Kahn on The Mask Wars and Social Control: Lessons From the 1927 Unveiling Campaign in Soviet Uzbekistan @USTLawMN @cwsl_ilj

Robert Kahn, University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota), is publishing The Mask Wars and Social Control: Lessons from the 1927 Unveiling Campaign in Soviet Uzbekistan in the California Western International Law Journal (2022). Here is the abstract.

During the late 1920s Soviet authorities embarked on the hujum, a campaign to encourage women in Uzbekistan to unveil. As with the COVID mask wars, the hujum was highly politicized. For some, the hujum was a campaign of personal liberation; for others it was an attempt by the Soviet Union to impose imperial control over its Muslim subjects. To explore the relevance of the hujum for our mask wars, this essay looks at two accounts of the hujum. Douglas Northrop’s Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia views the hujum as a failed attempt to impose Soviet values on an unwilling Uzbek population. Has the COVID mask, like the veil, become a symbol of failed state overreaching? Marianne Kamp, in the New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity and Communism (2006), sees the hujum as trapping Uzbek women between supporting the Soviets and following patriarchal veiling norms. Have COVID masking campaigns likewise stripped us of our agency? Taken together, Northrop and Kamp’s accounts help shift the debate over COVID mask wearing away from mask authoritarianism toward a world where people should be free, most of the time, to decide whether or not to cover their face.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Lukina on The Semenchuk Case of 1936: Storytelling and Propaganda Above the Law in the Soviet Criminal Trial @ANNVYSHINSKY

ICYMI: Anna Lukina, Oxford University, has published The Semenchuk Case of 1936: Storytelling and Propaganda above the Law in the Soviet Criminal Trial, at 41 Review of Central and East European Law 63 (2016). Here is the abstract.

This article applies the concept of legal narrative to one of the Soviet show trials of the 1930s, the Semenchuk Case (1936), and examines its interlink with the refetishization of law initiated by Andrei Vyshinskii. While distinguishing Soviet legal narrative as a special type of storytelling in criminal cases, this analysis describes the substantive and formal patterns that arose within this narrative type as a direct consequence of the ideological goals of Soviet courts. Within Soviet legal narrative, the accounts of the defence, prosecution, and the judgment, all relate closely to historical context, and the broader political and ideological agendas of decision-makers, which extend beyond the facts of the case.