A Tashkent poet and the leading voice of 20th-century Uzbek women's poetry, known above all for verse written in memory of her husband, the poet Hamid Olimjon. A state prize in her name is awarded every year to gifted young women.
Zulfiya Isroilova was born in Tashkent on 1 March 1915 into a family of metal casters. She graduated from a women's teacher-training college and went on to postgraduate study at the Institute of Language and Literature. Her first collection, “Pages of Life”, appeared in 1932, and in the 1930s she married the poet Hamid Olimjon. For many years she worked in publishing and journalism, edited the magazine Saodat and took part in Soviet delegations to conferences of Asian and African writers. She was named People's Poet of Uzbekistan in 1965 and Hero of Socialist Labour in 1984, and died in Tashkent on 1 August 1996.
Her work
Her poetry peaked in the war years with “They Called Him Farhod” (1943), “In the Days of Separation” (1944) and “The Pleiades” (1947). The poems she wrote after Hamid Olimjon's tragic death in 1944, full of devotion, longing and grief, are among the most moving pages of Uzbek lyric verse. Later she wrote of mothers, women, peace and friendship, winning the USSR State Prize in 1976 for “Lines of Memory” (1974) and the cycle “Rainbow”. She received the international Jawaharlal Nehru Prize in 1968, translated from other languages, and her own poems have been translated into many.
Remembrance
In 1999 Uzbekistan created the Zulfiya State Prize, awarded each year on the eve of 8 March to gifted young women aged 14 to 30. A statue of her was unveiled in central Tashkent on 1 March 2008, recast in bronze in 2014 and moved in December 2017 to the Alley of Writers. Her poems are part of the school curriculum, and many have become songs.
On 25 June (8 July) 1916, at the height of the First World War, Nicholas II decreed the conscription of Turkestani men aged 19 to 43 for labour behind the front. Issued at harvest time and enforced through unfair lists, the decree provoked mass unrest. In July there were protests in Khujand, Tashkent and towns of the Fergana Valley; in Jizzakh the rising turned into armed fighting and was crushed with great brutality by punitive detachments, which left the old town badly damaged. The revolt also spread across Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Tens of thousands of labourers were eventually sent to the front zone regardless.
After the October Revolution of 1917, power in Tashkent passed to a Bolshevik-led soviet that excluded the local Muslim majority. In response, the Fourth Extraordinary Congress of Turkestan Muslims, meeting in Kokand on 27 November 1917, proclaimed a Turkestan Autonomy within a Russian federation. Its government was led by Mukhamedzhan Tynyshpaev and then Mustafa Chokay, with Jadids among its members. In February 1918 Red Guard units sent from Tashkent stormed Kokand; much of the city was destroyed and thousands of civilians were killed. Short-lived as it was, the autonomy is seen as a milestone in the region's pursuit of national statehood.
After the Turkestan Autonomy was crushed, an armed movement against Soviet rule spread through the Fergana Valley from 1918. Soviet sources called it the Basmachi movement; Uzbek historians today more often describe it as a struggle for independence. It was led by local commanders, or kurbashi, such as Ergash, Madamin Bek and Shermuhammad Bek (Kurshermat). After 1920 the fighting shifted to Eastern Bukhara and the mountains of Kashkadarya and Surkhandarya, where Ibrahim Bek was a leading figure; the Ottoman general Enver Pasha joined in 1921–1922 and was killed in 1922. Large Red Army forces had largely suppressed the movement by the mid-1920s, though isolated bands held out into the early 1930s.
In February 1920 the Red Army and Young Khivan forces ended the Khanate of Khiva: the last khan, Said Abdullah, abdicated, and in April the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed. On 2 September 1920 the Red Army under Mikhail Frunze, together with the Young Bukharans, took Bukhara after a bombardment that set the Ark and parts of the city ablaze; Emir Alim Khan fled to Eastern Bukhara and in 1921 to Afghanistan. In October the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic was created, headed by Fayzulla Khodjaev, with Fitrat among its ministers. Both republics were dissolved in the national delimitation of 1924.
In 1924 Central Asia underwent national-territorial delimitation: the Turkestan ASSR and the Bukharan and Khorezm republics were replaced by new republics drawn largely along ethnic lines. On 27 October 1924 the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was formed, with the Tajik ASSR inside it until 1929. Its First Congress of Soviets met in Bukhara in February 1925. Samarkand was the first capital; in 1930 the capital moved to Tashkent. The borders drawn then largely define today's Uzbekistan, but in mixed areas such as the Fergana Valley they left complicated frontiers and enclaves.
On 8 March 1927, International Women's Day, the Soviet authorities launched the Hujum (“assault”) campaign in Central Asia. It aimed to persuade women to give up the paranja robe and horsehair veil and to change their status through literacy classes and work outside the home, with mass veil-burnings staged in city squares. The campaign met fierce resistance: many unveiled women were harassed, and by some estimates around 2,500 were murdered. Historians judge the Hujum in different ways — as a reform that opened education and careers to women, and as a coercive policy that cost many lives.
