TY - JOUR
AU - Starks,, Tricia
AB - Speech, and the companionate ability to hear it, featured prominently in the campaigns of Soviet officials to inculcate a new, revolutionary ideology into their largely illiterate population following the revolution of 1917. In this engaging, well-written, and clearly-structured volume, Claire L. Shaw asks where that left the deaf-mute – a group of about nine percent of the population in 1917 and rising in number after the effects of war and bombardment in World War II – and how the story of their interaction with the Soviet project to build a new man, a new society, and a new world might challenge the “orality” of the revolution, provide different images of the new citizen, and show alternative paths to inclusion in the revolutionary project. Shaw’s research illuminates new visions of revolution and challenges established narratives for many fields, joining a number of new works on disability and the senses in Russia and the Soviet Union but contributes in its own unique ways. Historians of the deaf will confront the idea of a universal deaf experience and the supremacy of western narratives that have deaf agency emerge in the 1960s. Sensory historians will engage the absence of a sense and its impact on conventional narratives of either oral or visual supremacy in the modern era. Disability historians will encounter a vision of inclusion based on collectivist labor ideals rather than private liberal ideology, and Russian and Soviet historians will question standard periodization, the parameters of Stalinist oppression, and the limits of post-Stalinist relaxation. Shaw draws much of her research from the institutional records of the All-Russian Association of Deaf-Mutes, known under the acronym VOG (Vserossiiskoe Ob”edinenie Glukhonemykh and maintaining under different names but the same acronym from its foundation in 1926 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union). VOG shepherded the deaf community of Russia through intense changes. The group mediated between grass-roots activism and state-sponsored programs, advocated for deaf people, and provided many services including social, cultural, and educational assistance. Like most of the west, the tsarist state depicted the deaf-mute as savage and incapable of political participation or integration into society. The provisional government, similarly captive to models of orality for civic life, did not allow the deaf to vote. The Soviet state, however, emphasizing the social, not private, origin of the self, envisioned a different pathway to citizenship – labor and integration into the worker collective – and allowed the inclusion of deaf people, along with all disabled, in the vote and in civic life following the revolution. Through the 1920s, into the Stalin era, and on into the period of massive institution and facility building in the 1950s and 1960s, deaf people worked to create an inclusive vision of the Soviet self where deafness was not an insurmountable barrier but an obstacle that could be overcome with productive labor which would allow eventual inclusion in the collective. While the Soviet state gave paths to inclusion, Shaw shows that it was not without its repressive actions. Soviet officials closed independent institutions in the 1920s and pushed orality in deaf education in later decades. An antipathy to sign language, expressed in the prerevolutionary era as a prejudice against the ability of gesture to convey higher thought, and later articulated by Stalin as antipathy to its “primitive” nature, created a conflict within the deaf community. Speech was needed for access to labor and educational attainment but sign was important for inclusion and participation in the deaf collective. Shaw explores these tensions regarding sign as well as societal pressures that transformed the Soviet deaf theater from a venue for the deaf into an entertainment for the hearing and the enduring social prejudices against the deaf for their perceived criminal tendencies. Shaw concludes her story with the post-1991 triumph of medical understandings of deafness, the seeds of which she situates in the Brezhnev era, and the decline of VOG, which she links to the aging of deaf activists, the decline of Soviet infrastructure, exposure to western ideas of deaf empowerment, and the fragmentation of the Soviet deaf community. As in many other areas of minority issues – for women, for homosexuals, for the transgendered -- the Soviets were ahead of the curve. The story of the deaf in the Soviet Union challenges conventional narratives from the west where liberation and community emerge much later, in the 1960s, and instead of a time of self-hood and citizenship the 1920s and 1930s were dominated by eugenics campaigns, limitations on civil rights, and blocks to deaf agency and community. But the differences for the deaf story are not limited to global comparisons. The opportunities for liberation through labor made available to the deaf, the ability to “overcome” a “social defect” made possible by Soviet ideology, left the deaf with a mixed attitude towards the Soviet past that confounds the conventional periodization of the Soviet system. Shaw argues that the deaf clung to Soviet selfhood longer than other social groups because of the many good things associated with the Soviet, and especially Stalinist, past. I perhaps would have enjoyed a bit more regarding the anxiety occasioned by the deaf – a group seen as inaccessible to major forms of Soviet propaganda (especially the radio) -- but this was likely because of the lack of sources. Deaf in the USSR is a volume with important reverberations for studies of disability, the senses, medicine, Russia, and the Soviet Union. Shaw articulates the historiographic issues in each of these fields clearly, making each accessible to the non-specialist, assuring that this would be an ideal book for graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses. This is an important book for not just historians of Russia and the Soviet Union, nor only scholars of deafness and disability, but for researchers in all of these fields and beyond. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Claire L. Shaw. Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917–1991
JF - Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
DO - 10.1093/jhmas/jrz009
DA - 2019-04-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/claire-l-shaw-deaf-in-the-ussr-marginality-community-and-soviet-zk20hwhzOg
SP - 232
VL - 74
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -