ABSTRACT
The hujum was part of the Bolsheviks' larger effort to revolutionize everyday life and create a New Soviet Person. While the campaign against the veil was specific to Central Asia, it resembled other Bolshevik projects to "civilize", "modernize", and "liberate" the oppressed and "backward" masses, variously represented as workers, peasants, women, children, and national minorities. When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they understood their revolution as the spark that would set off socialist revolution throughout Europe and eventually the world. The Bolsheviks, along with other Russian Marxists, populists, and European socialists generally, had long assumed that revolution would open the way to women's emancipation. Vladimir Lenin continued to maintain that extending rights to national minorities was the best means of persuading minorities both at home and abroad of the emancipatory intentions of the Russian proletariat. The failed 1923 uprising in Germany came in the last months of Lenin's life.
