Speech by delegates Nadja, delegate of the Communist Party of Turkey, and Bibinur, a Turkmen.

The female comrades spoke on the final day of the Congress’s proceedings and did not hide their criticism of the male delegates, many of whom were opposed to including three of them in the Congress presidium (as later, by majority, occurred).

Below is the Appeal of the women participants at the first All-Russian Conference of Communist Women Activists of the East, held a few months later, to the women workers and peasants of Soviet Russia.

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The movement that women in the East are now initiating should not be viewed from the perspective of those frivolous feminists for whom the role of the woman in public life should be that of a delicate plant or an elegant toy. This movement must be seen as a necessary and important consequence of the general revolutionary movement that is currently sweeping across the world. The women of the East are not only fighting for the right to go out without a veil, as is often believed. For the Oriental woman, with her moral ideal so elevated, the question of the veil is of very little importance. If women, who are half of humanity, remain the adversaries of men, if they do not have the same rights as men, it will obviously be impossible for society to progress: the state of backwardness of Oriental society is irrefutable proof of this.

Be assured, comrades: all the efforts and commitment that you will put into realising new forms of social life, all your aspirations, however sincere and vigorous they may be, will remain fruitless if you do not appeal to women so that they become true helpers in your work.

In the specific situation created by the war, the Turkish woman has had to abandon the home and her domestic duties to perform various public functions. However, the fact that Turkish women have performed tasks during the war that had previously been reserved for men, who were called to fight, and that in certain areas of Anatolia – where the roads were impassable even for pack animals – women carried artillery pieces and ammunition for the troops on their shoulders, cannot, of course, be considered a step forward in the quest for political and social equality for women. As for those who argue that women, by replacing pack animals, have achieved a social victory, it is not even worth discussing. We do not deny that at the beginning of the 1908 revolution there have been some measures in favour of women. But there is no need to exaggerate their importance: they are clearly insufficient in relation to the goal we have set ourselves.

The opening of a few primary and secondary schools for women in the capital and in some other cities, and even the creation of a university for women, are only a thousandth part of what still needs to be done. It goes without saying that the Turkish government, whose policy was based on the oppression and exploitation of the strong over the weak, could not decide on more radical and decisive measures in favour of the woman, this slave of man.

We also know that in Persia, Bukhara, Khiva, Turkestan, India, and other Muslim countries, the situation of our sisters is even worse than ours. But the injustice to which we and our sisters are victim to does not go unpunished; the state of backwardness and decline of all the peoples of the East bear witness. Know, comrades, that the evil that has been done to women has never gone unpunished and will never go unpunished.

Given that the Congress of the Peoples of the East is drawing to a close, I am obliged, due to lack of time, to refrain from presenting to you the situation of women in the various countries of the East. But the comrade delegates, who have the great mission of spreading the great principles of the revolution in their countries, must not forget that all their efforts to ensure prosperity for their peoples will be in vain without the genuine help of women. To put an end to all evils, communists believe it is necessary to institute a classless society, and to this end they declare an implacable war to all the bourgeois and privileged classes. Communist women of the East have a battle even more difficult, in addition, which is that against the despotism of their men. If you, men of the East, remain, as in the past, indifferent to the fate of women, be sure that our countries will fall into ruin, and you and we will fall together with them; for us, the alternative is to join, together with the other oppressed, a fight to the death for the conquest of our rights.

Here, in summary, are the main demands of women. If you want your emancipation, listen to our demands and give us effective aid and support: – complete equality of rights; – unconditional right of the woman to receive, on an equal footing with the man, the same general or professional education in all schools designated for that purpose; – equality of rights for man and woman in marriage. Unconditional abolition of polygamy; – unconditional admission of women to all public positions and all administrative institutions; – organisation in all towns and villages of committees for women’s rights and protection.

All this is indisputably our right to demand. The communists, who have recognised that we have equal rights and who have reached out to us, will have in us women their most loyal comrades. Certainly, it is possible that we still wander in the darkness, that we must still cross some precipices, but we are not afraid, because we know that to reach the dawn, we must pass through the night.

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I greet you, dear comrades, on behalf of the Russian and Muslim female workers and proletarians of the city of Aulié-Ata.

Dear comrades, you have come here, to the Congress of the Peoples of the East, to solve the immense problems facing you. You represent the best of the workers and the oppressed masses. All the nationalities of the East, oppressed and mercilessly exploited for centuries by tsarism and by the imperialists, place all their hopes in you, their delegates.

We, women of the East, suffer an exploitation that is infinitely harsher than that of men, and we are more aware than anyone of all the horrible aspects of the lives of these prisoners who are the Muslim women of the East.

But now, dear comrades, we finally see a beautiful sun warming us with its caress, like a mother does with her child in the cradle; this sun, the first we have seen shine, is the power of the Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, and Dokhanis’ Deputies.

Soviet power is our mother, and we are her children. And the soul of this Soviet power, which liberates us and is the vanguard of the workers of the whole world, is the Russian Communist Party, it is the valiant Red Army which, at the cost of the blood of the workers, our brothers, has won justice for the oppressed. We too must fight relentlessly and work for the emancipation of all the oppressed peoples of the East.

We women are awakening from the nightmare of oppression, shaking off the yoke that bound us, and every day we swell your ranks with the best of our forces. We look forward to your fruitful work.

It was difficult for you to live in Tsarist Russia, but it was far more difficult for us, women of the East, to survive centuries of humiliation and oppression. We have never been human beings, but objects (...) We have always been separated from the world by a wall that to us seemed indestructible, we could not know the joys of life, we have never known what our slavery was for, and, above all, for centuries and centuries we never managed to understand how it could be eliminated.

We did not even dare to think about fighting back, about rebelling, and thus we trusted the baj, the wealthy landowners, and even more so the mullahs, who did everything they could to convince us that this was how it had always been and that this was the only way to be respected and protected. Thanks to the burqa, which they called the symbol of our honour and dignity, they separated us from the world and sold girls to the highest bidder.

We were born slaves and we died slaves. This was how thousands, millions of women lived their lives, and it seemed that that should be their eternal destiny, that there could never be a hand capable of breaking their chains. But then, in October 1917, a red star appeared, never seen before, and so it was that the women workers and peasants joined the Revolution, and this changed their lives. News of these events reached us late and in a confused, sporadic manner. In order for it to reach us, women of the East, it had to penetrate through walls, railings, and our burqas.

For a long time, we did not believe it. The mullahs threatened and frightened us with divine punishment, while our husbands, fathers, and brothers did everything they could to prevent us from having contact with the world. Our fellow workers who have come to us from Soviet Russia have won our trust, and many of us began to answer their calls, to follow their example, to teach others to free themselves from subjugation, to no longer be ashamed, to no longer be afraid (...)

We believe in your energy and we know that in the future you will always come to our aid to prevent us women of the East from being thrown back into ancient slavery, locked behind bars once again, suffocated under the veils of submission and solitude.