Turning Defects to Advantages: The Discourse of Labor in the Autobiographies of Soviet Blinded...

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2014 44: 651European History QuarterlyMaria Cristina Galmarini

Autobiographies of Soviet Blinded Second World War VeteransTurning Defects to Advantages: The Discourse of Labour in the

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2014, Vol. 44(4) 651–677

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DOI: 10.1177/0265691414544617

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Article

Turning Defects toAdvantages: The Discourseof Labour in theAutobiographies of SovietBlinded Second WorldWar Veterans

Maria Cristina GalmariniJames Madison University, USA

Abstract

This article explores how blinded Soviet Second World War veterans faced the prob-

lem of social reintegration and adjustment to peacetime civilian life. Their suddenly

acquired blindness compelled these men to craft new subjectivities. To give legitimacy

to their desires for inclusion and equality, many blind veterans advocated integration

through labour. While these men chose to operate within the hegemonic discourses of

labour and ability, their status as blind veterans also altered the Soviet idiom of pro-

ductive work and exemplary subjectivity. Using the highly scripted genre of autobiog-

raphy, disabled individuals engaged with the standards of fitness promoted by the

socialist culture of labour, but also reconceived work as a source of happiness and

proposed an alternative model of Soviet subjectivity.

Keywords

Autobiography, blindness, disability, post-Second-World-War Soviet Union, veterans

In the aftermath of the Second World War the Soviet state recognized between2.6 and 2.8 million soldiers as disabled servicemen and decided to addressthis population’s economic hardships and demands for social reintegration byemphasizing their right to professional retraining and job placement.1

This approach – which was consistent with the Soviet pre-war understanding of

Corresponding author:

Maria Cristina Galmarini, James Madison University, Cleveland Hall, Room 201, MSC 2001, 58 Bluestone

Drive, Harrisonburg, VA 22807, USA.

Email: [email protected]

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social assistance to vulnerable social groups and also similar to contemporaryEuropean trends – was spelled out in a series of resolutions passed by the highestorgans of state government. It was publicized as evidence of the state’s beneficencetowards wounded veterans. However, historical research assessing the outcomes ofthese welfare policies has shown that the majority of disabled veterans was neitherproperly retrained nor hired according to the specifications of the welfare agencies,but rather assigned low-skilled and poorly paid jobs, or simply left to their owndevices and compelled to beg on the streets in order to provide for themselves andtheir families.2

Rehabilitation and employment were particularly difficult to achieve for thoseSoviet men and women who had lost their sight on the battlefields and suddenlyfound themselves faced with a highly labour incapacitating disability such as blind-ness. The All-Russian Society of the Blind (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Slepykh,hereafter VOS) was the main organ responsible for their education, housing, spe-cialized vocational training, and placement in various state enterprises and institu-tions.3 Yet VOS had a hard time not only accomplishing the social reintegration ofthe new cohorts of blind people, but even simply keeping track of their growingnumbers and recruiting them as fee-paying members. For instance, in October 1943a social worker called Muratov suggested a hypothetical number of 6,000–8,000Russian blinded veterans, but admitted that VOS had been able to enrol among itsmembers only 1,543 of them and did not ‘know where the other invalids of thepatriotic war are and what the blind-of-war do’. He also reported that, two yearsinto the war, only 12 per cent of the ‘known’ blinded veterans had been placed onthe job market.4 In 1948, VOS had a census of 14,179 war blind, but registered only7,747 of them in its ranks.5 We do not know the true number of blinded ex-service-men who were rehabilitated and employed according to their specialization, but,since their professional requalification and job placement happened mainlythrough VOS, we can assume that only around 50 per cent of the monitoredblind veterans had any real opportunity to preserve professional status andincome. The rest (and all those blinded veterans who were not counted at all inVOS’s statistics) had a slim chance of resuming regular salaried work by their ownefforts and ended up surviving by selling post-cards, fortune-telling, singing, andaccordion playing in public markets and train stations. They remained out of thestate’s field of vision and were thereby deprived of their rights to social welfare.They shared with the other Soviet wounded veterans an everyday reality of impov-erishment, disenfranchisement and neglect – experiences that certainly led manyblinded veterans to feel anger, resentfulness and disillusionment.

In contrast with the grimness of the experience of war blindness that emergesfrom the archival record, some blind veterans’ oral and written memoirs from thepost-Stalinist and late Soviet period recount the lives of their authors as feats oflabour leading to the overcoming of their disabilities, the achievement of socialintegration, and the attainment of personal happiness. How do we make sense ofthese proud success stories vis-a-vis the untold biographies of the many war blindwho made a living by soliciting alms? Should we dismiss them as the atypical

652 European History Quarterly 44(4)



testimonies of a minority of overachievers which does not reflect the everydayrealities of wider social strata? In my analysis of a sample of around fifty-fiveoral autobiographies and an approximately equal number of written recollections,I recognize that they are not representative of the diverse and generally negativeexperience of the Soviet war blind in the post-war years. Rather, I propose toengage with these documents as crucial sources to think about the appeal andthe limits of the socialist discourse of labour in the self-fashioning of young mentraumatically deprived of their working capacities. Choosing the widespread genreof autobiography compelled these men to embrace the language of productivelabour and the mandate to overcome their disabilities. At the same time, withinthe constraints of hegemonic forms and constructs, grassroots blind autobiogra-phers renegotiated a labour discourse scripted for the able-bodied and often twistedthe idiom of labour to turn their ‘defects’ into advantages. As I ultimately argue inthis article, their specific use of the discourse of labour within the genre of auto-biographical narration allowed these blind men to fashion themselves as sufferingbut still striving subjects. This was a process that facilitated their social reintegra-tion and even suggested new forms of exemplary Soviet subjectivity, although it didnot substantially upset disciplining categories and hierarchies of normativity – thewar blind ceased to be an ‘invalid’ only when he outperformed the able-bodied.

Most of the oral sources analysed for this project come from the collection TheVeterans Remember – an audio book including memoirs, open interviews, andvarious kinds of autobiographical narratives recorded by the blind activistVladimir Shestakov between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, and spanningmemories from wartime to the onset of perestroika. In addition, I examined anumber of oral autobiographies which are part of Shestakov’s personal audioarchive but have not been included in the compilation The Veterans Remember.6

The written source base consists of blind veterans’ memoirs that were published inthe local press, collected in small volumes of fictionalized autobiographies, orprinted as monographs. It also includes the unpublished autobiographies thatI found in the State Archive of the Perm’ Province and the Museum of the All-Russian Society of the Blind in Perm’. These archives are particularly rich in blindveterans’ autobiographies because the city of Perm’ hosted Dr Boris Kovalenko’srequalification courses – a special programme for blinded Second World Warveterans which operated between 1941 and 1946 and attracted around 300 blindex-servicemen from all over the Soviet Union.7 Drawing upon this source base,I will explore how blind veterans/activists constructed arguments for labour basedupon the contradictions between socialist notions of work and embodied experi-ences of disability.

These blind autobiographers were a particularly upwardly mobile group amongthe Soviet war blind. They were relatively well-educated men who had becomeblind as young adults serving in the army and who had been better equippedthan other blinded veterans (such as older men, women, or less educated ruralinhabitants) to turn their disability into a positive life experience. They had beenamong the few war blind who completed professional requalification courses and

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learned how to read and write in Braille.8 They had not only opted to pay member-ship fees for VOS, but also to work as activists within this Society and had movedon to careers in its administration.9 In addition, they had been among the followersof a movement that Vera Dunham has identified as Voropaevism. This was a formof norm-busting Stakhanovism among the disabled that took its name from thefictional hero Colonel Voropaev and that, in 1948–1950, counted between 2,300and 4,198 blind who fulfilled the planned norms of production to 200–300 percent.10 In short, these were men who had received exemplary care from theSoviet state and thrived on its discourse of labour as liberation from the burdenof invalidism.

Besides the identity of their authors, the time of composition of these oral andwritten autobiographies is a significant contextualizing factor. While Stalin hadattempted to silence any negative aspect of the war and to exclude images of warinvalids from the official representation of post-war life, the Khrushchev andBrezhnev years saw the flourishing of new interpretations of the war and itsplace in the country’s historical narrative. As Nina Tumarkin has argued, in the1970s – when most of these memoirs were composed – the aging veterans’ experi-ence was used to ‘mobilize loyalty, maintain order, and achieve a semblance ofenergy to counter the growing nationwide apathy and loss of popular resilience ofspirit’.11 That time was also the beginning of a disability rights movement thatagitated for greater opportunities in the areas of education, housing and work.12 Inthis context, blinded Second World War veterans felt entitled to author autobio-graphies that addressed both blind and able-bodied audiences and that counteredthe exclusion, stigma and isolation of the post-war decade.13

Thus, their recollections appear to fulfil several purposes. They were loci ofhistorical memory, where the authors could track their selves in time and re-align their personal stories within the post-war sense of Soviet citizenship. Theywere empowering commemorative projects that celebrated blinded soldiers’ ‘hardwon victories’ alongside the accomplishments of other veterans.14 They also stroveto create a collective vision of the predicament of blindness and suggest ways toovercome this predicament. Certainly, these autobiographies were also offered ascultural scripts for the blind as well as the seeing: while the former were providedwith a model of proper behaviour, the latter were stimulated to identify with theable-bodied auxiliary characters (be they friends, mothers, girlfriends, wives oreducators). As didactic tales, they had the purpose of moulding mutual relation-ships between the able-bodied and the blind. Finally, these autobiographies wereviable spaces to (re)construct one’s disabled self and embed it in the social matrix.The focus of my analysis is on the latter function of blinded veterans’ autobiogra-phies as tools to fashion an acceptable subjectivity and thereby pursue the agendaof social reintegration and happiness.

In Russia as well as in other European countries, autobiography has beenhistorically associated with modern ideas of subjectivity. Since at least the eight-eenth century, members of disenfranchised groups have used autobiographicalauthorship to advance their claims for emancipation and viewed this goal as




inextricable from embracing an array of shaping discourses (ideological constructsand official historical narratives, but also novels and other fictional genres).15

Historian Diane Koenker has remarked that autobiographical statements formu-lated by Russian lower-class people are narrative texts whose construction ‘isinfluenced by cultural narrative models, by collective memory, by scripts alreadycirculating in society at large’.16 Other scholars of Soviet history have emphasizedthe ways in which certain models and archetypes shaped the autobiographicalefforts of various individuals and social groups. Frederick Corney, for instance,has shown that ordinary Soviet writers were heavily edited by the collective in theprocess of narrating their memories of the October Revolution. Igal Halfin hasargued that communist autobiographies required the voicing of a particular nar-rative of confession and conversion. Autobiographical narratives definitely servedas an instrument for creating subjects for the Soviet state. Indeed, as JochenHellbeck has discussed, autobiographical practices and techniques of self-surveil-lance were a means for creating the New Soviet Man, because autobiographersinternalized the goals of the ever progressing communist revolution. At the sametime, when historians consider the autobiographies of war veterans – as SeanGuillory recently did in relation to Civil War veterans – it appears that ‘suffering,estrangement, hopelessness, powerlessness, dislocation, and near-death experience’played a significant role alongside other more official factors shaping subject for-mation in the Soviet system.17

Similarly, the blind autobiographies of the post-Stalinist period were subjectedto conventions of form, content and goals which moulded their authors’construction of self. Blinded veterans/autobiographers knew that being deemedas ‘invalid’ (invalid) or ‘unable to work’ (netrudosposobnyi) conferred on them aset of presumed negative qualities (such as social isolation, psychological fixationon their personal misfortune, and economic dependency).18 This stigma of invalid-nost’ (literally invalid-ness) moved them to embrace the official narrative of reha-bilitation through work when they told their post-war life stories. Furthermore, theemotional stance required from all Soviet subjects in autobiographicalnarration was boldness and optimism, defiance of any difficulty, and faith inself-transformation.19 Thus, blind autobiographers had to overcome any disen-chantment, hopelessness, melancholy, powerless rage, or alienated withdrawalthat might have impacted their psyche after the violent and traumatic eventwhich blinded them. In short, despite the overwhelming difficulties of their situa-tion and their mental and emotional suffering – what modern day psychiatry hastermed Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome – blind memoirists had to reject invalid-ism, overcome labour incapacity, and kindle renewed hopes for happiness throughlabour.

In this complex autobiographical endeavour, Nikolai Ostrovskii and his fic-tional hero Pavel Korchagin came to provide a real life model and a literarystandard. Ostrovskii was an iconic Soviet writer who suffered from ankylosingspondylitis, a disease that left him blind and virtually paralyzed. His semi-autobio-graphical novel How the Steel was Tempered featured the defeat of terrible

Galmarini 655



disabilities through the path of labour. 20 As I show in this article, the mostsuccessful blind autobiographies were those that involved the elaboration of acoherent narrative composed on the model of Ostrovskii’s novel and organizedaround the conceptual category of labour (however much or little labour reflectedtheir ‘real’ life experiences). At the same time, reproducing a narrative form and adiscourse that were ubiquitous and dominant in their society, blind autobiogra-phers also told their particular stories of men who had been disfigured by the war,but had survived, tenaciously struggled for their right to belong, and successfullynegotiated their reintegration into the collective. In their recollections, the so-calledvoennooslepshie (blind-of-war) embraced labour as the common language spokenby the Soviet able-bodied community and therefore as the tool to re-insert them-selves into that society, but they also layered it over with specific economic andpsychological issues pertaining to their condition as labour-incapacitated men.

‘Adding to’, writes Homi Bhabha, ‘serves to disturb the calculation of powerand knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification’.21 Bhabha hasdefined the condition of subalternity and marginalization as the ‘dispossession anddislocation’ of ‘those who have to live under the surveillance of a sign of identityand fantasy that denies their difference’.22 I believe that this conceptualization fitsthe blind autobiographers whose success stories I analyse in this article. Althoughbetter placed than other blind people to deal with their disability, these men weresubaltern and marginalized vis-a-vis the able-bodied Soviet subjects because theyhad been dispossessed of their previous identity as healthy male workers.Traumatically blinded in military action and thrown out of the job market, theyfound themselves dis-located and had to find ways to re-locate their disabled selves.Interpreting their newly acquired disability and striving to overcome their frustra-tion, depression and general exhaustion, blind autobiographers turned their injuryinto a chance to reflect on their social alienation and challenge their marginalizedstatus as physically disabled. Like the young able-bodied diarists described byJochen Hellbeck, these blinded veterans and VOS activists worked in their auto-biographies to become worthy Soviet subjects, but they also struggled to expandunderstandings of worthiness and acceptable subjectivity. Indeed, with the see-mingly smooth linearity of their success stories, the voennooslepshie employed thediscourse of labour to argue that physical defects actually helped in creatingexemplary subjects. While in the Soviet Union there seemed to be no space forthe alternative perspectives of those without the capacity to work, precisely thetheme of defect was used in these autobiographies as an instrument to redefinemodel subjectivity. ‘Working ability’ and ‘able-bodied-ness’ ceased to be unambig-uous synonyms; blind activists compared themselves as disabled people to the hardworking Soviet model subject, modified both images, and then integrated both intothe social body. Their autobiographies had a clear propensity to spawn alternativerole models and thus to become weapons against univocal constructions ofsubjectivity.

Ultimately, however, the potential for subverting hierarchies of normativity wasconstrained in these autobiographies by the very measures of value that blind




activists imposed on their lives. Since their arguments were rooted in the denial ofinvalidism and impairment of function, they implicitly acknowledged that a per-son’s capacity is relevant to the question of integration. As Douglas Baynton hasremarked in relation to other contexts, this strategy was often used to deflectexclusion and marginalization, but it ultimately failed to challenge the assumptionthat disability is a legitimate reason for exclusionary practices. 23 In addition, thesearguments reveal an inherently violent construction that, as Lennard Davis hasexplained, forces the disabled to perform successfully in order not to be viewed asdisabled.24 Because labour capacity was emphasized by the state’s official disabilitypolicies as the privileged criterion for citizenship, blind autobiographers in the enddid not engage in a counter normative project vis-a-vis the discourse of labour: justas their narratives drew attention to a different type of self, they still argued forequality with the able-bodied based on their capacity to work.

The Soviet case analysed in this article fits in the framework of analysis pre-sented by disability scholars focused on the United States and Western Europe.Indeed, the intention of twentieth-century states to return disabled veterans toproductive labour must be understood in relation both to the lived condition ofdisability and its function as a marginalizing and disciplining category.For instance, the interwar British and German states had deemed ‘curativework’ or Arbeitstherapie necessary for all groups of disabled individuals and parti-cularly for the war invalids. Increasingly in the aftermath of the Second WorldWar, governments of varied political persuasions upheld the commitment to guar-anteeing disabled veterans’ security through policies of full employment.25

Similarly, in the attempt to come to terms with mental and physical war scarsand in the urge for social reintegration, ex-servicemen worldwide have writtennarratives of outworking the society of the able-bodied that allowed a reversal ofnormal-abnormal status without challenging the very category of disability.26

At the same time, Soviet narratives of traumatic blindness and post-war reinte-gration had their own specificities. First, although in all post-Second World WarEuropean countries the state’s involvement in social welfare grew considerably inrelation to voluntary sector charitable agencies, in the Soviet Union the statecompletely monopolized disabled veterans’ reintegration. For Soviet blinded veter-ans/activists this meant that they could operate within a strong institutional back-ground and harvest the discourses and practices of integration that had been longcultivated by an official state agency such as VOS. Second, although the healthymale body occupied a central place in Soviet society as well in other Europeancountries, powerful literary and real-life models had the potential to make thedisabled self equally normative.27 Pavel Korchagin’s triumph over disability notonly suggested a happy end to the bodily and psychological havoc done by the war,but also represented a Soviet disabled self that could have meaning, value andhistorical significance (as long as he performed useful productive work and sub-mitted to the discipline of labour). Finally, a significant specificity of Soviet blindautobiographies relates to the close historical linkage between autobiography andunderstandings of subjectivity. In comparison with bourgeois Bildunsgsromane that

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traced their authors’ path from dependency to self-realization, blind activists’recollections indebted to the conventions of communist autobiographies placedconsiderable emphasis on mentoring and peer-pressure as key aspects of self-improvement. Thus, telling memoirs in Ostrovskii’s vein allowed authors toimport a conception of blindness that contributed to a strong and emblematic,but never autonomous disabled self. Whether able-bodied or disabled, the norma-tive Soviet self was not a liberal subject.

Trudovoi put’ as VOS Official Discourse

Since the Revolution of 1917, Soviet political leaders and various types of medicaland legal experts had promoted ‘the road of labour’ (trudovoi put’) as the pathwaythat brought all deviant individuals to an honest life of equal rights and integra-tion. Through work, education, and correct ideological training, criminals abjuredtheir past, while unsupervised single women and people with physical disabilitiesovercame their darkness and adopted a brighter way of life.28 When VOS wasfounded in 1923 as the official state organ for the care of the visually impaired,it readily adopted the banner of blind people’s socio-economic emancipation andintegration through the road of labour. To its members, the Society promisedemployment either within its ‘didactic-productive workshops’, or in the invalids’cooperatives, the local industries, and the facilities of the People’s Commissariat ofSocial Assistance. Although these efforts and promises had varying practical out-comes, VOS activists remained faithful to the discourse of labour as liberation fromdisability throughout the entire Soviet period.29

This construct had particularly strong currency with the blinded veterans whoentered the ranks of VOS’s activists during the Second World War and in theimmediate post-war years. Indeed, the value of labour – not only as a means ofsubsistence but also as one’s unique key to inclusion and happiness – had beenmore dominant in their upbringing than in the socialization of earlier generationsof blind people and the congenitally blind in their generational group. These weremen who had grown up as able-bodied children under Stalinism. As such, they hadbeen encouraged to seek incorporation in the economic life of their country andstrive for professional accomplishments and quality of personal life.30 After thewar, their expectations of inclusion and happiness through work contrasted sharplywith the acquisition of a particularly labour incapacitating and therefore stigmatiz-ing and isolating condition – an important difference vis-a-vis a less incapacitatingdisability such as deafness, and in comparison with conditions that could be reme-died with techno-medical interventions such as mobility disability. Suddenlyexcluded from the labour-oriented Soviet citizenship due to their newly acquiredblindness, these men considered the traumatic loss of sight as a tragic event whichhad derailed them from their previous life path. Joining VOS with this experientialbackground, they insisted that disability had to be overcome and the blind had togo back to the ranks of the Soviet active workers to which they felt they essentiallybelonged.31 As Aleksandr Malyshev put it describing his dismissal from active




military service, ‘I ardently wanted to go back into the ranks of the builders of ourlife together with all the others’.32 Another blinded veteran wrote: ‘All around usare our people, the Soviet people’.33 These statements expressed the desire not to beleft out. And employment seemed to this group of blind the only possible means tofulfil their aspirations.

Thus, the voennooslepshie embraced VOS’s longstanding discourse of labourbecause it purported to address burning economic and social questions in an effec-tive way. They also forged their own variation of the trudovoi put’ whereby to beemployed was not only the solution to material necessities and dreams of collectivebelonging, but also the pathway to emotional well-being. In fact, as blinded veter-ans/activists explained, the economic and psychological benefits of having a jobwere inseparable: they constituted the two sides of the coin of labour. As AleksandrPatoka remembered, ‘for a blind disabled individual, labour is above all the foun-dation of his life, not only from a material point of view, but also morally. It is veryhard for a person without sight to just sit at home’.34 In his collection of blindpeople’s life stories A Small Island of Light, the blind writer Ivan Gilev used a seriesof metaphors to express what he believed to be the meaning of labour for a blindperson: work is ‘the wings of life’, ‘a song of life’, ‘youth’, ‘a source of light’, and ‘aticket to life’.35 Gilev’s metaphors closely associate work and life, merging the twoconcepts into one inextricable ideal and lyrically suggesting that the commitment towork brings social and emotional rebirth.

Remembering their activism within the Perm’ section of VOS in the post-wardecade, several blinded veterans interviewed by Shestakov described the difficultconditions of the time and argued that the most urgent issue for the war blind wasto create economically efficient productive bases. At the same time, they commen-ted on the emotional significance of labour as they attempted to re-imagine theirlives as blind men and regain confidence in themselves. For instance, MikhailChernytsin proudly remembered that a community of 80 blind people (‘all hard-working and always aspiring to work’) was able to establish a successful industrialenterprise in the city of Perm’ and that, by 1953, this facility already employed 150blind workers. More industrial enterprises were organized between 1944 and 1955in the villages of Berezniki, Vereshchagino, Kungur, Lys’va, Chernushka, Nytvaand Solikamsk. Chernytsin insisted that the blind had accomplished these feats ofwork thanks to their initiative, energy and spirit of independence – personalitytraits that guaranteed the success of their endeavours against a wall of indifference,social prejudice and objective difficulties, such as the post-war general penury ofresources and the lack of financial support from the local administrative organs. AsCherdytsin succinctly put it reiterating the parallel between work and life, ‘here weworked and here we lived’.36

Historian Sarah Ashwin has contended that the Soviet work collectives ledworkers to feel ‘genuine attachment’ toward them because they provided food,housing, medical care and social opportunities.37 In the post-war decade, thedorms and ‘red corners’ that operated by some enterprises of the blind offeredafter-work recreation through art and music classes, choirs, concerts, dancing

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and theatrical clubs, chess games, sports and occasional tourist excursions.38 Itmust be said that recreational activities have a more prominent space in the recol-lections of blind female veterans. In addition, these women explicitly located per-sonal life-changing events, such as marriage and the birth of children, in thesymbolic space of the enterprise. For instance, Lidiia Savel’eva said, ‘here I gotmarried and gave birth to two daughters and a son’.39 This way of remembering iscertainly influenced by gender discourses of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev yearswhich encouraged women to find satisfaction in family and social life, while men’ssense of realization was firmly located in the realm of salaried work.40 Nonetheless,both male and female blinded veterans/memoirists nostalgically remembered thatthe blind lived ‘happily’, because an atmosphere of friendship and mutual helpallowed everybody to overcome their many material and psychological difficul-ties.41 Nobody would refuse to work, because they knew that they were workingfor their own sake and this awareness made them happy.42 In short, adopting thediscourse of the trudovoi put’, blinded veterans cum VOS activists insisted that towork, study and participate in amateur art activities literally nurtured the blind andprevented them from feeling like outcasts.

The idea of hard work as an equalizing and integrating force permeates even theless idyllic recollections. Ivan Lukinykh, for instance, recognized that since he washired in the blind enterprise of Nytva in 1953, he had experienced ‘both easy andhard times, happy and sad moments’. However, in the weekends and holidays whenthe whole staff of both disabled and able-bodied would gather at a ‘friendly,cheerful table covered with food . . . everybody was equal, independently fromtheir working position, age, or disability’.43 This image of happy convivialitybased on equality reiterates in microcosm the argument in favour of blinded veter-ans’ active participation in the workforce and, by extension, in the Soviet socialbody. In addition, this image is particularly significant because it does not comefrom the classic repertoire of labour iconic motives, but it is nonetheless directlyrelated to labour, as though it were a by-product of it. The festive table coveredwith food emblematically captures the ideologically conditioned and ideal worldpainted in VOS activists’ autobiographies – it was a world of material well-being,friendship, happiness and equality beyond hierarchies of work, generation or phy-sical fitness.

The interesting point in all these descriptions is not so much the romanticizedand nostalgic portrayal of the enterprises of the blind in autobiographies that weretold and written decades later. More significant is the repeated use of terms indi-cating psychological well-being to describe not only leisure, but also a set of activ-ities that were performed for work-related purposes. This language is indicative ofthe imbrication of two discourses, both of which were hegemonic and normalizing– the project of socialist labour and the construct of happiness for the Soviet blind.Blind autobiographers saw their identity entirely in terms of their place within theenterprise. They needed to believe in the solidarity of the work collective, for it wasonly there that they could lead a life of worth and dignity. Happiness and integra-tion had been promised in return for dedication to the ideals and disciplines of




labour. If the virtues of respectable blind subjectivity meant conformity to a set ofdisciplinary rules, the blinded veterans and VOS activists of the post-war decadeproved prepared to conform.

Trudovoi put’ as Master Narrative

The trudovoi put’ – the road of socialist labour and the positive transformation thatit implied – was not only an official state discourse endorsed by VOS and harnessedby committed blind activists. It also constituted a master narrative to rememberand recount success stories. As such, it was a psychologically complex path thatechoed elements of the socialist realist plot. It was the telling of an exemplary life inwhich an unreformed and uninitiated main character became able to profess a newmoralistic way of life. In order to articulate new selves, this master narrativerequired the transformed authors to examine the development of their personality,recall where they came from, and who they used to be. These narratives wereritualized and repetitive, becoming a type of conversion story. At the same time,they also allowed their authors to pursue their particular agendas.44

Adopting the Soviet narrative of transformation, blind autobiographers alsostrove to make it their own. They marked the arduous overcoming of their defectsthrough signposts that were both intimately related to their traumatic blindnessand part of the common set of experiences of the larger social body. The mostsignificant of these signposts or turning moments were the military event that madethem blind, the encounter with a mentor, and the first day of work. Because of theirdual status as war victors and war victims (‘poor victors’ in Fieseler’s words),45

these blind activists cum autobiographers had a complex approach towards thewar: on one hand, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was a paradigmatic event that definedthem in relation to a generation; on the other hand, it was a negative force that haddisfigured their bodies and deformed their intimate lives. Labour, instead, was lessambiguously presented as the tool that helped them rebuild their selves, theirhomes and intimacies, while also allowing them access to the larger Soviet bodysocial and strengthening the connection with the able-bodied. In short, autobio-graphical narratives marked by these recognizable signposts created a space whereblind and able-bodied individuals participated in one another’s lives and madethem intelligible to both.

The trudovoi put’ was a journey from negative to positive Soviet subjectivity thatcould not be accomplished solo. Indeed, despite the importance of initiative andindividual hard work, the war blind could not possibly take all merit for theirtransformation. They had to acknowledge the help of either a state institution ora tutor who often stood for a state organ. This narrative mechanism performed aseries of important functions: again, it inscribed the individual and his personalstruggle within the collective (thus substantiating these blind men’s desire for socialintegration); it recognized the blind men’s subject position vis-a-vis the helpingstate (thus confirming loyalty to it); and, while praising an official or an institutionfor providing help, it also mandated the state’s duty to provide services and the

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blinded veterans’ right to receive help. As a VOS activist put it, the state ‘has theduty to help the blind-of-war integrate into a full-fledged working life so that theycould be useful to the socialist society and feel happy despite their serious physicaldisability’.46

Besides institutional sources of help (VOS itself or the Commissariats ofWelfare, Health and Education), blind memoirists often mentioned a mentorwho guided the untrained war blind along the path of transformation.47 Forinstance, when Nikolai Ermachok arrived in Perm’, he had a hard time gettingused to living in the dorm for the blind without the help of his family. The mentorVasilii Shumilov – himself a blinded veteran – shook him out of his apathetic statewith the following words:

Why are you crying? What is this helplessness you are talking about? . . .what is it so

bad that happened to you? There are interesting classes, you get a stipend. Everything

will be worked out, Kolia, believe me. . .48

These words capture the attitude that blind veterans were supposed to have inorder to accomplish their transformative journey.

The Soviet notion and everyday experience of collectivity was another importantsource of help for the blinded veterans walking along the road of labour. A spirit offriendship ruled in the veterans’ collectives and was facilitated by the ideas ofsoldierly brotherhood. In addition, peer pressure convinced the more recalcitrantblind men to adopt a working life, thus functioning as a crucial levelling anddisciplining mechanism. Some autobiographers emphasized VOS activists’common traits even in such aspects as the way they smoked or the clothes theywore.49 According to the testimony of Ivan Kilikeev, entering a collective of youngblind people who ‘lived together, studied together, and helped each other’, enabledall of them to successfully undertake their transformative journey.50 GeorgiiKoriavko defined the trudovoi put’ as ‘a long path, a very long path of both retreatsand advances’. Stepping into it and acquiring new working skills was an achieve-ment of the individual which he accomplished within the structures of the Sovietstate, with the support of the collective, and under the control of a mentor. 51

The path of labour entailed both the requirement to be independent and theneed to accept the care (and control) exercised over the disabled by the able-bodied.This tension emerges in the veterans’ oral and written autobiographies every timethe blind authors articulate what they desired and expected in their relationshipswith the able-bodied. The ‘able-bodied friends’ are often described as willing help-ers in the most complicated matters of the blind’s everyday life. In Perm’, healthystudents never refused to help the veterans. According to the blind memoirists, thiswas motivated not only by the general readiness to serve that characterized theSoviet people, but especially by the gratitude and respect that everybody felttowards the defenders of the country. Friendship with the blind veterans wasportrayed as a great fortune and source of joy for the able-bodied. Blind memoir-ists wanted to imagine able-bodied young people as being proud of deserving the




trust of a veteran. In these activists’ autobiographical narratives, the healthy eventried to imitate the ex-servicemen looking up to them as older and more experi-enced friends. The voennooslepshie told them stories about their life before the war,the military service, and their experience at the front. In short, blind veteransportrayed themselves as a positive example for the able-bodied Soviet youth. Atthe same time, the blind insisted that teaching and influence went both ways.Hanging out with the able-bodied students, the war blind ‘started to worryabout their appearance . . . copied the best manners and habits of their newfriends’.52 Stating mutual influence was a way of affirming integration and recon-ciling it with the mandate to accept the ‘attentive care’ of the state, its institutionalagents, and its able-bodied population.

All these components of the trudovoi put’ as master narrative can be observed intwo emblematic blind autobiographies, that of the Second World War veterans andVOS activists Aleksandr Malyshev and Arkadii Shan’gin. The following sectionanalyses their written and oral autobiographies as well as several journal articlesabout them. During the thriving veterans’ movement of the Brezhnev years, thesetwo men’s biographies were repeatedly told – by themselves and by their contem-poraries – because they served both as indicators and instruments of integrationinto Soviet society by way of self-transformation through the road of labour.Malyshev’s and Shan’gin’s stories provided paradigms of a positive journeywhich led blinded ex-servicemen from ‘dark thoughts and pessimism to a full-fledged and full-blooded life’.53 They promised the overcoming of post-traumaticstress and the attainment of rich professional and intimate lives. Time and again,all this was achieved through ‘hard work’ as a ‘creative’ force that integrated theblinded veterans with the rest of the Soviet social body, but also channelled theiraspirations and contended that their dreams could be realized only throughdiscipline.

The Model Blind Subject: Aleksandr Malyshevand Arkadii Shan’gin

All of Malyshev’s autobiographical recollections move fast through a life that was‘nothing unusual’ until the traumatic acquisition of blindness.54 That was the firstturning point in his trudovoi put’ – the moment when his narrative slowed downand the author could indulge in his self-presentation as a man genuinely confusedby a stressful event. For instance, Malyshev vividly described the pain of realizingthat he had turned blind.

I woke up in the military hospital. It was dark. The eyes itch. I asked: ‘Is it night?’

A guy next to me answered: ‘It’s day’.55

This description was repeated verbatim in a number of newspaper articles whichturned Malyshev’s painful discovery of permanent blindness into a shared experi-ence of all the war blind. In a piece entitled ‘A Soldier’s Courage’, the journalist

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Rikhter wrote: ‘the first thought that comes to your mind is: ‘‘Life is now useless’’.This thought is the number one enemy for all those who become blind’.56

When blind autobiographers described their experience in the military hospitals,they fashioned themselves as unable to imagine a future and desperately wonderinghow to ‘find a place in life’. The questions ‘how will I live now?’ and ‘what will Ido?’ mark the moment of disclosure of truth about the soldiers’ blindness in almostall the memoirs recorded by Shestakov. For a young Soviet man, permanent loss ofsight and complete labour-incapacity meant ‘the crumbling of all plans and hopesas well as a future of personal unhappiness’.57 This sentence summarizes all theanxieties coming with disability in Soviet society. First, it was an economic issue:what professional activities could a veteran engage in as a blind man? On whatmoney could he live? Second, blindness threatened veterans with exclusion from thecollective. While the wounds they endured on the battlefields represented thecommon experience of a generation of Soviet disabled ex-servicemen, their blind-ness precluded them from participating in the post-war reconstruction. Third, dis-ability barred ‘personal happiness’, a phrase that often signalled the enjoyment ofromantic and sexual life. As Malyshev put it: ‘Who will love you now? They willhave only pity for you’.58

The press offered three distinct representations of blind men: the passive andpitied invalid, the hero of Ostrovskii’s novel, Pavel Korchagin, and – somewherein-between – the common blinded veteran.59 In the transitional moment betweenthe doubts on how to live further and the determination to work on his disabledself, these three images fought a virtual battle in Malyshev’s head. Initially, hethought that his fate was to be an invalid and live on people’s alms. He rememberedan old poor blind man from his village who:

knocked at the villagers’ homes asking for charity and, in the evening, having spent in

spirits the money gathered during the day, lay at the gates of somebody’s house.

The people had compassion for the poor man, they had pity.60

However, he soon began to hear the voice of his ‘conscience’ telling him that ‘in ourcountry nobody is alone in misery: the government assists the disabled with apension and an appropriate form of employment’. Finally, Malyshev rememberedOstrovskii’s courage and ‘felt him next to me’.61 In other words, the disclosure ofan exemplary blind self was a two-stage process requiring first the establishment ofan alterity (the identification of the Other in the pitiful blind ‘who live out of statemoney’)62 and then the praise for a disabled and model subject. The negative andthe positive subjects were the sources of reference enabling the loyal veteran to facepessimism and weakness of spirit.

Feeling the desire to re-qualify himself as a positive subject, Malyshev resolvedto ‘defeat the darkness that surrounded him’.63 He applied to the HistoryDepartment of the Perm’ Pedagogical Institute and, with the onset of the academicyear, ‘all the wavering and doubting . . . disappeared almost immediately’.64

Malyshev devoted himself to school: studying and being involved in research




completely absorbed him and made him feel happier and more confident. As thejournalist Rikhter wrote re-telling Malyshev’s life story, his student life was char-acterized by ‘the desire, the inspiration, and the complete faith that he could beuseful’.65

Intellectual activity became the defining concept in Malyshev’s interpretation ofhis life as a blind man. After having completed his first university year with excel-lent grades, in the spring of 1945, Malyshev followed the encouragement of hishistory professor, German Zamiatin (i.e. the able-bodied mentor), and prepared apaper for a conference. Since he did not have any experience with academic writing,Malyshev felt as though he ‘had to walk literally in the dark’. Together with thefellow student Iasha Rozhkov, he visited all the libraries in Perm’, read dustynewspapers, brochures, journals and monographs, and took notes in Braille.When the winter break started, he filled a big suitcase with these notes and wentto his native village. For one month, Malyshev processed the gathered materialsand dictated his thoughts to his father. When the day of the conference finallyarrived, ‘it was not without fear that I walked to the tribune’. But the paper waswell received and Malyshev even received a prize for it.66

The conference presentation represents another important signpost inMalyshev’s trudovoi put’. It fulfils similar positive functions as the first day onthe job for the blind who found employment in industrial enterprises. Indeed,the success at the conference emboldened the blinded veteran and pushed him tocontinue his intellectual work by writing a doctoral dissertation in history. Aswith other hurdles, Malyshev did not deny the difficulty of writing, but ratheremphasized his ability to surmount it (despite his blindness): ‘for one month Iwalked from one corner to the other, without knowing how to write the firstline. But in the end even this Rubicon was passed’.67 On 16 December 1953,Malyshev successfully defended his dissertation and later received the title ofprofessor.

Arkadii Shan’gin’s life story is in many respects similar to that of Malyshev.68

He too graduated from the History Department of the Perm’ Pedagogical Institutein 1950 and worked as middle school teacher until his retirement in 1986. And yet,Shan’gin’s biggest victory over blindness was not in the field of education per se,but rather in the combination of teaching with sports and tourism. These fields ofaction – perhaps the most incongruous for a blind man – were in line with thestate’s rhetoric of physical culture and the perceived benefits of athletics for dis-cipline among the citizenry.69 They came to play a fundamental role in Shan’gin’sstruggle to find a place in life. Before the war, he used to go skiing, hunting andfishing with his younger brothers Iurii and Boris. After he became blind, Shan’ginkept practising these activities. Paradoxically, it was largely by working as an‘instructor of children’s tourism’ and conducting difficult skiing excursions withhis pupils, that he turned his defects into advantages and overcame his disability.As Shan’gin put it in an interview with Shestakov, ‘wherever I dreamed to be,I have been’. And indeed, in 600 excursions – in summer and winter, by foot oron skis – Shan’gin covered approximately 6,000 km, literally crossing the

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Soviet territory, from the Urals to the Caucasus, along the lake Baikal and the riverDon, from the Far East to Karelia.70

In mediating between the ideal of Soviet veterans’ masculinity and the autobio-grapher’s traumatized state of blind man, Shan’gin’s narrative mapped a new sub-ject position. Indeed, his athletic and touristic work was endowed with the traits ofpositive masculinity – courage, persistency, honesty and self-sacrifice. But it wasalso recognized as a work that required extra consistency, intensity and willpower.To prove his capacity to perform on a par with (and above) the able-bodied malemembers of Soviet society, Shan’gin took upon himself all the organizationaldetails of his trips, including the preparation of night shelters in the woods.71

The Perm’ writer Aleksandr Graevskii wrote that each of Shan’gin’s trips waspreceded by a painstaking work of preparation down to the last detail.72 Hisfellow VOS activist Shumilov remembered the purposefulness and accuracy withwhich Shan’gin gathered materials on the Civil War battles in the Urals and onlythen led his students to visit these places.73

Shan’gin never presented blindness as a source of insurmountable distress. Onthe contrary, he kept arguing that he experienced complete satisfaction from theperformance of difficult and adventurous excursions. Recounting his many expedi-tions, Shan’gin proposed a narrative in which psychological well-being helped theblind recover from their physical problems, reverse the relationship of dependencyon the able-bodied, and even become leaders among them. As Shan’gin once said:

Of course, I was worried . . . often times I was alone, without a second teacher with me.

But I see that so much depends on my mood and my behaviour. I have to control

myself, to be a model . . . and I feel that the kids are following me and being inspired by

me.74

As this quotation reveals, enthusiasm and a healthy psyche were important but notsufficient, because the blind were above all required to behave in a disciplinedmanner. The aspiration to acquire knowledge and expand one’s mental and geo-graphic horizons combined in this discourse with the ideas of hard work, persis-tency and diligence.75

Soviet blinded Second World War veterans and VOS activists told their lives as‘a struggle for the right to be in the first ranks of society’.76 Malyshev and Shan’ginhad fought this battle for inclusion very successfully because they had not acceptedthe hopelessness that was associated with the word ‘invalid’, but rather preserved astrong will and eagerness for action. The Brezhnev-era press presented this type ofblind ex-servicemen as ‘our Soviet people’, who overcame the barriers that hinder‘invalid men’ from engaging in ‘worthy labour’ and being at ‘the front of labour’.77

As Malyshev wrote, ‘there are no cranky and pessimistic men among mycomrades . . .They all passionately love their work and believe in it as if it were amedicine against spiritual and physical suffering’.78 Blinded veterans/autobiogra-phers did articulate feelings of fear and despair, but in the end catharsis occurredthrough labour: the negative feelings of pessimism and gloominess were




transcended and the blinded veterans were restored to the community as commu-nist and blind subjects. In their autobiographical narratives, Malyshev andShan’gin repeated that blindness had not taken away from them any single joyof the life of healthy seeing men. They had a job that they enjoyed; they also hadwives, children and many friends.

In its mutually constituting dimensions as official VOS discourse and masternarrative, the trudovoi put’ normalized the blind. It transformed disabilities into thebest personality traits of the proper Soviet subject of the post-Stalinist period:young and strong despite his shortcomings; experiencing objective difficulty andsuffering but never giving up on life; and always striving to pursue the ‘Purpose’,i.e. the creation of Communism.79 Indeed, at a blinded veterans’ reunion inFebruary 1978, Malyshev and Shan’gin were introduced as ‘examples of the spiri-tual strength of the Soviet Man, his moral beauty and indefatigable devotion to theideals of the Party and Communism’.80 On one hand, this construct matched withthe Soviet state’s disciplining thrust and the need to create loyal subjects. On theother hand, this discourse could have an emancipating dimension. By using thetheme of disability as an instrument to define Soviet subjectivity, the blinded veter-ans’ variation on the trudovoi put’ turned the ‘defects’ of a marginalizedsocial group into advantages and thus presented a strong claim for their socialre-integration.

The Undisciplined Other: Beggars and Baian Players

While the autobiographies composed by VOS activists testify to blinded veterans’intense and conscientious labour, self-possession, and discipline, the archivalrecord reveals that the followers of Voropaevism were a minority and not all thewar blind willingly embraced the Soviet work ethic. It is telling that the pedagogicalcouncil of Kovalenko’s rehabilitation courses frequently recommending controllingthe war blind. At a meeting on 1 October 1941, Kovalenko himself complainedabout ‘some cases of infraction of work discipline and lack of independent study’.Kovalenko wrote about blind veterans who skipped classes, were late, and did notdo the homework.81 G. N. Vishnev had serious problems studying and was caughtcheating several times; V. F. Omel’ianenko was expelled from the courses becausehe failed various exams and skipped many classes without any reason; M. M.Trapitsyn, V. A. Lebedev, and I. N. Iurchenko frequently received poor grades;I. E. Kozhushkin was singled out for ‘blatant infractions of discipline’, because hewent to the bathhouse instead of going to classes.82 In January 1943, Kovalenkocomplained that some students worked little and only if forced to. They wereinterested neither in socialist competitions nor in trade unions or youth organiza-tions.83 In the fall of 1942, a group of ten blind students expressed doubts con-cerning the real advantages for the blind in completing a professionalrequalification course. They decided that it would have been better for them tobecome musicians, because it would have allowed them to perform for money onthe streets.84 In addition, some students disagreed with Kovalenko’s principled

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view that the blind should not receive economic assistance on grounds of theirblindness.85 These sources hint at the limits of the discourse of labour to offerreal inclusion.

In the early 1950s, disabled veterans using ‘alternative survival strategies’ wereoften rounded up and prosecuted as ‘anti-social parasitical elements’.86 For blindactivists/autobiographers, begging ‘invalids’ posed a serious discursive and concep-tual problem: they challenged their bid to integrate the blind into the fabric ofSoviet society and transform their defects into advantages. Most autobiographersaddressed this problem in two ways. The first was simply to omit from theirrecollections the experiences of undisciplined war blind who did not fit with themaster plot of the successful transformative journey. The second was to mobilizetheir experiences to create a blind Other, i.e. the alterity against which they mea-sured their value and through which they gave a didactic purpose to their stories.

‘Our goal’, said the VOS activist Aleksandr Patoka, ‘was to give a job to thosepeople and introduce them to socially useful work’. Patoka admitted that it wasdifficult to convince the renegade war blind to work in the invalid enterprises andsometimes the activists ‘literally and forcefully dragged these people to work’.He recounted cases in which some blinded veterans would work the first shift atthe market – singing and fortune telling – and then come to the enterprise only forthe second shift. However, as Patoka claimed applying the narrative arc of thetrudovoi put’ to the Other blind, ‘they gradually transformed themselves and beganto work honestly and conscientiously’.87 Malyshev expressed criticism towards thecomrades who did not ‘distinguish themselves by their loyalty’ and fell into ‘hoo-liganism and debauchery’.88 He definitely despised all the blind ‘singing somewherein a train station hoping to hear the sound of coins falling in their hats from thehands of citizens with tender hearts’.89 Gilev had a strongly critical approachtowards the ‘loafers’ and ‘drunkards’ who travelled around by train, were toolazy to work, but did not feel any shame in sitting with an extended arm.90

Blind baian players and beggars were portrayed by the exemplary blind either aspoor men trapped in their passive lives (unaware of their strengths and how tochannel their energy) or as parasites and vagabonds who did not want to learn anyprofession and submit to discipline. For the model blind, only the rejection ofinvalidism and engagement in useful labour could re-generate human dignity.91

‘The meaning of life’, wrote the ophthalmologist Kovalenko, ‘is not the searchfor the most advantageous situation – work less and get more. Only throughwork and a non-easy work can the blind make their lives into something worthyand win the respect of the people surrounding them’.92

Thus, the negative assessment of the Other blind had the didactic purpose ofteaching visually impaired people how to live as Soviet subjects. It reminded themthat the willingness to work would have earned them not the pity, but the muchdesired respect, friendship and love of the rest of society. Only then could the blindsing – ‘not for the money, but for the joy of their souls’,93 and knowing that ‘I playmy note in the choir of labour’.94 Portraying the begging blind in a negative light,VOS activists/autobiographers – who were themselves Others vis-a-vis the visually




unimpaired – not only reinforced disciplining mechanisms of social control, butalso expressed the aspiration no longer to beg for benefits.

Conclusion

Irina Paperno wrote that ‘memoir writing is an instrument of both self-creation andcommunity building’.95 Writing autobiographical narratives and recounting theirmemoirs into Shestakov’s recorder, the blinded veterans and VOS activists of thePerm’ province constructed themselves as disabled and yet acceptable and evenexemplary subjects. Furthermore, they inserted their blind selves into the largerSoviet social (able) body. Their autobiographies presented life stories shaped by thetraumatic loss of sight and the struggle to overcome blindness and be integralmembers of the Soviet community. While composing one’s life for external audi-ences was conditioned by the dominant genre of communist autobiography and thehegemonic discourse of labour, these activists’ autobiographical acts served alsothe specific purpose of mastering disability. They fundamentally helped them tore-align their lives and describe a self that strove to reacquire confidence. Throughthe trudovoi put’, a self that had been shattered by the war became able to recon-stitute itself within the socio-political community. While suggesting a parallelbetween blinded veterans’ capacity for inclusion and their ability to work, theroad of labour and Korchagin’s model nevertheless did not challenge deep-rooted conceptualizations of disability as a marginalizing and disciplining category.

The blind activist Vladimir Shestakov has not yet written or recorded his ownautobiography. So far, he has found purpose in collecting the stories of other blindmen.96 For him, to bring the war blind to compose autobiographies has been partof an agenda of reintegration that – tellingly – still needed to be sustained in theearly 2000s. At a time of crisis, when the Soviet project had failed and neoliberalpolicy was scaling back social programmes for the blind, Shestakov saw the con-tinued collection of blinded veterans’ success stories as one of the most pressingtasks facing the blind community in Perm’.97 The fact that this activist and most ofhis interviewees/autobiographers still believe that labour is the best strategy toimagine themselves as integrated citizens should make us reflect not only on thepower of dominant discourses (and nostalgic memory), but also on the ways inwhich these discourses intertwine with the motives and cultural politics of margin-alized social groups.

Acknowledgements and Funding

This research was assisted by a fellowship from the International Dissertation ResearchFellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I owe special thanks to Vladimir Shestakov and the friendsat the Perm’ section of VOS. Earlier version of this article were presented at the Russianreading group of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the ASEEES con-

ference in fall 2011. I would like to thank all the attendees of thesemeetings for their questions.Special thanks also to Diane Koenker, Veneta Ivanova, and Louise Loe for their comments.

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Notes

1. G. F. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London

1997), 92; Beate Fieseler, ‘The Bitter Legacy of the ‘‘Great Patriotic War’’: Red Army

Disabled Soldiers under Late Stalinism’, in Juliane Furst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia:

Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London 2006), 46–61, at 46–7, and

Beate Fieseler, ‘The Soviet Union’s ‘‘Great Patriotic War’’ Invalids: The Poverty of a

New Status Group’, Comparativ: Zeitschrift fu00 r Globalgeschichte und vergleichende

Gesellschaftsforschungen, 20(5) (2010), 34–49, at 39. Fieseler points out that the

number of physically impaired soldiers was over 18 million and only a minority of

them was official recognized as ‘disabled’. For a discussion of who was included in the

definition of ‘disabled veteran’ see Mark Edele, ‘Veterans and the Welfare State: World

War II in the Soviet Context’, Comparativ, 20(5) (2010), 18–33; and Mark Edele, Soviet

Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society

1941–1991 (Oxford 2008), 81–2.2. For general overviews of Soviet welfare legislation see Bernice Madison, Social Welfare

in the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA 1968) and Dorena Caroli, Histoire de la protection

sociale en Union Sovietique (1917–1939) (Paris 2010). For the laws governing all types

of disability see Madison, ‘Programs for the Disabled in the USSR’, in William O.

McCagg and Lewis Siegelbaum, eds, The Disabled in the Soviet Union: Past and

Present, Theory and Practice (Pittsburgh, PA 1989), 167–98; and Sarah Phillips,

Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Bloomington, IN 2011),

52–77. For more specific discussions on the war disabled and evaluations of policies’

outcomes, see Fieseler, ‘The Bitter Legacy’; Beate Fieseler, ‘The Soviet Union’s ‘‘Great

Patriotic War’’ Invalids’; Beate Fieseler, Die Invaliden des ‘Grossen Vaterlandischen

Krieges’ der Sowjetunion: Eine Politische Sozialgeschichte 1941–1991

(Habilitationsschrift, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, 2003); Edele, Soviet Veterans; Edele,

‘Veterans and the Welfare State’; Robert Dale, ‘The Valaam Myth and the Fate of

Leningrad’s Disabled Veterans’, The Russian Review, 72 (April 2013), 260–84; Elena

Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments 1945–1957

(London 1998); Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the

Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (Cambridge 2002); idem, The

Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards,

1943–1953 (Cambridge 2010); Mark B. Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban

Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, IL 2010). For a discussion of

reintegration strategies in other European countries see the essays by Noel Whiteside,

Nicole Kerschen and Emanuel Reynaud in the collection Comparing Social Welfare

Systems in Europe, vol. 1 (1995). See also Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, State, and

Social Welfare in Britain, 1830–1990 (Oxford 1994).

3. Directive no. 294, ‘On the measures to facilitate the employment of blind invalids of work

and of the Great Patriotic War and the improvement of their material everyday condi-

tions’, issued on 30 April 1946 by the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian

Republic. I consulted the copy preserved at GAPK, f. 986, o. 1, d. 20, ll. 27–8.4. GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 347, l. 20. Diverging VOS statistics from July 1943 reported

between 1,543 and 2,125 blinded veterans, but calculated that only around 580–590

had been recruited by VOS as fee-paying members (as compared to a total of 9,400–

10,900 blind paying membership fees). GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 347, ll. 5–12; l. 26; and l. 33.




5. In 1948, VOS monitored 61,846 blind individuals (14,179 war blind) and enlisted 30,422

members (7,747 blind of war) (GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 1195, l. 2). The total number of

counted blind people grew to 71,605 by January 1949 and 78,839 by January 1950, while

the number of war blind was confirmed to be between 14,542 and 15,394. Those paying

membership fees were respectively 37,519 (including 9,200 war blind) in 1949 and 45,874

(including 10,476 war blind) in 1950 (GARF, f. 413, o.1, d. 1480, l. 2). In 1950, VOS

activists still believed that the census of the war blind was incomplete because they

lacked numbers for the most remote provinces of the Russian Republic (GARF, f.

413, o.1, d. 1195, l. 2 and l. 10; GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 1480, l. 2). In the provinces of

Chuva, Tambov and Penza, the percentage of blind who were VOS members was as low

as 17–22% (GARF, f. 413, o.1, d. 1407, l. 26). Statistics from 1949 reveal how many

blind were employed, but do not say how many of them were war blind: a total of 28,886

blind had a job in January 1949 (GARF, f. 413, o.1, d. 1195, l. 13). In 1950, varying

statistics calculated between 34,763 and 37,415 blind people who were either employed

or attended schools (GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 1480, l. 4 and ibid., d. 1754, l. 54). This

amounted to around 45% of the known blind (75% of the members of VOS), but it is a

questionable statistic since the Soviet state did not like to admit the failure of its rehabili-

tation policies and VOS probably inflated these numbers.6. Vladimir Shestakov is a blind VOS activist living in the city of Perm’. He was born in

1940 and became blind in 1954 due to an unfortunate accident. He devoted his life to the

social integration of blind people through job placement. The Veterans Remember

(Vspominaiut veterany) was released by Shestakov in 2005 but it includes materials

collected throughout his life. Unfortunately, Shestokov is not a professional historian

and did not register the date of most interviews. When I interviewed him on June 16,

2010, he could not recall the precise date of many recordings, but he claimed that he

began collecting blinded veterans’ personal narratives a few years after he became blind.

Shestakov donated to me his compilation of oral autobiographies and numerous other

audio materials from his private archive on the occasion of our interview.

7. Many of these war blind settled in the Perm’ province and became VOS members. See

the collection Permskii pedagogicheskii institut – frontovikam. Kursy podgotovki voen-

nooslepshikh v vuz i k intellektual’nomu trudu (1941–1946) (Perm’ 1974) and N. B.

Kovalenko and V. M. Sretenskaia, Boris Ignat’evich Kovalenko (k 100-letiiu so dnia

rozhdeniia) (Moscow 1990).

8. Again, specific statistics related to how many war blind graduated from requalification

courses are rare to come across. As an example, we can consider that in the city of

Kazan’ in 1943 only 56 blind veterans (out of 126 counted) attended professional

courses (GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 347, l. 13). While around 300 blind veterans passed

through Kovalenko’s course in Perm’, only 86 graduated from them and found jobs.

Permskii pedagogicheskii institut – frontovikam. In 1949–1950, around 26,000 blind

people knew how to read and write in Braille. That left some 56,000 who did not

know the Braille alphabet and around 28–29,000 blind who were completely illiterate

(GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 1754, ll. 1–16).

9. Available statistics for 1950 count a total of 448 activists working for the 64 VOS

sections existing in the Russian Republic (GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 1480, l. 2).

10. Vera Dunham, ‘Images of the Disabled, Especially the War Wounded, in Soviet

Literature’, in The Disabled in the Soviet Union, 151–66. In VOS statistics there is no

indication of how many blind Stakhanovites were war blind. Some ‘famous’

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norm-busting war blind mentioned in VOS records of the late 1940s included Fetisov

and Zologuev (Moscow), Zyrianov and Noginov (Tiumen’), Ragulin (Perm’) and Koval

(Nizhnii Novgorod). This document mentioned also a war blind called Voropaev from

Moscow who fulfilled the norm to 170%. While the average monthly salary of a blind

man in 1950 was around 330 roubles a month (GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 1754, l. 172), the

above mentioned men could make between 775 and 1,400 roubles a month (GARF, f.

413, o. 1, d. 1195, l. 2 and ll. 10–12; and ibid., d. 1754, ll. 1–16).11. Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in

Russia (New York 1994), 133. For Tumarkin’s discussion of the ‘official silence’ about

the war invalids under Stalin see pages 98–103. For her argument on the publication of

memoirs about the war see pages 104 and 110–12.

12. Phillips, op. cit., 52 and 71–2; Fieseler, ‘The Soviet Union’s ‘‘Great Patriotic War’’

Invalids’, 48–9; and Edele, ‘Veterans and the Welfare State’, 20–1.

13. Many of these oral recollections were aired both by the VOS radio station and the Perm’

provincial radio station. The written memoirs were printed in the regular Russian

alphabet.14. Shestakov, interview on June 16, 2010.

15. George Steinmetz, ‘Reflections on the Role of Social Narratives in Working-Class

Formation: Narrative Theory in the Social Sciences’, Social Science History, 16

(1992), 489–516; Mary Joe Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and

German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill, NC 1995)

and idem Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and

History (Ithaca, NY 2008). A classic study on the cultural construction of autobiogra-

phies in the Russian context is Reginald Zelnik, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The

Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, CA 1986). Recent years have

seen the mushrooming of research on Russian autobiography as a historicist genre.

Among the most useful works are Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience:

Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca, NY 2009); Beth Holmgren, ed., The Russian

Memoir: History and Literature (Evanston, IL 2003); Barbara Walker, ‘On Reading

Soviet Memoirs: A History of the ‘‘Contemporaries’’ Genre as an Institution of

Russian Intelligentsia Culture from the 1790s to the 1970s’, Russian Review, 59

(2000), 327–52.16. Diane Koenker, ‘Scripting the Revolutionary Worker Autobiography: Archetypes,

Models, Inventions, and Markets’, IRSH, 49 (2004), 371–400, at 372.17. Frederick Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the Bolshevik Revolution

(Ithaca, NY 2004); Igal Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial

(Cambridge, 2003) and idem Red Autobiographies: Initiating the Bolshevik Self (Seattle,

WA 2011); Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Diaries from the Stalin Era

(Cambridge 2006); Sean Guillory, ‘The Shattered Self of Komsomol Civil War

Memoirs’, Slavic Review, 71(3) (Fall 2012), 546–65, at 549. For a review of the literature

on Soviet subjectivity see Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, ‘Models of Selfhood and

Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective’, Slavic Review, 67(4) (Winter

2008), 967–86.

18. Phillips, op. cit., 51.19. On the cultivation of a language of optimism in the face of obstacles see Stephen

Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA 1997); Karen

Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin




(Bloomington, IN 2000); David Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of

Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 (Ithaca, NY 2003); and Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind.20. Ostrovskii’s Kak zakalialas’ stal’ was first published in 1932, but it continued to exercise

popularity among the Soviet blind throughout the post-war and post-Stalinist periods.

For instance, the woman writer A. Brushtein used it in 1962 to talk about the process of

becoming blind and the importance of never giving up. Andrew Wachtel, ‘One Day –

Fifty Years Later’, Slavic Review, 72(1) (Spring 2013), 102–17. Evgenii Dobrenko dis-

cusses the process of identification with the hero of Ostrovskii’s novel. See especially

the Chapter ‘Korchagin’s Happiness: The Ideal Reader’, in The Making of the State

Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford,

CA 1997), 282–304. See also N. Groznova, Schast’e bortsa. O romane N.A.

Ostrovskaogo ‘Kak zakalialas’ stal’’ (Moscow 1981). Other famous models were

Colonel Voropaev from Petr Pavlenko’s 1947 novel Happiness and Aleksei Meres’ev

from Boris Polevoi’s 1946 novel The Tale of A Real Man – both of whom were ampu-

tees. For other ‘portraits of heroic and absolute triumph over physical disability’ see

Anna Krylova, ‘‘‘Healer of Wounded Souls’’: The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet

Literature, 1944–1946’, The Journal of Modern History, 73(2) (2001), 307–331.21. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York 1994), 162.22. Ibid., 63. For a discussion of how the theoretical frames set by subaltern studies can

be applied to forms of cultural hegemony in the Soviet case see Il’ia Kalinin,

‘Ugnetennye dolzhny govorit’: massovoi prizyv v literaturu i formirovanie sovetskogo

sub’ekta, 1920-e – nachalo 1930-kh godov’, in A. Etkind, D. Uffel’mann and I. Kukulin,

eds, Tam, vnutri. Praktiki vnutrennei kolonizatsii v kul’turnoi istorii Rossii (Moscow

2012), 587–663.23. Douglas Baynton, ‘Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History’,

in Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky, eds, The New Disability History (New York

2001), 33–57, at 51.

24. Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London

1995), 10.

25. See the literature mentioned in endnote 2, esp. Whiteside and Finlayson.26. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War

(Chicago, IL 1996); Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in

Britain and Germany, 1914–1939 (Berkeley, CA 2001); J. M. Winter, Remembering

War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century (New

Haven, CT 2006); and Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory

(Bloomington, IN 2011).27. Laura Philips has suggested that Russian culture was more accepting of disabilities than

Western culture, ‘Gendered Dis/ability: Perspectives from the Treatment of Psychiatric

Casualties in Russia’s Early Twentieth-Century Wars’, in Social History of Medicine

20(2) (August 2007), 333–50. Lilya Kaganovsky has argued that disability was not

simply accepted, but even celebrated by Soviet culture – at least in the realm of rhetoric

and fantasy.How the Soviet Man was (Un)made: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity

under Stalin (Pittsburgh, PA 2008).28. For a classic description of work-oriented therapy in the Soviet Union see Madison,

Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 141–2. For an analysis of the role of labour as an

instrument of transformation for deviant subjects see Maria Galmarini, ‘The ‘‘Right to

Be Helped’’: Welfare Policies and Notions of Rights at the Margins of Soviet Society

Galmarini 673



(1917–1950)’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012),

esp. Chapter 3. Specifically, on the role of labour for re-making the Soviet deaf see

Claire Shaw, ‘Deaf in the USSR: ‘Defect’ and the New Soviet Person, 1917–1991’

(PhD Dissertation, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College

London, 2010).29. See Ot s’’ezda k s’’ezdu (Moscow 1989); Marat Biriuchkov, ‘Vserossiiskomu

Obshchestvu Slepykh – 80!’ Shkol’nyi vestnik, 4 (2006), 20–42; E. Ageev, ‘V nogu

so zriachimi!’, Nasha zhizn’, 4 (2000), 2–4 and 12–13; and A.Ia.

Neumyvakin, ‘Istoricheskie vekhi VOS (k 85-letiiu)’, at http://www.vos.org.ru/index.

php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1160:2010-03-17-10-25-03&catid=46:c-

gr-arhivpub&Itemid=157 (accessed January 5, 2011).

30. For discussions of Soviet workers’ identity vis-a-vis cultures of labour in the 1920s and

1930s see Diane Koenker, Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism,

1918–1930 (Ithaca, NY 2005) and Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of

Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941 (Cambridge 1988).31. The post-war expectation for inclusion within a collective spirit has been discussed also

by Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the

Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ 2000).32. GAPK, f. 1640, o.1, d. 1, l. 1. See also idem ll. 2–3; ll. 13–14; ll. 15–16; and ll. 17–18.33. GAPK, f. 1640, o.1, d. 32, l. 28.34. Chapter ‘Patoka A. E.’, in Vspominaiut veterany.

35. I. D. Gilev, Ostrovok sveta (Berezniki 1997), 38, 53 and 57. See also Gilev’s interview

recorded by Shestakov in December 2000 and preserved in his private archive.

36. Chapter ‘Cherdytsin M.A’. in Vspominaiut veterany. Chernytsin’s autobiography was

recorded in 1975.

37. Sarah Ashwin, Russian Workers: The Anatomy of Patience (Manchester 1999), 11.38. See especially the chapters ‘Drozdetskaia T.N.’, ‘Petrova L.Ia.’, ‘Gruppa rabochikh

kungurskogo UPP’ and ‘Stepanova V.P.’, in Vspominaiut veterany.39. Chapter ‘Savel’eva L.V.’, in Vspominaiut veterany.40. On gender roles in the late Soviet period see Anke Stephan, Von der Kuche auf den Roten

Platz. Lebenswege sowjetischer Dissidentinnen (Zurich 2005). See also Krylova, ‘‘‘Healer

of Wounded Souls’’’.41. Chapter Gusev V.V. in Vspominaiut veterany. For descriptions of how ‘happily’ (veselo)

and ‘peacefully’ (druzhno) the blind lived despite the difficult living conditions see also

the chapters ‘Ponamarev Iu.A.’, ‘Gruppa rabochikh kungurskogo UPP’, ‘Savel’eva

L.V.’, ‘Doronin I.F.’ and ‘Stepanova V.P’. See also the short stories ‘Dusha prosit

pesni’ and ‘Trudnoe schast’e’ in Gilev’s Ostrovok sveta, 62–63 and 84–86.42. See the chapters ‘Cherdytsin M.A’. and ‘Nikolaev O. G.’, in Vspominaiut veterany.43. Ivan Lukinykh was hired in the blind enterprise of Nytva in 1953 when he was 25 years

old. See his memoirs in the chapter ‘Lukinykh I.M’. in Vspominaiut veterany.44. This type of autobiography was not unique to blind narratives. Regina Gagnier calls all

autobiographical stories that recount the path towards self-improvement ‘militants’

narratives’ (‘Social Atoms: Working-Class Autobiography, Subjectivity, and Gender’,

Victorian Studies, 30 (1987), 335–363). Diane Koenker recognizes this type of autobiog-

raphy as the ‘canonical worker autobiography’ (‘Scripting the Revolutionary Worker

Autobiography’, 378). Julie Draskoczy has noticed this process in the autobiographies

written by prisoners working at the Belomor Canal construction site (‘The Put’ of




Perekovka: Transforming Lives at Stalin’s White Sea-Baltic Canal’, Russian Review,

71(1) (January 2012), 30–48). For a detailed discussion of conversion stories in Soviet

literature see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, IL 1981). In

reference to disabled men see Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man was (Un)made.45. Fieseler, ‘The Soviet Union’s ‘‘Great Patriotic War’’ Invalids’, 49.

46. GAPK, f. 1640, o. 1, d. 112, l. 9.47. Meeting a mentor is a key component of the socialist realism master plot. Clark, The

Soviet Novel.48. Quoted in Aleksandr Malyshev, ‘Vizhu serdtsem’, Vechernaia gazeta, 13 March 1981, 3.49. GAPK, f. 1640, o. 1, d. 127, l. 43.50. Quoted in Golubchikova, ‘Nado zhit’!’ 2.

51. Interview recorded in 1986 and preserved in Shestakov’s archive.52. Malyshev, ‘Vizhu serdtsem’, Vechernaia gazeta, 13 March 1981, 3.53. Ibid., 17 March 1981, 3.

54. GAPK, f. 1640, o.1, d. 1, l. 1. Malyshev was born in 1922, in the village of Osipovo

(Kostroma province). His father had been a peasant before the Revolution and later

found employment in the Soviet railway administration. His mother was a housewife.

He was mobilized in September 1940 in the Moscow Military Engineering Institute from

which he graduated in July 1941 with the rank of lieutenant. After two minor injuries,

Malyshev was seriously wounded on August 13, 1942 and completely lost his sight. His

autobiography, I See With My Heart (Vizhu serdtsem) was first published in several

instalments in the newspaper Vechernaia Perm’ in 1980 and then appeared as a mono-

graph in 1982. Malyshev wrote many other autobiographical texts which remained

unpublished and are currently preserved in the State Archive of the Perm’ Region.

The better preserved notes can be found in the following files: GAPK, f. 1640, o.1, d.

1, l. 1; ll. 2–3; ll. 13–14; ll. 15–16; and l. 17.

55. Vizhu serdtsem (Perm’ 1982), 10.56. M. Rikhter, ‘Muzhestvo voina’, Uchitel’, 7 May 1980, 2.57. V. N. Aleksandrov, ‘Muzhestvo uchenogo’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1962, no. 2, 153. See,

among the others, the memoirs of Ivan Kilikeev and Ivan Iurchenko in Vspominaiut

veterany.58. Malyshev, Vizhu serdtsem, 10. For a discussion of how Soviet writers represented muti-

lated veterans’ reintegration into the realm of private life see Krylova, ‘‘‘Healer of

Wounded Souls’’’.

59. Among the many articles, see I. Kizilova, ‘Uroki muzhestva’, Vechernaia Perm’, 7

September 1979, 2.

60. Malyshev, Vizhu serdtsem, 11.61. Ibid. In the 1970s Malyshev was often presented as the living incarnation of the fictional

Korchagin. See for instance the chapter ‘The Joy of Labor’ (Trudovoe shchast’e) in

Anatolii Osipov’s book Korchagins of the Five Continents (Korchagintsy piati kontinen-

tov, Perm’ 1973).62. Kizilova, ‘Uroki muzhestva’, 2. The importance of establishing an alterity has been

emphasized by Georges Gusdorf in the essay ‘Conditions and Limits of

Autobiography’, in James Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical

(Princeton, NJ 1980), 28–48.

63. Malyshev’s words as reported by the journalist Aleksandrov in the article ‘Muzhestvo

uchenogo’.

Galmarini 675



64. Rikhter, ‘Muzhestvo voina’, 2.65. Ibid.66. The whole episode is told in Malyshev’s autobiographical notes preserved in GAPK, f.

1640, o. 1, d. 1, ll. 4–12.67. GAPK, f. 1640, o. 1, d. 1, l. 8.

68. Born in 1924, in the village Us’va (Perm’ province), Shan’gin became blind in September

1942 while fighting in Stalingrad. For a synopsis of Shan’gin’s life see the documentary

film Slepoi kotoryi vidit (2005), which features Shan’gin telling his life story during a

skiing excursion with his brother and nephew.69. Phillips, 73–4. Tricia Stark, The Body Soviet: Propaganda, Hygiene, and the

Revolutionary State (Madison, WI 2009).70. Interview dated 1989, preserved in Shestakov’s personal archive.71. GAPK, f. 1640, d. 127, l. 34.

72. Aleksandr Graevskii, Zakon shchedrosti (Perm’ 1967).73. GAPK, f. 1640, d. 127, ll. 34–5.74. 1989 interview, preserved in Shestakov’s archive.

75. References to stubbornness (upornost’) as a positive character feature and key to hap-

piness are countless. For some specific examples see GAPK, f. 1640, o. 1, d. 3, ll. 1–2, ll.

5–6, and l. 10; ibid. d. 1, l. 4 (recommendation letters on behalf of Malyshev); GAPK, f.

1640, o. 1, d. 3, l. 9 (accounts on Malyshev and Shan’gin by other members of the Perm’

local section of VOS); Muginshtein, ‘Muzhestvo’, 2; Malyshev, Vizhu serdtsem, 31; S.

Nikolaev, ‘Pobeda voli’, Zvezda, 26 October 1945, 2; Iu. Vakhlakov, ‘Po primeru

Korchagina’, Molodaia Gvardiia, 8 October 1954, 2; A. Eremin, ‘Muzhestvo kommu-

nista’, Zvezda, 14 March 1961, 2; Aleksandrov, ‘Muzhestvo uchenogo’, 153; and T.

Kulakova, ‘Otlichnik narodnogo prosveshcheniia’, Uchitel’, 16 November 1977, 1.

76. Iu. Vakhlakov, ‘Predannost’ uvlecheniiu’, Zvezda, 14 February 1968, 2.77. Ia. Muginshtein, ‘Muzhestvo’, Zvezda, 4 April 1975, 2; and M. Birenbaum, ‘Slovo o

frontovikakh’, Nasha Zhizn’, February 1978, 14–15.78. Malyshev, ‘Vizhu serdstem’, Vechernaia Perm’, 15 March 1981, 3.79. Geoffrey Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism: Soviet Fiction Since Ivan Denisovich

(New York 1980). See also Anatoly Pinsky’s paper, ‘The Empirical and the

Independent: The Diaristic Form and Subjectivity under Khrushchev’ (forthcoming in

Slavic Review, Winter 2014 or Spring 2015), presented at the conference ‘Projects of

Modernity: Constructing the Soviet in European Perspective’ (Perm’, Russian

Federation, 24–26 June 2013).80. Sergei Shumakov’s speech, preserved in Shestakov’s archive.81. GAPK, f. 1640, o. 1, d. 116, l. 3.

82. Ibid., l. 30.83. Ibid., ll. 32 and 34.84. Ibid., ll. 34–5. For more details on the so-called ‘baian controversy’ see GAPK, f. 1640,

o. 1, d. 118, ll. 2–3 and d. 127, l. 27. The preference for music over other forms of

employment was not unique to the Perm’ blind community. According to a report on

the activities of the Presidium of the Central Administration of VOS read at the

Society’s Plenum in October 1943, the war blind of the Moscow province were com-

pletely uninterested in learning how to operate industrial machines, preferring to pursue

musical education over the acquisition of industrial skills (GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 347, l.

20).




85. GAPK, f. 1640, d. 125, ll. 47-51.86. Fieseler, ‘The Soviet Union’s ‘‘Great Patriotic War’’ Invalids’, 42. See also Dale, ‘The

ValaamMyth’, and Edele, ‘Veterans and the Welfare State’. On the treatment of beggars

in the Soviet Union see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth,and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism’, Cahiers du Monderusse, 47(1–2) (2006), 1–32; Elena Zubkova, ‘S protianutoi rukoi: nishchie i nishchenstvo

v poslevoennom SSSR’, Cahiers du Monde russe, 49 (April–September 2008), 441–74;and Hubertus Jahn, Armes Russland Bettler und Notleidende in der Russischen GeschichteVom Mittelalter bis in die Gegenwart (Paderborn 2010).

87. Chapter ‘Patoka A. E’. in Vspominaiut veterany.88. GAPK, f. 1640, o. 1, d. 127, l. 11.89. Malyshev, ‘Vizhu serdstem’, Vechernaia Perm’, 16 March 1981, 3.90. Gilev, Ostrovok sveta, 11. In stark contrast with Gilev’s moralizing discourse is Eduard

Kochergin’s representation of the mass of war wounded populating the Soviet trainstations in his novel Angelova kukla (Saint Petersburg 2008), esp. 41–6.

91. Malyshev, ‘Vizhu serdstem’, Vechernaia Perm’, 16 March 1981, 3.

92. GAPK, f. 1640, o. 1, d. 116, l. 36.93. Malyshev, ‘Vizhu serdstem’, Vechernaia Perm’, 16 March 1981, 3. In some recollections,

singing during the performance of work or participating in the enterprise’s choir were

signs of the cheerfulness that ruled in the blind workshops.94. Gilev, Ostrovok sveta, 99.95. Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience, 41.

96. In this respect his collection of personal narratives can be seen as a form of socialmemoir. See Katherine Lebow, ‘The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar PolishAutobiography and Social Rights’, Humanity, 3(3) (2012), 297–319.

97. Shestakov, interview dated June 16, 2010.

Author Biography

Maria Cristina Galmarini is Assistant Professor in the History Department atJames Madison University (VA, United States). Her current project – ‘The‘‘Right to Be Helped’’: Deviance, Entitlement, and the Soviet Moral Order’ –explores the social policies, biopolitical projects, and grassroots politics of entitle-ment that surrounded people with disabilities and other marginalized social groupsin Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1950.

Galmarini 677



Turning Defects to Advantages: The Discourse of Labor in the Autobiographies of Soviet Blinded...

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