The Muslim Woman Discourse in the Ukrainian Soviet Press of the 1920 -1930s

The article analyzes the Muslim woman discourse in the Ukrainian Soviet press of the 1920-1930s. It is the publications in the newspapers about the women of the Soviet Union East that are of significant interest in the study of the feminist movement history. The purpose of the research is to analyze newspaper texts of the Soviet period to deconstruct their propagandistic content and to characterize the real state of the Muslim woman. The merit of the Ukrainian journalists is that they called attention to the issues of women’s life in Central Asia, Caucasus, Transcaucasus, and Crimea of that time. The key aspects highlighted by the press are family abuse, judicial absence of rights, and illiteracy. The Ukrainian press of the 1920s stated a hard dependent state of the Muslim woman in the family and in the society in the pre-Revolution past, it announced the life enhancement for women in the Soviet present. In the 1930s, the press focused on the “emancipated” Muslim women. The issues of women’s everyday life, daily routine, and health lacked the attention of journalists. An ideological component in the publications about women of the Soviet Union was important. Communist propaganda stressed that women’s emancipation is a part of the international proletarian movement for social liberation. The woman was of no value as an independent personality, she was considered as a resource, which can be used to consolidate the Soviet regime in regions and to spread communist propaganda. The press of that time formed a stereotype about the woman of the East as a victim of gender-based discrimination, who was not able to overcome that independently, without the help of the Soviet authorities.


Introduction
The media discourse of the Muslim woman, and moreover, a historic aspect of this issue remains on the periphery of researchers' attention in Ukraine. However, it is the publications about the Soviet East women in newspapers that are of essential interest for studying the feminist movement history. The communist regime declared the support for former subordinate groups, which also included women. A strategic purpose of the gender-based policy pursued by the Bolsheviks was to get as many women as possible engaged into the revolutionary struggle, to raise them as committed communists dedicated to the Soviet regime, to enforce and to establish it firmly, as well as to create grounds for the world revolution. That is why in the 1920s a "Bolshevik emancipation project", as defined by M. Voronina (2017), aimed at integrating women into the society's (first of all, party's) life and at the mass involvement of women into manufacturing. The establishment of women's departments and an occupation of a female organizer in the party cells of all levels, regular meetings of women-deputies, campaigns to involve housewives, employees' wives into socially useful activities, etc., also promoted that. Thus, the communists took control over the feminist movement, and the social activists' activity was put into the direction the party required.
In the 1920s there appeared periodicals for women Komunarka Ukrainy (English: Communist of Ukraine), Selianka Ukrainy (The peasant of Ukraine) (in 1932 it was renamed for Kolhospnytsia Ukrainy (English: Collective Farmer of Ukraine), which confirmed the party's attention to the "woman's issue", and the names of magazines themselves said about class and ideological criteria while choosing readership. However, in the 1920s other popular newspapers and journals, including Visti VUTsVK (English: News of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee of Soviets) (with a weekly annex of Kultura i Pobut (English: Culture and Everyday Life), Chervonyi Shliakh (English: The Red Way), Zhyttia i Revoliutsiia (English: Life and Revolution), Hlobus (English: Globe), Nova Hromada (English: New Community) often published materials devoted to female emancipation. The headings of numerous articles said for a powerful ideological component of the emancipation movement in Soviet Ukraine, as, for example, "Woman is to front lines of socialism builders" (Women of the Soviet East, 1924).
In the early 1920s in the republics of Central Asia and Caucasus, the Soviet authorities initiated social reforms, particularly, they concerned the emancipation movement among local women, which was seen in the establishment of women's departments attached to the territorial cells of the Communist Party. They had to be involved in the liquidation of illiteracy among women, protection of women from the domestic abuse, but the most important task for the communists was the mass involvement of local women into social and party's work.
In the Ukrainian press of the 1920s, it was seen a permanent interest to the problem of Muslim woman's emancipation, the journals of Selianka Ukrainy (English: The Peasant of Ukraine), Komunarka Ukrainy (English: Communist of Ukraine), Visti VUTsVK (English: News of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee of Soviets), Kultura i Pobut (English: Culture and Everyday Life), Hlobus (English: Globe), etc. placed a number of materials on this theme (Figure 1). The journalists' materials are dedicated, to a large extent, to the women of the Soviet East (republics of Central Asia, Caucasus and Transcaucasus, Crimea), to a smaller extent -Egypt and Turkey. The topicality of the research is determined by the fact that the Ukrainian media studios did not research the image of Muslim woman in the Ukrainian press of the Soviet period.

Methods
The research of the press history specifies consideration of numerous factors: historic, political, economic realia of the period, social-and-cultural context, etc. That is why the majority of researchers (J. Butler (2016), L. van Zoonen (1994, R. Gill (2009), D. McQuail (2010, М. Lazar (2007), etc.) agree that gender media studios are inter-disciplinary researches arisen at the intercross of media studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.
The method of media gender studies includes both criticism by feminists, psychoanalytical and sociologic approaches, post-structural ideas, content analysis traditional for mass media. The most popular, in D. McQuail's opinion, are "literary, discursive and psychoanalytic methods" (2010). Among the new approaches, one should mention the scientists' interest in the discourse-analysis, which was first used for the news analyses by Teun A. van Dijk (2000), a Dutch researcher of media language, in the 1980s.
A philosophical source for this method was a concept of social constructivism, which influenced the development of modern science, especially humanities and social communications. The theory of discourse by E. Laclau and Ch. Mouffe is based on the idea that the "discourse forms the social world using the meanings, but the meanings can never be permanent since the language is permanently changing. No discourse is closed and accomplished" (Phillips & Yorgensen, 2008). Symbolic elitists (politicians, scientists, journalists, teachers, etc.) fill in the discourse with new ideas, concepts, i.e. changing meanings. To decipher these messages, it is necessary to pay attention to historical conditions of the society's development, its cultural, national, and mental peculiarities, i.e. social context specifies meanings of public discourses, including media one.
According to British media researcher D. Matheson, news and entertainment media do not represent the reality but "censored, polished version of reality" (2017). The constructionist approach has also become dominant in modern post-feminist studios; particularly, a theory which is followed by the majority of researchers, including Ukrainian ones, is based on it. For example, M. Maierchyk emphasizes that "gender is culturally constructed" and "gender norms can be different in the cultures remote geographically or in time" (Gender for media, 2013). If to analyze the texts about Muslim women of the Soviet East, one should apply also post-colonial criticism, since in the Soviet Union the Russians pursued a colonial policy in the territories they joined. Post-colonial studios are represented by the works by Edward W. Said (1978), Bhabha Homi K. (1984, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988). The women of colonized peoples undergo double oppression, that is why a discourse-analysis is the most suitable to study the representative state of social subordinate groups. T. A. van Dijk stressed that domination of particular social groups can be hidden and a method of discourse-analysis was offered to detect an authoritative structures' interests, latent racism in mass-media, but he stressed that this method also applicable to struggle against sexism (Dijk, 2000).
The researches by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) naturally uniting feminist studies and postcolonial studies meet the purposes of our assignment the most precisely: to analyze newspaper texts of the Soviet period to deconstruct their propagandistic content and to characterize the real state of the Muslim woman.
Moreover, the texts about the Muslim woman disclosed the problem of gender-based violence. The violence against women remains one of the topical social issues all over the world (Yalçın, 2017), correspondingly, mass-media specifies an ideological aspect of this problem. One of the topical researches in this area is "The violence of Rhetoric. Considerations on Representation and Gender" by Teresa de Lauretis (1987). She proved that while presenting social practices of violence, its language constructing in the press is important: individual rhetoric technics and language strategies are used in media texts to hide the facts of family violence of men with regard to women, to distract the audience, to find excuses for violence in individual cases.

Result and discussion
It is not a coincidence that the issue of gender-based violence was disclosed most picturesquely in the Ukrainian periodicals for women of the 1920s (Komunarka Ukrainy (English: Communist of Ukraine), Selianka Ukrainy (English: The Peasant of Ukraine), since a new Family Code and the women's rights in the family were under an intensive discussion in press at that time. The cases of domestic violence, men's tyranny were not rare in the patriarchal Ukrainian families; the journalists of that time called attention to such facts. That is why the theme of Muslim women discrimination resonated with the Ukrainian readers and evoked sympathy. N. Zinkina's review of Work Among Women in Central Asia (1925) mentioned facts of woman bondage: "in Turkmenia a woman cannot speak in presence of a man, for that purpose her mouth is bound with a wrap. A female Kara-Kirghiz is not entitled to eat together with her husband. A female Uzbek is hidden in airless yards and is entitled to go out only if she is covered with a long gown called "porondja" (burqa) and a coverlet of horse-hair ( Zinkina, 1925).
G. Odynets's report of Do not Leave a Comrade in the Fight embodied the author's impressions from the trip to Kirghizia, particularly, to All-Kirghizia's Congress of "koshchi". The name itself already certified the communicative intentions of the author: an intensive influence on the readers, their encouragement to act. The author built the report as a passionate speech to the Ukrainian women, which started and finished with slogans: "Comrades-women of Ukraine! I want to tell you how an Asian Kirghiz woman lives"; "Women of Ukraine! Do not leave your comrade in the fight" (Odynets, 1926). Thus, the author expressively characterized his audience. The pictures of Kirghiz women's life are depicted in the way to impress the readers emotionally, to make them take an offense and to evoke sympathy: "The burden of whole work falls on a woman, while her husband is hanging over having several wives. Rambling the steppe, a Kirghiz man loads a woman with heavy bags but he himself is riding a camel and whipping her" (Odynets, 1926). The journalist specified that at the Congress, he took the floor with a speech on a theme "how a woman in Ukraine exercises her rights". The reaction of the Kirghiz female listeners is indicial: "after my speech had been translated into Kirghiz, the women, listening, were wiping tears from their faces" and one of them decided to address a meeting and asked "to help Kirghiz women to find the way out of the darkness and barbarism" (Odynets, 1926). The report had to touch hearts of the Ukrainian women and to encourage them to take an active part in the women's movement of the whole Soviet Union. However, there was no real mechanism for women's cooperation inside the Soviet Union, that is why the Ukrainian women of that time could hardly help the women of the East.
The issues of family despotism and absolute patriarchic control in a conservative Turkmen surrounding are also skillfully depicted in the sketch by Almatynska of the Soviet East. Victims of Everyday Life (1926). It tells about the family of young Guliale and her brother Juli-Onapa. The girl's fate is described in the context of the past and modern life of the Turkmen society. The author tells readers about the peculiarities of nomad peoples' life, focusing on the routine of their women. In the past, the Turkmen people often attacked neighboring Persians and captured their women. The author said that marriage to captives was a wide-spread phenomenon in the first third of the 20th century. Guliale's brother, Juli-Onapa, brings a girl taken by force from her father, a Persian merchant, to make her his second wife.
The sketch shows the Turkmen women as victims of patriarchic traditions. T. А. van Dijk researched the representations of the subordinate ethnic groups ("out-groups") in the European press and stated that media workers use "stereotyped or negative themes", "in-group perspective", "ethnocentrism" (2000) for their description. As known, the Russians were unspokenly considered a title nation in the Soviet Union. That is why, in the publications analyzed it was the Russians who were dominating "ingroup", since they represented the Soviet government in the Eastern republics. The Ukrainian journalists in the materials devoted to the emancipation of the Muslim women, often described non-Slavic people from this "in-group" perspective. For example, the sketch of the Soviet East. Victims of Everyday Life began from the statement: "Weird and Austere Customs of Nomad Peoples" (Almatynska, 1926).
The report by G. Odynets Do not leave the comrade in the fight called a Ukrainian rural woman "more educated" and was opposed to an "unenlightened Kirghiz woman" (1926). In other publications, the same adjective "savage" was used with regard to eastern peoples, creating, thus, an opposition pair, determining for the Soviet authority discourse: "in-group" -Russians (or eastern Slavic people in general) as civilized peoples and "out-group"-eastern peoples of the Soviet Union as "savage", "barbarians".
Journalists reproduced "dominating ideology of elite", particularly, of Soviet functionaries, the overwhelming majority of whom was Russians or those who identified themselves with them, and legitimated in this way the colonization of these lands by Soviet Russia. For example, in the sketch of the Soviet East. Victims of Everyday Life, a brave Russian woman, strong-willed communist, was opposed to timid Turkmen women (Almatynska, 1926). A women's organizer, who arrived in an aul (mountain village) to collect delegates for the Women's Congress, wants to help local women. She persuades them that "look at the playing children: the older one is eleven, according to the Soviet laws, they still have to study, but they are already married. It is a huge harm to the woman's health" (Almatynska, 1926). If she chooses a way of persuasion with the women of the aul, with the representatives of local authorities she speaks in the language of intimidation and threats: "If you do not collect the women of the aul, you are not the Head but the enemy of the Soviets" (Almatynska, 1926). The communicative models chosen demonstrate her dominating position, since she is aware of herself as a representative of the Soviet authority.
The details to the portrait of the female communist who smokes gages and knows how to use weapons are telltale. These outer attributes, which traditionally define "male" way of life, underline independence and strong-willed nature of the heroine. The women's organizer personalizers the progress of the Soviet authority, and an old, conservative way is personalized by the guileful Aul Council Chief. He threatened women -delegates with a notice that in the town, at the congress, they will be given in marriage to the Red Army men.
The sketch author among the mass of Turkmen women, who are not aware of their rights, highlighted the heroine, young Guliale, who rejected patriarchic norms of life for a Turkmen woman and brought herself to a last-ditch move: she escaped from the brother's house and asked for a piece of advice from the women's organizer. The chief of the Women's Department helped Guliale to avoid an undesirable marriage, having sent her and minor girls-her brother's wives to study: "In a week, at a Turkmen boarding school in Poltoratsk, three girls -wives were sitting happily with a textbook. Guliale visited them on holiday, she studied at InPros (Institute of Enlightenment)" (Almatynska, 1926). Although this work is not without a propagandistic pathos, but the situations depicted are reliable, the plot is dynamic, and the natures of the characters are persuasive. Both landscapes and the descriptions of Turkmens' dwellings interiors, elements of Turkmen women's clothes, specific addresses -"opa" (sister), "taksir" (lord, master) (Almatynska, 1926) created a bright picture of life in Turkmenia for readers. The sketch, doubtlessly, did not only evoke sympathy among the Ukrainian readers but also an intensive protest against any form of women emancipation.
Many publications tell about local activists who fought for the women's rights: in severe conditions of the patriarchic East, they worked in the Caucasus, Transcaucasus regions, Central Asia. The data of the Ukrainian press within the interwar period certify how strong was resistance to their activity: "In Azerbaijan (Transcaucasus and Central Asia more than 30 female activists were beaten dead last year" (Woman of the Soviet East, 1925). (1926), stylized as a Crimean-and-Tatar legend, created an attractive image of a strong Muslim woman. The love story, being unrolled during the civil war, has an evident social underlying message: Zeddi is a daughter of rich Kara-Murkhaz, and her beloved Bekir is his worker. Poor worker Bekir likes the Reds but his competitor, the Russian colonel, serves for the Whites. According to the Communist ideology, the author depicts the Crimean Tatars as divided into two camps: "In the mountains, it has been a struggle for a long time. It has been a fight between the Reds and the Whites" (Pantiukhyn, 1926).

N. Pantiukhin in the short story of Tatar Woman
In contrast to the traditional depiction of a Muslim woman as an obedient creature, a victim of family despotism, Crimean Tatar Zeddi is described as courageous and strong-willed, she does not obey her father's order, rejects decisively a proposal to marry an old Russian colonel. Without any doubts, she escapes with Bekir, but understands how dangerous this way is. Even while escaping she behaves bravely and decently, and is ready for a fight: "Zeddi loves Bekir. Zeddi can ride and shoot from the Russian rifle the same well" (Pantiukhyn, 1926). The picture accompanying the legend illustrates Zeddi's fight against colonel rather than Bekir's.
The image of Zeddi becomes a generalized image of the woman, whom Simone de Beauvoir characterized: "She, being as each human creature, a free personality, makes her choice and soon appears in the world where a man delineates a role of the Other for her. She is tried to turn into a thing, direct to immanence, since her transcendence would permanently feed her awareness of her sufficiency and sovereignty. The drama of a woman is to live exactly in this conflict between a strong aspiration of any individual to firm up her sufficiency and her state, which turns a woman into a subordinate object" (Beauvoir, 1994).
The pay-off of the work is motivated enough, and is ideologically committed: in the duel both the colonel and Bekir die, and Zeddi stays alive, the Reds save her. But the title of the work itself -Tatar Woman -indicates the accents made by the author: he showed the Crimean Tatar woman as the one, who is able to fight for her own choice and dignity. However, one should admit that the image of an unenlightened, unaware woman who is not able to fight independently for her emancipation was wide-spread in the Ukrainian Soviet journals.
The sketch by I. Turneltaub is about the women of Azerbaijan ("traveling notes") Around Transcaucasus; the author called them "Turki women" (Turneltaub, 1927). The author shared his impressions from a trip around Transcaucasus and paid attention that in 1927 in Azerbaijan province many women were still wearing a chador -"this symbol of an eastern woman's slavery", but in Baku he met "emancipated Turki women, European in complete meaning of this word" (Modern Egyptian woman, 1927).
They followed the latest European fashion and tried to express themselves in professional and social areas. As the author stated, only in 1926 the Azerbaijan women were allowed to perform on the stage and, after a visit to the theatre, the journalist mentioned a high professional level and skillfulness of the dancers: "Turki actors dance wonderfully: schematonics, rhythmicity, their whole body posture breathes with real eastern beauty" (Modern Egyptian woman,1927). Charioni, an outstanding woman of Egypt. It says very little about her: she is a journalist, an activist of the women's movement, as well as the movement for liberation of Egypt. A photo portrait which projects intelligence, education, and simultaneously internal power of this extraordinary woman, completes an impression about her and forms a positive thought for the journal readers. Moreover, it becomes evident that the woman is characterized within the limits of a patriarchal discourse, since the journalist writes first that she is Charioni-pasha's wife, and only then lists her personal professional and social achievements (Figure 2). As known, a visual component in journalist materials has a powerful emotional influence on the reader. Hlobus Journal (English: Globe) published an item with a big news called Old and New Turkey (1926). Two groups of women are contrasted: one is wearing traditional Muslim clothes (hijab, khimar, niqab, burqa) with covered partially or in full faces and the other is wearing traditional European clothes and with hats on (Figure 3).

If the journals of
The two groups of women symbolically mean an old, imperial country with a religious dominant and a secular European state Turkey strived to be. In the comment to the photo, the author provided a negative description of traditional clothes -"shameful chador" (Old and New Turkey, 1926). The change of clothes is interpreted as a cardinal and positive change of the traditional way of life of whole Turkey, as progress.
Figre 3. The image to the article Old and New Turkey, Hlobus Journal (1926) The photo visually presents the information about President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's reforms concerning the "Europeanisation" of Turkey. It is emphasized that "cancellation of a chador and admission of a hat as a decent headwear, mandatory for a woman, is a sensation of the day" (Old and New Turkey, 1926). The journalist specified that it is "the most interesting activity of Kemal concerning the emancipation of a Turkish woman" (Old and New Turkey, 1926).
A significant disadvantage of these publications is that the authors had shallow knowledge of Islam. The researches of the modern Muslim world specify that people often "take outmoded customs, traditions, and frequently just bad attitudes of some Muslim men to women for Islam as a religion based on religious tolerance. A non-personal approach to the research of Islam requires to differentiate these things, since the plight of women in some Muslim societies is a result of lack of education spread there rather than a result of Islamic requirements" (Byelikov & Masalskyi, 2011).
In the journalists' text there is an option of "unhappy past -happy future", and the present is described as a transitional stage. Progress in the current life related, of course, to the Bolshevist revolution of 1917 and the establishment of the Soviet regime. "Within seven years of the Soviet authority, it has become seen that the self-awareness of the Eastern peoples increases, and, particularly, the awareness of the Eastern female workers" (Odynets, 1926). In many texts the materials are finished with the same clichéd expression approximately of this content: "Jointly with the Soviet government, with the help of all employees of our Union, the woman in the east destroys old life and builds the better future" (Odynets, 1926).
Among the positive changes in the current life of Muslim women, it was specified that the Soviet authority assumes a function of women's protection from family high-handedness through the organization of people's women's departments, people's courts, different party's institutions.
The most of the analyzed articles emphasize another important social problem beside the family despotism: "almost 100% of the women of East are illiterate" (Woman of the Soviet East, 1926). For example, the article by F. Neliepov provides information about the establishment of women's clubs in Azerbaijan, in Ossetia -women's schools and workshops (Nelyepov, 1924). The opening of a few educational institutions often gave journalists a ground to make an illogical conclusion about absolute emancipation and future atheism of the Muslim women: "the woman of the East wakes up from the age-long dream and starts combating the religious toxin and great-great-grandfathers' customs that repress her" (Woman of the Soviet East, 1926). The journalists numerously called on active participation of women in the social life: "Remember that the more work on your side done the closer your emancipation is!" (Woman of the Soviet East, 1925).
In fact, the only accessible social organizations for women were so-called women's departments, communist cells for work with women. Joining the party was considered to be the most important and the most honorable stage of life, a hill point of social activity of the emancipated woman. That is why the articles often provided statistics concerning the number of women who became members of Komsomol or communists.
The class principle of society division was determining for the communist ideology, the journalists also follow this principle. Materials clearly demonstrate available differentiation of women with regard to classes as "bourgeois woman" -"proletarian". The first ones were depreciatingly called "burzhuika", and the other one respectfully and compassionately -"eastern worker", "farmerette" (Where the woman is still a slave, 1926). It is stressed that the women of the lowest layers receive all-round support from the Soviet regime. The journals included the articles about the women who went a career ladder in the party with the new regime. Many of these articles were anonymous, so, in the journalist practice of that time we can see a powerful manifestation of the communist ideology, particularly, the ideas of collectivism, deindividualization of people, when they were not perceived as unique personalities but typical representatives of their class.

Conclusions
If in 1920s journalists placed the emphasis on discrimination and gender-based violence with regard to Muslim women, in the 1930s there were mostly notices about women's achievements in manufacturing, photos of female shock workers from the republics of Central Asia were often published. It is evident, that journalists thus declared that the Soviet government had changed dramatically the life of Muslim women within one decade and provided them with all necessary rights. The engagement of the majority of women into work at manufacturing (plants, factories, collective farms, etc.) was considered to be the main advantage of the Soviet way of life. However, they did not pay attention to the issues of family despotism, home non-paid work, women's everyday life, which could not been overcome within ten years.
The women's fight for their rights in the context of the revolutionary fight of the world's proletariat was popular. An ideological component was over-powerful, since the state of women abroad and in the Soviet Union were permanently compared in favor of the latter. The priorities were highlighted in compliance with the ruling ideology. V. Lenin's citations were in the majority of publications devoted to the women's state in the society. They were given as a kind of ideological guide for international women's movement. Economic indicators were determinant while analyzing the state of the European women, but national and cultural peculiarities were not taken into account. As an exit from this humiliating state, women were not offered to fight for their rights in the world but to take an active part in the general communist movement.
The merit of the Ukrainian journalists is that they drew attention to the issues of the women's everyday life in Central Asia, Caucasus, Transcaucasus, Crimea of those times. In the Ukrainian press of the 1920s, they acknowledged a hard dependent state of the Muslim woman in the family and society in the Tsar past, announced the enhancement of woman's life in the Soviet present. In the 1930s, the press focused on the "emancipated" Muslim women, worked fast and well in the different industries of the Soviet Union.
The authors paid attention to some social problems, particularly, to a necessity to liquidate illiteracy among women, to establish schools, to gender-based violence; but they did not pay enough attention to the issues of women's everyday life, routine, or health. Intensive atheist propaganda was on the pages of journals, that is why deep religious belief was called among the reasons for the hard slavery state of the Muslim woman. In general, the press of that time formed a stereotype about the Eastern woman as a victim of gender-based discrimination, as a representative of the Third World, who was not able to overcome that independently without the help of Soviet authorities.
The discourse of the Muslim woman included the notions, ideas, views of the dominating elite regarding the ethnic groups as "savage" and culturally undeveloped. Stereotypization and "in-group perspective" were the technologies for creating an image of the Eastern woman (Dijk, 2000).
Visual representations certified about "depersonification" of women in the placed photos, who were anonymous but socially defined. The women's emancipation was considered a component of the international proletariat movement for social liberation. The woman was not valued as a self-sufficient personality, she was considered as a resource, which can be used to enforce Soviet control in regions and to spread the communist propaganda.