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Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991
Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991
Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991
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Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991

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In Deaf in the USSR, Claire L. Shaw asks what it meant to be deaf in a culture that was founded on a radically utopian, socialist view of human perfectibility. Shaw reveals how fundamental contradictions inherent in the Soviet revolutionary project were negotiated—both individually and collectively— by a vibrant and independent community of deaf people who engaged in complex ways with Soviet ideology.

Deaf in the USSR engages with a wide range of sources from both deaf and hearing perspectives—archival sources, films and literature, personal memoirs, and journalism—to build a multilayered history of deafness. This book will appeal to scholars of Soviet history and disability studies as well as those in the international deaf community who are interested in their collective heritage. Deaf in the USSR will also enjoy a broad readership among those who are interested in deafness and disability as a key to more inclusive understandings of being human and of language, society, politics, and power.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 15, 2017
ISBN9781501713781
Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991

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    Deaf in the USSR - Claire L. Shaw

    DEAF IN THE USSR

    MARGINALITY, COMMUNITY, AND SOVIET IDENTITY, 1917–1991

    CLAIRE L. SHAW

    CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

    Ithaca and London

    For Ruth, Tony, and Edward

    We do our deeds in silence,

    And our deeds speak for us.

    —Deaf Soviet poet Ivan Isaev, 1971

    CONTENTS

    Acknowledgments

    Note on Transliteration and Terminology

    Glossary and Abbreviations

    Introduction

    1. Revolutionizing Deafness

    2. Making the Deaf Soviet

    3. War and Reconstruction

    4. The Golden Age

    5. Pygmalion

    6. Deaf-Soviet Identity in Decline

    Epilogue

    Notes

    Bibliography of Primary Sources

    Index

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    Looking back over my years of work on this project, I am conscious of the great many people and institutions who have helped me bring Deaf in the USSR to life. This book began at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and has come to fruition at the University of Bristol, where a generous year of leave soon after my appointment helped me access important new archival materials. In the intervening years, I was the grateful recipient of a Scouloudi Fellowship and a Past and Present Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, and was lucky enough to spend three months at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, working with the wonderful Sabine Arnaud. I thank all of these institutions for their support.

    Growing up in the grounds of Mary Hare Grammar School for the Deaf, where my father was principal, sparked an enduring interest in the deaf world, one that, as I pursued my studies in Russian language and history, would not let me go. I could not have written this book, however, without the help of those who opened the doors of the Russian deaf community to me. Alla Borisovna Slavina was an inspiration to meet: her insistence that Soviet deaf people stepped to the tempo of the March of the Enthusiasts was instrumental to my early research. Tania Davidenko and Vera Ezhova were enthusiastic teachers of Russian Sign Language; I only wish I had more time to practice. As I painstakingly worked my way through piles of VOG documents, the team at V edinom stroiu, including Mariia Evseeva, Iaroslav Pichugin, and Viktors Karepov and Skripov, welcomed me with unfailing warmth, kindness, and cups of tea, even when I accidentally broke their photocopier. Special thanks go to their editor, Viktor Palennyi, who has been an enthusiastic ally throughout this project, generous with his time and resources and always willing to interrupt his day job to answer obscure questions about Russian deaf history.

    My doktormutter, Susan Morrissey, has been involved in this project since its inception. Throughout my PhD, her insightful readings of my work pushed me to challenge my ideas and strengthen my arguments, and her support following its completion has never wavered. I am constantly grateful for her guidance and friendship (and that of my doktorschwester, Elisabeth Jahn-Morrissey). I thank Polly Jones, Stephen Lovell, and Miriam Dobson for their perceptive reading and their generous advice on how best to revise for publication. I also thank my undergraduate supervisor, Chris Ward, for encouraging me to pursue postgraduate study and for his faith that I could succeed. Many others have contributed to this project by debating ideas, reading drafts, and commenting on papers; thanks in particular go to Birgit Beumers, Wendy Bracewell, Matthew Brown, Charles Burdett, Pauline Fairclough, Julian Graffy, Simon Huxtable, Matthew Romaniello, Kristin Roth-Ey, Tricia Starks, Anna Toropova, and Emma Widdis. Over the last few years, it has been a pleasure to debate the nature of deaf spaces with Mike Gulliver, and this work is all the better for it. At Cornell University Press, Roger Haydon has engaged with my work with enthusiasm and perception; I am also grateful to Erin Davis, Carol Noble, and the two anonymous reviewers for their careful and constructive reading of the manuscript.

    The support I received as I made my way through the archives and libraries of Russia, Germany, and Britain has made this project possible. I thank the archivists of GARF, particularly Reading Room 2, and TsGA Moskvy; I am also grateful to the staff of the Lenin Library in Moscow and the Russian National Library in St Petersburg for their help. In London, thanks go to the staff of the SSEES library and Action on Hearing Loss library, especially the lovely Dominic Stiles, who gave me the keys to the store cupboard and allowed me to explore the dusty and eclectic Russian collection.

    As I have grappled with this project, my friends and fellow researchers have made the good times better and the stresses easier to bear. The residents of St George’s—Alex Nice, Zbigniew Wojnowski, Camille Muris-Prime, Hannah Meyer, and Digby Levitt—were a constant source of support; thanks also to Mary Ankers, Kath Apps, Rhian Atkin, Madeleine Barter, Cat Blinkhorn, Nick Gill, Delphine Grass, Matt Huxham, Eve Leigh, Dragana Obradovic, Debbie Pinfold, Siobhan Shilton, and Rowan Tomlinson for their encouragement and friendship. In Moscow, Marina Galkina, Anna Sokolovskaia, and James, Sveta, and Lily Marson have helped me to find a home away from home. I am also grateful to many generations of the FHC, particularly Seth Bernstein, for ensuring I would always have friends to meet on a Friday night.

    The Russian Department at Bristol has been a supportive and inspiring home over the last six years, for which I thank my colleagues Gesine Argent, Mike Basker, Rajendra Chitnis, Ruth Coates, Connor Doak, Natalia Gogolitsyna, Rebecca Gould, Derek and Dorinda Offord, Elena McNeilly, Jana Nahodilova, and Ilona Velichko. I am grateful to all my School of Modern Languages colleagues—too many to name here, for which I hope they will forgive me—who make it easy to come to work in the morning. I also thank my students, whose searching questions have pushed me to rethink many of my conclusions and whose enthusiasm for Russian and Soviet history is a source of constant inspiration.

    Last, but by no means least, my thanks go to my parents, Ruth and Tony, and my brother Edward, for their endless support and love. They have lived this project with me for the past ten years, debating ideas, picking me up when I was down, and reminding me that there is a world beyond my writing desk. This is as much their achievement as it is mine, and so I dedicate this book to them.

    NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TERMINOLOGY

    Russian words have been transliterated according to the Library of Congress scheme and are italicized in the text.

    The Russian word deaf-mute (glukhonemoi), in adjective and noun form, was in common use for much of the Soviet period. I use the term when translating from original source material; elsewhere, I use the terms deaf (glukhoi), hard-of-hearing (tugoukhii or slaboslyshchashii), and hearing (slyshashii). While it has become commonplace to capitalize the adjective Deaf to refer to those who see themselves as belonging to a culturally defined deaf community, this has political and historical connotations that do not map easily onto the Soviet experience, and so I do not follow that convention here except when referring to key concepts in Deaf studies.

    The Soviet theoretical framework surrounding disability made the distinction between invalidnost´, denoting a disability of the body, and defekt, which refers to sensory and developmental disorders, including deafness, blindness, and mental retardation (umstvenno otstalost´). In this work, I translate the term invalid and its derivatives as disabled, and defekt as defect.

    GLOSSARY AND ABBREVIATIONS

    Introduction

    The Soviet People of Silence

    Dvoe (The Two, 1965), a short film by the young director Mikhail Bogin, opens in the crowded streets of a nameless Soviet city. A music student, Serezha, is walking home from rehearsals at the Conservatory of Music when he accidentally bumps into a beautiful young woman, Natasha. His verbose and witty apologies are met merely by an enigmatic smile in response. She walks on. Intrigued by her beauty—and her silence—he follows her across town, making a series of fruitless attempts to provoke her into speaking to him. The reason for her reticence eventually becomes clear. On the steps of a theater, she stops to chat with a friend, expressing herself in vibrant sign language. The screen freezes and car brakes squeal. In an instant, Serezha understands: Natasha is deaf.

    From its opening scenes, Dvoe plunges the viewer into the everyday world of the Soviet deaf community. Natasha is a member of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Glukhikh, or VOG); a poster for its monthly magazine, Zhizn´ glukhikh (Life of the Deaf), adorns the front door of her apartment. By day, she studies acrobatics at the State Circus School. By night, she operates the lights at the Theatre of Sign and Gesture, the professional Soviet deaf theater founded in Moscow in 1957. Natasha communicates in sign language with her deaf friends and with Serezha through lipreading or written Russian on pages torn from a musical score. The film revels in her community’s otherness, hidden in plain sight within the city Serezha thought he knew. Yet at the same time, as Bogin himself was keen to stress, the film also reveals the commonalities between the young Soviet pair. As they get to know each other, Serezha and Natasha discover their mutual interest in the arts, their similar ambitions and experiences. She comes to see his chamber orchestra play; he attends a performance by the theater. Above all, Bogin commented, we wanted to tell on screen [the story] of the spiritual community of Soviet people, of genuine human worth.¹

    According to contemporary deaf reviewers, Bogin’s film vividly and accurately told of our society, which offers people all possibilities for the highest and fullest development of their creative strengths.² Yet despite this positive reading, the film’s depiction of deafness is not without its ambiguities. While the relationship between Natasha and Serezha points to a shared Soviet identity, Natasha and her deaf friends are far from integrated into the wider Soviet community. Their reliance on sign language actively prevents their interaction with hearing people. The reaction of certain hearing individuals to deaf characters is also telling: in a later scene, some young men try to get the attention of two of Natasha’s friends (with the same words Serezha used to flirt with Natasha) but, on realizing that the pair are deaf, they turn away in disgust. It is not even clear if any relationship develops between the two central characters. The final scenes show alternating shots of Natasha and Serezha walking separately through a park; whether they are walking toward or away from each other is a matter of interpretation.

    The tension between commonality and difference, belonging and not belonging, in the lives and identities of Soviet deaf people stands at the heart of this book. Deaf in the USSR explores the history of the deaf community in the Soviet Union from the February Revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991, while situating the experience of deaf people within the broader framework of Soviet programs of identity and the fashioning of a particular ideal of Soviet selfhood. It narrates the birth and development of a distinct Soviet deaf identity, its flourishing after the Great Patriotic War, and its decline during the 1970s. Through the examination of the shifting Soviet understandings of deafness and disability, as they were produced and disseminated through a complex matrix of science, ideology, education, and individual and group experiences, the text places deafness—and disability more broadly—in the center of Soviet history. By asking what it means to be deaf in a culture that is founded on a radically utopian and socialist view of humanity, and how Soviet ideologues reconciled the fallibility of the body with their dreams of a future society, deafness reveals the tensions and contradictions inherent in the Soviet revolutionary project.

    This book draws heavily on the history of one institution. First mooted in the heady days following the February Revolution of 1917 and formalized as a branch of the Soviet government in 1926, this institution changed its name over time—the All-Russian Association of Deaf-Mutes (Vserossiiskoe Ob´´edinenie Glukhonemykh, 1926–1932), the All-Russian Society of Deaf-Mutes (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Glukhonemykh, 1932–1959), and the All-Russian Society of the Deaf (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Glukhikh, 1959–)—yet its acronym of VOG, and its central role in Soviet deaf people’s lives, remained constant. It continues to function, in a different form, to this day. VOG provided an institutional framework that came to encompass all areas of deaf people’s lives, including work placement, living space, social activities, and cultural and educational services. It represented both a tool of Soviet governance and a locus of deaf grassroots activism and community building; founded and run by deaf people, VOG enabled the emergence of a strikingly cohesive form of deaf community identity within the Soviet body politic. The story of Soviet deafness, encapsulated in Natasha’s silence, is one of a distinctive and vibrant community, defined by its experience of the visual and institutionalized in a complex of social clubs, cultural institutions, workshops, and living spaces. Studying the history of VOG thus offers us an important new perspective on the institutional frameworks of marginality and community within Soviet society.

    Within these institutional structures, this book is fundamentally concerned with deaf people and their relationship to the Soviet project. VOG incorporated a wide variety of individuals and groups defined as deaf—those deaf from birth and late-deafened; signing and speaking deaf people—alongside hearing pedagogues, bureaucrats, and children of deaf parents, who variously engaged with, negotiated, and distanced themselves from prevailing definitions of deafness and sovietness. By engaging with the narratives of this constellation of Soviet deaf people, as revealed in institutional archives, deaf journalism, literature, art, and personal memoirs, this book explores the self-understanding of deaf citizens as socialist subjects. These individuals framed themselves as a community of silence within the Soviet body politic, challenging the perceived marginalization of imperfect individuals that has long defined historical narratives of Soviet disability. At the same time, the ideological frameworks of VOG, and the lives of those deaf people within it, were shot through with identifiably Soviet values, such as collectivism, mutual aid, and a desire to transcend and overcome the imperfect body in the service of bigger, social goals. The tension and negotiation between these two identities—deafness and sovietness—is the subject of this book.

    Soviet Deafness

    Deafness, referred to in Soviet scientific parlance as a defect (defekt), took on particular meanings in the Soviet context.³ Understandings of physical difference became intimately bound up with Bolshevik ideology and the ideals of the communist experiment. From the moment of its creation, the Soviet state represented an ongoing transformative project, through which the raw human material of a backward, peasant country was to be forged anew as a classless, egalitarian, and, ultimately, communist society.⁴ The individual in this scenario was viewed as plastic, able to be molded into the revolutionary ideal of the New Soviet Person, the rational and collectivist worker in whose name power had been seized.⁵ While the ideological discourse of the New Soviet Person tended to focus on the will and the consciousness of Soviet subjects, the physicality of the Soviet ideal was made abundantly clear in popular culture, embodied in the healthy, muscular workers and plump children of Soviet novels, films, posters, and parades.⁶ Soviet individuals were expected to work to remake themselves in the mold of these Soviet heroes. Yet within these utopian dreams it was unclear what to do with individuals seen as physically flawed. Could a disabled or defective body embody the Soviet ideal?

    Soviet deafness provides a revealing window into the dreams and limitations inherent in Soviet practices of molding the self, practices that have since been examined through the lens of biopolitics.⁷ Drawing on Foucault’s vision of modern statehood as the fostering of the right to life of its citizens, historians such as David Hoffmann and Peter Holquist have explored the interventionist policies of the early Soviet state as part of broader, pan-European attempts to foster an idealized, healthy body politic. Far from seeking to subjugate society and obliterate people’s sense of self, writes Hoffman, Soviet authorities sought to cultivate educated, cultured citizens who would transcend selfish, petty-bourgeois instincts and contribute willingly to a harmonious social order.⁸ Deafness interacted in particular ways with this project to develop ideal Soviet subjects, a project in which deaf people were included from the earliest years of the revolution. Not in itself incapacitating (or even visible), deafness did not preclude physical fitness or labor, key aspects of the theoretical makeup of the New Soviet Person. Deafness did not prevent an individual from wielding a hammer or working a metal lathe, nor, as the decades passed, did it impede deaf participation in the symbolic rituals of Soviet life, such as the May Day parades on Red Square. As such, deafness occupied a distinctly liminal category, in contrast to the physically crippled bodies of war veterans which, as Lilya Kaganovsky has shown, subverted the cultural fantasy of virile, Stalinist masculinity.⁹ From their place on the factory floor or on the Stakhanovite honor board,¹⁰ deaf bodies easily inserted themselves into the physically healthy vision of the Soviet body politic.

    Deafness might have been a hidden disability, but it was still ideologically fraught. As an obstacle to communication, deafness represented a challenge to Marxist ideologies of the self, which posited the primacy of community and social interaction in the shaping of individual consciousness. Early Soviet writings on deafness accepted its ideologically problematic nature, yet at the same time they viewed deafness as a social phenomenon, open to intervention by the state and situated within the range of backward human characteristics that the new Soviet utopia would easily cure. In framing deafness as the product of an outdated social system, the Soviet regime could claim deaf people as integral to the Soviet project, and deaf people themselves could tap into the discourses of self-transformation that characterized the early years of the revolutionary project. The utopian potential inherent in the ideal of the New Soviet Person—that of transforming a flawed, backward individual into the Soviet ideal—was seen to apply equally to the deaf. In the Soviet context, deafness was seen as an obstacle to be overcome through medical, social, and educational means. With the right training, skills, and support, it was argued, the deaf could transcend their defect and become active and useful members of Soviet society.

    This strain of eschatological thinking was in many ways typical of the first Soviet decades. As historian Igal Halfin argues, Marx conceived the New Man as a promise of the beyond, a subject-to-be that seeks realization; as such, the coming of the new society promised the creation of new people whose contours—both physical and mental—had yet to be elaborated.¹¹ The notion that deaf people could cease to be deaf, either through medical intervention or the reorganization of society, was thus not out of place in this new conceptual universe.¹² This way of thinking left a significant legacy within the Soviet deaf community; the notion of overcoming deafness, through a shifting constellation of means, remained central to Soviet deaf identity well into the 1980s. Yet such discourses were constantly challenged by the physical and material reality of deafness: the number of deaf people fluctuated throughout the Soviet period but singularly failed to shrink or to be overcome. Official census figures put the incidence of deafness in 1897 at 124,315 (approximately 9 percent of the population of the Russian Empire), and in 1929 at 115,298 (7.8 percent of the population of the RSFSR); VOG activists estimated the figures to be much higher, around 200,000 in 1917.¹³ By 1971, internal VOG figures recorded 169,855 deaf and hard of hearing individuals in the RSFSR, 148,627 of whom were over the age of fifteen.¹⁴

    These tensions between ideological frameworks and medical realities hint at the complex issue of definition confronting Soviet deaf people and those who study them. What exactly did it mean to be deaf (glukhoi) in the USSR? As Douglas Baynton has argued in the U.S. context, the typical understanding of deafness as simply a matter of hearing loss conceals fundamental complications and nuances: Physical differences do not carry inherent meanings. They must be interpreted.¹⁵ It is certainly true that a broad definition of deafness as hearing loss or lack (nedostatok), resting on a European-descended understanding of deafness as a medical reality, is consistently evident in discussions at Soviet state level and among deaf people themselves.¹⁶ This notion of physical lack was refracted by particular Soviet concerns, however, with deafness at various moments viewed as a lack of culture, as a form of backwardness, and as a personal tragedy. The perceived impact of this lack also revealed the preoccupations of Soviet educators, activists, and deaf citizens, who invoked shifting understanding of capacity throughout the Soviet period and engaged with emerging notions of equality, agency, support, and welfare.

    Hearing loss is not the only definition of deafness revealed in this book. Sign language (mimika), in particular, played an important role in cementing a sense of deaf identity throughout the Soviet period. The Soviet state had a fluctuating and ambiguous attitude to sign language, in line with most Western states at the time, and did not formally recognize sign as a language in its own right. In response to strong lobbying from VOG, however, the state came to accept sign language as a communicative tool within the deaf community and tacitly facilitated its development as a marker of deaf identity. The presence of state-funded sign language interpreters in factories, higher education establishments, courts of law, and doctors’ offices beginning in the late 1920s enabled sign to become a common feature of everyday life for deaf people and pushed deaf people to learn sign in order to access work and services. In the 1950s, the development of sign-language theater as a distinct art form both at an amateur level within the deaf club system and at a professional level in the Theatre of Sign and Gesture, raised its status. Similarly, developments in linguistics, such as the creation of the first sign language dictionary by I. F. Geil´man in 1957, caused sign to be recognized more widely as a language worthy of the name.

    This narrative of the flourishing of sign language is an important part of Soviet deaf history, linking the Soviet experience to a broader understanding of deafness as a social identity defined by established patterns of cultural transmission, and a common language.¹⁷ Strikingly, the attempts to foster sign language through interpreting practice, cultural institutions, and linguistic research were in practice distinctly Soviet, rather than Russian, revealing the linkages between deaf activists and institutions across the USSR and, later, the Eastern Bloc.¹⁸ The celebration of sign language was not universal, however, and not all those defined as deaf in this study were sign language users. Many deaf people, particularly those deafened later in life, chose not to learn sign; others preferred to use written communication or fingerspelling. These language attitudes were influenced by the thorny question of linguistic definition, with deaf activists and state representatives engaging with sign variously as a minority language, as a modality of oral speech, as a form of everyday practice, and as a marker of unculturedness. Soviet concerns about language value thus informed deaf cultural practices.

    Deafness was also defined by the cultural and social organizations under the umbrella of VOG that shaped the lives of its members. As Christopher Krentz has argued, deaf people at various historical moments have expressed the desire to relocate to places where they could escape prejudice and manage their own affairs.¹⁹ In many respects, VOG represented the ultimate realization of this desire—a deaf-run state body that unified deaf grassroots activism and advocated for deaf people. From its origins in 1917, with the efforts of deaf activists, VOG gradually became an institutional framework that encompassed all areas of deaf people’s lives, including work placement, living space, social activities, and cultural and educational services. Techniques of concentration, or the grouping of deaf people in state industry and educational institutions, similarly fostered a collective deaf identity. This matrix of deaf spaces, in which visual cultural practices predominated, lay at the center of Soviet deaf people’s everyday experiences. In accounts of the Soviet period, these spaces—and the personal and emotional ties that exist within them—predominate; the notion of the deaf community as a surrogate family is a common theme, with the early years of deaf activism driven by personal connections and the advocacy of certain individuals. Biological families also played a role; unlike in continental European and North America, where policy was more directly influenced by eugenic concerns, the banning of deaf intermarriage was never posited in the USSR.²⁰ Activists referred to it as a normal occurrence, with hearing children of deaf marriages often entering the deaf community and working as sign language interpreters.²¹ This personal, immediate experience of the local community laid the groundwork for the emergence of, to use Benedict Anderson’s much-cited term, an imagined community of Soviet deaf people in the later years of VOG.²²

    While it might be tempting to consider the deaf community as a particularly elaborate form of Soviet subculture, its institutional frameworks complicate this picture. As part of the state hierarchy, VOG was an integral part of the Soviet biopolitical vision of overcoming and individual transformation. When we discuss the deaf community, it is therefore difficult to divide the Soviet world into easy binaries of deaf and hearing, state and grassroots, us and them.²³ Deaf activists in VOG acted as conduits for Soviet ideological values, translating and appropriating official categories of practice in a manner suitable for their deaf constituents. At the same time, their role as agents of the state enabled them to claim the right to advocate on behalf of their deaf comrades, making the case for sign language and deaf cultural specificity in the face of state attempts to integrate deaf people into the broader structures of Soviet governance. While not all deaf people were activists, the sheer reach of VOG (which, according to internal figures, included 98.6 percent of all Soviet Russian deaf people by 1978) perpetuated and legitimated the particular linguistic, cultural, and communal identity of Soviet deaf people while tying that identity firmly to the structures and values of the Soviet experiment.²⁴ These values shifted over time, from activism and agency to a discourse about benefits (l´goty) and welfare in the aftermath of World War II.

    The ideological notion of a typical deaf person, to be transformed by social and educational means, was thus belied by the diverse variety of deaf experiences and understanding of deafness under the umbrella of VOG. The Soviet deaf community, broadly conceived, united a wide variety of types and causes of hearing loss, linguistic practices, and relationships to other deaf people and to deaf cultural and social institutions. Within and outside VOG, the terms deaf (glukhoi) and deaf-mute (glukhonemoi) fluctuated, understood at times as markers of inclusion or exclusion within deaf social and cultural circles, or within the imagined Soviet body politic. In their fluctuations and politicization, these terms became barometers of the emergence and overlapping of distinct deaf and Soviet identities, identities that engaged and informed each other.

    Marginality/Sovietness

    The notion of deaf people (and of other disabled people in the USSR) as marginalized, pushed aside in the Soviet state’s zeal for social homogenization, remains central to much of the literature surrounding Soviet disability. As scholars have argued, the assertion that there are no invalids in the USSR! underpinned Soviet state attitudes and led to disabled individuals being excluded from work places, pushed aside by welfare bureaucracies, failed by medical institutions, and marginalized by wider society.²⁵ Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova have argued that the state socialist legacies of control, segregation and stigma continue to haunt disabled people in postsocialist societies.²⁶ In the strongest articulation of this argument, Maria Galmarini-Kabala suggests that deaf people, alongside other marginalized groups such as unemployed single mothers, were always perceived as abnormal in the Soviet system and thus denied any real chance at integration.²⁷

    This tale of enforced marginalization is complicated by the experience—and indeed the very existence—of the Soviet deaf community. Over the course of the Soviet period a strong deaf identity emerged, institutionalized in the frameworks and organizations of VOG, and shaped by a visual understanding of the world, but always informed by and in dialogue with Soviet understanding of the self and of society. The diverse cohort of individuals with varying levels of hearing loss became molded into an institutionalized social force, and deafness became not simply a defect but a community, a language, and a lived reality imbued with the characteristics of sovietness.

    These two identities—the Soviet and the deaf—became intertwined in the revolutionary ferment of 1917, as deaf people broke the chains of prerevolutionary marginality and claimed agency and independence. Before 1917, deaf people had been equated with the insane or mentally impaired and kept under a system of tutelage that curtailed their rights and individual freedoms. In its destruction of the legal structures of tsarism, the revolution also enabled the deaf to shake off the bounds of tutelage and claim agency and independence for themselves. Throughout the Soviet period, this demand for agency proved a defining motif in the history of the deaf. Deaf Soviet subjects insisted time and again on their right to work, to study, to support themselves, and to be independent (samodeiatel´nye) citizens of the Soviet state. This demand for agency was not simply a question of self-sufficiency; the deaf actively wrote themselves into the Soviet narrative of overcoming, challenging their defect by seeking to demonstrate that their capabilities matched, and even surpassed those of the hearing. These claims to agency shifted over time, from a practical focus on industrial skills and basic education to a broader conception of the artistic and educational talents of Soviet deaf people (as epitomized by Bogin’s Natasha). In labor, education, culture, and social life, deaf citizens publicly rejected their marginal, prerevolutionary identity and claimed equality of capability and opportunity.

    This rhetorical rejection of marginality was not straightforward, however, and its course reveals the complex interdependency of marginalization and agency in the USSR. From the very beginning of the Soviet period, deaf people insisted that agency and sovietness were possible only if the deaf joined together to run their own services and facilitate their own transformation: The affairs of deaf mutes are their own, as one of the early leaders of VOG asserted in 1925.²⁸ This choice to remain together in order to facilitate their own transformation into Soviet citizens thus situates the marginalizing impulse not in the structures of the Soviet state but within the deaf community itself. Indeed, deaf people’s insistence on their own institutional frameworks often stood at odds with the Soviet government’s frequent attempts to integrate them into the social and organizational structures of the broader hearing community. This insistence on deaf self-determination shows both their unwillingness to entrust their fates to the structures of hearing society and governance, and the ultimate acceptance by the Soviet state of the promise that, by being together as a community, deaf people would be able to enact their transformation into full-fledged Soviet citizens. This practical distancing was not without consequences; the lack of contact between VOG and hearing institutions, and between deaf and hearing people, represented a very real barrier to mutual understanding.

    While Soviet deaf people insisted on their right to be treated equally and empowered to take their place in the Soviet body politic, their innate physical and conceptual difference was never denied. Indeed, the celebration of their unique path to socialism rested on the definition and exploration of their deafness. As Brigid O’Keeffe has argued in relation to the Soviet Roma, notions of alterity were an integral part of the transformation of the disparate populace of the former Russian Empire into a unified Soviet body politic: Nationality policy worked as a pliable tool of minority peoples’ Soviet self-fashioning.²⁹ Deaf subjects within VOG were certainly aware of other categories of difference, at certain times mobilizing categories of minority nationhood, gender, and physical disability to assert their right to self-determination. Yet these parallels were only accepted insofar as they enabled deaf people to embrace socialism and become active agents of their own lives. Attempts by the Soviet state to equate the deaf with other disabled groups, such as the blind, were resisted; despite attempts by the state to standardize the activities of VOG with those of its sister organization, the All-Russian Society of the Blind (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Slepykh, or VOS), there was strikingly little actual contact between their two constituencies. As the deaf engineer Sergei Usachev explains, The deaf and the blind, in light of the difficulty in communicating with each other, did not tend to make friends.³⁰ The claim made by VOG activists in the 1920s that deaf people should be considered deaf in form, socialist in content—an adaptation of Stalin’s classic formulation to describe ethnic difference within the USSR—thus represented less an acceptance of the deaf as part of a broader marginalized community and more a powerful rhetorical shift toward agency and inclusion: like minority nations (narody), deaf people’s difference could be recast as a tool of integration, rather than an obstacle to it.

    The notion that deafness might represent a different modality of sovietness engages in productive ways with new understandings of Soviet subjectivity. Since the opening of the Soviet archives, Soviet social historians have sought new ways of analyzing the success or failure of the biopolitical ambitions of the Soviet state, looking to diaries and personal documents as a means of considering the New Soviet Person as a complex process of self-realization. Those concerned with mapping the contours of the Soviet (and particularly Stalinist) soul have looked to break down the Cold War picture of an assumed liberal self hiding under a performance of loyalty to the Soviet state, instead examining ideology as a productive force that shaped individual and collective experiences.³¹ As Jochen Hellbeck’s seminal work on Soviet diaries argues, Anyone who wrote himself into the revolutionary narrative acquired a voice as an individual agent belonging to a larger whole. Moreover in joining the movement individuals were encouraged to transform themselves.³² Indeed, Soviet ideology emerges as a driving force in the development of Soviet deaf identity: Soviet values such as collectivism, initiative, consciousness, and labor were key categories used by deaf individuals to conceptualize their own identity.

    Scholars of Soviet subjectivity have also questioned the degree to which analytical models of the self are perceived as homogeneous and essentialist. As Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone point out, It was possible for the Soviet self to possess contradictory sensibilities and exhibit mixed emotions as it negotiated biological needs, interpreted cultural codes, and constructed self-definitions in dialogue with state and community precepts.³³ The contested role of biology within this paradigm has begun to receive significant scholarly attention, with historians noting that, while the physical contours of the idealized Soviet body were a ubiquitous part of propaganda, the New Man in the Soviet Union was to approximate the ideal of a total man, which involved the soul as well as the body.³⁴ Certainly, the deaf experience points to a distinct physical plurality within the Soviet model of the self that opened up opportunities for a variety of sensory and linguistic experiences within the Soviet ideological frame. This stands in stark contrast to Nazi Germany, for example, which viewed essential characteristics such as race and physical disability as grounds for social exclusion, sterilization, and death.³⁵

    Indeed, deaf people’s evident willingness to sign Bolshevik—to adapt Stephen Kotkin’s concept of speaking Bolshevik, or the obligatory language for self-identification employed by Soviet individuals—challenges our understanding of the USSR as a logocentric (and indeed, phonocentric) universe.³⁶ It thus situates this work within a developing field of Soviet sensory history.³⁷ From the metalworker Petr Spiridonov, who signed life has become more joyous, comrades! in a newspaper interview

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