support from individual professors and even university administrations. Persistent lobbying of government led to permission for public lectures for women (1869), then preparatory courses and finally university- level courses (1872 in Moscow), all existing on public goodwill, organization, and funding. Medical courses (for “learned midwives”) were opened to women in St Petersburg (1872), extended to full medical courses in 1876. In 1878 the first Higher Courses for Women opened in St. Petersburg, followed by Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan. Though outside the university system, with no rights to state service and rank as given to men, these courses were effectively women’s universities. Feminist campaigners also provided financial resources to students needing assistance, setting up a charity to raise money for the Higher Courses in 1878.
The campaign for higher education and specialist training was critically important for radical women too. Radicals’ increasing identification with
FEMINISM
“the people” inspired them to train for professions that could be of direct use, principally teaching and medicine. During the early 1870s dozens of radical women (along with nonpolitical women in search of professional education not then available in Russia) went abroad to study, especially to Zurich, where the university was willing to admit them. Some radicals completed their training; others were drawn into Russian ?migr? political circles, abandoned their studies, and soon returned to Russia as active revolutionaries.
Feminism-like all reform movements in Russia during the 1870s-suffered in the increasingly repressive political environment. All independent initiatives, legal or illegal, came under suspicion: these included a feminist publishing cooperative founded during the mid-1860s, fundraising activities, proposals to form women’s groups, and so forth. Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 brought further misfortune. Several of the terrorist leaders were women, former nigilistki, and in the wholesale assault on liberalism following the murder, feminists were tarred with the same brush. The reaction after 1881 proved almost fatal. Expansion of higher education was halted; some courses were closed. Feminists ceased campaigning, and all avenues for action were barred. Only during the mid- 1890s could feminists begin to regroup, but under strict supervision, and always limited by law to education and philanthropy.
POLITICAL ACTION
Before 1900 Russian feminism had no overt political agenda. For some activists this was a matter of choice, for many others a frustrating restriction. In several, though not all, western countries women’s suffrage had been a focal point of feminist aspirations since the 1850s and 1860s. When rural zemstvos and municipal dumas were set up in Russia in the 1860s, propertied women received limited proxy rights to vote for the assemblies’ representatives, but legal political activity-by either gender-was not permitted. Indeed, no national legislature existed before 1906, when the tsar was forced by revolutionary upheaval to create the State Duma. It was during the build up of this opposition movement, from the early 1900s, that Russian feminism began to address political issues, not only women’s suffrage, but calls for civil rights and equality before the law for all citizens.
After Bloody Sunday (January 9, 1905), feminist activists began to organize, linking their cause with that of the liberal and moderate socialist Liberation Movement. Besides existing women’s societies, such as the Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society (Russkoye zhenskoye vzaimno- blagotvoritelnoye obshchestvo, established in 1895), new organizations sprang up. Most directly political was the All-Russian Union of Equal Rights for Women (Vserossysky soyuz ravnopraviya zhen-shchin), dedicated to a wide program of social and political reform, including universal suffrage without distinction of gender, religion, or nationality. It quickly affiliated itself with the Union of Unions (Soyuz soyuzov). Feminist support for the Liberation Movement was unmatched by the movement’s support for women’s political rights, and much of the union’s propaganda during 1905 was directed as much at the liberal opposition as at the government. Unlike the latter, however, many liberals were gradually persuaded by the feminist claim, and support increased significantly in the years of reaction that followed. The government refused to consider women’s suffrage at any point.
The women’s union-though itself overwhelmingly middle-class and professional-was greatly encouraged by women’s participation in workers’ strikes during the mid-1890s and, particularly, women’s involvement in working- class action in 1904 and 1905. After 1905, however, feminists were increasingly challenged by revolutionary socialists in a competition to “win” working-class women to their cause. Prominent Bolsheviks such as Kollontai had finally convinced their party leaders of working-class women’s revolutionary potential. During the last years of tsarist rule, when the labor movement overall was becoming increasingly active, Kollontai and her comrades benefited from the feminists’ failure to make any headway in the mass organization of women, a failure exacerbated after the outbreak of World War I by the feminists’ stalwart support for the war effort. It was the Bolsheviks, not the feminists, who capitalized on the war’s catastrophic impact on the lives of working-class women and men.
With the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917, the feminist campaign resumed, and initial opposition from the Provisional Government was easily overcome. In the electoral law for the Constituent Assembly, women were fully enfranchised. Before it was swept away by the Bolsheviks, the Provisional Government initiated several projects to give women equal opportunities and pay in public services, and full rights to practice as lawyers. It also proposed to transform the higher
FERGHANA VALLEY
courses into women’s universities; in the event, the courses were fully incorporated into existing universities by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
During the 1920s, with “bourgeois feminism” silenced, women’s liberation was sponsored by the Bolsheviks, under a special Women’s Department of the Communist Party (Zhenotdel). In 1930 the Zhenotdel was abruptly dismantled and the “woman question” prematurely declared “solved.” See also: KOLLONTAI, ALEXANDRA MIKHAILOVNA; KRUP-SKAYA, NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA; MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE; ZHENOTDEL
Atkinson, Dorothy; Dallin, Alexander; and Warshofsky, Lapidus, eds. (1977). Women in Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans. (1979). Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans; Engel, Barbara Alpern; and Worobec, Christine, D., eds. (1991). Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edmondson, Linda. (1984). Feminism in Russia, 1900-1917. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Edmondson, Linda, ed. (1992). Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Engel, Barbara Alpern. (1983). Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Farnsworth, Beatrice, and Viola, Lynne, eds. (1992). Russian Peasant Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glickman, Rose L. (1984). Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Noonan, Norma Corigliano, and Nechemias, Carol, eds. (2001). Encyclopedia of Russian Women’s Movements. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Norton, Barbara T., and Gheith, Jehanne, M., eds. (2001). An Improper Profession: Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stites, Richard. (1978). The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
LINDA EDMONDSON
A triangular basin with rich soil and abundant water resources from the Syr Darya River, modern canals, and the Kayrakkum Reservoir; the Ferghana Valley (Russian: Ferganskaia dolina; Uzbek: Farg-ona ravnina) is situated primarily in Uzbekistan and partly in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and is formed below the Tien Shan Mountains to the north and the Gissar Alay Mountains to the south. This has been the agricultural center of Central Asia for the last several thousand years. The basin is a major producer of cotton, fruits, and raw silk. It is one of the most densely populated regions of Central Asia, including the cities of Khujand, Kokand, Ferghana, Margilan, Namangan, Andijan, Osh, and Jalalabad.
Throughout its history, material and cultural wealth have made the valley a frequent target of conquest. Khujand, at the western edge of the valley, was once called “Alexandria the Far” as an outpost of Alexander the Great’s army. From the third century the valley emerged as a Persian-Sogdian nexus and major stop along the Silk Road under the suzerainty of the Sassanids. The Chinese Tang Dynasty briefly exerted influence in the valley during
