Claire L. Shaw. Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991; Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 310 pages; hardback $49.95; ISBN: 1501713663
In a picture taken during the 1933 May Day Parade in Moscow, we witness a procession of young athletes with firm bodies walking towards the Red Square. Dressed in a uniform of sporty blouses and practical shorts, the athletes are on their way to the Lenin Mausoleum, where they can salute the USSR’s top leaders. It’s a display seen a hundred times over – one that historians in training study in a first year course, or the general public has seen in any given documentary on life in the USSR. It would be a wholly unremarkable picture, if it were not for one detail. The first column of male and female athletes carries a banner which reads ‘glukhonemye’ or ‘deaf-mutes’. ‘With their cheerful appearance, the deaf-mutes testified to their readiness to fight alongside the working class of the USSR for the general line of the party and its leader, comrade Stalin’ the then magazine for deaf-mutes Zhizn glukhonemykh wrote about the event. Deaf people seemed intent on participating in Soviet life. They dedicated themselves to overcoming the obstacles to their inclusion into the Soviet project in general and the industrial workforce in particular. For it was the Soviet project, many leading figures in the burgeoning deaf community felt, that gave them the opportunities to emancipate themselves. No longer were they the dependent, disabled people they had been under the tsarist regime – now they could become valuable members of the working class.
However much the deaf athletes, or the editors of Zhizn glukhonemykh, subscribed to a narrative of radical inclusion, or framed perfecting the deaf masses as a Soviet aim pur sang, they were also confronted with exclusion. In everyday life not everyone was equally capable of realizing the utopian rhetoric of overcoming deafness. The deaf people on the May Day Parade picture marched alongside their hearing comrades but also distinguished themselves by carrying a banner proclaiming their deaf-muteness. This was illustrative of the separate institutions that helped deaf soviet citizens develop a distinguished communal identity, but also at times kept them at a substantial distance from the hearing world.
It is precisely these kinds of tensions between the deaf identity project and the Soviet identity project, between inclusion and exclusion, sameness and difference, which lies at the heart of Claire Shaw’s Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community and Soviet Identity. Shaw writes a history of deafness in the USSR from the February Revolution of 1917, to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, while situating deafness in the broader programme of Soviet selfhood. She examines the different Soviet conceptions of deafness throughout the period as influenced by factors ranging from self-advocacy, science, defectology, schooling and technology; to institutionalization, ideology and professionalization. To this end, Shaw draws on deaf journalism, films and literature produced by deaf and hearing people alike, as well as personal memoires. The main body of her source material hails from the institutional archive of VOG, an acronym that covered the different names that the Russian Society of the Deaf bore throughout the period under scrutiny. According to Shaw, VOG offers a lens through which we can gain an understanding of what it meant to be deaf that is both broad and in-depth. The society was involved with activities concerning housing, education, sign language, literacy, labour placement, cultural work, and social services, and was, as Shaw notes early on, a locus for ‘both Soviet governance and grassroots activism and community building.’ By the end of the 19070s it was estimated that more than 98% of Russian deaf people were members of VOG, although the core of its operations were directed from Moscow and to a lesser extent St. Petersburg. Inevitably, and with some exceptions, much of Shaw’s focus is on these cities.
The first chapter traces the foundation of VOG in 1926 after a period of reconceptualising deafness in reaction to the tsarist period and in exchange with the new Soviet ideas. Deaf people drew upon models developed by women and ethnic minorities to turn their differences into a path towards Sovietness while simultaneously insisting that ‘the affairs of the deaf-mutes are their own.’ Chapter two brings us to the 1930s when VOG becomes an organization of mass politics and deaf people try to write themselves into the Stalinist transformative narrative. At the same time, fears about those deaf people who could not live up to the ideal spread within the deaf organization. Chapter three examines the break in deaf history that was the Great Patriotic War. Disabled war veterans raised the overall status of people with disabilities and the postwar state infrastructure was rebuilt with an emphasis on welfare. Both trends rendered VOG a stronger and more centrally controlled organization. They also raised the existing tensions in the deaf community between striving for autonomy and being ‘passive’ recipients of expertise and care services. Chapter four zooms in on the Golden Age of deafness during the 1950s and 1960s in which deaf cultural institutions and educational efforts flourished. Deaf people came close to a functional hybrid deaf/Soviet identity that was also advertised to the world at large. Chapter five takes a detour to follow up on a nationwide debate about deaf criminality and lingering fears concerning deafness, femaleness, marginality, and otherness., while chapter six tracks the downfall of the deaf cultural community in the Brzehnev era: deaf models of selfhood gave way to curative and technological visions. Finally, an epilogue outlines with broad strokes the evolutions deafness underwent after the collapse of Soviet Union.
Deaf in the USSR is often at its most compelling when it grapples with the category of deafness itself. Many of our conceptions of what disability and deafness actually are have roots in 20th century disability and Deaf activism, and scholarship from the UK and the US. These conceptions bear specific political and historical connotations that are not self-evidently transferable to the context of Soviet Russia. Proponents of global disability studies have been rewriting this Anglo-American conceptual framework of disability to suit local contexts for quite some time now, but what place the former ‘Soviet world’ is to be assigned within global disability studies is still quite unclear. Few authors have tried their hand at the endeavour (See, for instance, the work of Michael Rembis & Natalia Pamuła [in Polish]).
Shaw employs her national case study to elaborate on specific Soviet understandings of deafness. A social interpretation of deafness, for example, was prevalent in the USSR decades before disability activists in the UK and the US formulated the social model of disability. Moreover, Shaw does so without falling into the trap of completely disconnecting the history of the USSR from international developments. After all, the social model of disability, as developed in the UK in the 1970s, was inspired by Marxism, while early Soviet conceptions of deafness in turn were influenced by 19th century conceptions of deafness hailing from German and French deaf education.
‘Could a defective body ever embody the Soviet ideal?’ is the question that returns throughout Deaf in the USSR. It is used by Shaw as a window onto the moulding of the Soviet self and, more importantly, onto the limitations of this moulding. While Shaw sporadically touches upon the subject of how deafness was related to other defective bodies, the topic is never fully addressed. Shaw emphasizes how work and employment were essential to overcoming deafness and approaching the Soviet ideal. In this regard deafness distinguishes itself from other disabilities, as it does not make access to physical labour quite as difficult. A limited discussion of the relation between ‘Soviet’ deafness and other forms of ‘Soviet’ disability would not have been uncalled for, especially as Shaw seems to take issue with the dire picture of disability in the USSR painted by researchers such as Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova.
Shaw is clearly interested in how studying deafness in the USSR can shed light on more than the history of deafness itself. At several points throughout the book she demonstrates that deafness can be useful for reevaluating broader historiographical debates. In the case of the 1933 May Day Parade photograph, she asserts that such forms of deaf inclusion shed a new light on this period. The 1930s have often been depicted as a decade in which earlier, more plural socialist visions of equality and emancipation where completely buried by the dictatorial regime of Stalin. Shaw’s broader reflections could have been worked through in more depth, but they show an important willingness to leave behind the type of disability history that follows an ‘add disability and stir’ recipe. It is in these attempts that the reader sometimes catches a glimpse of the full potential of disability as a as category of historical analysis: valuable both in its own right, and in its ability to pinpoint questions about a society at large.
Anaïs Van Ertvelde is a PhD student at the Leiden University Institute for History on the ERC funded project Rethinking Disability: The Global Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Historical Perspective. Her current research focuses on how government experts, disability movements and people with disabilities themselves conceive of, and deal with, disability in the wake of the UN international year. She uses a cross-‘iron curtain’ perspective that involves three local case studies and their global entanglements: Belgium, Poland, and Canada.