Exceptions to Socialism: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Transformation of Soviet Development in Comparative Perspective

In the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet social scientists and planners grew increasingly skeptical that they could draw Central Asian peasants, and especially women, into the industrial workforce, and turned to experimenting with “non traditional” forms of work, such as home labor for handicrafts and consumer goods and family subcontracting in agriculture. This article traces Soviet debates about women’s labor and the family in Central Asia in the context of demographic policy, productivity, and welfare. It argues that the evolution of home labor and other “non traditional” labor policies aimed at Central Asians share two distinctive features with neoliberal-inspired welfare discussions in the United States as well as the emerging politics of entrepreneurship in the sphere of international development. First, all three emerged as a result of social scientists and planners revisiting earlier paradigms after perceived policy failures. Second, despite their pessimistic reading of earlier policy initiatives, Soviet policymakers and their counterparts hung on tenaciously to the idea that state policy could be used to improve people’s lives. By studying the turn towards individual labor and entrepreneurship in the USSR alongside the emergence of micro-credit in international development and changing welfare politics in the US, we can see neoliberalism emerging where universalist policies meet their limits.