“Fight for the Liberation of the Women of the East!” Soviet carpets and posters for the emancipation of Central Asian women in 1920-1930

Abstract

Visual propaganda was a powerful tool for spreading new ideas and practices in Soviet Central Asia. Posters, textiles, and other objects of Soviet material culture with their vivid visual images and printed appeals had encouraged and incited men and women to fight for a new happy life in the socialist state. This article examines posters and carpets created between the 1920s and 1930s that called for the emancipation of Central Asian women. The study of graphic and textile narratives provides an opportunity, on the one hand, to draw attention to the “Soviet material ideology” or objects of material culture marked by Soviet iconography and, on the other, to consider what ideas about women’s emancipation they disseminated and how the image of the "Soviet East" woman was reproduced. “Artifacts” that were part of everyday life, together with written sources, help in the study of the multidimensional picture of Soviet history. They shed light on gender roles in the 1920s and 1930s, on the connections between tradition and modernity, the national and supranational, top-down and bottom-up narratives. This study is based on the posters from the collection of the Russian State Library and the Marjani Foundation, as well as the rugs from the Museum of Fine Arts of Turkmenistan, the Russian Museum of Ethnography, the All-Russian Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts, and private collections.