Central to Douglas Northrop's archivally based study of the Soviet attempt to unveil Uzbek women is the argument that the Soviet Union was a colonial empire, one where Bolsheviks tried to transform daily cultural practices and gender relations against the wishes of most Uzbeks, who responded as colonial subjects by using weapons of the weak. Northrop's use of previously unavailable Communist Party documents allows an exploration of the Party's arguments for and against unveiling, and describes the Party's surprise at the vehemence and violence of anti-unveiling resistance in Uzbekistan. Starting with the 1927 Communist Party initiation of the Hujum—or campaign against veiling in Soviet Uzbekistan—this work's exclusive focus on the unveiling campaign allows Northrop to reveal that resistance to unveiling and other laws concerning “liberation” continued into the 1950s, and to examine the ways that intrusion into family life and cultural practices served the Party as a tool for defining loyalty during the Stalinist period. Northrop far exceeds Gregory Massell's The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (1974) in exploring Party arguments over policies toward Central Asia.

Northrop agrees with Massell's basic assertion that the Communist Party started the unveiling campaign because it saw Central Asian women as potential substitutes for a proletariat, believing that if the Party offered them liberation, they would become loyal transformers of society. He then outlines the ways that this vision failed: through the “complex social and subaltern strategies pursued by individual Uzbek men and women in dealing with an alien state . . . [ranging] from apparent support to active opposition, from studied obliviousness to passive resistance to the spreading of gossip and rumors” (p. 347). What emerges is a careful, nuanced look at a variety of Uzbek social responses to Soviet laws and the Party's unveiling campaign. Relying heavily on reports from the OGPU, or secret police, Northrop seeks the voices of Uzbeks who opposed Soviet initiatives for ending polygyny, establishing minimum marriage age, and ending bride-price, all of which were defined as “crimes of daily life” and banned, and he finds a widespread anti-Soviet Islamic discourse and embedded cultural practices that solidified and expanded Uzbek resistance to the Soviet state. Uzbeks responded angrily to unveiling and, Northrop argues strongly, came to define their own identity through reinforced women's veiling.

A few cautions: In spite of the title, this is a book about Uzbekistan; other Central Asian republics receive only a few mentions and no analysis. In substantiating his thesis that Soviet rule in Central Asia was colonialism, Northrop minimizes liminal voices. The author dismisses Uzbek supporters of unveiling as “few,” and unrepresentative of Uzbeks; he defines as subalterns only those who directly resist, not those who work within institutions and reinterpret and negotiate change. Northrop argues that Bolsheviks misunderstood Uzbek society partly because “Few nonindigenous party members had much firsthand knowledge of or empathy for the Uzbek language, religion or culture . . . ” and because they looked through an “underlying filter of class categorizations” (129). However, Northrop offers no alternative picture that would enable the reader to understand how Uzbek society operated. While Northrop contends that OGPU archival files were the best source for recording subaltern Uzbek voices (107), this reader wonders how much to trust the writings of a force made up of non-indigenous men who did not speak Uzbek, and who were not constant observers but were directed to trouble spots. And finally, Northrop's inclusion of a photo of naked Uzbek women from a Russian medical journal in a section critiquing Russian Orientalism is not in keeping with the tone of the volume, which is both respectful of and sympathetic to Uzbek society.

These criticisms notwithstanding, Veiled Empire is a fascinating account of a radical Soviet experiment. Each chapter is packed with well-chosen and intrinsically interesting archival stories supporting the author's themes and arguments, and numerous historic photos provide a wealth of imagery depicting Uzbek society in the first half of the twentieth century. These illustrations and Northrop's thematic approach make this volume accessible to non-experts, and easily adaptable for the classroom.