With the publication of The Frontiers Reader^[1] in 2002, English-reading scholars were provided with a selection of essays on the practice and interpretation of women’s oral history, mostly published in the journal Frontiers between 1977 and 2001. A similar approach guided the first of two volumes of Zhenskaia ustnaia istoriia: Gendernye issledovaniia (Women’s Oral History: Gender Studies), offering a Russian-speaking audience canonical texts on conducting oral history research about or with women. Most of these papers were previously published in English or German, the oldest, Sherna Berger Gluck’s “What’s So Special about Women’s Oral History,”^[2] in 1971, and the relatively recent “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” by Joan W. Scott,^[3] in 1986. The second volume assembles several papers produced within the Open Society Institute’s International Women’s Program, focusing on collecting and analyzing oral histories by women in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova for educational and research purposes. The eighteen chapters of this volume address women of ethnic minorities, women in conflict and postconflict situations, women and Islamic practice, and the impact of post-Soviet transition on women.
The translation of texts by Berger Gluck or Scott as well as the instructive writings of Paul Thompson and Alessandro Portelli about the general value and specificities of oral history is commendable and will be useful for those beginning to work with oral history, especially students. At the same time, the collection may leave some scholars unsatisfied, as none of the texts reflects more recent debates within the oral history movement, such as those concerning the intricacies of personal memory, its dynamic relationship with cultural memory, or the construction of subjectivity and identity in the moment of narration. This absence is in line with many authors’ adherence to a binary system of gender and their reluctance to consider the social construction and relationality of gender categories. In addition to Joan Scott’s piece, Joan Sangster’s review of feminist debates and their impact on oral history is an exception here. Sangster’s concise analysis of the effect that larger scholarly trends have on oral history, such as the emergence of poststructuralist approaches, deserved a more prominent place in the collection. Her analysis indicates why the inclusion of texts on biographical research (Elena Meshcherkina), religious discourse (Barbara Stowasser, Marianne Kamp) and anthropological field study (Lila Abu-Lughod) in the book is useful: although often unacknowledged, oral history is an interdisciplinary project.
All in all, the collection would have benefited from an introduction that addresses the selection of texts, including the historical contextualization of the original works. After all, most of the articles reflect a specific moment in the (women’s) oral history movement, in Marxist historiography, and in second wave feminism. First and foremost, they are situated in Anglo-American and West European scholarly contexts and thus it is not self-explanatory why their insights should guide or be useful for scholarship in the post-Soviet context. Instead, the introduction to the first volume focuses on the Open Society Institute’s program, and is written not by the editor of the book, Andrea Peto, but by the U.S.-based director of the program, Debra Schultz. While there should always be room to celebrate achievements such as the program and the publication, editors owe their readers an outline of the academic, ideological, and historical parameters of the publication.
The second volume assembles a variety of papers that resulted from the work of the International Women’s Program in post-Soviet countries. Most of the papers analyze a small number of women’s narrations about their lives, especially about the changes in their lives in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Topics are addressed in four sections: the emergence of the movement for gender equality in modern Russia; the transformations in women’s education as well as professional and family life in the Central Asian republics of the former USSR; women’s experiences of the civil war-like conflicts in many of the Soviet republics in the early 1990s; and the role of women in the reconstruction of religious communities and movements in the former USSR. The collection thus addresses a century of women’s lives in the Soviet Union and its successor states, touching upon questions of citizenship, education, migration, and the relations between center and periphery. The reader has a chance to learn about truly marginalized experience; the lives of Soviet citizens, women and men, in the Central Asian republics, in villages far from the centers of political power, so far have been of interest mainly to only a small group of experts. Several of these papers include long selections from personal narratives by women from Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, and thus offer valuable information on the effects of collectivization, centralization, and sovietization on individual lives.
A highlight of the collection is Bakhriniso Kabilova’s paper on women’s songs as oral histories. The musicologist treats the songs of Tajik women as a source for the study of Tajik culture, specifically of women’s history and social relations in the community. Focusing on songs authored by the singer herself (as opposed to folk songs), Kabilova analyzes the process of making sense of life through music where other means of expression are largely foreclosed for women. She thus chooses an innovative approach to trace the interpretation of specific experiences on an individual level, transgressing disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, she preserves otherwise ephemeral sources: Such songs, she points out, exist “only in the moment of their performance” (P. 421) and are rarely recorded for transmission, which gives way to the loss of an important memory of women’s lives.
One of the major insights to gain from narratives in the section on “Woman, Memory, War” is that, from the perspective of the narrators, the ethnic tensions leading to civil war in various regions of the USSR in the late 1980s marked a turnaround in the relationships between people of different national origins. The narratives suggest that Soviet internationalism “worked,” but was compromised, for instance, when Armenian residents were expelled from Azerbaijan in the late 1980s: “We were always so proud of ourselves, us Bakunians (bakintsy). Baku was an extremely multinational city, very welcoming. …And then this outbreak of the nationalist curse, we have never had this before. I have worked there for more than 20 years as a teacher, and I often did not even know my students’ nationality” (P. 286). Many people protected their Kyrgyz neighbors against nationalist violence in Osh (Kyrgyzstan), or helped Armenians to leave Baku (Azerbaijan) and thus to escape rape, beatings, and murder. Reading these reports, one wonders if the narrators’ suspicions are correct, that the agonizing Soviet government had prepared and organized the outbreaks of ethnic violence. Otherwise, it remains unclear who were the actors of nationalist aggression. As one woman said about her Armenian coworkers, “they did not think about the separation of Karabakh at all. That was far away from them, they lived very well … I knew many of them, and I know that they were not at all interested in the Karabakh question” (P. 284).
As a whole, the narratives provide an incredibly valuable source for initial and deep analyses of how the political, social, and cultural transformation affected the individual lives of women and, by proxy, their families, including partners, children, and ancestors. For instance, many women cited in Olga Rzaeva’s paper recollect how the experience of civil war changed their overall outlook on life, motivating them to more independence, professional flexibility, and responsibility for themselves (P. 306). Others report that they lost their motivation to reach certain goals and found themselves indifferent and fatalistic, where they used to sense a bright future (307f). For many, the displacement and refuge led straight into another catastrophe: the 1988 earthquake in Armenia increased the personal and material losses and made a restart even more difficult. Compounded by the sense of alienation from their new Armenian neighbors who rejected them for having abandoned Armenian traditions when living in Azerbaijan (P. 259), displacement is experienced in a spatial, social, and personal sense, challenging national policies as much as personal efforts of self-identification.
In many other papers, I missed a stronger presence of the authors in contextualizing or explaining the events; nonexperts, in particular, may require more background information to fully understand and make sense of the oral histories. Such analyses appear necessary to help the reader grapple with contradictory accounts of the role of the Soviet Army. While a resident of Osh remembers her relief and happiness when soldiers entered the city to quell the outbreak of violence (P. 317), Armenian women remember similar feelings toward soldiers who guided them to shelters in Azerbaijan, yet these women voice the criticism that troops remained inconsequential in detaining rioters and deliberately led families along roads scattered with corpses and wounded Armenians so as to scare them into leaving Azerbaijan (P. 247). Azeri women articulate their disbelief when they faced Soviet soldiers shooting at the Soviet population and thus shattering their general trust in the Soviet state, as in this quote: “Since then my relationship toward the army has changed significantly. Especially in regard to Russia’s politics in the Northern Caucasus. What are they doing there in Chechnya?” (308f).
Using these insightful reflections to analyze the long-term effects of both event and recollection provide a good opportunity to show the potential of oral history to detect how people make sense of their past and present. In this regard, the articles prove to be very uneven and often left me unsatisfied and looking for a more analytical perspective on the narratives. It is extremely problematic that some authors’ involvement in the events is not critically reflected upon and thus affects the presentation of the scholarly project. For instance, Rzaeva’s position becomes clear in moments such as when she says, “Almost all women whom I interviewed, said that our path to national independence began with the tragic events of January 1990… Precisely in this moment many women became aware of their national belonging and felt civic responsibility” (P. 309, emphasis added).
In the same vein, reading the second volume reproduced the sense of uneasiness evoked by the selection of texts for the first volume. Many writers display an attachment to traditional gender roles in representing their interlocutors’ recollections. For instance, Elvira Novikova and Nina Kareva explain some narrators’ choices as follows: “The choices of those born before the war were determined by the common cause, by the wish to serve society – living for others (typically the female version), younger people follow other directions – living/caring for themselves (a choice rather made by males)” (P. 28). Similarly, Susanna Shakhnazarian justifies her work with women’s oral history, explaining that women are more willing to speak about denied agency and displacement and men are less talkative in this respect (P. 244). Such essentializing explanations reproduce precisely those social structures of difference that are often enough the basis for hierarchy and dominance. When women are afraid to participate in the oral history project, or even prohibited by their husbands from doing so (“because they do not want to get in trouble because of a woman’s chatter,” P. 327), women’s experiences are actively devalued and removed from public scrutiny. This absence is part and parcel of constructing women’s role and identity in society and requires the attention of any scholar who is working toward the betterment of women’s lives.
There is no question that books such as Zhenskaia ustnaia istoriia are crucial to placing women’s experiences on the agenda, given that the social sciences, historical research, and public policy in the countries represented in the two volumes are still largely ignorant about the experiences described and facilitated by gender difference. But the achievements of feminist and poststructural approaches, questioning the very categories with which we make sense of our lives and the power structures based on these categories, need to guide both our research practice and the analyses we develop. Otherwise, we cannot expect our inquiry to contribute to social change and challenge social marginalization – two central goals of the oral history movement.