A Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia by Kayta Hokanson (review)

Reviewed by: A Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia by Kayta Hokanson Hana Stankova Hokanson, Kayta – A Woman's Empire: Russian Women and Imperial Expansion in Asia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023. 360 p. In A Woman's Empire, Katya Hokanson considers the perspective of nineteenth-century Russian women travellers in Central Asia, bringing to the fore aspects of the Russian conquest of Central Asia that have thus far gone unacknowledged due to scholars' predominant focus on men. Hokanson's book is organized in three parts, with the first considering imperial domesticity, the second focused on the context of the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires, and the third turning toward women scientists who explored Central Asia on behalf of the Russian Empire. Hokanson focuses on specific case studies of individual women, drawn from the surviving texts by and about them, to consider the diverse roles these Russian women played in the Russian Empire's nineteenth-century expansion into Central Asia. Hokanson recognizes the heterogeneity of these women's perspectives while also pointing out that they generally approached Central Asia as a colony in need of "civilization." They shared an interest in the rule of law, the legislation of women's rights, and the broader goal of competing with the British and encouraging further scientific progress. She situates these accounts in relation to the better-studied Russian literature about the Caucasus, where the "segmented and 'familiar' space" stood in contrast to the "less differentiated" land of Central Asia, allowing for Russian women to add unique perspectives and voices to the largely male canon (p. 5). At End Page 198 the same time, she draws on previous scholarship about European women in British colonial settings to consider their complex and intersectional identities, which allowed them to take on the status of "honorary men" during the course of their travels, even as they also differentiated themselves from Europeans based on their belief that Russians treated the ethnic other "more fairly and humanely" (p. 8). Unlike male travellers in Central Asia, these women were more focused on the "process and interaction" that they observed rather than a finished colonial product (p. 16), had a heightened awareness of personal safety in this colonial space (p. 12), and had greater latitude in describing emotions than their male counterparts (p. 25). For all of these reasons, Hokanson's book makes it clear that these oft-ignored accounts are vital for a complete understanding of Russia's conquest of Central Asia. The first chapter of the first section, on authors who wrote "from within" the imperial endeavour, focuses on Varvara Dukhovskaia, the wife of a general, and later governor general, whose memoirs give insight into the perspective of a high-class Russian woman struggling with a sense of self-importance and resentment at having to live in this imperial periphery. Nevertheless, Dukhovskaia did take part in the "civilizing mission" through her patronage of music and her participation in ceremonial events. Dukhovskaia's text also touches on aspects of trans-imperial competition, given her meetings with other explorers from different countries and participation in the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, where she recounts the Western Europeans' disappointment to see that Russians were "simple mortals clad in European dress" (p. 69). In Chapter 2, the quasi-fictional Central Asian sketches of Elena Apreleva, who wrote under a male pseudonym, reveal greater sensitivity toward the changes that the Russians brought about for the local population. Apreleva was unusual in writing for a twofold audience of local Russian settlers in Turkestan and Russians in the imperial centre who were not familiar with the territory, and, through her fiction, implied that Russian rule was justified only insofar as it improved the lives of Central Asians, and especially women and oppressed minorities. She considers the cost of Russian rule for Russians themselves, drawing on the 17 years she spent in Turkestan herself. The third chapter introduces the second section on imperial rivalry with the British by shifting to the especially fascinating figure of Elena Blavatskaia. She is better known as Madame Blavatsky and was the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, as well as an Anglophobe...