Concepts of health under socialism
Revolutionising Deafness: Disability and Agency in Soviet Russia, 1917-1926
Claire Shaw’s paper examines the activity of the deaf community in Soviet Russia after the revolution of 1917, as a means to shed light on the interaction between ideological models of selfhood and the agency and identity of deaf individuals. The post-revolutionary period saw the development of new, ideologically-based understandings of normality and disability, including the utopian belief that disabled individuals, given the right social circumstances, could ‘overcome’ their defect and become ‘New Soviet People’. This paper argues that these shifts provided deaf individuals with new opportunities for individual and collective agency, and shaped the development of a particular ‘deaf-Soviet’ identity in the post-revolutionary period.
Claire Shaw has recently completed a PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL.
Nervous Illness and the Cultivation of Health in Early Soviet Russia
Simon Pawley’s paper relates widespread concern about nervous illnesses in the 1920s to efforts by the Soviet state to encourage people actively to cultivate their health. Concern about nervous illness as a social malady as well as an individual condition led the Soviet state to encourage citizens to pursue health by engaging in physical culture and sport, rationalizing work-practices and engaging in ‘rational leisure.’ These efforts helped to transform the concept of ‘health’ from the mere avoidance of illness to the active pursuit of a healthy body and mind.
Simon Pawley is a PhD candidate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL.
The limits of Sovietisation: Comparing approaches to disability in East Germany and the Soviet Union
Studying ‘actually existing socialism’ is impossible without considering how comprehensive state healthcare and welfare provision structured the everyday life of citizens in central and eastern Europe. Social policies and services reflect official concepts of need, care and society and consequently shape how ‘vulnerable’ groups are defined and perceived. Forms of assistance for disabled people provide particularly sharp insights into questions of control within ostensibly caring services and ‘normality’ versus societal diversity.
Based on a pilot study of professional literature and documentary films shown on state television, my paper compares East German approaches to mental and physical disability with the Soviet Union’s paradigm of ‘defectology.’ I focus on the 1970s and early 1980s when extensive welfare systems had been established in both countries. Certain institutional similarities belie the fact that disability was much less of a political taboo in East Germany. The GDR’s approach to disabled people – especially the pedagogical basis of ‘rehabilitation’ – was foremost German and only secondly socialist, not least due to significant church-based provision. The productivist undertones of Marxism-Leninism thus had different implications for the organisation of disability services in East Germany and the USSR. Beyond enriching the study of daily life under state socialism, such divergence between the two countries is important for understanding the limits of policy coherence and Soviet ideological dominance in Warsaw Pact countries.
Michael Rasell
Lecturer, School of Health and Social Care, University of Lincoln, UK