Bab’i Bunty in Semirech’e: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Central Asia during the First World War

Abstract

Bab'i bunty – women's riots - were a form of collective action in which women responded to crisis by making conscious and explicit use of their sex to achieve clear political goals. Owing to rapidly rising prices of food and manufactured goods from 1916 onwards the First World War saw widespread bab'i bunty across the Russian empire. In Semirech'e – the only region of Russian Central Asia with a substantial settler population - the class politics of these protests were complicated by questions of ethnicity and religion. This article explores a series of bab'i bunty which erupted in the towns of Lepsinsk and Vernyi and their surrounding districts, in which Slavic soldiers' wives (soldatki) targeted Muslim-owned businesses, but also those owned by their fellow settlers. In between these outbreaks in the summer of 1916 Semirech'e would become the centre of a violent uprising by Kazakhs and Kyrgyz against the Tsarist regime.