in Namangan was very liberal, wanted to grow his hair long, and weak pink - despite wider stares. Having studied at a Russian school, he preferred to hang out with Russians, ‘because they are more liberal’. Personal connections may have been enormously important in cultivating cultural assimilation.
Cultural assimilation, by forced deportations
BRAVO to Antonela Miho, Alexandra Jarotschkin, and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya!
This is a fantastic paper demonstrating cultural change through population movement. There are many earlier examples, including the Indo-Aryan migrations into South Asia, the Mycenaeans into Ancient Greece, the Tibeto-Burmans and Timurids into South Asia, the Bantu expansion, pastoralists into Eastern and Southern Africa, Arab conquests across North Africa, and Iberian conquistadors into South America.
Geography is not destiny! People on the move change our world!
Related posts
Did Forced Resettlement promote Cultural Tolerance and Assimilation?
Why is Female Employment Low in Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan, but not Bhutan?
How has Central Asia's Religious Revival shaped Gender Relations?
Further Reading
“Diffusion of Gender Norms: Evidence from Stalin’s Ethnic Deportations” by
Antonela Miho, Alexandra Jarotschkin, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya
“Enemies of the People” by Gerhard Toews and Pierre-Louis Vézina
Is there an implication of this, a potentially creepy one, for Han in-migration into Turkic Islamic Xinjiang?
This seems to me like a good argument for Open Borders, which could replicate this modernization effect globally, but non-coercively. (At least to the extent that First World emigration goes beyond expat bubbles).
I am confused by the Miho et al. graph suggesting that Russian (in Siberia - area of deportation) and German male literacy in 1897 were comparable. According to the 1897 Census, Siberia's literacy rate was even lower than European Russia's, something like 20% IIRC. So Russian men in Siberia couldn't have been at more than 30%, but the graph claims 60%.