The Right to Be Helped: Deviance, Entitlement, and the Soviet Moral Order 9781501757884

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THE RIGHT TO BE HELPED

THE RIGHT TO BE HELPED DEVIANCE, ENTITLEMENT, AND

THE SOVIET MORAL ORDER Maria Cristina Galmarini-Kabala

NIU PRESS/ DEKALB

NIU Press I DeKalb, IL Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115 © 2016, 2017 by Northern Illinois University Press first printing in paperback, 2017 All rights reserved 25242322212019181716 978-0-87580-769-0 (paper) 978-0-87580-497-2 (cloth) 978-1-60909-196-5 (e-book)

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Design by Shaun Allshouse Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov Library of Congress Control Number: 2016285284

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction Prologue Deviant Citizens in Fin-de-Siecle and Interwar Europe

SECTION I Ideas of Rights and Agents of Help

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Chapter 1 Social Rights in Russia Before and After the Revolution Chapter 2 From Invalids to Pensioners

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Chapter 3 The Activists and Their Charges

SECTION II The Practice of Help

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Chapter 4 "Homes ofWork and Love" (1918-1927)

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Chapter 5 "Worthless Workers-They Don't Fulfill the Norms" (1928-1940) Chapter 6 "A Massively Traumatized Population" (1941-1950) Epilogue The Rivalry with the West and the Soviet Moral Order Timeline of Welfare in Russia and the Soviet Union

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Glossary Notes

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Bibliography Index

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Considering themselves as a model product of nature, the "normals" ... believe it natural to apply ... their concepts about what is proper and what is improper, without worrying too much whether their conceptsof the "normals" -correspond to the demands of justice.

-Deaf activist Aleksandr Udal', 1917

To my son Matteo, in gratitude for the adventure we shared

Acknowledgments

"This Rubicon will be passed;' I told myself every time I was ready to give up. That's what the blinded veteran Aleksandr Malyshev repeated to himself when he was writing his doctoral dissertation in the early 1950s. This simple statement gave me the energy and the strength to pursue my project as much as it sustained Malyshev in his academic endeavors. However, for me as for Malyshev, it would have not mattered without the comradely support of colleagues, friends, and family. It is my great pleasure to thank at least some of them here. I am deeply thankful to my academic advisors at the University of Illinois for their constant support and guidance. First and foremost, I thank Diane Koenker, who has indefatigably read all the versions of this book since its very inception, has guided me with her intelligence and sincere care, and has taught me to trust myself as a historian. Many other mentors have also greatly contributed to shaping my thinking: Mark Steinberg, Antoinette Burton, John Randolph, and Maria Todorova gave me precious advice and encouragement. Both inside and outside the halls of Gregory Hall, they have been a source of inspiration for me throughout the years. Among my many Russian mentors, I am particularly grateful to Galina Yankovskaya, who shared with me her deep knowledge of Stalinism and made my visits to Russia possible despite all bureaucratic hindrances. I largely wrote this book at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies in Cambridge, where I enjoyed the warm support of colleagues from a variety of disciplines. In particular, I thank Terry Martin, Stephanie Sandler, Juliane Furst, Mikhail Dolbilov, all the Fellows in the Subjectivities and Identities in Eurasia Seminar as well as my colleagues in the Historians' Seminar and the Gender, Socialism, and Postsocialism Working Group. I am thankful to Christine Worobec for her feedback on the book's introduction and her support of the entire project; to Thomas Ewing and the other anonymous reviewer of my draft manuscript for their careful reading and constructive criticism; to my editor Amy Farranto for believing in my ideas; to Timur Mukhamatulin for his work as research assistant; and to Anna Ivanova for looking up a

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last-minute reference in the libraries of Moscow. I owe much gratitude also to Mary Louise Loe, Christine Varga- Harris, Liene OzoliQa-Fitzgerald, Ali sa Klots, and Vladimir Ryzhkovskii for the feedback they offered on various drafts of my chapters. This book would have not been possible without the generous financial support of the International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and the Office of Dean David Jeffrey at James Madison University. I also thank Helen Sullivan, Jan Adamczyk, and Joe Lenkart of the Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois as well as the archivists and librarians of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Moscow), the Archive of the Russian Academy of Education (Gorki Leninskie, Moscow province), the State Scientific-Pedagogical Library K. D. Ushinskii on Pogodinskaia St. (Moscow), the State Archive of Perm' Region (Perm'), the Library and Museum of the All-Russian Society of the Blind (Perm'), Perm' University, and the Historical Archive of Omsk Province (Omsk). I would have not been able to pursue my research without the intellectual generosity and assistance of many colleagues at these institutions. I am deeply indebted to all of them for the time and energy they devoted to me, day after day and year after year. Their expertise, mentorship, and hospitality are the pillars on which this book stands. Many friends have helped me through this book and supported me with their love, intelligence, honesty, and patience. Any list of names would be incomplete, but I do wish to express special gratitude to a group of loyal tovarishchi who have shared with me not only their wisdom of things Russian, but also true friendship: Olga Svinarskii, Nazanine Agassi, Yulia Dolinnaia, Veneta Ivanova, and Hana Jochcova in Urbana-Champaign; Iaroslav Leont'ev, Marina Bubnova, Galina Deeva, and Andrei Biurkland in Moscow; Mariia Romashova and her amazing family, Olga Kislukhina, Ekaterina Petkova, Veronika Zaleshchuk, and Mariia Khrustaleva in Perm'; and Umut Abeldinova in Omsk. Last but not least, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my family: my mother, Teresa Benedetti, and my father, Gaetano Galmarini (now deceased). There are no words to say how grateful I am to my beloved, Jakub Kabala, whose name truly deserves to be on the cover of this book. I thank him for the interest that he has always shown in my ideas, for the time we spent talking about this book, for his insights, his fresh perspective, his sharp comments, his sense of humor, and his intellectual openness to

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a world that was new to him and that we now share. I thank him also for our child, Andrea Aleksander, and the promise of more books and ideas to discuss together. My son Matteo, as usual, is the real engine behind it all. I thank him for making me laugh, forcing me to "stop thinking" (as he says), and constantly reminding me of why I wanted to write this book. To him I devote it, because he does not see any difference between "normal" and "abnormal;' and I hope he never will.

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0 R T WE NT Y L0 N G years, since 1909, the village teacher Mariia

Petrovna Zolotova-Sologub had worked in "nightmarish conditions:' During the day, she received her pupils in a cold and damp peasant hut. In the evenings, she walked behind the broken oven that separated the classroom from her bedroom, consumed a modest dinner, and went to sleep. Living in unheated quarters and subsisting on a "starvation diet" had disastrous consequences on her health. Zolotova-Sologub had a complicated pregnancy and a premature delivery, as a result of which her daughter Margarita grew up as a "weak, sick, and nervous" child. The mother herself began to suffer from various ailments such as "hysteria and neurasthenia, heart disease, and anemia:' Finally, Zolotova-Sologub developed rheumatoid arthritis and underwent the amputation of a leg. "Now I am a cripple ... a complete invalid;' she wrote in June 1929 in a letter to the Women Workers' and Peasants' Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Unable to walk and to care for her sick child, Zolotova-Sologub argued that she needed "help" -medical assistance for herself and a monthly subsidy to buy food for her daughter. More importantly, she felt entitled to the state's help. Indeed, Zolotova-Sologub did not come from the wealthy and privileged whom the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had cast out as class enemies and alien elements. Not only had she worked to bring literacy to the Russian countryside, she had also been part of a Bolshevik organization and-as she claimed in her letter-suffered mistreatment at the hands of the White armies during the Civil War of 1918-1921. Yet, Zolotova -Sologub did not have the required working seniority to qualify for a decent disability pension. The sixteen rubles and sixty-six copecks that the state insurance agency had assigned her were certainly not enough to live on. Describing her predicament to the state authorities, this disabled single mother insisted that the Soviet socialist state had the duty to provide free medical therapy, food, and education to her daughter and herself. "Soviet power;' she asserted, could not possibly "forget" her and refuse her help simply because she was now "useless" and no longer able to perform productive labor. In the

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end, as Zolotova-Sologub intimated in her letter, the very moral legitimacy of Soviet socialism depended on the realization of her right to be helped. As she wrote, "Is this [rejection of help] in line with the program of the Party and of socialism turning into communism? ... Doesn't an educated person-simple and working, sick and with a sick child-doesn't she have the right to enjoy at least the crumbs at the table of the revolutionary feast?" 1 This book embodies my aim to answer Zolotova-Sologub's questions. My intention is to illuminate the ways in which marginalized members of Soviet society understood their social rights and articulated their moral expectations vis-a-vis the socialist state between 1917 and 1950, and to analyze how various state authorities, mid-level bureaucrats, and educated professionals responded to vulnerable individuals' requests for help. Their interactions on the issue of social justice could be characterized by an enlightened nature, but also by coercive discipline, and most frequently by a combination of both. To disentangle these contradictory forces, in this book I focus on four specific social groups-behaviorally problematic children, unemployed single mothers, and blind and deaf adults-and offer case studies from three major urban centers in the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic-Moscow, Perm: and Omsk. Through this material, I argue that the dialogue over marginalized individuals' right to be helped was pivotal to defining the moral order of Soviet socialism.

The Unspoken Variables of Lenin's Formula and the Rights of the Deviants Vladimir Lenin described the social contract under socialism in terms of needs and contributions, famously saying "he who does not work shall not eat:' Scholars have generally read this motto as indicative of the revolutionary injunction to distinguish between the friends and the enemies of the new Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The workers-i.e., the able-bodied and industrially productive citizens of the first socialist country in the worldmade up the first group, while the rich, the bourgeoisie, and the parasitical exploiters of the workers' labor constituted the second. The welfare of those who lived off their own work was protected by a state-funded insurance system, which-although far from truly effective-provided industrial workers with a strong sense of entitlement and identity as the core of the Soviet project. 2 In turn, for those who evaded the central duty of Soviet citizenship to engage in useful work, nothing less than revolutionary justice demanded

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the deprivation of political as well as social rights. This logic, as Golfo Alexopoulos has shown, did not preclude the politically disenfranchised from adopting specific petitioning practices of their own. However, they constituted the least entitled group within Soviet society, who could at best make a claim for reinclusion into the community. 3 A reading of Lenin's provision through such an inclusionary-exclusionary framework does not, however, account for the large and nebulous group of citizens who fell in between the friends-foes divide and lived on the margins of the nascent Soviet collectivity. These were people like Zolotova-Sologub: men and women impaired in their mobility, sight, or hearing. They could be unemployed and unmarried mothers, or children with behavioral problems, mental disorders, and physical disabilities. The field of Soviet history does include important works on each of these social groups. For instance, my work joins the studies of childhood and wayward youth written by Anne Gorsuch, Dorena Caroli, Juliane Furst, Alan Ball, and Catriona Kelly. 4 It draws on the research conducted by Wendy Goldman, Frances Bernstein, and Mie Nakachi on unmarried mothers and pro-natalism. 5 It also builds on a number of recent works by Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova, Sarah Phillips, Mark Edele, Lilya Kaganovsky, Claire Shaw, and Beate Fieseler, which illuminate both the everyday hardships of people with disabilities in the Soviet Union and the discriminatory force of the construct of disability in that cultural context. 6 Yet, while these historians have provided crucial interpretative starting points in relation to these marginalized populations, they have not raised the question of how Lenin's formula applied to them. As nonworking elements, labor-incapacitated and unemployed people appeared as deviations from the sociopolitical norm of contributive labor and remained largely uncovered by the workers' insurance system. Were other social services available to them? How did they lay claim to their social rights, their membership in the Soviet social body, and their human worth? In the end, if the Revolution had set the goal of emancipatory justice for all the oppressed and downtrodden, why did the rights of economically inactive and socially stigmatized people seem so problematic to define and legitimize? Finding answers to these questions was of vital significance to the unproductive and supposedly "deviant" elements of Soviet society. However, as we will see throughout this book, the dilemmas that such deviants posed to the socialist order deeply worried also the political authorities of the Soviet Union and many educated contemporaries. In this book, I look at unemployed single mothers, blind and deaf people, and behaviorally problematic children together as deviants. The word

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deviant can indicate illegal behavior or delinquency, but here I have in mind its designation of bodies, sexualities, and socioeconomic behaviors that differ from a set norm. Although it might seem counterintuitive to apply this term to the claimants (and sometimes bearers) of social assistance rights, I believe that this terminological choice has two advantages. First, it is a powerful reminder that these populations were always perceived as abnormal. Second, deviant strongly conveys the assumption-which informed both the representation of these social groups by the "normals" and their own self-fashioning-that they would engage in aberrant behaviors unless restrained or provided with proper assistance. While not technically delinquents, adults with physical disabilities, jobless unmarried mothers, and "difficult" youth threatened to slip into nonconformist and illegal activities that in the Soviet Union were considered counterrevolutionary-such as begging, private trading, fortune-telling, public singing for alms, homelessness and vagrancy, alcoholism and drug addiction, if not thieving and prostitution. In the eyes of power, they were always "deviating" (otkloniaiushchiesia)-that is, departing from the imagined norm of able-bodiedness, working capacity, disciplined behavior, and gender uprightness. At times, they were seen as maliciously "refraining" (ukloniaiushchiesia) from contributing to the collective. 7 They were "the undesired and suffering others" -in anthropologist Didier Passin's words-who "oscillat[ ed] between [inspiring] sentiments of sympathy on the one hand and concern for order on the other hand:'s In comparison with the exemplary Soviet subject, who was imagined as a skilled, wage-earning, industrially productive, healthy and young, rational, and implicitly male citizen, all economically inactive individuals were by default unproductive others-invalidated, infantilized, and feminized. 9 Of course, they did not constitute neat communities, internally homogeneous and externally bounded. Their deviance depended on contingent circumstances and on the specific time and place in which they lived. Nonetheless, it always derived from their inability to contribute to the goals of the socialist state and from their alleged lack of any aspiration to overcome this inability. If we look at deviance from this perspective, then we see that the questions left open by Lenin's slogan necessarily found competing answers among those perceived as deviant, the political leaders writing policies about them, and the professional experts responsible for assisting them. When unemployed and labor-incapacitated people wrote petitions to the Soviet state in order to demand social assistance, they articulated a clear sense of entitlement. 10 They felt that they had a right not only to economic

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security, education, and health care, but also to social integration and personal happiness. Men and women with physical disabilities reflected upon the misery that was caused by their impairments and contended that the Soviet regime should guarantee them help in attaining justice and equality. The parents of children with various mental and physical handicaps wrote on behalf of their "defective" (defektivnye) children: they wanted education for their offspring and expected the socialist state to ensure liberation from the social pain of disability. Jobless and husbandless pregnant women argued that they would no longer be compelled to seek abortions, abandon their children, and practice prostitution, if only the state would give them financial subsidies and medical care. In short, people who deviated from the Soviet norms of economic and gender behavior often believed that they had the right to enjoy the material well-being and social justice that had been promised to the able-bodied and economically productive citizens. They grounded their claims in the contention that they too strove to contribute to the collective, despite their social suffering and physical ailments. In addition, they emphasized that they would overcome their defects and transform themselves into valuable members of the social body-provided that the state put them in the proper conditions to do so and upheld its terms of the social contract. While social historians have long argued that ordinary Soviet people viewed socialism as a sociopolitical order in which the border between attaining one's rights by law (po pravu) or through networks of patronage (po blatu) was very elastic, and in which people could simultaneously refer to traditional expectations of justice and to new ethical values, 11 in this book I show that for those who deviated from the norm rights were even more flexible. People like Zolotova-Sologub were rarely able to claim and acquire rights autonomously, either as inborn and inalienable entitlements or as codified and juridically enforceable laws. Neither could they simply appeal to a moral economy grounded in the Leninist saying "he who does not work shall not eaf' 12 Nevertheless, as the unproductive members of Soviet society struggled to establish a relationship between their contributions and their needs, they asserted that Lenin's formula entailed unspoken variables such as gender and reproductive labor, physical ailments and mental disorders, material suffering and emotional pain. They further argued that the state's representatives needed to factor these variables in if they wanted Soviet socialism to be a legitimate moral order. This sense of entitlement to help was based not only on laws, but also and above all on a particular understanding of socialist morality that derived from the experience of being different. It

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was informed both by policies and discourses imposed from above and by embodied experiences of poverty, disability, and marginalization. 13 The final outcome of Zolotova-Sologub's story clearly illustrates this point. In response to her letter, the Women Workers' and Peasants' Department proceeded to inspect her "family, material, and economic situation:' and then assigned her a onetime monetary subsidy of fifty rubles. It also arranged for her and her child's recovery in a local hospital and for the provision of free medical therapy to both of them. Interceding on Zolotova-Sologub's behalf with other state agencies for over one year, the Women's Department was in the end able to obtain a permanent increase in her disability pension (doubling it from sixteen to thirty rubles per month) and the placement of her sick daughter in a children's sanatorium. In the eyes of the social worker Popova, who had handled the case, the labor Zolotova-Sologub had performed in the past and her current state of suffering qualified this disabled single mother as an entitled citizen. 14 To express gratitude, in her last letter to Popova, Zolotova-Sologub reached out again to the value of revolutionary work: "But now, oh now, my spirit is lifted; I suddenly grew strong wings, hope, and confidence that the Soviet state does not leave without attention and reward those who have worked for the Revolution:' 15 This positive outcome, and in fact the entire correspondence between Zolotova-Sologub and Popova, reveal that both petitioners and mid-level bureaucrats internalized the official values of labor and need, but also contextualized them and made sense of them through the petitioners' life stories. In the Soviet Union, it was the state that initially set the terms of entitlement, and individual citizens could write petitions only within the framework the authorities provided them. However, although party ideologues and policymakers defined the very categories of gender, disability, and suffering from above, the incorporation of personal experiences of impairment, difference, poor health; poverty, and precariousness offered both petitioners and bureaucrats a powerful tool with which to broaden official discourses. As we will see through many more examples in the following chapters, categories that were quite unstable since their very definition at the hands of the political authorities became even more controversial when deviant citizens mobilized them in their requests for help. Thus, the politics of entitlement explored in this book constitute an integral part of a dual process that has been well described in Soviet historiography with regard to other issues. Namely, the state attempted to mold people's subjectivity by promoting certain values and imposing structural and institutional forms, and individuals responded by fashioning themselves in ways

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that fit configurations of power and even internalized the goal of becoming the New Soviet Man. 16 At the same time, this particular type of grassroots politics of entitlement also demonstrates that when people deemed to be deviant voiced their claims to the officials in power, they were both fitting acceptable forms of presentation and expressing desires, anxieties, obligations, and intentions of their own. While Soviet social policies produced and maintained the ways marginalized people thought about themselves in relation to power, petitioners not only reproduced the meaning of normality and deviance, but also tested the limits of these concepts. In doing so, they disturbed from within the very mechanisms by which the Soviet state's institutions of care and cultural forms mediated their subjectivity. The questions left unanswered in Lenin's formula greatly preoccupied the Soviet political authorities, because "invalids" (invalidy), unemployed single mothers, and mentally disturbed children constituted not only deviations from the exemplary Soviet subject, but also suffering citizens whom the socialist state had to protect. Certainly, the leaders of the Soviet Union never regarded decisions about the well-being of these populations as equally important as choices relevant to the welfare of workers. Yet, party and government officials recognized that social policy toward vulnerable groups had the potential to define their state's identity. The Soviet Union's unique care for its poor, sick, and insane citizens cast the October Revolution as an emancipatory event, a complete and absolutely positive break with the tsarist past and any other state formation in the world. Indeed, because of its legitimizing force, social protection remained a major component of Soviet self-representation even during the harsh years of Stalin's rule. The Constitution of 1936 reiterated Lenin's dictum "he who does not work shall not eat" and complemented it with the axiom "from each according to his ability, to each according to his work;' thus indicating that the Soviet government had rejected religious and private philanthropy in favor of reciprocal obligations and state-funded welfare. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia also made this point clear when it explained that "charity" (blagotvoritel'nost') was no longer "one of the manifestations of Christian love" -as in the prerevolutionary Orthodox Theological Encyclopedic Dictionary-but rather the expression of bourgeois hypocrisy and a religious glossing over the rule of the exploiting classes. In contrast to charity, the Soviet key informational resource positively identified help (pomoshch'), provision (obespechenie), protection (zashchita), and care (zabota) as the bundle of state measures aimed at guaranteeing justice to the needy, and it unfailingly accompanied these words by the attribute social (sotsial'nyi)Y This shift in semantics reflected

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the emancipatory and humanitarian dimensions of socialist welfare but also indicated the state's complete monopolization of the social sphere and its ability to decide who was entitled to help and who was excluded from it. Besides being a paradigm of socialist morality, social assistance to vulnerable populations was also supposed to be a modern-state project rigidly directed from above and fulfilling the state's productivist agendas. Finally, along with marginalized petitioners, mid-level bureaucrats, and high state authorities, many educated contemporaries also reflected upon the variables of Lenin's formula. They too used the concept of help to the deviants as one of the key categories through which they viewed the Soviet sociopolitical order and as an idiom by which they discussed its morality. As we will see in the following chapters, physical ailments and mental disorders, gender and reproductive labor, material suffering and emotional pain were themes discussed almost everywhere in the years between 1917 and 1950-in periodicals and daily newspapers, collections of laws, handbooks, medical surveys, police reports, poems, fictional literature, and movies. For sympathetic experts, in particular, help constituted a right that each impaired, helpless, and backward Soviet citizen should enjoy. At the same time, help was also the fundamental component of a transformative project conceived and managed from above and directed at those below through the adept interventions of experts. That modern educated publics have historically conceived help as a blend of care and control is an argument well known to historians and social theorists. As Samuel Moyn has pointed out in his critique of Lynn Hunt's book Inventing Human Rights: A History, the ability to feel empathy stems from "an enlightenment cultural practice" that requires educated people to embrace rights, but also leads them to embark upon civilizing missions. 18 According to Michel Foucault and the numerous scholars who draw on his theory of governmentality, professional authorities have often constructed help as a combination of integrating and disciplining impulses, discourses that empowered them as the experts, and practices that simultaneously entitled and marginalized the "abnormals" of modernizing societies. 19 In fact, as Didier Fassin has observed, the dialectic between "compassion and repression'' and the "confusion between the humanitarian and the political" are still very much alive in contemporary European biopolitics. 20 One of the central contentions of this book is that this double sociopolitical and moral logic of help was part and parcel of Soviet professionals' and social workers' approaches to the deviants of the socialist polity. As we will see, Soviet activists' discourses and practices of social protection were not

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simply nefarious elite plots aimed at controlling the masses and removing those who did not fit. zt They were also marked by positive transformational components, by the aspiration to give rights and integrate, and by the paradoxical tension between progressive reform and repressive social discipline. 22 Motives involving some degree of coercive rehabilitation, normalization, and punishment of nonworking deviants coexisted with emancipatory intentions and genuine humanitarian concerns. On one hand, Soviet activists championed help as a tool of order, knowledge, and control-all values that could lead to coercion and at times outright physical violence. On the other hand, in the eyes of many activists, help entailed equally powerful discourses concerning ethical notions of human dignity and, above all, moral rights in a socialist regime. In short, since neither Lenin's formula "he who does not work shall not eat" nor his more extensive speculations on the subject of welfare offered a clear blueprint for defining the social rights of the deviants of Soviet society, contemporaries engaged in heated debates about the place of disability, gender, suffering, as well as productive and reproductive labor in legitimizing a citizen's entitlement to help. Individuals at the margins of the norm entered these debates, too, as through their letters and actions they pushed forward their own ideas about the nature of socialist help and the meanings of their alleged deviance. They sometimes looked at the experts as potential allies and advocates on behalf of their rights, but often they viewed them as standing outside the parameters of justice and representing a state from which they felt alienated. For all of them, as much as for policymakers and high political authorities, help was an occasion to bring into focus the idea of a different but still entitled Soviet subject.

How This Book is Structured: Historical Actors and Historical Contexts The Right to Be Helped consists of two parts bookended by a prologue and an epilogue. While the book's core chapters address the specificity of the Soviet case in the postrevolutionary and Stalinist periods, the prologue offers a thumbnail historical sketch of the treatment of deviant populations in finde-siecle and interwar Europe, and the epilogue casts a glance at the postWorld War II pan-European debates on social welfare and human rights. In section I (Ideas of Rights and Agents of Help), I introduce the entire cast of characters and human conditions as well as the institutional apparatuses, laws, and conceptual underpinnings that defined the right to be helped in Soviet socialism. Soviet notions of social rights, as I discuss in chapter 1, had their formative sources in ideas and social movements that

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had appeared already in the last years of the tsarist regime but could find a venue for concrete implementation only after 1917, with the establishment of the Commissariat of Social Assistance (Narodnyi Komissariat Sotsial'nogo Obespecheniia) and the Department of Social Insurance of the Commissariat of Labor (Otdel Sotsial'nogo Strakhovaniia Narodnogo Komissariata Truda). These two institutions emerged and developed in competition with one another-the former was in charge of protecting unemployed and laborincapacitated citizens, while the latter represented the privileged scheme of contributory insurance for industrial workers. As we will see, the logics behind the two systems were never reconciled and, depending on political necessity, the Soviet government alternated between contributory and universalist arguments to justify its politics of entitlement and marginalization. This inherent contradiction at the very inception of the right to be helped set the context for many of the difficulties that the Soviet state would later encounter in crafting and implementing its policies of social assistance. Alongside ideology and institutions, the human predicaments of selfdefined "invalids" also powerfully influenced the Soviet state's dilemmas in defining social rights. I advance this argument in chapter 2 through an analysis of the exchanges between individual help-claimants and the bureaucrats working in the Commissariat of Social Assistance. Here, I condense incommensurable destinies by bringing together the intimate stories of disabled men and women and the state's laws and programs of social protection. It is precisely in the frictions between state discourses and personal biographies that, I would suggest, we can best see the breadth and the limits of the Soviet right to be helped. In addition, the interactions between petition-writers and social assistance workers demonstrate that the deviants of Soviet society-whether they achieved specific rights or failed to secure them-actively participated in defining the particulars of a shared culture and thereby imparted new meaning to the notion and the lived experience of socialist morality. While the Commissariat of Social Assistance was broadly responsible for the welfare of all uninsured, unemployed, and labor-incapacitated individuals, four distinct organizations emerged already in the immediate postrevolutionary years as specifically committed to defending the rights of behaviorally problematic minors, blind and deaf people, and unemployed unmarried mothers. I introduce these organizations in chapter 3 and then trace their developments in the book's second section. They included a "defectological" center called the Medico- Pedagogical Station (Mediko-Pedagogicheskaia Stantsiia), the All- Russian Society of the Blind

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(Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Slepykh), the All-Russian Society of the DeafMute (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Glukhonemykh), and the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy (Otdel Okhrany Materinstva i Mladenchestva). These agencies employed child psychiatrists, teachers, directors of welfare facilities, social workers, legal consultants, gynecologists, midwives, and blind and deaf advocates for disability rights, whom I collectively call activists. They translated the state's policies into practice and operated as liaisons between higher political officials and ordinary people. Some of them had to deal with petitions for state help as part of their routine and everyday work. Others were experts with strong professional reasons for desiring to help the marginalized groups of Soviet society, while still others became spokespersons for their communities due to the fact that they themselves suffered from physical impairments. Despite their differences in identity and motivation, they all held positions within the state's administrative apparatus and were responsible for disseminating and enacting legislation and policy at the local level. Legitimized either by their competence or by an explicit political mandate (and most of the times by both), these activists controlled the mechanisms of social welfare and were able to muster enough political support to propose new programs or make significant changes in the implementation of old policies. As in other European countries of the time, Russian welfare and medical experts had access to political, administrative, and personal resources that allowed them to qualify state policies and decide the limits of their applicability. Under socialism, however, the state had a greater ability to bring activists' knowledge in line with the political imperatives of the moment. Soviet professionals, mid-level bureaucrats, and social workers had been mobilized by a revolution that had created many possibilities for them, but that could also take their authority away when state politics shifted.D As we will see, the activists of the Medico-Pedagogical Station, the All-Russian Societies of the Blind and the Deaf-Mute, and the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy were committed to the emancipation of deviant individuals from social injustice, but they were also entangled with the state's agendas of regimentation of childhood, sexuality and motherhood, as well as disability and labor capacity. These activists joined hands with the state to follow the socialist dream of justice and modernity as well as to acquire stronger professional authority. While they could strongly empathize with their constituencies, they also largely accepted the disciplinary tasks that they were expected to perform in relation to them. The Societies of the Blind and the Deaf are a prime example of the

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contradictions at play for men and women who simultaneously worked within the state apparatus and championed disability rights. Their activities were sometimes in line with the state's policies of coercive normalization of the blind and the deaf, while at other times they strove to nurture attitudes of acceptance toward human difference. Strong tensions even animated the doctors and midwives of the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy as well as the "defectologists" in charge of correcting "morally defective" children in the Medico-Pedagogical Station. All of them had to juggle their own personal ethics and sense of professional responsibilities with the demands of state power and the claims of their assisted. As I argue in chapter 3, they found an outlet in devising constructions that legitimized assistance to deviant subjects but also empowered themselves as the agents of Soviet help. 24 In section II (The Practice of Help), the story of the right to be helped unfolds chronologically under the impact of major events in Soviet history between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the attempted welfare reforms of 1949-1950.25 Here, I analyze how state authorities, social activists, and marginalized citizens themselves fine-tuned their constructions of social rights to respond to the turbulent and ever-shifting conditions of the Soviet reality in those years. At the beginning of the Soviet regime, as I discuss in chapter 4, state authorities and experts largely saw themselves undertaking a thoroughly rational and modern but also humane and emancipatory project, one that was explicitly framed as the opposite of "bourgeois charity;' a corrective to the stigma and condescension with which needy populations were treated in the tsarist order. As we will see, the years between 1918 and 1927 constituted an overall positive phase in which the Soviet Union was intent on catching up and surpassing the rest of the world in the articulation of a progressive welfare system and in the application of modern scientific ideas to the field of public care. In those years, Christian and capitalist moralities were discredited, but their Soviet counterparts-secular and egalitarian moralities-were not yet firmly established. Prominent activists and experts rushed to fill that moral vacuum by suggesting standards of entitlement grounded in need as much as in contribution, and by introducing conceptions of subjectivity that valued deviant citizens' capacity for self-transformation. The onset of Stalinism in 1928 and then the drafting of the Stalin Constitution in 1936 changed the relationship among rights, paternalistic benevolence, and oppressive control (chapter 5). Indeed, by the late 1920s it had become clear to political leaders that neither the theory of Marxism nor the rhetoric of the Revolution offered a solution to the practical and financial

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problem of providing support to the mass of unemployed people not covered by state insurance. As the ideal goal of equal distribution was dangled before the eyes of the population, the reality of social protection was increasingly constrained by economic and political exigencies. With the great leap forward into the industrialization project, the Soviet state changed its discourse of help and insisted that all costly programs involving help to needy citizens be subordinated to the cause of socialist construction. As a result, in the years between 1928 and 1940, the early Soviet open -ended and multivocal environment of help became streamlined. For instance, the defectologists advocating on behalf of the rights of so-called difficult children were beleaguered and deprived of their budgets. In the case of disabled men and women, the desires of enterprise managers to maximize production greatly limited welfare services for this group. Although a few activists still struggled to preserve the rights of blind and deaf people, for most of them the expediency of the Five-Year Plans replaced the revolutionary ideals with the goal of labor productivity. Similarly, the advocates of single mothers' rights encouraged all women to mobilize for production and reproduction, often compelling them to accept jobs and pregnancies they did not want. Only after 1941 did the picture of state help to marginalized individuals change again, as the suffering and chaos of wartime ushered in new ways to address the dilemmas of social assistance (chapter 6). Military service in the Second World War, for instance, introduced new relations of obligation and debt, which further modified the dynamics of labor and need. Activists involved with the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy, a group of committed child psychiatrists, and a new cohort of blinded veterans attempted to reinject the field of social assistance with humanitarian beliefs alongside political and economic exigencies. Their efforts aimed at relaunching the less coercive side of help to the deviants that had characterized the first postrevolutionary decade and had almost disappeared during the 1930s. In many respects, these efforts heralded Nikita Khrushchev's reforms of the Soviet welfare system and his emphasis on the "humaneness" of socialism. The book's final chapter, however, also attends to the ways in which deviant subjects could contest the activists' understanding of Soviet morality. Throughout the book we will see that, despite the important changes just outlined, a few crucial aspects of the right to be helped stably defined the Soviet moral order. First, the tension between progressive policy and repressive discipline constantly informed it (although this tension had different outcomes in connection with shifts in ideology, economy, and politics).

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Second, a moral order in principle founded on the Leninist social contract always problematically coexisted with an order grounded on gifting, whereby citizens' welfare depended on Stalin's personal care. Both benevolent paternalism and the idea of a social contract undergirded official ideology, and both were incorporated in people's understandings of their rights. 26 Lastly and perhaps most importantly, negotiating the strains inherent in the right to be helped remained pivotal throughout this period in delineating the relationship between the Soviet government and its many out-of-mainstream subjects. The deviants of Soviet society pushed for an enabling socialist state in which they too could attain a certain degree of justice. Yet for them the right to be helped was always intrinsically bound up with forms of control that channeled their individual aspirations and streamlined their identities according to the demands of the state and the larger "normal" society.

Note on Terms and Sources Before beginning my inquiry into the moral order of the postrevolutionary and Stalinist Soviet Union, a few more comments are necessary to clarify some of the terms I have chosen to use and the sources on which I have been able to draw. Help is the common translation of the Russian noun pomoshch' and verb pomoch'. The term social assistance, instead, might surprise some readers and therefore requires a terminological explanation. Although social provision would be the literal translation of the Russian sotsial'noe obespechenie, and other scholars have rendered it as social security or social welfare, I avoid these translations because they reproduce a certain confusion inherent in the Russian usageY In the Soviet Union, the phrase sotsial'noe obespechenie was used in two senses. In a broad sense, it indicated the whole system of social and economic measures guaranteeing citizens' rights to material assistance, medical care, and education. In a narrower sense, this expression indicated the material help provided through state funds to individuals ineligible for state insurance. 28 For the sake of clarity, I use welfare to translate obespechenie in its broader sense, and assistance in place of obespechenie in its narrower meaning. Insurance or social security are here used to translate the Russian strakhovanie. For clarity's sake, I have also chosen to avoid the acronyms by which most state institutions were called in the Soviet Union, instead identifying relevant

INTRODUCTION

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agencies by names that are accessible to English-speaking audiences, including shorter forms of the official names. For instance, I use Society of the Deaf and Society of the Blind to stand in for the All- Russian Society of the Deaf-Mute and All-Russian Society of the Blind. Likewise, I generally refer to the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy as the Mother and Infant Department. Interested readers will find a list of specific acronyms, full official names, and their literal translations in the glossary. With my choices of terminology and translation, I wish to place the right to be helped firmly under the rubric of twentieth-century European social policies, biopolitical projects, and ideas of social rights. I invite readers to reflect on the common welfare concerns that the Soviet Union shared with other European countries, but also on the dilemmas of legitimacy that were specific to the Soviet socialist setting and on its divergence from other authoritarian regimes and their eugenicist discourses. In this book, I provide a complex and multifaceted account pieced together through the recovery of disparate voices-of men, women, and whenever possible children who lived at the margins of Soviet society, but also of government officials, social commentators, medical practitioners, and various types of educators and social workers. Yet to capture the moral order of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1950 in its entirety is an impossible challenge, and what I have achieved is far from a complete picture. First of all, I have selected three specific cities-Moscow, Perm', and Omsk-and consciously focused on the dynamics of the right to be helped in urban Russia. Research in Moscow has allowed me to explore the archives of numerous central, all- Russian institutions. This was fundamental in the development of my project, because as much as power and financial resources in the Soviet Union flowed through Moscow, so did people's requests for help. For instance, the disabled single mother Zolotova-Sologub, whose story opened this discussion, sent her letters from Piatigorsk, in the Northern Caucasus. Perm' and Omsk, instead, were two large provincial towns located respectively in the Ural region and on the border with Kazakhstan. There, I had access to regional, district, and city-level repositories that allowed me to observe the priorities of local offices vis-a-vis the deviant subjects of their communities, and thereby gain a better historical understanding of the relationship between the center and the periphery in the administration of social services. As readers will notice, these regional sources do not reveal any significant difference, slippage, or conflict in translating the Soviet project from center to periphery. 29 Furthermore, this book does not represent people's life stories in equal measure with the opinions of the activists and experts who dominate

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the narrative. Unlike the limit in geographic scope, this constraint is an unwanted effect of the sources I have been able to draw on for this book. Indeed, for a long time Russian archival practice has manifested a preference for preserving periodicals, daily newspapers, manuals, and official instructions over people's own testimonials. The police reports and medical protocols that I analyze in this book do offer some glimpses into the personal stories of subjects deemed deviant and the ways in which they might have embraced or contested the activists' understanding of the Soviet moral order. In these documents, however, people's testimonies earned only the negligible weight that activists accorded them. In other words, these sources tell us more about the intentions and expectations of social services providers than about people's own evaluations of the experience of help. An even mightier barrier to representing deviant subjects' perspectives is the lack of complete records to track down responses to individual help-claims. Sometimes all I had were remarks in red or blue pencil on a handwritten petition. Other times, I was lucky enough to identify a paper trail, but the fates of people's cases could still remain obscure, either because the process dragged on for years without ever reaching a definitive resolution or because important pieces of documentation were missing. Aware of these caveats, I hope that my account will provide historians with a framework to think about the legitimacy of the Soviet moral order and to assess the very diverse range of discourses, formative sources, and historical actors that shaped it beyond social control and resistance. This picture of the Soviet moral order also invites readers from other disciplines to reflect on how authoritarian regimes grounded in utopian ideologies have historically treated difference, and how the moral economy might still function today in undemocratic states for those who deviate from the norm of ability, gender, and social conduct. By analyzing the ways in which marginalized historical actors created a sense of dignity for themselves, this book describes possibilities of intervention, but also makes clear the hierarchies of economic exploitation and political domination that are assumed within the discourse of deviance. The Right to Be Helped is about dialogues that are vertical. It bears witness to the uneven forces that are involved in making political and moral orders.

PROLOGUE

DEVIANT CITIZENS IN FIN-DE-SIECLE AND INTERWAR EUROPE

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IDE A 0 F the norm emerged around the mid-nineteenth century and soon brought with it the concept of the extreme or deviant. Statisticians and eugenicists were the first to use these ideas to construct normal and abnormal bodies. Experimental psychology, with its psychological and intelligence measurements, also contributed to ideas of normality and deviance. Later, Sigmund Freud built on the notion of the norm to create the concept of normal sexuality and contrast it with the perverse, abnormal, pathological, and criminal. A Taylorist model of deviance, instead, assessed an individual's productivity and classified individual health and human value by labor contribution. In this economic view, symptoms of deviance that were publicly visible-such as the divergent ways of life of the impoverished urban classes-were believed to disturb public order and subvert the virtues of modernization, especially respectability and industriousness. The norm (i.e., wage labor) was established as the truth and then used to construct any deviation (vagrancy, homelessness, mendicancy, prostitution, single motherhood, disability, etc.) as a threat or danger. In short, the rise of science and industrial technology in the modern age led to the standardization of human bodies, psyches, and behaviors. 1 The constructs of the normal and the deviant found various practical applications and impinged on different treatments accorded to the subjects that they purported to describe. This process characterized not only eugenics, medicine, and psychology, but also modern states' social policies. Indeed, the revolution in the epistemology of social knowledge that occurred in the nineteenth century was pivotal in the emergence of modern social protection. Although social policy had a long history and its functions and meanings had been ambivalent since its very inception, it was in the mid- to late-nineteenth century that the modern nation-state became increasingly aware of the ordering capacity of social protection. 2 Thus born in the fields of statistics and science, deviance ceased to be a mere HE

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description of reality and an innocent analytical category. It became the tool for systematic and pervasive social actions, which singled out popular practices and social groups intended to be controlled and transformed through repression, relief, or-most frequently-a combination of both. Ultimately, the normal and the deviant became ways of establishing hierarchies of economic and political domination that justified the denial or limitation of certain rights. This historical process can be most vividly observed in relation to three forms of deviance: physical disability, single motherhood, and child behavioral difference.

Physical Disability, Single Motherhood, and Deviant Childhood in the Social Sciences As scholars of disability studies have variously theorized, disability is not only a human condition but also a social construct whose frames are built by reference to aesthetic norms and performative demands. These norms and demands make us imagine that there is a clear-cut borderline between bodily or spiritual integrity and abnormality. They also produce an understanding of disability as a limited capacity to fulfill social expectations. In line with this imagination, disability appears as a deviation from the accepted standard of well-being and from the psychophysical ability to perform actions and establish proper social contact. It works as a concept with the power to discredit those individuals and social groups who supposedly show flaws or defects. For Zygmunt Bauman, Douglas Baynton, and Bill Hughes, it was the modern culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that transformed physical impairments into disabilities and then used the discourse of disability to justify marginalization and oppression. 3 Because the project of modernity could not accept the coexistence of order and flaws, physical difference needed to be assimilated or banished, corrected or severed, normalized or exiled. Modern medicine became the main vehicle for achieving these ends: the old custodial institutions turned into medical spaces legitimized to identify and cure pathological bodies, while their disabled residents became the testing ground for various rehabilitation practices. In addition, since poverty was one of the key factors in the modern constitution of disability, entry into the labor market was proposed as a rehabilitative solution to it. The disabled were either made able or hidden from the gaze of the normal. However, because modernity had a great deal of difficulty in incorporating physical impairment, more often than

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not it segregated, estranged, and invalidated people with disabilities both materially and conceptually. Finally, among modernity's most excessive remedies to the problem of impaired bodies was extirpation. In various scholars' opinion, the logic that created institutions of confinement for people with disabilities is commensurate with the logic that created the concentration camp. 4 People with disabilities, however, did not only suffer at the hands of modern biopower. Modern culture has been characterized by the desire for order as much as by the idea of moral responsibility. The latter led the able-bodied to view the disabled as victims of tragic events and consequently as persons deserving of sympathetic social responses. Because disabled people were symbols of contingency, uncertainty, and the frailty of human existence, they were not only feared but also pitied. Individuals with physical impairments were a reminder that no one can escape tragedy. In the end, as Zygmunt Bauman has suggested, the modern impulse to care for unfortunate fellow humans was also a utopian desire to control, banish, or rectify the evils of the human condition that they stood for. 5 This context neither recognized the validity of the invalids nor effectively embraced and accommodated them within the body social. It was, in Bill Hughes's words, "the 'light' side of institutionalised disablism:' 6 Together with its darker counterpart of marginalization and exclusion, it constituted an important dimension of the debate over the representation and sociopolitical treatment of deviance in early twentieth century Europe. Single mothers were also part of this debate. As historian Nadine Lefaucheur has remarked in relation to late nineteenth-century France, "the situations which result[ed] from women having children out of wedlock [were] singled out as creating social risks necessitating the intervention of the authorities:' 7 This happened because single motherhood constituted a transgression of the institution of marriage. The stigma attached to this identity often resulted in abortion practices, infanticide, and the abandonment of illegitimate newborn babies-i.e., social risks that industrializing and modernizing states wanted to avoid at all costs. In addition, around the 1890s, epidemiological evidence relating infant mortality to women's health during pregnancy prompted the adoption of various protective measures aimed at both the infant and the mother. These included the establishment of homes for mothers in order to enable unmarried pregnant women to rest in the last weeks before delivery and then to keep their children with them for breast-feeding. This response to the social problems of child abandonment and infant mortality identified unmarried mothers rather

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than illegitimate children as the population at risk and therefore in need of special care. 8 At the same time, not all forms of single motherhood were represented in the same way. While the normality of female widows was rarely questioned, that of other women alone with children was often doubted. In the case of unmarried, separated, divorced, and abandoned women, single motherhood was considered as self-inflicted. As Lefaucheur has explained, if these mothers had behaved more morally and if they had been better wives, then they would not have found themselves in these situations. 9 Describing welfare programs for single mothers in the early twentieth-century United States, Anna Igra has similarly shown how assistance often went hand-in-hand with strategies based on the categorization and ranking of women in need: unwed mothers occupied the lower rungs of the ladder, worthy widows of war veterans were at the top of the hierarchy, and deserted wives were somewhere in the middle. 10 Especially after the First World War, these hierarchies undergirded intense discussions on the issues of female celibacy and single motherhood. Mary Louise Roberts has argued that unmarried women and single mothers became such controversial topics in the French postwar press because they "symbolized shifts in the social organization of gender" and "provided an opportunity to negotiate social relations during an era of change:'ll From this moment onward, single motherhood would be gradually sanctioned as a deviant family situation in the family codes of all European states. 12 The issue of women having children out of wedlock and the related problems of child mortality and abandonment were bound up with the question of children's socialization. Again, it was largely with the advent of modernity that European societies ceased to tolerate children in the streets and began to consider abandoned and delinquent minors as well as teenagers suffering from psychological disorders as social threats. Experts in law, medicine, and pedagogy hurried to devise measures to reduce risk situations and thereby defend the society of the normal from the abnormal. In alliance with policymakers, they transformed child protection into a sociopolitical institution aimed at fulfilling the state's responsibility to care for deviant children while also punishing and often suppressing them. In particular, mid-nineteenthcentury experts developed two main learned theories aimed at explaining the etiology of criminal personality in underage citizens and averting its most damaging effects on society. The first was a degenerative and criminalizing theory; the second was a medicopedagogical and curative one. Both strongly influenced Russian approaches to deviant children before as well as after the Revolution.

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The degenerative paradigm of child behavioral abnormality pointed to the weight of biology and heredity in deforming not only children's fragile bodies but also their shaky psyches. Although environment could play a role, in this theory child delinquency was largely the result of the physical and moral defects carried by the parents. The late nineteenth-century criminologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists who espoused this view drew on studies of criminal anthropology and evolutionary biology to produce a powerful discourse of "degeneration:' Most famously, Benedict Morel regarded mental deficiency as a form of devolution whose clinical manifestations took different forms: changes in temperament, hysteria, epilepsy, and psychoses. His biomedical vision of child deviance emphasized the destabilizing, destructive, and even contagious properties of individual youths. 13 The medicopedagogical theory, instead, highlighted the social and environmental factors affecting the young generations of modern societies and determining the growth of juvenile crime. For instance, the professor of forensic science Jean-Alexandre Lacassagne and the sociologist Gabriel Tarde maintained that there was a strong scientific correlation between family separation, the absence of a parent, and juvenile delinquency. As they contended, if social neglect was the cause of children's defects, then it was possible to save nonconforming children. Adamantly sustaining this view, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall proposed to unite medical and pedagogical knowledge into one discipline, which he called "pedology" and which soon took root all over Europe. In early twentieth-century Hungary, Germany, Italy, and Britain, the pedological approach generated advocacy movements that strove to decriminalize children in precarious social conditions by reversing the logic of crime and punishment as well as that of degeneration and expulsion. On a practical level, pedology facilitated the emergence of special schools, shelters, and various forms of guardianship for all sorts of deviant children. 14 Of course, these networks of medical institutions and children's homes were not simply sites of humanitarian help: they were also scientific laboratories for the classification of disabilities and places of institutional confinement and control.

Deviance, Social Rights, and Modern Welfare Systems An important dimension of the debate over the representation and treatment of deviant subjects was that of social rights. Indeed, as social insurance legislation began to develop and grant social rights to economically active

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citizens, modern states had to define also the rights of those outside the labor force. What economic protections and social services should modern states provide by right to those who deviate from the economic norm of the fully employed, wage-earning, and self-sufficient citizen? The decades between the 1880s and the 1930s were the historical moment in which the fields of social insurance and social assistance emerged as"the first significant experimentation" for what would later be called "the welfare state:' 15 Indeed, first gradually at the turn of the century and then more rapidly after the First World War, several European governments abandoned the poor laws-which denied citizenship rights to economically inactive individuals-and replaced them with social policies rooted in citizens' rights. The new legislation accorded the right to make claims on the state for support in periods of economic distress. It operated as an insurance system for the able-bodied against the risks of accident and unemployment and against the consequences of illness and old age. With the introduction of this new legislation, citizens who became disadvantaged in terms of market-related economic resources could use their political resources to modify the outcomes of market distribution. In other words, in the context of market exchanges, economically vulnerable groups could use the political sphere to favor their position. 16 This type of legislated social rights was first introduced in Germany when Otto von Bismarck proposed a corporatist income-security model of social protection. Bismarck's proposal entailed several important novelties: it directed social insurance only at the economically active parts of the population; it foresaw separate programs for different occupational groups; it related benefits to income; it required income ceilings for coverage; and it mandated employer-employee participation in the administration of social insurance. For the first time, the obligation to finance insurance was imposed on employers in the same measure as it was required from workers. The state too participated in the financing of benefits, although with a very modest quotient. The Bismarckian social insurance was not designed, strictly speaking, as a retirement program. It was a scheme intended to provide workers with pensions in case of disability: old age itself was considered as a particular case of disability. So-called traumatic neuroses were included within the workers' compensation legislation when they were specifically caused by work accidents. Bismarck's model excluded housewives and others outside the labor force. In short, in this model entitlement to benefits was a function of productive and monetary contribution. 17 By the 1930s, the social insurance systems of most European countries had the basic characteristics of the German corporatist income security

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scheme_ 18 This was in part connected with the great power position of the German Reich in continental Europe and in part with the propaganda and translation work actively pursued by the architects of the German welfare system in early twentieth-century transnational networks. 19 Yet, Bismarck's commutative philosophy, in which entitlement arises almost exclusively from work, was never reproduced in its pure form. 20 In Britain, for instance, the contributory principle introduced with the social insurance programs of 1911 was extended to cover almost the entire population after the First World War. 21 In France, the first law on pensions for workers and peasants was passed in 1910 and then developed into a social insurance scheme that touched upon all areas of sickness, maternity, old age, and disability. It combined a corporatist centralized income security model with that of mutual aid societies or subsidized voluntary organizations. 22 In Hungary, national health schemes covering work-related accidents were first established in the 1890s, preparations for an old age insurance got under way around 1911, and unemployment insurance programs were debated between 1906 and 1913. 23 Insurance against work-related accidents was put in place in all the Scandinavian countries as well. Sweden, in particular, had a near-universal pension system that had been established already in 1913 under the pressure of a large population of independent farmers; it provided basic security through flat-rate benefits to practically all citizens. 24 In Spain, until1936, old age, maternity, and labor accidents were the objects of compulsory insurance programs, while other risks were left to either voluntary or private provision only partially subsidized by the state. 25 In Italy, a law instituting obligatory accident insurance for industrial workers was first enacted in 1898. However, larger mandatory insurance programs against disability, old age, and unemployment were established only after the First World War as a way to compensate for the devastation wrought by the war and to dampen widespread social tensions. 26 Of course, in the 1930s, the emergence of national-socialist regimes in Italy, Germany, and Hungary would impart a new orientation to these countries' social policies and lead to increasingly racialized understandings of their deviant populations. 27 Everywhere in Europe, the laws on pensions were mainly directed at the economically active part of the population, while those not insured via their own contributions or by virtue of marriage had to rely on social assistance. The French government had established means-tested social assistance (assistance publique) already in the mid-1880s. Later, it added programs of free medical assistance for the poor (1893), help to destitute children (1904), assistance to the elderly, the disabled, and the chronically sick (1905), and

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assistance to large families (1913). Through this legislation, the French Third Republic tried to organize assistance by defining precise rules and categories of deviant persons to be protected. 28 According to Didier Renard, the French laws were intended not as a response to all situations of poverty, but rather to provide benefits to cover specific risks such as sickness, old age, and family responsibilities. As a result, they benefited not the general category of the destitute, but urban and rural workers in regular employment. 29 Because no unemployment insurance was legislated during the social insurance reforms of 1928-1930, the French unemployed had to rely on meanstested assistance rather than on insurance rights until1967. 30 In Britain, the Old Age Pension Act of 1908 was a noncontributory system whereby pensions were paid from the age of seventy, subject to a poverty test. Then, the British National Insurance Act of 1911 included a "Supplementary Benefit" section that provided a safety net for individuals outside the labor force but preserved many elements of the poor laws. Only in 1920, the Unemployment Insurance Act expanded coverage as a response to the mass unemployment of the post-World War I years. Indeed, Humphrey Southhall has interpreted this act as "a panic response to political instability" following the riots of 1919. 31 Denmark had introduced the right to old age pensions for all citizens with low income already in 1891 as part of a program based on voluntary, state-subsidized insurance. In 1934 Sweden also introduced a state-supported, voluntary unemployment insurance program connected to the unions. 32 Both social insurance and social assistance were institutional forms of welfare that responded to the modernization needs of the states adopting them. By defining the responsibilities of the public and private sectors in the field of social protection, they imposed a legal framework that changed the nature of traditional aid systems. In France, for instance, social assistance played a significant role in strengthening the republic in the struggle against the Catholic Church. Likewise, Britain shifted toward an increasingly statist social settlement by making voluntary trade unions and friendly societies complementary to state interventions. 33 Hungary too moved from private benevolent institutions and local mutual help associations to a "growing emphasis on state intervention and state control of the social sphere:' 34 Although the voluntary sector and the market continued to play significant roles in the mixed economy of welfare that took shape in these countries, in all of them the state advanced to a more prominent position in the field of social protection than it had ever occupied. According to some authors, this expanding scope of the state's welfare activity was closely linked to these

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countries' pursuit of economic and military advantage in the years between the two world wars. 35 Another common trait characterizing all European governments of the time was the conviction that insurance was a superior and more legitimate form of provision than assistance. For instance, in 1923, reporting on a new proposal of welfare insurance to the French Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, Edouard Grinda wrote: "Public assistance constitutes an advance on the charity and alms of the Middle Ages; in this evolution welfare represents the highest stage, the stage most worthy of the worker. The law on social insurance that we are presenting to you is the welfare charter:' Another delegate added: "[Insurance) must succeed in warding off poverty in the face of which assistance, with its limited and uncertain financial possibilities, can offer only inadequate help which may on occasion be a heavy burden for human dignity to bear:' 36 Since the post-World War I debate on social security was taking place within a context of scarcity of resources, the question of costs certainly promoted a form of state welfare provision that forced employers to make some contribution and help restrain public expenditure. Yet, the contributory insurance principle would maintain its political and moral ascendancy among social welfare practitioners throughout the twentieth century. Its many virtues and alleged universality were stressed over the stigma, selectivity, and discretional character of the old poor laws and the new practices of social assistance. In fact, the greater legitimacy accorded to insurance over assistance betrayed persistent prejudices about the different social groups that the two systems were imagined to cover. Class structured the distribution of social rights through insurance and informed people's opportunities to make effective use of these rights, because eligibility criteria for specific benefits were organized in terms of occupational categories, lifetime earnings, and income. Military contribution functioned in ways that muffled distinctions of class because it defined disabled ex-service men, war-widows, and war-orphans as worthy of social policy in compensation for their war efforts. However, this logic did not challenge the superiority of contributory insurance over noncontributory assistance, and post-World War I governments strove to reintegrate war invalids in the labor market and "make them serviceable for the economy again:' 37 Gender, too, affected social rights, since these were conditional to labor force participation and women tended to be less economically active outside the home. 38 Furthermore, the perception of female widowhood as social risk and single motherhood as deviance (as discussed above) had important consequences for

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the social rights of unmarried women. Widows were usually guaranteed social insurance via the contributions of their deceased husbands, while single mothers relied on mechanisms of assistance subject to means-testing and were more or less forcibly pushed back into employment. 39 This "differentiated continuum of positions;' according to sociologist Robert Castel, has historically characterized all "employment societies" in which "welfare cover extends across different social groups, but is differentiated in terms of the place they occupy in the hierarchY:' 40 In this type of society, the noncontributory benefits assigned to economically inactive people "designate their beneficiaries as being outside the dynamic of the production of social wealth'' and associate them with a status inferior to that of persons capable of meeting their own needs. 41 On the other hand, employment societies view the citizen-as-contributor-the employed, military active, healthy, and male head of household-as a more desirable form of subjectivity. 42

••• The debates over the representation, treatment, and rights of deviant citizens that I have presented in this prologue in relation to Western Europe were taking place also in Russia. As we will see in the following chapter, in Russia too modern social policies began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when moralistic and religious explanations of individual defects gave way to new scientific views. Especially after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the new Soviet government discredited the doctrine of charity and upheld the commitment to full employment as the best solution to social problems. Similarly to the social programs realized in interwar Western Europe, the welfare system of postrevolutionary Russia was a hybrid born from the exigency to combine the mechanisms of insurance with the goals of assistance, and largely reproducing the flaws of both. Indeed, in the Soviet Union too social insurance was harnessed to the moral rhetoric of universalism, although it necessarily excluded the economically inactive. Social assistance, instead, provided a more inclusive system of relief rooted in human suffering; but it also carried a reputation for stigma. In short, the welfare policies and approaches to deviance that were first discussed in the last years of the tsarist regime and then fully developed in the Soviet Union after 1917 derived from a general repertoire of modern state practices. As David Hoffmann has argued, the Soviet socialist regime of welfare was "one of the many ideological products of European modernitY:' 43

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At the same time, some welfare issues in Russia were unique to fitting social policies to Marxist ideology and conceptualizing rights and deviance in the first socialist country of the world. Given that the socialist state associated help neither with charity (as in religious traditions and Victorian philanthropy) nor with the rights of the individual (as in liberal theories), how then were care and respect for human dignity to be understood? How could the Soviet government lay exclusive claims to universality and effective justice? How were social activists to construct subjectivity and determine hierarchies of entitlement in ways that substantially differed from the "employment societies" of capitalist Europe? Was the elimination of class exploitation sufficient by itself to perfect the defects of deviant citizens? In addition, besides these conceptual and ideological dilemmas, the very mechanisms for delivering social assistance played out rather differently in the communist state than in the liberal democracies. While all over Europe the modern state-centralized and bureaucratic-assumed a more prominent role in the field of welfare than ever before, in capitalist countries the state allied itself with many nonstate agencies and assigned complementary roles to the voluntary sector, the family, and the market. The Soviet Union instead rejected the mixed economy of welfare, placed all activism within state structures, and asked professional experts as much as bureaucrats to work within nationalized facilities.

CHAPTER 1 I

SOCIAL RIGHTS IN RUSSIA BEFORE AND AFTER THE REVOLUTION

On April 2, 1938, a man called Zolotarev sent a letter to the newspaper Omskaia Pravda. He wrote: Not only has the Soviet state issued a constitution, it also guarantees its realization! Article 120 of the Constitution states that the citizens of the USSR have the right to material assistance in old age and also in case of disease and loss of working abilities. This right is realized by the wide development of social insurance (sotsial'noe strakhovanie) and social assistance (sotsial'noe obespechenie) financed by state money for the workers and the employees; by free medical help to the workers; and by the availability of a wide network of vacation resorts for the workers. The Soviet state has not only issued laws, but it also guarantees their realization .... The protection of old age, disease, and inability to work ... can exist only where the working class is in power, where there is a dictatorship of the proletariat. This question receives special attention from our friend and father Stalin. He personally addresses the question of social assistance .... This hard work, politically important and full of responsibility, is entrusted to the sections of social assistance of each provincial executive committee. Hundreds of people come to these sections every day asking for help. As the chairman of one of these bureaus-the Omsk provincial section of the Commissariat of Social Assistance-Zolotarev asked the local executive committee to assign a better location to his office. He argued that the satisfaction of his request "would prove even more and practically convince everyone that the state really cares about the living person who has lost the ability to work .. that in our Soviet state every person is beloved:' 1 Zolotarev's letter emphasized the importance not only of stating formal legal rights but also effectively realizing them in the lives of the Soviet workers. None other than Stalin had declared just two years earlier that the crucial

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issue in defining social rights was to "transfer the center of gravity ... to the question of the means for ensuring these rights." 2 Indeed, when the Soviet government had promulgated the new constitution of 1936, it had insisted on one vital matter: only because the foundations of communism had been finally laid, because the socioeconomic conditions had been put in place for social rights to be realized in practice, and-somehow contradictorily-because Stalin paid "special attention" and "personally" addressed the issue of welfare, only under these circumstances could state assistance be sanctioned as a legal right. The constitution, and Stalin himself, who had issued it, were presented as inaugurating a new era in the history of social justice. 3 Despite this rhetoric of new beginnings, however, many of the processes described by Zolotarev as absolute novelties of his time had in fact been in the making since the last years of the tsarist empire. The welfare of the Russian workers, for instance, was actively discussed in socialist as well as liberal intellectual circles already before the Revolution and then turned into an ideologically and politically crucial task of the new Soviet government immediately after 1917. In addition, the means and institutional apparatuses to accomplish this task had emerged already in 1918-1921 as the combination of insurance and assistance described by Zolotarev in his letter. Even the ambivalent mixing of state assistance as-of-right and as humanitarian care ("every person is beloved") that Zolotarev indicated in 1938 had been at the core of the Soviet welfare regime since its very establishment. Looking back roughly thirty years from Zolotarev's letter, in this chapter I analyze how these key ideas and practices of Soviet welfare came into being. First, I present a brief overview of the formative sources and unresolved problems of social protection in prerevolutionary Russia. Then, I focus on the contradictions that underpinned notions of rights at the inception of Soviet socialism and would continue to complicate Soviet welfare throughout the Stalinist years.

1. 1. Formative Sources and Unresolved Problems before 1917 The idea of assistance to deviant citizens as-of-right was discussed already in tsarist Russia. Especially in the years between 1905 and 1917, heated debates over the treatment and the rights of populations at risk began to emerge in several different social circles. Medical and educational experts,

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legal professionals and sociologists, tsarist officials, political radicals, and ordinary citizens too articulated opinions on the issue of social assistance that showed the influence of Russian philosophy, but also the impact of the European social sciences and of Bismarck's political theory. Abandoning traditional understandings of help as charity and the manifestation of a civic spirit, in the early twentieth century many educated Russians argued that the legal right to assistance should be granted to every person in need-especially to orphan children under age fifteen, the physically and mentally incapacitated, and the temporarily unemployed. 4 Like their counterparts in other countries, Russian physicians and teachers viewed the discussion over the rights of deviant social groups as pivotal to the professionalization of the scientific fields in which they worked. More and more vocally after the Revolution of 1905, they demanded that their government modernize and reform old policies in relation to disability rehabilitation, women's care, and recalcitrant children's education. Their modernizing efforts, however, were frustrated by the autocracy's unwillingness to sustain significant reforms in any aspect of public health and education, let alone in the realm of politics. Although scientific expertise enjoyed prestige in imperial Russia as much as in other European countries, unlike their colleagues abroad, Russian professionals lacked the necessary institutional support to gain relevance and put their knowledge into action. 5 As we will see, this situation would radically change after the Revolution of 1917, when several social activists of the prerevolutionary period moved into state-controlled services and adjusted-more or less successfully-to the vast range of responsibilities that the new Soviet state assigned to them. Alongside medical and educational professionals, Russian lawyers and sociologists also found themselves greatly preoccupied with the question of deviant citizens' social rights. They demanded that the tsarist government endow rights and duties on an individual basis. In addition, some of them developed a view of human rights that encompassed a combination of political and economic rights. 6 The liberal thinker B. A. Kistiakovskii, in particular, contended that human rights are the essential connection between definitions of rights and the social, economic, and political structure of a society. Writing in 1909, he viewed the institutionalization of individual liberties and the emergence in Russia of a constitutional government system as the training ground for the eventual development of human rights in a socialist society/ In 1911, the Russian philosopher P. I. Novgorodtsev similarly connected legislated social protection to human worth, affirming that only social insurance can guarantee "to all human beings the right to

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a worthy existence:'s The Russian intelligentsia's concern about properly defining the rights of deviant citizens was rooted both in their fundamental commitment to human dignity and in the European debate about the logics, mentalities, and stigmatizing procedures associated with the poor laws. Russian workers picked up these strains of thought and often articulated the concept that all human beings share a natural dignity and the right to respect. When they confronted employers with strikes and demonstrations, they insisted on treatment befitting their worth as persons. The ways in which they formulated their demands for economic and social justice reveal that, for ordinary Russian people of the time, social rights had several formative sources: the humanist tradition of Russian philosophy, Orthodox Christian theology, and the political ideas of socialism. They all mattered in grappling with the profound practical consequences of the question of rights. 9 The Russian autocracy, in its turn, was following in the path of other European countries and slowly moving toward a more prominent state role in the provision of welfare. Alexander II had made a first timid attempt at formulating state measures of social protection in 1861, when his government drafted an accident insurance law to cover miners in the Ural region. In 1866, "a law required manufacturers to set up factory hospitals, though this requirement"-explains David Hoffmann-"was not enforced:' 10 More importantly, in 1893, an insurance law created funds to provide protection against work-related illness and injury, and in 1903 the law "On compensation to the victims of unfortunate accidents" forced entrepreneurs to pay subsidies to their workers for loss of working ability due to accidents on the job. The latter law concerned only individuals working in factories and excluded all those who worked in the construction or agricultural sectors. Then, in 1912, a series of new insurance laws expanded the range of circumstances under which Russian workers could be provided with pensions and subsidies. In its fundamental features, this legislation corresponded to the Bismarckian type I have discussed in the prologue. Later Soviet historiography would be very critical of it, claiming that it covered only specific professions, branches of industry, regions, and social risks. 11 In addition, as Yanni Kotsonis has argued, the tsarist regime "was inimical to the formal delineation of rights" 12 and, I would add, careful not to integrate the projects of insurance legislation into a comprehensive program of social and political transformation. Finally, an important voice in the Russian prerevolutionary debate over social rights belonged to the socialists. In contrast to liberal political

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thinkers such as Kistiakovskii and Novgorodtsev, the socialists claimed that legality in itself could not guarantee justice. They associated help on behalf of the destitute not so much with laws, but rather with revolutionary plans and radical movements to end economic and social suffering. For the Marxists, in particular, social legislation was a measure used by the capitalists to reduce the reproduction costs of the labor force; it helped them preserve a labor force that otherwise would be destroyed by the tendency of single entrepreneurs to intensify exploitation. Communism, instead, held out the promise of a society in which every citizen might obtain satisfaction of his/ her needs beyond empty declarations of rights. The rejection of the concept of individual rights as irrelevant to the revolutionary project was grounded in the radicals' disdain for the regime of the individual subject enshrined in and protected by rights. Rather, they argued that the individual was subsumed within the class. Rights, in communist theory, are neither natural nor inalienable. They are man-made and politically determined-something to be conferred by the state in its effort to transform society. Most notably, as Piers Beirne and Alan Hunt have argued, Vladimir Lenin "lacked a coherent view of rights:' Legal notions "played no positive part in his thinking about the means for securing the interests of the Soviet citizenry;' because the Bolshevik leader regarded individual legal rights "as mere expressions of bourgeois individualism:' 13 Thus, at the second and sixth congresses of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party in 1903 and 1912, Lenin advanced the key principles of state welfare that would later constitute the foundation of the Soviet social insurance system. On both occasions, however, he articulated these principles not in terms of individual rights, but rather as the sociopolitical conditions that could eventually lead to the realization and sustainability of rights. 14 For Lenin and the other Bolsheviks at these congresses, the process of achieving social justice in Russia entailed altering property relations, nationalizing the means of production, liberating labor, and mobilizing public resources. In a socialist system, they averred, economic resources would no longer be related to the market, and citizens would no longer have the need to modify the outcomes of market distribution by making use of legislated social rights. Only when guaranteed by the proletarian revolution and the establishment of socialism would social rights include both the right and the duty to work, since labor would become the basis for the construction of the well-being of everyone. 15 This line of thought would be tested at several points in the history of Soviet socialism and in relation to social groups not necessarily included in the original Marxist doctrine. The Revolution of October 1917 constituted

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the first testing ground, setting in motion developments that reinscribed long-standing issues of economic justice and social equality within a completely new political context. For instance, by identifying social security for the insured members of the workforce as the key form of welfare in the future socialist society, Lenin had in principle rejected the notion of help as something based on the economic need of the recipient. In contrast to religious charity, private philanthropy, and the poor laws of nineteenth-century Europe, the forthcoming socialist regime was supposed to furnish insurance benefits to those who earned them through contributive work. This was Marx's notion of"active" citizenship, in which only productive and contributing citizens are guaranteed material support for the realization of their rights. 16 Nonetheless, after the October Revolution, Soviet welfare ended up including also various forms of social assistance directed at uninsured people outside the labor force. The socialist leadership, as we will see in the next section, did not make a univocal choice between help as an entitlement distributed in the workplace, help based on need, and help grounded in the universal right to subsistence. 17 Rather, it emphasized insurance as the normal channel of socialist welfare and, without excluding social assistance, made the latter system and its beneficiaries appear as inferior and abnormal. This was a quite paradoxical outcome: while the Soviet Union drew legitimacy from its difference vis-a-vis the capitalist democracies of the Western world, the awkward combination of insurance and assistance, as well as the social hierarchies entailed in this combination, made socialist welfare resemble the social protection regimes emerging in the rest of Europe. Related to the dilemma of integrating the logics of insurance and assistance was the Bolsheviks' attempt, following the very aftermath of the Revolution, to find a balance between two competing intentions. On one hand, they wanted to implement economic support for their sociopolitical base-i.e., urban, industrial, and mostly male workers-in order to dampen discontent and stimulate productivity. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks wished to provide social services to the entire population (although always with the exclusion of the "enemies" within the nascent Soviet community). Especially in the immediate postrevolutionary years, political and institutional agents argued over the relative importance of these two goals. As a result, the privileging of one class competed with the ideological appeal of universalist doctrines and the aspiration to achieve equality for all through the redistribution of resources. Although the Soviet state put insured workers at the core of its social policies and reduced the others to less deserving citizens (marginalized both materially and discursively), it did not

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completely exclude the economically inactive underbelly of its society from the purview of Soviet help. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat still imagined itself as having the responsibility to care for those who deviated from the work-based polity that Marxist doctrine advocated as the norm. Certainly, this help could be interpreted as a sociopolitical project to control those who fell beyond the jurisdiction of the insurance agency and to extract from them whatever labor they might have. But when we examine how the Commissariat of Social Assistance understood itself and its clientele, it becomes apparent that disciplining motivations operated in tension with the ethics of socialism and its emancipatory and egalitarian dimension. From this commissariat's perspective, political control and economic exigencies inextricably coexisted with humanitarian welfare as a paradigm of socialist morality.

1.2. The Contradictions at the Inception of Soviet Help A mere three days after the Revolution, on November 10, 1917, the Petro grad Military- Revolutionary Committee declared that "the rich classes and their servants will be deprived of the right to receive products:' 18 The Constitution of July 1918 fulfilled this promise by denying the right to vote to all "nontoiling" social groups and by discriminating against them in matters of everyday life. As Matthew Rendle and other historians have explained, the politically disenfranchised (lishentsy) "were more likely to lose access to jobs, rations, housing, and education:' 19 The first Commissar of Justice, I. Z. Shteinberg, put it quite bluntly when he later wrote from his political exile in Berlin: "Merely because you are a former bourgeois, you are deprived of the most ordinary, common human rights:'zo While the so-called exploiting classes-i.e., "the bourgeois, the priests, the kulaks, and the speculators"were denied all political, social, and human rights, the postrevolutionary press constantly reminded readers that "our Soviet Republic has its laws, and they are all directed at defending the interests of the poor:' Newspapers and journals of the time encouraged "all poor and suffering people" to "turn for help to your Soviet regime. It will always come to your aid:' 21 In other words, denying any conception of rights that was independent from the political and economic relations existing within society, the new socialist state understood rights in class terms and recognized only one liberty: freedom from poverty. 22 Because this conception was based on an analysis of society that centered on the polarization between two classes, it fostered a binary opposition between the rich (therefore exploitative) capitalists and

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the poor (therefore suffering) proletarians. The former were seen as enemies of the Revolution, infringing upon the entitlements of the latter and consequently to be deprived of any right. The poor classes, on the other hand, had emerged from the Revolution as the legitimate carriers of rights. As such, they were encouraged to denounce any violation of their entitlements and actively turn for help to the Soviet regime. The provision of help to the suffering was central to the new state's positive self-image in contrast with the tsarist regime and the capitalist governments. As Juliane Fiirst has put it, "the care and attention lavished on the weakest members of society was supposed to right the wrongs of the tsarist regime, while at the same time to signal to the capitalist world the moral and social superiority of the Soviet system:' 23 Soviet welfare experts emphasized the socialist state's concern for human life and its care for all needy, deviant, and marginalized people. For instance, in a 1919 programmatic article on the notion of help, Zlata Ionovna Lilina, the wife of Grigorii Evseevich Zinov'ev and at that time Commissar of Social Assistance, commented as follows on Russian prerevolutionary assistance: There, where the human person was ignored and the yoke of slavery burdened a strong, healthy, able-bodied population of millions of men and women, even less thought and care were given to the poor, the puny and the weak, the sick and the children.

Instead, she continued, her Commissariat was the place "to which flows all the misery and all the pain of the people:' 24 Soviet politicians insisted that not simply the scope but the very nature of help profoundly differed in the nascent Soviet order and in other political systems. While under capitalism social welfare took the shape of alms, under socialism it became a state concern and was financed exclusively by the state. Lilina and her colleagues at the Commissariat of Social Assistance argued that beneficence retained elements of upper-class condescension and rested on the whim of the rich rather than on the entitlement of the poor. This type of misgiving about charity was present also at the grassroots level. As we will see in chapter 3, blind and deaf activists had long been suspicious of any form of aid that debased people with physical impairments and eroded their self-reliance. Stating that "private philanthropy is out of the picture" because it is an unacceptable substitute for social justice,Z 5 Lilina accurately described the Bolshevik regime's uncompromising relationship with all sorts of charitable movements. Indeed, the new government had

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moved fast to close down all philanthropic organizations and prohibited the Orthodox Church from engaging in assistance to the poor. In place of beneficence, almsgiving, religiously inspired pity, and reliance on individual citizens' sense of civic duty, the Soviet state advanced the right of all poor and suffering people to receive material assistance. In October 1918, one of the first decrees on Soviet social assistance specified that the right to state help is granted in case of need, inability to work, or unemployment to "all, without exception, whose source of subsistence is their own labor without the exploitation of others:'26 Later, in 1923, a brochure published by the Commissariat of Social Assistance confirmed that socialist social protection extended "to all those who need assistance" and emphasized that only the state could carry it out properly: As the government earmarks funds for the army, the navy, the school, and the judiciary, so under the system of social assistance the state provides help from state funds to all those who need this helpY As we know, other European countries too were making the case for a centralized state, able to command sufficient resources to meet social needs in a comprehensive and uniform way. The crucial difference was that the socialist state put the entire sphere of social welfare under state control. Indeed, many institutions in the new Soviet state were made available to the poor and the suffering for demanding assistance as a matter of right. As Bernice Madison writes, if the primary need of a person seeking help was health care, this individual would be referred to the Commissariat of Health (Narodnyi Komissariat Zdravookhaneniia, or Narkomzdrav). If the best way to solve a citizen's difficulties was through training and education, he/she was sent to the Commissariat of Education (Narodnyi Komissariat Prosveshcheniia, Narkompros). If the applicant for help was a full-time member of the labor force, this individual was encouraged to turn to the Commissariat of Labor (Narodnyi Komissariat Truda, Narkomtrud). In the purview of the latter Commissariat stood two related areas of social policy: labor protection (which focused on working conditions) and social insurance (which was geared to caring for workers in case of sickness, work-related accidents, and unemployment). The Department of Social Insurance (Otdel Sotsial'nogo Strakhovaniia) within the Commissariat of Labor was supposed to provide accident insurance as well as old age pensions and family benefits to all economically active citizens and their dependents. 28 Lastly, if an uninsured and unemployed applicant required custodial care or long-term economic

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assistance, this person was directed to the Commissariat of Social Assistance (Narodnyi Komissariat Sotsial'nogo Obespecheniia or Narkomsobes). 29 While for the other commissariats the welfare function was one among many, for the Commissariat of Social Assistance it was the only raison d'etre. The immediate antecedents of the Commissariat of Social Assistance had been a Ministry of Public Philanthropy (Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennogo Prizreniia), which had been established by the Provisional Government in May 1917, and a People's Commissariat of Public Philanthropy (Narodnyi Komissariat Gosudarstvennogo Prizreniia), which was set up after the Bolshevik Revolution. As Madison has remarked, the name of the latter agency was a clumsy combination of the new commissariats with a carry-over term from the tsarist era. It was quickly abandoned as inappropriate for a socialist society and, on April 30, 1918, changed into People's Commissariat of Social Assistance. This name would exist until 1946 when the word ministry replaced again the term commissariat throughout the entire Soviet governmental structure. 30 During the turbulent years of the Civil War, the status of the Commissariat of Social Assistance as a Soviet institution repeatedly changed: initially, it was an independent agency that had republic-wide jurisdiction and was flanked in its social welfare responsibilities by the other mentioned

Figure 1.0 1. Areas of Social Protection and Responsible Institutions in the RSFSR The Soviet System of Social Protection

Health Care

Education

Provided by the Commissariat of Health

Provided by the Commissariat of Education

Social Insurance & Labor Protection

Custodial Care & Economic Assistance

Until1933:

Provided by the Commissariat of Social Assistance

Provided by the Commissariat of Labor and its Department of Social insurance

After 1933: Provided by the All-Union Central Committee of Trade Unions

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commissariats. Then, in January 1920, it was briefly turned into a minor bureau within the Commissariat of Labor. Finally, in June 1920, it was separated again from the Commissariat of Labor and given back its autonomous status. 31 These fluctuations reflected the state's difficulty in clearly defining the jurisdictional functions of the Commissariat of Social Assistance visa-vis the Commissariat of Labor, as well as their relative importance in the Soviet structure of government. For instance, on March 27, 1919, a directive · of the Council of People's Commissars had identified broad responsibilities for the Commissariat of Social Assistance: The defense of abandoned children (younger than 3) and mothers who remained without means of subsistence as a consequence of the war, counterrevolution, natural or social disasters; the defense and assistance of mothers and infants; the assistance of children (older than 3); the assistance of individuals who lost the ability to work during military service as well as the victims of counterrevolution, fires, floods, famines, epidemics, wars, and the abnormal social relations of the capitalist order, such as orphanhood, poverty and begging, prostitution, physical and moral defectiveness. 32 However, at the time of their final separation in June 1920, a decree on the respective purposes of the Commissariats of Labor and Social Assistance stated that the former was to care for the needs of the working class, while the latter would preside over "invalids, peasants, and the indigent:' 33 This official demarcation of functions led to a loss of institutional prestige for the Commissariat of Social Assistance and its practice of help: while the insurance offices of the Commissariat of Labor were given the pressing political task of offering reliable protection to Soviet workers, the Commissariat of Social Assistance was left with the menial chore of assigning meager pensions to the abnormals of the Soviet polity. In addition, since the Commissariat of Social Assistance was formalized only at the level of the Russian Republic (while the other commissariats were All-Union), this organ ended up having fewer resources and less skilled personnel. 34 With the beginning of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921, the Commissariat of Social Assistance moved from a unitary system of help to any individual uncovered by insurance to a structure that provided different forms of assistance for different social groups. The so-called peasant committee mutual aid funds helped peasant widows and orphans as well as villagers who had become unable to work due to old age, disability, sickness, or pregnancy. In 1932, after the collectivization of agriculture, these organs

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would turn into "public mutual aid funds" (kassy obshchestvennoi vzaimopomoshchi) for collective farm peasants. Until1965, although these funds were formally under the administrative authority of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, they were self-funded and did not receive any support from the central budget. Furthermore, the state farms (sovkhozy) could organize "village commissions" (sel'skie komissii) for the assignment of social assistance to the Soviet peasants. In relation to the disabled, instead, the post-1921 Soviet welfare system included producers' cooperatives aimed at providing employment to all adults with physical impairments. These cooperatives were supervised by the Commissariat of Social Assistance, but they largely developed their own mutual aid programs. Finally, a Pensioning Department (Pensionnyi Otdel or Otdel Pensionnogo Obespecheniia) was responsible for regulating the distribution of money, goods, and services to those citizens who were eligible neither for social insurance nor for mutual aid. Since they were the recipients of"pensions and subsidies" (pensii i posobiia), this organ's clients were usually referred to as "pensioners" (pensionery). 35 This tripartite division of social assistance would remain in place until Khrushchev's reforms in the 1950s-1960s. For instance, in a directive dated May 10, 1935, the Commissariat of Social Assistance explained: The sector of social assistance includes: (1) [access to] pensions, homes for disabled adults, homes for disabled children, and benefits to the contingent served by the social assistance program; (2) administration of production-training enterprises [uchebno-proizvodstvennye predpriiatiia or UPP] and job placement for the disabled ... ; and (3) administration of mutual aid funds in collective farms. The document also listed a series of "civil organizations" (obshchestvennye organizatsii) that operated under the direction of the Commissariat of Social Assistance with varying degrees of autonomy. Among them were the unions of invalids' cooperatives (koopinsoiuz) and their funds of mutual help (koopinkassy), as well as the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf. 36 Among the subsections of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, the Pensioning Department operated in a particularly chaotic and arbitrary way. 37 Its own administrators often complained about the "abnormal conditions" of this agency and related them above all to the dearth of properly trained personnel specifically hired to manage social assistance. 38 Indeed, the clerks working for the local sections of the Pensioning Department were usually simple men and women who not only handled people's applications

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Figure 1.02. The Organization of Social Assistance after 1921 The Peasants Peasant Committees of Mutual Aid Funds

Social Assistance after 1921

1932

Public Mutual Aid Funds

The Disabled

Society of the Deaf

Society of the Blind

Producers' Cooperatives & Unions of Invalids' Cooperatives

The Pensioners (Ineligible for sociol insurance or mutual aid)

Pensioning Department

for pensions and subsidies but also fulfilled a series of additional unrelated roles. Mr. Silin, for instance, held several parallel posts: he was the director of the local social assistance office in the Sargatskii district of Omsk province, but he was also a member of the Youth Organization (Komsomol) and the editor of a daily wall newspaper. Silin constantly took part in political campaigns that distracted him from his regular work in the pensioning office of the local social assistance section. In the year 1939 alone, he was required to participate in the spring harvest, the autumn harvest, the elections in the Supreme Council, and the census. 39 These overwhelming engagements would have made it impossible for anybody to work efficiently. They combined with the requirements of economic development in the social workers' localities, the interests of their specific offices, and their personal ideological preferences in affecting their everyday choices in assigning or denying help. On top of that, people like Silin had to deal with a pensioning legislation that was complex, unsystematic, and often encumbered with provisions no longer in force. For instance, although the central bureau in Moscow set

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"quotas" of money to be assigned to various categories of pensioners, 40 social workers in the localities often established their own inconsistent requirements for the provision of subsidies and applied variable sizes and priorities of payment. Depending on whether an applicant had ever been employed, subsidies could be assigned as a percentage of the applicant's former income, a percentage of a certain category's maximum income, or a minimum subsistence amount. As a result, a pension could fluctuate from 100 percent of the applicant's former income (if he/she had any) to less than 10 percent of any income categoryY As they often admitted in their reports to Moscow, the employees working in the commissions for the assignment of pensions had "a very poor knowledge of the pensioning legislation'' and made "many mistakes:' 42 Inundated with petitions and unsure how to handle them, local social assistance sections frequently applied to uninsured individuals the norms and laws foreseen for the clients of the social insurance system. 43 As Bernice Madison and Pavel Stiller have noticed, insurance administrators too were quite inconsistent in adhering to official policies, and both their sociopolitical views and their practices could be in partial contradiction with the laws. 44 This situation would characterize the administration of social assistance until December 1949, when then Minister Aleksei Sukhov called for reform and a much-needed "unitary legislation on pensioning:'45 Finally, the economic conditions in which social assistance was implemented throughout the early Soviet and Stalinist years added in to the ideological, institutional, and practical everyday confusion of Soviet help. The years between 1921 and 1928 were a turbulent time of famine, deurbanization, tremendous flux, and genuine poverty. Unemployment accelerated throughout the 1920s and urban standards of living correspondingly declined. The ideas and practices of social assistance that emerged at that time would later occur against different economic backgrounds. Indeed, beyond the formulation of principles, shifts in economy between periods of scarcity and unemployment (on one hand) and times of relative stability and labor demand (on the other hand) conditioned the design and implementation of specific social assistance policies. Thus, while both the work-oriented dimension and the need-based approach of Soviet social rights took shape in the 1920s and then continued to exist in dynamic tension with each other, various economic, social, and political changes could tip the balance between these key principles. As we will see in section II, the introduction of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928 and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1941 carried much more weight in determining the social welfare equilibrium than the Constitution of 1936. This occurred because, despite the

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rhetoric of the Stalin's constitution, the right to be helped never constituted a legally sanctioned right. Rather, it was a moral compromise that constantly changed under the influence of ideological concerns, the institutional architecture of Soviet welfare, the state's economic objectives, and the pressures of various social forces.

••• Declaring that every worker was entitled to receive state help in case of need, even before the Revolution Lenin had emphasized the importance of grounding social protection in a system of state-funded insurance. When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they indeed promoted a progressive welfare scheme that focused social expenditure on wage earners while leaving the care of the unemployed and disabled in the hands of a lesser system of social assistance. In this chapter, I have showed that although the social insurance position had political and moral supremacy in the Soviet welfare regime, the social assistance paradigm ran parallel to it and importantly complemented its functions from the very inception of Soviet socialism. Instead of seeing a dichotomy between the availability of strong protection for the most exemplary subjects and the complete exclusion of all the others from the circuits of protection, I have here suggested understanding Soviet welfare as a continuum of protection connected to a continuum of employment situations and subject positions-such as the industrial worker, the poor and suffering unemployed, and the exploiting enemy. While those employed in the core sectors of the Soviet economy were entitled to first-class benefits and the former rich were deprived of all social rights, economically inactive populations such as people with disabilities and other vulnerable social groups received the weak subsidization that the Commissariat of Social Assistance could offer them. This system was probably the closest approximation to universal social protection that the Soviet leadership could devise at that time without divorcing its ideological commitments and socioeconomic aspirations. However, rather than achieving social justice, this system ultimately marginalized the deviants of Soviet society and perpetuated hierarchies of inequality. This chapter has also revealed that, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, the most viable method for guaranteeing social rights was not legislation per se but rather the state's management of the field of welfare. In practical terms, this approach left social assistance officers alone with the daunting task of approving or rejecting deviant citizens' applications for state help.

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Without consistent welfare laws and social policies informed by an internally coherent ideology, their determination of who had the right to social protection turned out to be very patchy and unreliable. Since political leaders' welfare discourse sometimes adhered to the productive labor principle and at other times endorsed the minimum subsistence approach, social workers such as Zolotarev and Silin had a hard time defining the identity of their clients and coherently articulating their grounds for entitlement. As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, bureaucrats in the Pensioning Department referred to "useful work'' and "services" to justify the assignment of social assistance pensions to labor incapacitated individuals who had never worked. At the same time, they also realized that those who needed help the most were the least able to earn it through labor, and therefore they frequently privileged disease, disability, loneliness, and suffering over employment. They also evoked traditional constructions of family and gender. Having significant discretion in determining eligibility for help, social workers could provide "exceptional" one-time payments in the form of lump sums of money. They also let local ties and personal networks play a prominent role in granting access to services and sometimes distributed cash subsidies through fairly elaborate patronage machines. 46 Help-claimants, on their hand, were quite vocal in pointing out discrepancies in laws, official policies, cultural conventions, and moral standards. In doing so, they modified the identities that the state tried to impose on them and lay strong claims to a more just moral order.

CHAPTER 2

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N T H E BAS I S of their new government's proclamations, many Russian men and women moved quickly after the Bolshevik Revolution to claim the state's help in attaining material security. It is difficult to find reliable statistics specifying how many people asked and received help through the central Pensioning Department of the Commissariat of Social Assistance or its various sections in the localities. In the first half of 1920, the total number of pensioners helped by this agency was officially indicated to be 500,000, but in 1928 it decreased to 220,000. 1 There are no comprehensive statistics for the subsequent years. The Commissariat's headquarters in Moscow recorded the number of incoming petitions for help very unsystematically. Most local sections did not keep any count at all. When they did, they rarely maintained separate statistics for approved and denied petitions. The few preserved percentages are not reliable also because they did not take into consideration the letters that reached the Commissariat of Social Assistance through other organizations, such as the Communist Party Central Committee or the Council of People's Commissars. It is even more difficult to know how many visitors requested help simply by visiting the reception rooms (priemnye) that were attached to each social assistance section. Indeed, welfare officers were not required to write official reports on the activities of their reception rooms, and the oral nature of the exchanges happening there did not leave much written documentation. The testimonies of some social assistance employees reveal both the vast scope of the petitioning process in the postrevolutionary and Stalinist years and its utter messiness. "Things look bad with the count:' said a worried social worker; "everybody counts as they please, not caring about writing it down and deviating from the required forms of accounting:' 2 Another administrator declared that "in the days of collection of the complaints and petitions, almost all the workers sit and review the mail for entire days:' 3 As a bureaucrat in Omsk put it, "dozens of living people-pensioners (zhivye liudi pensionery) erect a siege around us every day and don't let us do our job normally:' 4 Complaining about the immensity of his work, another social

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worker stated: "There is the direct threat of literal explosion .... The provision of travel vouchers and subsidies, the discussions about clothes ... all this completely fills the working day of all the staff's My research in the archives of the central office of the Commissariat of Social Assistance in Moscow and its provincial sections in Perm' and Omsk confirms the huge quantity of petitions sent to this agency. Especially after the reorganization of 1921, the number of people turning for help to the Pensioning Department began to include many citizens who were eligible for assistance through the mutual aid institutions but did not receive any. This number encompassed also several people who were in principle insured but de facto not covered by insurance. Indeed, even for wage earners and salaried employees it was often challenging to receive regular social insurance benefits. Dorena Caroli has calculated that, by the end of the first Five-Year Plan, the provision of social insurance touched 87 percent of the Soviet working population, thus leaving a good 13 percent of workers uncovered. Even in the most prized industrial sectors, Caroli adds, only 30 percent of the workers "were considered as [fully] protected" in 1932. Moreover, as Madison has explained, "social insurance benefits were inadequate to meet the minimum needs of even the industrial workers who were covered by social insurance:' 6 As a result, the boundary lines between workers eligible for insurance and nonworkers entitled to receive social assistance were very blurred. This situation, for all practical purposes, swelled the clientele of the Commissariat of Social Assistance to enormous proportions. Flooding reception rooms with their handicapped and diseased bodies and inundating bureaucrats' desks with their desperate letters, most help-seekers told an ostensibly simple story. Like the disabled single mother Zolotova-Sologub at the beginning of this book, they introduced themselves as poor and underprivileged citizens of simple class origins who had performed useful jobs until they had fallen sick. As a matter of fact, they had turned into invalidy precisely because of their long and hard work. (Interestingly, the congenitally disabled rarely addressed their letters to the Commissariat of Social Assistance, rather preferring to find help through specialized organizations such as the invalid cooperatives and the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf that I will describe in chapter 3).As petitioners argued in their claims for help, their physical blemishes had combined with impairing social and psychological conditions and left them outside the labor force, without any means of subsistence, and in desperate need. They described their good behavior, while also emphasizing various forms of hardship and

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weakness. They were "invalid[s] against [their] own will;' to quote the disabled petitioner Vinokurov-suffering, defective, and otherwise deviant, but still striving Soviet citizens/ They all wanted to become pensioners, i.e., the entitled recipients of the state's material assistance and social services. To manage this ocean of human suffering, the Pensioning Department attempted to break down its customers into a manageable taxonomy of help, a categorization that could clarify not only who concretely possessed the right to be helped, but also why and in what forms. According to this scheme, all aspiring pensioners were divided into four major categories, each in turn including various intersecting subgroups: Labor pensioners (pensionery truda): people who became disabled on the job due to occupational diseases or accidents; elderly individuals who could no longer work or had accumulated enough seniority to stop working; and family members of deceased breadwinners. The labor pensioners assisted by the Commissariat of Social Assistance were all individuals who, for one reason or another, were not covered by social insurance. Indeed, while the insurance law required a seniority (trudovoi stazh) of around fourteen to twenty years of continuous work, for the purposes of social assistance the category of labor pensioner could be assigned even with a very short working record. 8 Military pensioners (voennye pensionery): people who became disabled on the battlefields and family members of Red Army soldiers. 9 Personal pensioners (personal'nye pensionery): individuals who had distinguished themselves by their contributions to the country or their local communities, and whose past endeavors had won them privileged entitlement to assistance. A special Commission or Department for the Assignment of Personal Pensions (Komissiia po naznacheniiu personal'nykh pensii or Otdel po obespecheniiu personal'nykh pensionerov) took decisions concerning this group. However, in this case as well as for the other categories of pensioners, all resolutions had to be approved by the local executive committees, which often worked as gatekeepers and tried to protect local budgets from this type of expense. 10 Others (prochie): individuals who were born with disabilities (invalidy detstva); those who had acquired disability through some non-workrelated and nonmilitary accident (invalidy sluchaia); and "all other invalids who are not covered by the laws on social insurance:' Very few official documents cared to spell out the identity and legal rights of the "others;' thus making this label into a catchall category for those people

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whose economic need derived from calamities not directly related to productive or military serviceY In some localities, the executive committees did not assign money for the category "others" at all. This put the congenitally blind and deaf in a particularly precarious situation, as they were either not assisted or randomly included in a different category of pensioners. 12 Like any hermeneutic system, this taxonomy was an abstraction: no single person represented the perfect expression of any one category, nor were these categories mutually exclusive. In fact, one frequently found overlaps between them. The indeterminacy of pensioner categorization methods demonstrates the constructed nature of the Soviet social assistance typology. In addition, this taxonomy did not reflect rigid class identifications. Rather, the main criterion for identifying the recipients of social assistance and subdividing them into groups was their relationship to labor conceived in the broadest possible senseY This was quite paradoxical: while pensioners were by definition needy unemployed individuals without full capacity to work, their identity as well as their access to social rights were always fundamentally related to labor. On one hand, Soviet help extended to social categories that traditionally relied on activities outside the labor market, such as beggars and prostitutes; on the other hand, the Commissariat of Social Assistance devised a taxonomy of help that depended on the type of relationship any given social category had established with the existing economic system. Entitlement to social assistance was grounded in one's past performances or potential for future contributions in the form of productive, military, or reproductive work, but it also included help based on need for those who could not possibly relate their identity to labor. This conceptualization turned the right to be helped into such a flexible notion and practice that it could be applied to all Soviet people. However, it also inevitably created hierarchies of entitlement and, although it did not systematically exclude those who could not access labor in the present, it nonetheless fostered their marginalization. Thus, this taxonomy was an abstract scheme developed to translate biographies into social assistance categories. It allowed constructing invalids as pensioners, thereby transforming them from economically inactive deviants into entitled citizens. In the process of separating the deserving from the undeserving, the Commissariat of Social Assistance in the end brought the pensioners into being. 14 The very individuals petitioning for state help would in turn appropriate this taxonomy in its forms (style and lexicon) and

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content (recurrent themes). Petitioners' narratives abundantly drew from the official jargon of need and effort in order to trace and valorize their personal life stories. Most importantly, they recognized that the state agency of social assistance could provide a system of relief rooted not so much in contract (as social insurance did) but above all in human suffering. In this chapter, I outline the framework through which the Soviet state produced and controlled the pensioners, prescribed them what to do, and compelled them to pick up different cultural scripts. At the same time, I analyze how marginalized individuals themselves accepted, adapted, subverted, or negated the system's messages, and how they shaped their own patterns of dialogue with the state's authorities. The process of demanding state help as a legal and moral right was possible for the Soviet deviants only when they made assertions through the categories of identification and the grounds of entitlement that were supported by the state-disability, family and gender relations, material need, and special merit. Yet, as petitioners used the state's discourse and seemed just to repeat a simple storyline, they in fact mobilized very personal, heterogeneous, and unpredictable experiences of material poverty, impairment, poor health, social precariousness, and deviation from the norm. While both the taxonomy devised by the Commissariat of Social Assistance and the petition itself as a textual genre tended to reify the petition-writer, self-defined invalidy enlarged the more constraining borders of the officially acceptable forms of presentation. As we will see in this chapter, they did so in several manners. They expressed feelings, desires, anxieties, obligations, and intentions of their own. They also incorporated reflections on the ambiguities informing official understandings, and sought redress in light of their specific contingent situations. Despite their marginalization and vulnerability, these men and women still had the power to decide how to make sense of the conflicting categories and hierarchies that were imposed on them. Their utterances powerfully tested the limits of Soviet constructions of subjectivity, of the official sphere of justice, and of the very meaning of socialist morality. 15 The identity of the invalid, who despite his or her deviance was still entitled to socialist justice, emerged as early as 1919-1921 in the crucible of official ordinances, administrative terms, and unquantifiable ethical notions of deservedness. It acquired specific features in connection with contingent changes both in the personal lives of the petitioners and in the larger economic and political context. This chapter largely focuses on the formative first ten or fifteen years after the Revolution, casting only a few glances ahead. Chapters 5 and 6 will attend to the changes that occurred in

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petitioners' self-fashioning and narratives of entitlement with the onset of Stalinism and the Second World War.

2. 1 . Disability The Soviet state largely conceived disability (invalidnost' or, literally, invalidity) as a lack of capacity to work and earn income (netrudosposobnost'), a subtraction of performative power from a body imagined at its full productive potential. The Bolsheviks had not invented this view: it followed in the German tradition of legislation providing for industrial compensation and reflected notions about the functionality of the human body that were common in the rest of Europe. 16 This approach differed from conceptions of disability as lack of bodily integrity and physical capacity sensu strictu. For instance, according to a productive-oriented logic, blind individuals are classified as disabled not because their blindness marks their bodies and makes it difficult for them to perform certain everyday activities, but rather because their blindness hinders their access to certain jobs or to any job at all. 17 As we will see, this understanding of disability was contested by the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf: while these organizations recognized their members' disability in terms of bodily integrity, they adamantly rejected invalidity as lack of labor capacity. In addition, the Commissariat of Social Assistance viewed disabled men as deviations from a gendered norm of physical as well as sociopolitical fitness. For disabled, economically inactive males, to lack work capacity and be unemployed meant to forsake not only the ideal subject position of healthy productive members of the social body, but also the role of breadwinners for their wives and children, thus turning into a heavy burden both for the collective and their families. This highly gendered and productive-oriented conceptualization of disability would characterize the Soviet Union throughout the period under study. Legislation and social programs toward the disabled, however, would change quite significantly in connection with shifts in ideology, politics, and economy. During the Civil War, the Bolshevik government did not advance any project of social assistance that comprehensively and systematically addressed all forms of disability and the different social risks connected with them. This left aspiring pensioners with some leeway in the formulation of their requests for help. For instance, disabled veterans claimed the "right to receive a pension" because they had served in the army. They sometimes referred to the prerevolutionary legislation on military pensions, while at

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other times they simply brought up military service without specifying which government they had served and which war they had participated in. 18 Those who could prove that they had fought on the side of the Reds sent their requests for help not only to the Pensioning Department, but also to a special relief bureau within the Commissariat of Social Assistance called the Committee for the Provision of Help to the Victims of Counterrevolution. This agency did not clarify how a person might qualify as "victim of counterrevolution;' but only spoke in vague terms of suffering bodies and destroyed households due to the nefarious actions of the Whites. Between 1918 and 1920, not only veterans but all sorts of selfdefined invalids attempted to convince the bureaucrats in this Committee that they had been persecuted by the tsarist government and abused by its supporters. For this suffering, which made them distinctly Soviet despite their inability to work, they demanded to be rewarded. 19 In 1921, the Council of People's Commissars drafted the first Soviet program specifically aimed at people with permanent disabilities. It marked the beginning of an initial phase of disability policies, which lasted until 1932 and foresaw a categorization of disability based on six levels of labor incapacity. These included: 1. persons not able to work for a salary and also needing assistance in their

everyday life; 2. persons unable to perform any kind of remunerative work, but not in need of special care from their family members; 3. persons who must give up their former profession and skilled labor, but who can still earn income by performing unskilled, temporary, and easy jobs; 4. persons who must engage in less specialized, but still skilled labor; 5. persons who must give up their job, but can engage in a new one at the same level of skill; 6. persons who can continue to perform their occupational activity but with decreased productivity. 20 This systematization represented the attempt to measure the multidimensional problems of disability through a monodimensional scale that assessed only one's capacity to earn incomeY The aged, for instance, were initially classified as "labor invalids;' without indicating that their inability to work came from old age. Only after 1927 did the phrase "old age invalid" (invalid starosti) start to appear in the writings of the Commissariat of Social

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Assistance. At that time, old age pensions were introduced only for textile workers. Then, in 1937, all employed persons became eligible for old age pensionsY It is also worth remembering that disabled peasants and collective farm members were excluded from the category of labor pensioner. No matter how they acquired their disability, peasants could receive assistance only through the self-financed funds of mutual helpY Medical expert commissions (vrachebno-trudovye ekspertnye komissii, or VTEK) examined applicants in order to assign them a category of invalidity and set their pensions. Although avowedly "medical" and part of the Commissariat of Health, these commissions were asked to pay attention to the nonmedical factors that determined a person's degree of disability. Two "social' criteria were particularly important: (1) the etiology of one's handicap-that is, whether the disability arose from employment or military service, was congenital, or resulted from an accident that had occurred outside the job; and (2) its impact on one's capacity to work. Of course, privilege was given to the forms of disability that had arisen from military or work-related injuries and occupational diseases. For instance, in the case of blindness, the expert commissions often assigned the first group of invalidity only to individuals who had become blind on the job! When disability was not acquired while performing military or productive service to the state, the applicants' working seniority and the type of work they used to perform could compensate and still provide them with a set of entitlements. In other words, experts had to follow a political line in assigning applicants to disability categories, and economic expediency affected the establishment of"medical' criteria for determining entitlements. The right to full state assistance came only with the first category. It included the provision of prostheses and other enabling devices, housing in invalids' homes administered by the Commissariat of Social Assistance, and various forms of"work-related and financial help" (trudovaia i khoziaistvennaia pomoshch'). The disabled of the second and third groups received assistance through the Commissariat's workshops, labor colonies, and invalids' cooperatives. All disabled pensioners who refused to be placed in state facilities or rejected job offers from the invalids' cooperatives immediately lost their right to assistance. The right to a disability pension was not granted to disabled individuals ascribed to the last three groups of invalidity (unless they had acquired their disability on the job and were fully insured). A brochure issued by the Commissariat of Social Assistance and published in English translation in 1927 commented that the last three groups "had the right to be assisted to get a job:' 24 Finally, although deprived of the right to

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pension assistance as invalidy, all disabled people in the last three categories (even the uninsured and the victims of non-work-related accidents) could receive help as unemployed individuals. According to Soviet legislation in force until 1930, the right to social assistance in case of unemployment was granted to all citizens who were registered with the labor exchange offices (otdel truda), who could prove that they were indeed looking for a job, and who did not have any other means of subsistence. Assistance was denied to those who left their jobs of their own volition, refused the jobs offered by the labor exchange, had incomes "on the side;' and engaged in trading. The official "liquidation of unemployment" in 1930 made all the laws regulating assistance both to able-bodied and disabled unemployed individuals no longer effective. 25 In reality, even before that watershed moment, the first category of invalidity was anybody's best hope to attain social rights, while being assigned to categories four through six had no significant practical import. Russian men and women with disabilities had recognized the legitimizing force of their suffering bodies since the very aftermath of the Revolution. When it was literally vital to be identified as a member of the proletariat, labor-incapacitated people who could not claim belonging through the Leninist social contract ("he who does not work shall not eat") strove to achieve an effect of Sovietness through their handicapped but still striving bodies. They contended that they had become "Soviet workers" immediately after the October Revolution, but disability had forced them to leave their jobs and lead a depressing life outside the Soviet working collective. This is precisely what had happened to Stepan Parfen'evich Rumiantsev, a veteran of the Great War who had "lost [his] left leg" on the battlefields. Although he had turned into "an invalid;' Rumiantsev had still managed to find employment as a telegraph operator for the Russian Railways. However, after three years of regular work, he developed eczema in his right leg. At the beginning he did not pay attention to this disease and kept working at the railway's telegraph station, but the eczema became worse and needed medical attention. Showing "complete disrespect for an invalid's labor;' the local authorities did not believe him, called him a "faker;' and forced him to "tolerate all sorts of offenses, including being beaten in the face:' His boss repeatedly tried to fire him. Nonetheless, despite all the discrimination and against a diagnosis of "100 percent loss of working capacity;' Rumiantsev continued to perform his job "on par" with the able-bodied and provided for his family as much as he could. Finally, tired of the "persecution;"'mockery;' and outright "violence" to which the railway administration was subjecting

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him and afraid to be laid off his job, on February 28, 1921, Rumiantsev sought "defense and help" in the Commissariat of Social Assistance. 26 To the new Soviet agency of state help, Rumiantsev wrote a letter that was in line with the old conventions of petitions to the authorities: he strove to dissolve bureaucratic indifference and achieve justice by evoking sympathy for the ill-fated but worthy petitioner. This was reflected not only in his choice of words such as "a crust of bread" and "unfortunate invalid:' but also in the idea that a powerful patron's attention could "save me from the persecution that every minute threatens me and my familY:' These elements had their roots both in the Russian folk lament and in the humanist tradition of Orthodox Christian theologyY At the same time, there was something profoundly new in the request articulated in this letter. Rumiantsev addressed the Commissariat of Social Assistance as part of a regulated system of welfare that guaranteed social protection to all "working elements" as well as to the "poor and suffering:' and asked this agency to "order" the railway administration "to recognize the labor of the disabled and stop treating them with disparagement:' As Rumiantsev argued, "I am not to blame if I have turned into a cripple:'zs This man countered the perception of bodily disfigurement as a sign of some sort of guilt that was common in Russian folk and religious traditions; he also denied the assumption that disability impaired the capacity to fully participate in society. He insisted, rather, that the nascent community of the Soviet able-bodied change its attitude toward the disabled and their labor. In other words, this petitioner did not simply assume the stance of a supplicant begging for money and pleading for help, but rather that of a man who took part in the productive and social order of postrevolutionary Russia, and therefore could demand rights and respect. 29 The Commissariat of Social Assistance responded to Rumiantsev's letter by sending out an "inspector" to check on his work situation. Unfortunately, we do not know if that was enough to change the attitude of the railway administration. 30 Rumiantsev was not an exception. For many other disabled men and women, compulsory withdrawal from the emerging Soviet labor force led to economic precariousness and sociopolitical marginalization as well as affective pain. As the sixty-one-year-old Z. I. Vengerova wrote in June 1920, forced retirement from her job in the field of education due to a "peripheral paralysis" made her feel "completely shattered (razbitoi):' 31 The psychiatric doctor P. Vinokurov expressed a similar feeling in October 1920: he had given all his time, "without saving my energies, to the service of the mentally and neurologically ill victims of the war and the revolution ... and paid special attention to Red soldiers:' His body was now "so weak that I

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cannot perform any service .... This turns me into an invalid against my will, without any means to survive:' 32 Even a congenitally blind person such as the twenty-year-old Elena Vladimirovna Lushnikova could not simply accept being a "full invalid:' Claiming that she did not want to give up on the opportunity to work, in 1925 Lushnikova asked the Commissariat of Social Assistance to admit her to the dormitory for the blind in Moscow and let her learn a job. 33 These petitioners recognized their deviance, i.e., the inability to work that put them outside of "normal" society, but also argued that theirs was not a self-chosen path of departure from the collective. Throughout the 1920s, disabled people seeking help and redress wrote narratives of great effort and great suffering. They presented themselves as diligent Soviet workers, regardless of whether their labor had happened under the tsars or after the Revolution. Writing in 1924 and requesting help on the grounds of her twenty-nine-year work record, the disabled single mother Mariia Ivanovna Toropova applied to her prerevolutionary work all the concepts that would have made it "worthy" (zasluzhennyi) in the mid1920s. As the first physician ever to set foot in a remote village in Perm' province, Toropova had to deal with "uncultured, benighted people:' She had not only to cure them, but also to enlighten them and quell their misgivings about medical science. All these difficulties did not stop Toropova and did not damage her faith in the final triumph of medicine. Eventually, with the coming of the Bolsheviks to power, Toropova could take active part in the implementation of the new Soviet forms of medical help. She delivered lectures about hygiene and directed schools, children's shelters, the Home for Mother and Child, and the Home for Invalids. During the Civil War, when epidemics were spreading wildly all over Russia, Toropova continued working without regard for her energy and health. In short, she was a model Soviet subject-a modern woman of inexhaustible energy, belief in science, and love for the unfortunate and suffering Russian people. But now she had lost all her working capacity and was also raising a blind daughter alone. She did receive a pension from the insurance fund, but argued that this money was not enough for her family to survive on. 34 A biography of unrelenting "pedagogical work and service in the local governments (zemstva) for almost thirty years;' which eventually led her to "serious nervous disease;' was used by Mariia rvovna Neikirkh in August 1920, when she asked to be assigned a larger social assistance pension. 35 Similarly, in 1930, a woman called V.I. Isaeva contended that she had fallen ill with "strong nervous dysfunctions" because, following the state's call, she had left her native village and moved to Moscow to attend special courses

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to become chairman of the rural soviet. Now she could no longer undertake "any kind of social work" and found herself "in great financial need:' 36 Unfortunately, Neikirkh's and Isaeva's fates ended up being quite different. Neikirkh's work in the old tsarist institutions of rural government did not seem Soviet enough to the social assistance bureaucrat who handled her case, and this woman was denied any right to a larger pension. 37 On the contrary, Isaeva's work as chairperson of a rural executive committee was a very Soviet life choice. In the eyes of the social worker Baranova, the state of Isaeva's health, her nervous breakdowns, her "very serious material conditions" and "great need;' and her incapacity to work made it absolutely necessary to help her through monetary subsidies and medical therapy. 38 For the purposes of our discussion, it is remarkable that beyond their different life stories and the opposite outcomes of their petitions, both women placed considerable emphasis not only on the issue of survival, but also on the psychic suffering that accompanied their physical hardship. Both described feeling emotionally overwhelmed by the economic difficulty and social injustice of their situations. As Katherine Lebow has argued in relation to Polish workers' memoirs, the line between physical and affective suffering inevitably blurred "under the strains of poverty" and the author's specific circumstances of life were used as a sphere of moral justice that had a "thick materiality" attached to it. 39 Bodily and spiritual knowledge of suffering endowed Soviet petitioners too with a strong sense of entitlement and prompted them to claim rights as something both earned and suffered for. Disabled petitioners sometimes envisioned the possibility of a future usefullife. Yet this vision was a conditional prospect: state help would allow the invalids to be useful again to the collective, and petitioners promised to fulfill the duties of the social contract, but only if the state also honored its side of the bargain. This grassroots moral economy can be observed throughout the early Soviet and Stalinist years. For instance, in December 1920, Anton Antonovich Borodavko contended that, if given money to purchase new artificial legs, he would be able to "move around and be useful to myself and my familY:' 40 In June 1920, a certain A. E. Shtraus asked for help in order to "become finally a healthy, strong, and useful worker, which I could be and hope to be if I recover my health:' 41 In December 1929, the disabled single mother Anna Leo nova asked for help "so that I could ... help with my social work ... and educate the masses to be socialist:' 42 In June 1930, a disabled petitioner wrote that by receiving monetary help and physical therapy, his "exhausted body" would recover the lost strength and become "again useful to the Revolution:' 43 Addressing his petition for help to the Society of the Blind, the visually impaired man Isaak Osipovich Rabinovich wrote:

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I am sure that you understand what colossal loss [blindness] is for a man who has always worked and loved to give up his hours of free time for the sake of work. And now, finding myself in such a horrible, desperate situation, for entire days I idle around the room without knowing how to use the long dark days. 44

The self-defined "cripple" Zolotova-Sologub thus echoed: 'All around me there is the demand for experienced workers, especially in the Caucasus, but I, like stagnant water covered with mold, I am immobile, when I could be of huge utilitY:' 45 Invoking contribution as a ground for social rights that could be located in the future shifted attention away from the etiology of disability to the hidden potentials of allegedly deviant subjects. In addition, this approach further allowed the invalidy to present their incapacity to work and their unemployment not as a willful choice, but as a style of life that they were forced to adopt and that oppressed them morally. This type of narrative endowed petitioners with proper Sovietness by virtue of their aspiration to contribute and, conversely, put the blame for deviance on the state itself. Clearly, Soviet men and women with physical impairments had identified the key problem entailed in deciding disability pensions in accordance with lack of labor ability and earning capacity. Namely, this method of evaluation penalized the citizen who tried to return to work as against those individuals who deliberately refrained from working. Disabled people were asked to work within their possibilities, but at the same time those who did work were excluded from social protection.46 Of course, this was a reflection of the accelerating unemployment rates that characterized the years between 1918 and 1928 and swelled the clientele of the Commissariat of Social Assistance. Yet, this was in blatant contradiction to the socialist ideal of help through employment. As we will see in chapter 5, when the country's economic conditions changed in the early 1930s, the realization of this incongruity led Soviet policymakers to modify their original approach to the social rights of people with disabilities.

2.2. Family and Gender Relations While lack of working capacity prevented disabled people from fulfilling their labor duties, lack of a husband prevented unmarried women from fulfilling their gender and family roles and, in the end, determined their material poverty. According to this logic, single mothers were by default deviant subjects. However, if a woman and her children were alone because

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of the death of their breadwinner, they could acquire a particularly deserving status-that of dependents (izhdiventsy). In the postrevolutionary and Stalinist Soviet Union, patriarchal conceptions of gender inflected the rules of social assistance to a significant extent because they rescaled the premium given to productive work in favor of reproductive labor. Other scholars have indeed remarked that socialist constructions of poverty and entitlement were highly gendered and determined differing access for men and women to public services and support. 47 As Lisa Granik has written, "gender myths were so embedded in Soviet legislation and legal practice that the notion of formal equality itself was a myth, supported only by official rhetoric and propaganda. Soviet legislation was so engendered that it institutionalized, rather than eradicated, gender inequalitY:'48 This comment definitely applies to the field of social assistance: despite the neutral language of legislation on family dependents and the rhetoric of women's emancipation under socialism, the Pensioning Department adhered to a traditional model of the family as the foundational unit of society and a crucial factor in affecting access to state-controlled goods. Women received state help mainly in their capacity as mothers and, in the case of military families, as Red soldiers' wives. 49 Social workers were more lenient in assigning dependent pensions when women lost their male breadwinners than the other way around. The very formulation "loss of breadwinner" closely echoed the key legitimizing category for Soviet help-"loss of working ability" -indicating that state assistance was to compensate for the deficit of a fundamental good, either a job or a (male) spouse. And yet, the equation between the two values was highly gendered: single women busy raising their offspring were considered unable to work until the children turned eight, but this type of labor incapacity was never attributed to fathers. Historian David Hoffmann has remarked that the Soviet state's commitment to help women through social assistance and health care policies reflected the pan-European modern-state drive to manage women's reproduction. 50 Indeed, Soviet law identified single women's legal issues as questions related to abortion, child abandonment, sexual infection, rape, alimony, and the establishment of paternity. Underpinning this list was a patriarchal view of women that made help revolve almost exclusively around the medical campaign against child mortality and sickness. While men remained unmarked as ordinary workers, essentialist notions of women's nature were institutionalized through legislation that protected women mainly as mothers. For instance, among the most significant and long-lasting policies of this period was Decree No. 117 of the Council of People's Commissars

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(dated June 1, 1919), which foresaw the provision of monetary subsidies or help in kind to all pregnant female workers and women who had just given birth. Circulating the decree, the Commissariat of Labor accompanied it with a "List of rules for the provision of subsidies and pensions" -an instructive document that was widely used in the practice of local social assistance offices. 51 In section 3, on assistance to pregnant women and new mothers, Article 13 specified to whom the right to maternity subsidies was to be granted: all women employed in state, nationalized, private, and public institutions and enterprises, independently from the nature of their work and from their working seniority; all women who were officially registered as unemployed with the labor exchange offices; and all women who were recognized as disabled. In the difficult years of the Civil War, a series of legislative acts reaffirmed priority in the provision of food to all pregnant and breast-feeding women (married and single) and established a special subsidy for the purchase of foodstuffs and objects of care for newborn children. In addition, pregnant women and nursing mothers were granted priority for medical help and protected from job layoffs. 52 Besides the laws protecting both married and single women as mothers, official policies on family dependents were established by two regulations dated 1919 and 1921, and then confirmed in the social security directives of 1928 and 1930. 53 According to this legislation, children, siblings, parents, and spouses could qualify as dependents if they were minors, elderly, or otherwise unable to work. Age and working ability notwithstanding, any adult was entitled to help as a dependent when taking care of the minor children or siblings of the deceased breadwinner. The conditions and the "quotas" of this type of social assistance varied based on the causes of the breadwinner's death: of course, work-related injuries and occupational diseases were the preferred circumstances. In case the dependent was an adult, assistance usually consisted in the applicant's placement in a facility of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, such as an invalids' workshop, a cooperative, or a labor commune. Minors under sixteen who had become complete orphans after the death of a breadwinner were sent to children's homes and other facilities of the Commissariats of Education or Health (depending on the age and general health of the child). A subsidy in kind or in cash could be offered if the local social assistance section had enough resources and if the applicant was not already provided with housing. The absence of a breadwinner was often qualified as "loneliness" (odinochestvo). In Russian as in English, this word describes an emotion. However, in the usage of Soviet social workers it also had economic and social

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connotations: those who lived alone without kin represented an economically precarious social type, which did not have the same safety net available to the other categories of pensioners. 54 Indeed, "loneliness and poverty" were indicated in a 1923 brochure as the first factors facilitating the growth of prostitution among "young girls" (followed by the "lack of work habits"). 55 The causal relationship thus established between one's celibacy and female prostitution reveals that in the early Soviet Union gender shaped the emotional and socioeconomic meanings of "loneliness:' Women who were "left alone" (ostavshiesia odinokie) by the death of their husbands and the mobilization in the army of their sons were both materially and morally vulnerable, and thus had a greater entitlement to help than their male counterparts. Indeed, in the case of male applicants, "loneliness" was often a reason to deny help. For instance, the Commissariat of Social Assistance refused to award the status of pensioner to the unmarried man Vasilii Ivanovich Babich. Since this man did not have a family of his own and lived with his parents, in the eyes of the authorities he contravened his prescribed role of male breadwinner and therefore could not have any right to help. 56 A similar fate befell Evgenii Dmitrievich Noskov, a single man who lived with his mother in a village of Perm' province and whose multiple applications for a pension were unceremoniously rejected by the local social assistance authorities. 57 Unfortunately, the archival record does not allow reconstructing the personal stories of these two men, and their specific reasons for believing they had the right to be helped remain unclear. While traditional views of men as breadwinners and women as dependents colored the lenses through which the Commissariat of Social Assistance looked down on its clientele, they also affected the ways in which people looked back at this agency as a provider of social rights. Petitioning for help as invalidy, both men and women made frequent use of the family trope and extensively talked about their minor children and elderly parents. Yet, there were significant differences between men's and women's strategies for mobilizing family relations. Disabled men compared themselves not so much to the figure of the father, but rather to the legal status of provider and, in the face of their objective inability to carry out that specifically male role in any autonomous way, asked the state to grant them a regular monthly subsidy. This help would put disabled males in the condition to fulfill their family duties and thereby turn them into proper subjects. Disabled women, instead, could draw for legitimacy either on the legal status of dependents or on their maternal roles (or on both at the same time). In 1927, for instance, Mariia Ivanovna Ivanova declared that her husband had died while working

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as a doctor in a campaign for the liquidation of typhus and demanded the right to be assigned a dependent's pension without referring to any maternal responsibility. 58 In 1939, the sixty-two-year old Praskov'ia Timofeevna Berendeeva turned to the Omsk social assistance office complaining that she was raising two orphans (of thirteen and eleven years) all by herself and demanding an increase in her miserly monthly pension. The Omsk executive committee recommended to verify her situation with a home visit and, "depending on her material conditions;' to give her a pension either as a dependent or within the category "others:' In the end, her pension was raised from fifteen to thirty-five rubles a month. 59 Similarly, the Omsk social assistance section decided to assign a pension of twenty rubles to the unemployed single mother Anna Matveevna Golovacheva because her family consisted of three persons, all without working abilities. 60 In principle, when women were able to work, they ceased to qualify as needy and the state was not legally responsible for helping them materially. In practice, however, it was not so difficult for women to find good reasons for their unemployment. For instance, although a certain P. N. Puchkova was completely able-bodied, the Pensioning Department identified her as a labor-incapacitated invalid because she had three small children (of thirteen, nine, and two years) and assigned her a pension for "loss of breadwinner:' 61 The story of Agrippina Gerasimovna Deviatkova is even more revealing of how gender could trump legislation. When her husband, Vasilii Efimovich, died in June 1938, he had accumulated enough work seniority as manager of the Tiumen' city museum to allow his widow to receive a regular insurance pension. However, eight months before his death, Vasilii had been accused of hiring "class alien elements" to work in the museum and was arrested for political reasons under the infamous Article 58. Arrest and death in prison legally deprived his family of the right to receive any insurance pension. Nonetheless, despite the apparent dead-end nature of her legal predicament, Deviatkova still demanded the Omsk social assistance section to provide her with state help. The latter agency replied by sending inspector Afanasii Fadeevich Luzin to verify the material conditions in which Deviatkova lived. It turned out that Deviatkova and her four minor children lived with her sister and brother-in-law in a tiny eighteen-square-meter apartment located in a cold, dark, and suffocating basement. Deviatkova worked in the print shop of the newspaper Krasnoe Znamia (although she was not regularly hired, but rather worked "off the books") and received a salary of 115 rubles a month. She did not have any other type of income because the apartment belonged to the sister and Deviatkova herself possessed only

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a cow. As Luzin wrote in his report, "The material situation of the family is extremely difficult. The two older children should go to school, but they are completely half-naked [sic]:' Furthermore, Deviatkova was sick: she had already undergone three surgeries for appendicitis and a hernia, and her general health was "very weak:' As the widow of a purged person, Deviatkova must have been herself suspected of political unreliability. Nonetheless, the inspector Luzin formulated such compelling arguments in her favor that the Omsk executive committee in the end assigned her a pension of 176.40 rubles a month. The explanatory note accompanying the final decision did not make any mention of her husband's stained past, but simply stated that the pension was assigned to Deviatkova "as an exception" and emphasized the woman's loneliness, hardship in raising four children between the ages of one and ten, and "bad material situation:' 62 As we will see in chapter 5 while analyzing the dynamics of the right to be helped during the Stalinist purges, Deviatkova's story is indeed "an exception;' yet it reveals that exceptions could be made. Most female petitioners evoked the specter of child mortality to inspire compassion both for themselves as dutiful sacrificial mothers and for their offspring as unjustly suffering victims. Their "hungry;' "weak;' "sick;' and "nervous" children were not the "flowers of our lives" that appeared in Soviet posters and journals, but yet another complication in disabled women's already difficult lives. 63 In their petitions for help, women reminded the state authorities that "children need not only to eat, but also to have clothes, shoes, and go to school" -as the disabled single mother Mariia Nikolaevna Ershova wrote in May 1939. 64 In addition, unmarried mothers tended to relate their disability, disease, and "hysteria and neurasthenia" to their difficult pregnancies and deliveries. 65 As we have already seen, Zolotova -Sologub recounted that the Whites had arrested her when she was pregnant because she was a member of a Bolshevik organization, and "mistreatment by the Whites" had caused the premature birth of her child. 66 Whenever possible, female petitioners connected suffering and material need to contribution in the field of reproduction. In brochure after brochure, the Soviet propaganda machine tirelessly argued that capitalist approaches to women negatively impacted children's health and the rates of infant mortality. In particular, the main culprits were capitalist working conditions that prevented women from breast-feeding and deprived children of their mothers' milk from the very first days after delivery. Only the socialist state, averred experts and social workers,

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guaranteed the conditions for the realization of both female emancipation and women's rights as mothers. Petitioning single mothers took this doctrine very seriously and used it to portray themselves neither as beggars of the old times nor as backward peasant housewives, but as model Soviet female subjects-aware of modern scientific and socioeconomic truths, tough, and enduring all kinds of suffering. Thus, in Aprill927, a certain Chernousova listed the usual motives that legitimized her right to be helped-"being unemployed, absolutely without any means of survival, having to support two children ... not having any relative or acquaintance, and finding myself at the limits of the most cruel need and misery" -but above all she insisted that she "didn't want to lose my children ... especially the second one, who still sucks at my breasf'67 A group of self-defined "breast-feeding mothers" from Perm' province decided to engage the Mother and Infant Department on its own turf by lamenting that they had not received any material support from the state in the last four months and "the children wants [sic] to eat" (unfortunately, the activist Klavdiia Grebneva could do no more for them than to reply, "We cannot give you subsidies because there is no money:') 68 After 1936, when abortion was recriminalized in the Soviet Union, women-petitioners related various handicaps and ailments to the abortions that their husbands had forced them to undergo. 69 As much as disabled petitioners put blame for their deviance on state institutions that denied them help, so several unmarried and unemployed mothers contended that bureaucrats' "soulless inattentive attitude" drove them into prostitution. This is what had happened to Rimma Ivanovna Shigina, A. N. Rodinova, and Anastasiia Dmitrevna Deviatova around 1930.7° The latter, for instance, had been forced to leave school when she was fourteen "due to my defects" and later had been abandoned by an alcoholic husband. She had duly turned to the labor exchange, but this bureau had refused her any help. As she wrote in a petition to the Women's Section, Without the labor exchange it is impossible to find a job anywhere, and now I am forced to go to a street corner and sell my body to pay for the rent and feed the kids. There is no other way out and nowhere to ask for help. And so once more I ask the Women's Section to give whatever help they can so that I will not die in the dirt and so that I can raise my children. The boy Vladimir is four and the girl Vera is two. They have not been accepted into any day care. And so here I am, abandoned by everybody just like in the old regime and nobody pays attention to me. 71

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Similarly, a certain Zuleika Shimova (who belonged to the dungan Chinese minority living in Soviet Kazakhstan) claimed her "right to study" and asked the Women's Section "first, to help me continue and finish my studies in the medical technical school with a stipend ... and second, to help my family get settled.... Otherwise I will be forced to return to the difficult everyday conditions of a dungan woman:' 72 While state assistance was the only opportunity for unmarried mothers to become acceptable Soviet subjects, the denial of help automatically pushed these suffering women into deviance, turning them again into the miserable clients of bourgeois philanthropy, the beggars of tsarist times, or the parasitic antisocial elements that sabotaged the construction of socialism. The threat articulated by single mothers and other unemployed people to look for sources of income in nonproductive, disorderly, and non-socially-useful activities powerfully hit at the heart of the Soviet transformative project and its sense of social norm and anomaly. 73 In her analysis of women's letters to the social insurance offices, Dorena Caroli has concluded that "women did not receive the help they hoped for:' 74 For the Commissariat of Social Assistance, instead, women without a breadwinner were more entitled to state help than single men. The reason for this difference, I would suggest, is to be found both in the two agencies' visions of their target populations and in women's self-presentation as subjects of help. The social insurance agency catered to the needs of waged industrial workers and envisioned its clients largely as males. Therefore, women's claims to material security on the grounds of their labor contributions were perforce weaker than those of their male counterparts. The Commissariat of Social Assistance cared for the "poor and suffering" and was thus more sensitive to women's self-portrayals as lonely, helpless, and needy individuals. Petitions authored by children with disabilities are very rare. Yet, the parents of invalid-children (deti invalidy) frequently turned to the Commissariat of Social Assistance and other welfare agencies in search for help. Some parents were adamantly opposed to the internment of their children in state facilities and specified that the help they wanted was financial assistance. For instance, in October 1921, the father of a twenty-one-year-old "mentally retarded" woman demanded the assignation of a social assistance subsidy because his daughter was unable to perform any type of work and he needed to provide constant care to her. Rejecting his multiple petitions with the paradoxical explanation that the girl had not worked anywhere, the Commissariat of Social Assistance recommended placing her in a state facility.

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This was not the help that the man felt his daughter should be entitled to. As he wrote: My daughter is retarded from birth; she has not been anywhere and has lived only at her parents' home. Of course, she cannot be placed in the shelter ... her internment there would be like condemning her to hunger and perhaps to death/ 5 Other parents wanted their children to receive proper physical rehabilitation and education in the special homes for defective minors managed by the Commissariat of Education. For example, in 1930, a single mother called Bunkis-Strakhovaia requested the placement of her son in a colony for "morally defective" children because "the education of my son is catastrophic ... the child is completely alone for the whole day and does not accept any form of education:' The situation was made even more difficult by the fact that a detoxification center was located in the building where the two of them lived and, according to the mother, "the kid is witness to the most disgusting scenes:' 76 While Soviet defectologists made loud promises of scientific and humane help to all defective children (as I will discuss in the next chapter), Soviet women were not afraid to hold the experts to their promises. For instance, feigning medical ignorance while also showing strong agency, the single mother of a deaf girl from Kuibyshev province related her life story as follows: My daughter Valentina was one and a half when I, with great horror, came to the conclusion that she was deaf-mute. I think that the cause of her deafness was a disease, whose name I don't even know because I used to live in a remote small village and did not avail myself of medical help in a timely manner. My daughter is beautiful, healthy, very smart, but the older she gets the more difficult it is for me to raise her. Now she is five years old. She does not have a father.... I took my Valechka to Ul'ianovsk. I was full of bright hopes that my little girl would finally live in an environment that is normal for her and would no longer tolerate any more persecutions from the healthy kids ... Unfortunately, the Ul'ianovsk home for deaf children did not have enough available beds in 1935, and Valentina, together with twenty-five other deaf children, was denied admission to this facility.7 7

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2.3. Special Merit and Desperate Need The taxonomy of help devised by the Commissariat of Social Assistance combined the legitimizing principles of labor and need in ways that simultaneously expanded the right to be helped and built it in the shape of a hierarchical pyramid. This was particularly evident in relation to personal pensioners and "others:' Although both categories identified entitled citizens, they also clearly positioned applicants for help at the opposite ends of the Soviet pyramid of deservedness. Personal pensioners were entitled to special help because they had performed contributions so valuable that could not neatly fit into other categories. The "others;' instead, were given a minimal right to subsistence despite the fact that they had never contributed and most likely would never contribute to the well-being of the collectivity. The quality of these two groups' relationship to labor found reflection in the quantity of financial assistance assigned to them: while personal pensioners were in the most advantageous economic position among all pensioners, the "others" had to be content with miserly subsidies. For instance, in the years between 1935 and 1940, in Omsk province, personal pensioners were assigned an average amount of 150 rubles a month (with variations between 75 and 350 rubles), while the "others" received pensions of around 60 rubles. 78 In 1949, the average monthly pension of an individual classified as "other" in Tula province was 38 rubles, while a personal pensioner in the same area could receive up to 268 rubles per month. 79 In the last quarter of 1950, in Perm' province, 459 "others" were assigned a total of 26,713 rubles, while 223 personal pensioners received a total of 55,660 rubles. 80 Beyond the preeminence of personal pensioners over "others" according to Soviet ideas of subjectivity, a pragmatic explanation for the different sizes of their pensions is the fact that local insurance funds were supposed to pay 50 percent of a citizen's personal pension. 81 Finally, as Madison has noticed, the "others" could count only on the support of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, while the labor and military pensioners could also receive financial support and access to services through other help-oriented organizations. 82 The idea of giving subsidies to persons with special merits (zaslugi) was first mentioned in a directive of the Council of People's Commissars dated March 24, 1920. A later directive, dated July 16, 1920, identified special contributions as: ( 1) "the participation in the struggle against the international imperialists and the bourgeois states that had sided with the counterrevolutionary movement"; and (2) "the construction of socialism and party work:' Those who qualified as personal pensioners according to these criteria could

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Figure 2.01. Average Amount of Pensions in Rubles for the Categories "Personal Pensioners" and "Others" Personal pensioners

1935-1940

Others

150

60

268*

38

249

58

[Omsk province)

1949 [Tula province)

1950 [Perm' province)

Source: IsAOO,f.437,o. 9.,d. 568,1. 6,1.13,1.41,1.48; and lbid.,d.152,1. 23; GARF,f.413,o.1,d.ll40,l.37; GAPK, f. 1137, o. 1, d. 224, I. 2. Note:* indicates the maximum amount of pensions.

receive a pension in the case of disability or when they reached old age (fifty-five years for men and fifty for women). Although personal pensioners achieved this status through their personal accomplishments, when they died, their privileges could be transferred to their dependents. 83 A series of new directives issued at the end of the 1920s and in the early 1930s confirmed personal pensioners' previous privileges concerning housing, payment of utilities, public transportation, and medical and educational services, but also specified that personal pensioners could become members of invalids' cooperatives and receive payment for their work without losing the right to personal pensions. This change is not insignificant: it signaled that the performance of productive activities was encouraged for all Soviet citizens and played a bigger role than in previous years in establishing merit. 84 In the 1940s, military service was again added to "the field of productive and social work" since, in practice, local social assistance sections and executive committees granted or denied the "right to a personal pension" depending on the petitioners' special merits on both accounts. 85 Since the status of personal pensioner came with several benefits and perceptibly higher pensions, many Soviet unemployed and uninsured people attempted to argue for their right to be identified as such. The ways in which they constructed their identity as exemplary invalids largely overlapped with the repertoire of constructions and arguments advanced by the regular invalidy. However, a different temporality distinguished their narratives. While we have seen that applicants for regular social assistance pensions

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often projected contribution and usefulness in the future, what mattered to would-be personal pensioners was always the past and the present. Let us consider a few stories that illustrate which past accomplishments were mobilized by petitioners for personal pensions and which merits counted as "special" in the eyes of the bureaucrats. Vasilii Stepanovich Vinokurov, for instance, had been involved in communist political circles since 1901 and had been arrested by the tsarist police several times. In 1918, he established a Bolshevik party cell comprising 150 people. After serving in the Civil War, he worked in the field of leather production until1929. He began to receive a regular personal pension in 1933 and, in 1948, obtained an increase in his monthly allowance. In formulating the reasons for this rise, the Perm' social assistance section referred not only to Vinokurov's past revolutionary service and his present difficult material situation, but also to the fact that he was supporting a sick and unemployed wife. 86 Similarly, the former Red Army soldier and war invalid Il'ia Ivanovich Galashev was assigned a personal pension in 1940 for his "active participation in the Civil War and in the consolidation of Soviet powd' 87 Vasilii Ivanovich Muromtsev-former Red Army soldier, Red partisan, veteran of the Civil War, and early member of the Bolshevik party-was an invalid of the second group who, despite his disability, worked as director of an industry in the Kungurskii district of Perm' province. He was assigned a personal pension in 1948 for his service to the country on the front during the Civil War and in the field of work as manager of a productive unit. 88 On the other hand, the most frequent reasons for rejecting a personal pension included a current ability to work, the fact that the applicant had not performed sufficient productive labor in the past, the presence in the household of family members who were able to work, or a relatively good economic situation. 89 As with other types of social assistance pensions, considerations of gender also strongly inflected the laws with personal pensions. In the case of widows, the applicant's material condition seemed to carry less weight than other parameters, such as the merits of a deceased husband or the presence of many children. Anisiia Vasil'evna Pirozhkova, for instance, was the widow of a personal pensioner and herself an invalid unable to work. She had been supported by her husband and did not receive any subsidy in her own name. Her son and daughter lived independently with their own families. Despite the fact that she owned a house, a cow, and a vegetable garden, in 1948 Pirozhkova was assigned a personal pension on the grounds of her deceased husband's special merits as well as her own disability and "loneliness:'90 Likewise, in December 1948, out of eight applications for personal

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pensions reviewed by the Perm' executive committee only one was accepted; it came from the widow Minna Kolchanova. A housewife without the ability to work, Kolchanova had been supported by her husband throughout her life. However, after his death and their son's mobilization in the army, she began to live alone. Her deceased husband's service to the country together with her current "loneliness" won Kolchanova a pension of 150 rubles per month. 91 In other words, past merit was imagined as constituting, a male applicant's qualification, while for women it was above all the present conditions of poverty and solitude that mattered. Men demonstrated valor and heroism, and were therefore awarded all sorts of state recognitions. Women were relegated to the roles of faithful companions and selfless caregivers living in the reflected light of their men; they were first of all sacrificial mothers, and as such they deserved pity and compassion. Thus, the criteria by which Soviet uninsured men and women were endowed with the right to a personal pension seemed-once again-to mix legal and moral judgment. People had to demonstrate merits related to some kind of performed labor (revolutionary, party, military, productive, or reproductive). Work in the field of culture, education, medicine, science, and art could be a special merit too; however, this kind of labor needed to be "long and sacrificial" (dolgoletnii i samootverzhennyi), "creative and Soviet" (sozidatel'nyi i sovetskii). 92 Furthermore, since people's rights were not simply decided within a legal framework but above all debated with reference to socialist morality, personal pensions were particularly vulnerable to be taken away if citizens proved unworthy of them. Would-be personal pensioners were required to have and maintain an unstained past history of military medals and awards for Stakhanovism. As we will see in chapter 5, with the tighter controls and heightened suspicions of the mid- and late 1930s, many personal pensioners would be unmasked as deviant citizens and deprived of their social assistance rights. At the opposite end of special merit was another legal and moral ground of entitlement: the lack of any means of subsistence and the state of being in need (nuzhdaemost'). This was a plus for all aspiring pensioners, but constituted the exclusive legitimatizing argument for the "others:' For instance, in 1939, the Omsk social assistance section put the applicant Nikolai Prokofevich Arkhimov in the category "others" and assigned him a regular social assistance pension only because he did not have and would never have enough work seniority to receive a pension of any other type. 93 The "others" were legitimized solely by their economic poverty as "those with a low income" (maloimushchie) and "those who fell into need" (pavshie v nuzhdu).

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They were-quite literally-the residual cases, the leftovers of Soviet social welfare, those who did not fall under the scope of any regulation but were still entitled to be somehow assisted. 94 Compassion and humanitarianism, however, were not to be replaced by foolishness. As an administrator wrote in a letter to the Perm' social assistance section in February 1920, On one hand, we need to verify the cases in which ... the invalids and the unemployed ... are in fact hiding their real incomes, underground jobs, etc. On the other hand, control very rarely achieves any goal apart from having a negative moral import. ... When everyone knows and understands that social welfare is the effective and just distribution of goods among all the members of a working family, then nobody will think about taking advantage of social welfare. 95 Until the transformation of the Soviet collective into this perfect "working family;' the Commissariat of Social Assistance was encouraged to use various forms of means-testing to verify people's real needs. All applicants for state help had to accompany their petitions with a statement certified by their house manager, the local militia, or the city soviet, and including enough information to prove their destitution. In addition, the applicants' homes could be subjected to investigation by welfare personnel in order to attest that their condition was truly poor and that they really lacked the clothes and basic goods they claimed to need. 96 These requirements were quite ironic because they de facto continued the poor law tradition that was so loudly criticized in Soviet welfare rhetoric. 97 A form titled "Act of investigation of the level of disability, family composition, and economic situation of the citizen applicant" made two points explicit to all social assistance claimants: first, the right to be helped was conditional upon one's relation to labor, family duties, and need; second, this right was subject to controls. According to this form, when the social assistance inspectors visited applicants in their homes, they were to inquire about the work abilities and employment potential of all the members of the household. Was any family member employed? And what were their monthly salaries? Which occupational skills were available to the unemployed family members? Was the applicant registered at the local labor exchange office, and since when? Then followed a series of questions concerning the family's economic situation. What forms and amounts of state

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subsidies was each family member already receiving? What were the size and condition of the apartment in which the family was living? And how much did they pay for rent? Did the applicant have any real estate property or financial assets of any other kind? 98 As we see from these questions, both the applicant as an individual and the applicant's family were subjected to investigation. Neighbors were sometimes interviewed, too, in order to check whether the applicant was in truth unemployed and to clarify the specific reasons the subject was not working. 99 At the bottom of the form was a blank space for the investigators to write a personal assessment of the case under review. Most often, the social assistance officers used this space to add information on the whereabouts of applicants and give details on their families. Sometimes, they wrote personal comments (either in favor of or against the applicant), which proved critical in making final decisions about whether to approve or reject specific applications. For instance, Iakim Feodorovich Onianov's application for a new fur coat was rejected because the investigator had discovered that the Onianov family did not live in need at all. The fur coat, as the social worker wrote in his '1\ct of investigation;' was the only object that this family was lacking! 100 A review of the forms preserved in the archives of Perm' and Omsk shows that, in the end, only individuals who had no relatives to support them and were completely destitute and unable to work had a real chance to receive monetary help as "others:' These "Acts of investigation'' dramatize the Soviet Union's investment in enforcing its regulatory apparatuses of control. Yet they also reveal that in the field of social assistance (as in many other realms) this modern state could rarely fully implement strict surveillance. Social assistance investigators and medical experts were challenged both by the chaotic conditions of their everyday work and by people's ability to manipulate the system of care and control. Indeed, unemployed men and women moved around all the time and frequently escaped the state's investigations. Sent out to check on applicants' destitution, some inspectors found empty homes, and the only information they could feed back to the state was about absence: "There is no such person living at this address. They left the apartment:' 101 Other times, it was the petitioners themselves who took the initiative in demanding an investigation of their material situation. Perceiving the visit of a social assistance inspector as an indication that their case was (finally!) under review, people understood these visits not only as demeaning forms of control but also as the first step toward the provision of the assistance to which they felt entitled. 102

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2.4. Voices and Experiences That Imparted New Meaning All the examples above reveal that claiming the right to be helped meant adapting the policymakers' abstract taxonomy to the contingent situations that were occurring in people's everyday lives. Disability, gender and family relations, special merit, and need were categories of legitimization constructed by power. But when help-seekers employed them to assert entitlement, they enriched and modified these categories with their own embedded experiences of material poverty, impairment, and social precariousness. The jumble of stories I have brought together in this chapter suggests that, despite the stark injustice of invalidy's everyday situations, ·and although their narratives of suffering could have a critical potential, their claims were not the manifestation of outright resistance to power. Rather, the right to be helped was for them an area of friction whereby deviant citizens could enter the common field of the moral economy and impart new meaning to it. By reproducing authoritative discourse and performing codified acts, petitions for state assistance operated like other officially recognized practices in the Soviet Union. Namely, they legitimized power but at the same time, in Alexei Yurchak's words, "enabled many new ways of life, meanings, interests, relations, pursuits, and communities:' 103 Besides the negotiations around disability, gender, merit, and need, three more aspects of people's politics of entitlement clearly illustrate this point: the blurring of the legal and the moral, the rights/ control tension, and the need to engage the state in a dialogue. These three facets of the right to be helped show that marginalized men and women (at least those who decided to write to power) did not so much contest the legitimacy of Soviet socialism as incorporate their own vision of justice into socialist morality. The tendency to confuse legal and moral arguments in defining the right to be helped was shared by party ideologues as well as mid-level bureaucrats and petitioning invalidy. As we have seen in chapter l, Marxist theory denied that rights were individual and inalienable, and Lenin had postulated that rights were bestowed upon citizens by the socialist state when the latter created the conditions for the realization of rights. At the same time, according to Soviet rhetoric, the socialist laws on social assistance reflected the "care" of the state for the "human person:' Following a logic that confused help as a right and help as a form of benevolent compassion, petitioners couched their claims in both moral and legal tones. In their letters to the state agency of social assistance, uninsured men and women outside the

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labor force contended that the law entitled them to social services and benefits. Phrases such as "by law" (po zakonu), "we have the right" (my v prave or imeem pravo), and "I enjoy all the rights" (ia pol'zuius' vsemi pravami) were common in this type of petition. 104 At the same time, alongside references to legality petitioners often indicated the "righteousness" (pravota) of their claims vis-a-vis the Soviet moral order. 105 In their eyes, the provision of state help equated not only to the mechanical and dispassionate application of welfare laws, but also to larger and deeply felt questions of "justice" (spravedlivost') and "good revolutionary act[s):' 106 Historian Mark Steinberg has argued that Russian workers challenged conditions of life that appeared to violate their sense of human dignity and natural rights by mobilizing the category of personhood (lichnost') .107 Similarly, a number of petitioning invalidy stated that they were "first of all a person" and as such were entitled to "preserve my health and have a long life:' 108 Unemployed and uninsured people understood that the suffering and disabled body was a resource on which to base a demand for help, and recognized that this was both a legal entitlement spelled out in Soviet disability policies and a humanitarian principle articulated in officials' and experts' discourses. For them, the guarantee of health and material security related both to individual human dignity and to the rights that the Soviet state had placed at the core of its welfare programs. 109 To attain the justice promised by the Revolution, people with physical impairments and other labor-incapacitating conditions accepted and even sustained the tension between rights and controls. As we have seen from their petitions, many help-seekers seemed willing to subject themselves to the intrusive investigations that the practice of Soviet help made inseparable from the realization of rights. However, when discipline came without either humane care or legal entitlements, petitioners could be quite vocal in pointing out all the inner contradictions of the Soviet doctrine of rights and the limits of the state's role in granting them. For instance, in March 1920, in a note to the Perm' newspaper Red Ural, a certain Polyntsev contrasted the "sad picture" of a local family of four "invalids" living on "a miserable pension" and the fact that they had "sacrificed everything to fight the enemies of the Revolution:' 110 Writing in July 1930, a woman called !lena Bakhturina revealed the real face of the "liquidation" of unemployment that had been supposedly achieved in that year. She declared that she had been without a job since 1923 and, despite her demands to be hired somewhere, "I am not provided with any suitable job ... I have no help from anywhere:' 111 Angry at the fact that he was not receiving a social assistance pension although formally assigned one, in January 1935 the invalid A. I. Reinson complained

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that "due to the boorishness of the social assistance section, my family and I are starving:'m In March 1938, a man without legs protested that the local social assistance section "doesn't give me any help and doesn't show any sensitivity to me as an active fighter for socialism:' 113 In 1950, a blind woman in Tbilisi argued that she did not see "the realization of the care that is indicated in the constitution:' 114 The Soviet state had professed to have a superior moral purpose on behalf of society. In addition, to distinguish itself from other modern states that articulated the same claim, the Bolshevik government had proclaimed that real justice could be realized only under the benevolent guidance of the Communist Party and its leaders. Even the more disgruntled petitionwriters did not contest the Soviet state's mandate to further the common good and the verticality of power relations that came with it. 115 Rather, by throwing charges of inconsistency in the face of the bureaucrats reading their letters, they exposed all the discrepancies in what official doctrine presented as a coherent vision. Not by achieving specific legal victories, but rather by the very act of adding their dissonant voices and experiences, they problematized the rights/control linkage and thereby challenged the state's presumptive monopoly on how to understand justice. Of course, this does not mean that in the Soviet Union the state authorities acknowledged petitioners' ideas, that marginalized help-seekers pushed social policies in new directions, or that they directly prodded debates. Especially at times of political terror, people must have stayed clear of critiquing the leadership of the party-state or questioning its legitimacy, since they knew that they could be repressed for doing so. 116 And yet, regardless of the democratic credibility of the petitioning process, many men and women at the margins of Soviet society still used it in the attempt to enter into a dialogue with the organs of power. They did so because they sensed that a solution to their problems "can be found only in the support of the Soviet state ( v sovetskoi podderzhke);' as the unemployed former accountant Konstantin Kulakov wrote in May 1926. 117 Thus, when unemployed and disabled help-seekers described feelings of isolation and desperation, the sense of being "forgotten;' "thrown overboard;' and "utterly alone;' they were in fact protesting the Soviet state's refusal to dialogue with them. Not simply moves to evoke pity, their utterances effectively incorporated the tradition of lament into the new socialist ethos of help, and thereby modified both. Abandonment by the state "as it happened in the old regime;' to quote again the prostitute Anastasiia Deviatova, should not occur under the Soviets-and when it did, it created

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resentment and bitterness. 118 For her and the many other deviant citizens whose predicaments I have reconstructed in this chapter, petitions for help offered a realm of appeal in which they could demand that the Soviet state guarantee the justice that had so far been denied them. The framework of moral rivalry with both the tsarist regime and the capitalist West was particularly conducive to a phenomenon whereby Soviet letter-writers simultaneously protested suffering and claimed rights by reference to socialist laws and moral regimes. For them, the denial of state intervention was a form of legal and moral injustice that was not admissible under socialism. As Liene Ozolirp-Fitzgerald has argued in relation to unemployed people in post-Soviet Latvia, a forgetful state appeared as a glaring contradiction to those who had seen the Soviet regime as the guarantor of social protection and justice. 119 Expressing bewilderment and disappointment at this paradox, help-seekers in the postrevolutionary and Stalinist periods simultaneously legitimized the Soviet sociopolitical and moral order and reshaped it with their personal experiences.

••• Soviet political elites saw the classification of economically inactive citizens in relation to labor and need as a means by which they could control not only the mass of help-seekers, but also their own ideological anxieties about the troubling field of social assistance. This was in line with the obsession for categorization that other scholars have observed in the Soviet leadership. 120 However, the taxonomy of help devised by the Commissariat of Social Assistance-as much as other Soviet classificatory schemes-stabilized neither the identities of the help-claimants nor the grounds for entitling them, thus leaving the meaning of the right to be helped susceptible to the interpretations of different historical actors. By focusing on the exchanges between state bureaucrats and applicants for social assistance, in this chapter I have shown that what marked the identity and legitimacy of"the pensioner" was not a firm set of categories and laws, but rather the idea of lack-of labor capacity, of family support, of means for survival. This lack invalidated a person's ability to be self-sufficient and therefore entitled that individual to state assistance. However, while defect granted Soviet pensioners the right to be helped, it also set them apart from full-fledged subjects and caused their marginalization within the body social (as revealed for instance by the use of the term "others" to indicate an entire category of pensioners). On one hand, social assistance was a discriminatory form of protection,

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because it was related to the perception that certain individuals were not and would never be part of the productive exchange. On the other hand, social assistance had an emancipatory appeal for allegedly deviant citizens, because it allowed for a variety of subject positions that were different from the normative New Soviet Man and required ongoing self-correction, but could nonetheless be accepted as legitimate. For the most marginalized "others;' the communicative process entailed in claiming the right to be helped had integrative powers, because it meant tightly inscribing one's Self into the Soviet system of legal and moral rights. 121 It represented a medium of inclusion and agency because it offered a framework to create new values while simultaneously asserting the very socialist notion of emancipation. As we will observe in the next chapter, the interplay between marginalization and entitlement also characterized understandings of the right to be helped among specific communities of experts and activists. Like the social workers of the Commissariat of Social Assistance and the aspiring pensioners writing to them, child psychiatrists, teachers, legal consultants, gynecologists, and midwives too learned to identify their clients in the new vocabulary of Soviet help, but at the same time adapted this vocabulary to their professional, disciplinary, and humanitarian aspirations.

CHAPTER 3

THE ACTIVISTS AND THEIR CHARGES

B

ESIDES THE ASSIGNMENT of monetary help through the Pensioning Department of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, the Soviet system of social protection involved a series of state organizations that operated under the aegis of various commissariats and implemented social policy in such diverse fields as education, health care, family life, housing, and employment. In the following chapters, I will discuss the services offered by four of them: the Medico-Pedagogical Station, the Mother and Infant Department, and the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf. Before moving to their practice of help and how it evolved throughout the early Soviet and Stalinist periods, it is necessary to clarify these agencies' institutional standing within the emerging system of Soviet welfare. A few comments are also in order on how the people working in these organizations constructed their charges and how their constructions compared with the bureaucrats' vision of"the pensioner:' As we will see, despite their efforts to produce coherent and scientific representations, experts and activists in the end were unable to disentangle the most intricate knots in the Soviet right to be helped. The labor/need quandary remained as inextricable in their conceptualization of social rights as it was in the state's discourses. More importantly, their desire to protect individual human dignity constantly rubbed against their impulse to normalize the deviants. The staff of the Medico-Pedagogical Station, for instance, consisted of medical and educational professionals who pushed for noncriminalizing pedagogical approaches to child deviance. Since the early twentieth century, this group of experts had opposed the degenerative theory of child development and instead campaigned to address children with psychological disorders through a curative paradigm. Among them, the child psychiatrist Vsevolod Kashchenko had proposed to use the words defective (defektivnyi) and defectiveness (defektivnost') as scientific terms that encompassed not only children with physical and cognitive disabilities but also orphaned, abandoned, and runaway children, juvenile delinquents, waifs with personality problems, and mentally disturbed youngsters. All these children,

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averred Kashchenko already in 1912, were not beyond help; their social dangerousness could be corrected and even prevented. 1 In this chapter, I will discuss how after the Bolshevik Revolution Kashchenko and other supporters of defectology (defektologiia) were able to positively inform Soviet notions of deviant children by advancing their right to be helped as both a disciplinary modern-state practice and a social value grounded in scientific laws. We will see that defectology prevailed over other projects for children's collective upbringing because it was a scientifically founded source of optimism making authoritative claims about dysfunctional children's corrigibility and integration in the nascent Soviet social body. 2 However, we will also see that the postrevolutionary defectologists stopped short of assessing their own investment in the Soviet transformative project. Despite all their scientific objectivity and good intentions, these experts never criticized the modernist drive inherent in the socialist order to correct "morally defective" children and turn them into future productive contributors. The combination of present suffering and future contribution characterized also the constructions of deserving single mothers advanced by the Mother and Infant Department. For this organization's doctors and social activists-as much as for the bureaucrats of the Commissariat of Social Assistance-women without men were in a position of particular weakness and helplessness, which demanded the special solicitude of the state. At the same time, women as caregivers were expected to be dutiful, self-sacrificial, hardworking, and disciplined. Historian Lynne Attwood has argued that in the postrevolutionary and Stalinist Soviet Union, women's hard work had to be interwoven with traditionally feminine traits and roles. 3 In the discourse of experts and activists, as we will see in this chapter, unemployed and unmarried mothers embodied both need and reproductive contribution; they simultaneously represented the rightful claimants of help from the state and the dutiful supporters of the state in its reproductive politics. These women's right to be helped was underpinned by deep-rooted patriarchal views of gender that granted them strong entitlements to social protection but also profound marginalization. Of course, this conception was not unique to the Soviet Union. A model of womanhood that constructed women as particularly vulnerable while also exalting their nurturing nature, caretaking proclivities, self-abnegation, and ability to make sacrifices for the collective characterized other world powers and individual reformers of the early twentieth century. However, in post1917 Russia these patriarchal ideas contradictorily interlaced with socialist

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aspirations of gender emancipation and with specifically Soviet concepts of citizens' duties and state imperatives. 4 What made the Soviet case different was the way in which single mothers were asked to relate not simply to the male wage earner, the doctor, or the social worker, but ultimately to the socialist state as the key source of well-being. Unmarried mothers outside the labor force epitomized the defective, lacking, and helpless subject who could overcome deviance only through loyalty to the state and hard work on behalf of the collectivity. The activists of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf, by contrast, never portrayed their target populations as being in a condition of helplessness. Rather, they systematically denied blind and deaf people's invalidism and insisted on the real possibility for their constituencies to overcome physical inadequacy. Through the argument for capability, these two societies moved the Soviet blind and deaf out of the traditional condescending domain of charity (based either on Christian or secular compassion) and expressed pronounced intolerance toward those disabled who asked for beneficence. While disabled beggars, street musicians, fortune- tellers, and postcard sellers were seen to be work-shy and undeserving invalidy living off alms, the active members of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf positioned themselves as entitled recipients of the state's assistance. In other words, disabled activists claimed that blind and deaf people needed state care, but not tutelage: they would help themselves through labor and become productive citizens if the state provided support by guaranteeing them access to appropriate jobs. In this emancipatory logic, the reception of state help was conceived as a social right that, unlike charity, did not preclude self-realization and integration within Soviet society. The advocacy for access to able-bodied society on the basis of ability instead of pity was widespread among twentieth-century disability rights movements across the world. 5 However, disability scholarship has pointed out some troublesome implications of a discourse that denied functional impairment and subordinated acceptable subjectivity to the promise of performance. This construction acknowledged that contribution is relevant to defining the right to be helped and, conversely, accepted the idea that disability is a legitimate reason for exclusion. As Douglas Baynton has suggested, the proposition that equality in capacity justifies social equality in the end simply reverses the argument that differences in capacity legitimize inequality. 6 As we will see, the Russian Societies of the Blind and the Deaf strove to fight their members' marginalization without radically challenging the oppressive assumptions behind the very category of disability.

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Thus, in the eyes of all these communities of activists, the recipients of state help carried a mixture of traits that indicated both deviance and deservedness. Features such as defectiveness, neglect, defenselessness, loneliness, irrationality, ignorance, and backwardness entitled wayward children, unmarried mothers, and disabled men to state help as a right, but also strongly promoted hierarchies of marginalization among them and between them and the "normals:' As we will see in chapters 4 through 6, both the entitling and the marginalizing sides of these representations would be tested in the activists' concrete practice of help. The humanitarian motivations and the liberating desires of the first postrevolutionary decade would never completely disappear from the advocacy of these organizations, but they would later lead to very disempowering outcomes.

3. 1. Defectologists and morally defective children Presenting itself as a scientifically based promise of the alteration of Man through the reformation of both body and consciousness, defectology exercised a strong appeal to the Bolshevik political establishment. Already in January 1918, after the closing of all private institutions of education, a state decree mandated that "morally defective" as well as deaf, blind, and "mentally retarded" children be sent to state facilities of "defectological" reeducation. In the same month, another decree abolished prison incarceration for minor delinquents and established special interdepartmental Commissions for Minor Affairs to handle the placement of children responsible for "socially dangerous acts" in the new establishments of defectological care/ These decrees made the discipline of defectology an integral part of the Soviet state's modus operandi vis-a-vis abnormal childhood and practically involved many doctors, pedagogues, and psychoanalysts in the elaboration of social policies in this field. Indeed, according to the statistics reported in the All-Union School Census of 1927, at that time there were 60 residential schools (internaty) for the "difficult-to-raise;' 104 facilities for the "mentally retarded;' and 89 establishments for the "physically defective:'s This infrastructure provided a viable space for the defectologists to pursue their long-standing agenda of help to children deviating from the norm. The January 1918 decrees gave the responsibility to oversee the entire system of defectological reeducation to the Commissariat of Social Assistance. However, several other institutions pressed claims and lobbied for

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greater involvement in the management of deviant children. Wrangling for power against both the police department and the Commissariats of Education and Health, the Commissariat of Social Assistance tried its best to preserve a dominant position in the field of deviant youth. For instance, in 1918-1919, this agency's inspector and future staunch advocate of children's and women's rights, Sofiia Kopelianskaia, addressed multiple letters to the higher institutions of government requesting that the treatment of defective children remain in the exclusive hands of her commissariat. She argued that the policeman was a bad representative of state help toward the growing mass of problematic children-"antisocial and criminal minors" as well as "intellectual and physical defectives:' 9 Due to the nature itself of his task and the lack of training in dealing with children's special needs, the policeman could not possibly provide reeducation. He only caused more damage to those "morally neglected children'' (moral'no zapushchennye deti) who lived on the streets. 10 Neither could private philanthropy be a solution to the problem of morally defective childhood, because it underscored an understanding of help as a privilege granted to a few children. Only the Commissariat of Social Assistance, insisted Kopelianskaia, could offer defective children a form of help that was "social, planned, and indispensable:' Social, because the state itself provides this help. Planned, because the socialist state cannot reconcile itself with the idea of random private philanthropy ... And indispensable help, because in a properly organized state there cannot be and should not be parasitism. 11 This help, Kopelianskaia continued, was a matter of right and should be provided by the Commissariat of Social Assistance to all Soviet children. Asserting that "every child has the right to education, but there is no carrier of rights without a corresponding carrier of duties, and the carrier of the duty to educate the child is the state;' Kopelianskaia called for a "magna charta libertarum" including all questions of children's rights. 12 Similarly, at the First All-Russian Congress for the Protection of Childhood, which took place in Moscow in 1919, none other than Lenin's sister Anna Il'inichna Ul' ian ova-Elizarova said that Soviet help to neglected defective children should no longer be charity, but "the right of every child:' 13 In practice, as Catriona Kelly has remarked, "discussions of children's rights had a limited impact upon actual legislation, which defined children's rights more or less exclusively within the familY:' 14 While the Soviet Union developed a Code on Marriage and the Family, Kopelianskaia's proposed charter of

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children's rights was never written, and legislation concerning children remained scattered in family law codes, labor protection codes, and civil and criminal codes. 15 Kopelianskaia's efforts proved to be ineffective not only in relation to the legal formulation of children's rights, but also concerning her commissariat's powers in the management of defective children. In the fall of 1919 and spring of 1920, the Council of People's Commissars issued a series of decrees that spelled out the respective domains of the Commissariats of Education, Health, and Social Assistance, and that left little space of action to the latter agency. The Commissariat of Health was made responsible for physically and mentally handicapped children who required constant medical care. The Commissariat of Education (through its Section for the Socio-Legal Protection of Minors and Defectives, or SPON, and its Department of People's Education, orONO) dealt with "normal" orphans as well as with all categories of "defective;' "difficult;' and "law-breaking" children. 16 The Commissariat of Social Assistance (as usual the last wheel of the cart) was asked to run an unspecified variety of facilities. 17 Finally, an interdepartmental bureau called Council for the Protection of Children (later replaced by the Commission for the Betterment of the Lives of Children) was supposed to coordinate the activities of these individual agencies in order to improve services to all Soviet socially neglected children. 18 In practice, the 1919-1920 decrees turned the Commissariat of Education into the biggest institutional player in the reeducation of deviant youth. For instance, so-called labor homes (trudovye doma or trudovye kommuny) for minor lawbreakers were initially put under the exclusive jurisdiction of this commissariat. Only after 1924 did the political police agency (OGPU) begin to manage its own communes for hardened recidivists, which operated side by side with the system of facilities under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Education. It took the Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) until 1935 to assert full control over the labor colonies for deviant children. 19 As concerns the Commissariat of Health, it must be said that two of its higher authorities at this time-Vera Mikhailovna Bonch-Bruevich and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashkostrongly championed defectology because this discipline's focus on the social dimension of various pathologies fit well with their ideal of "social medicine:' 20 In 1922, besides the care for sick children with physical and mental disabilities, this commissariat assigned itself the right to operate "curative educational colonies for morally defective children'' when the latter happened to suffer from a physical ailment of any kind. In addition,

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the Commissariat of Health strove to be involved in the welfare of children recognized to have psychological pathologies. 21 Since the acquisition of a preeminent position in 1920, the Commissariat of Education increasingly coopted the defectologists into its institutional apparatus. For instance, when the First All-Russian Congress for the Struggle against Child Defectiveness, Delinquency, and Homelessness (June 24

Figure 3.0 1. The Soviet System of Defectological Reeducation between 1918 and 1935

1918-1919 Morally Defective Children (through interde· partmental Commissions for Minor Affairs) Mentally Retarded Children Blind, Deaf, and Physically Defective Children

1920-1935

Commo.ariot of Ed"otion

-f

"Normal" Orphans Difficult or Morally Defective Children Law-Breaking Children Physically Defective and Mentally Retarded Children in need of constant medical care Sick Morally Defective Children Children with Psychological Pathologies

Commissariat of Social Assistance ~~ Other Types of Defective Children (non-specialized facilities of care)

Council for the Protection of Children/ Commission for the Betterment of the Lives of Children (after 1924} Political Police Agency ~~

All Socially Neglected Children (coordination among the other agencies)

Hardened Recidivists

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to July 2, 1920) met under the leadership of then Commissar of Education Anatolii Vasil'evich Lunacharskii, the latter declared that "all defectiveness, with the exception of the sick, ... must be brought together in the Commissariat of Education:' 22 One year later, the Commissariat of Education organized another All-Russian Conference for the Struggle against Child Defectiveness (September 30 to October 8, 1921). At this meeting, the defectologists cheered the new centralized public system for the education of defective children and discussed how to further develop the web of defectological facilities under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Education. For its part, the latter Commissariat launched a campaign to train more defectologists and encouraged physicians and pedagogues to publish specific methodological literature on defectology. 23 Vsevolod Petrovich Kashchenko-the child psychiatrist who had proposed the scientific use of the term "defective" -became the rector of a well-funded Pedagogical Institute for Child Defectiveness, which, by the academic year 1923-1924, counted 540 enrolled students. 24 On the model of this Pedagogical Institute, a subsection of the Commissariat of Education called the Children's Social Inspectorate offered short training courses involving the study of child psychology, psychopathology, and criminology as well as practical work with abandoned and delinquent children. 25 Various defectological research centers were organized also in Leningrad in the immediate postrevolutionary years. Later, a Medico- Pedagogical Department based on the principles of defectology was opened in Kiev by the defectologist Andrian Vladimirovich Vladimirskii. 26 Several specialized conferences on defective childhood took place throughout the 1920s. Lev Semenovich Vygotskii, who is considered by many specialists today as the founder of Soviet special education, addressed some of the most burning questions of defectology at the 1924 All-Union Congress for the Socio-Legal Protection of Minors. 27 The story of the Medico- Pedagogical Station is emblematic of the flirtation and romance (but also of the later divorce, as we will see in chapter 5) between the Commissariat of Education and the defectologists. This facility had inherited the territory, buildings, furniture, and staff of a former School-Sanatorium for Nervous Children, privately funded and administered by Kashchenko. However, the postrevolutionary Medico- Pedagogical Station was advertised as a "completely new institution;' a model home and reeducation center for the morally defective children of the Union's capital city. 28 Tellingly, this important facility was never the exclusive responsibility of the Commissariat of Social Assistance. It was initially placed under the aegis of the interdepartmental Council for the Protection of Children, but

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soon practically moved to the control of the Commissariat of Education. Thanks to this commissariat's generous sponsorship, a massive restoration in the fall of 1919 turned the small two-story house that had constituted the prerevolutionary School-Sanatorium into a modern complex including a system of nine pavilions for inpatient care, a museum of child defectiveness, and a clinic for outpatient services. 29 In 1925-1926, the defectologists working in the Medico- Pedagogical Station examined 226 children, diagnosed 71 percent of them as "morally defective:' and placed them in special defectological institutions. This cohort of children included "mentally retarded:' "neuropathic and psychopathic:' "epileptic:' "socially neglected:' "with speech defects:' and simply"physically exhausted" boys and girls. 30 Teachers' delegations coming from the Povol'zhe region, Kuban', Viatka, and Kiev regularly visited the museum, the clinic, and even the children's pavilions. They participated in workshops and seminars, and then they adopted the curriculum proposed by the Medico-Pedagogical Station in their own day cares, special schools, collection points for minor criminals, labor colonies, and children's psychiatric hospitals. 31 The Soviet authorities were so proud of this facility that they invited foreign delegations to visit it and, in 1927, allowed Kashchenko to showcase defectology at an exposition in Copenhagen. 32 Throughout the 1920s, while other corrective institutions associated with the Commissariat of Education were experiencing serious economic difficulties, the Medico-Pedagogical Station and similar defectological facilities continued to enjoy this commissariat's moral and material support. For instance, a "Report on the section of the Commissariat of Education for the education and instruction of defective children:' dated December 31, 1921, distinguished the defectological establishments that "respect the requirements of hygiene, sanitation, and good pedagogy" (and were therefore well financed by the Commissariat of Education) from those labor colonies for minor criminals that"do not respect the most primitive requirements of pedagogy" (and hence did not qualify for financing). 33 Most strikingly, Anton Makarenko's M. Gor'kii Labor Colony-which would be highly praised in later Soviet pedagogical literature-was viewed with skepticism and did not receive much support in its early days. 34 In his fictionalized recollection The Pedagogical Poem, Makarenko offers an explanation for defectology's privileged status in comparison with his own approach to child behavioral deviance. He contends that defectology's pedagogical logic, which "strove to imitate medicine:' had "seduced many of my colleagues and the Commissariat of Education:' He, instead, "had no science in my hands ... didn't need book formulas ... but quick analysis and quick action:' For Makarenko,

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"not biology, neither logics nor ethics;' but his own "pedagogical instinct" and a rather foggy vision of collective life were the keys to creating the new Soviet person out of troublesome and criminal minors. 35 Kashchenko and the other defectologists, on their part, relied on the exact knowledge of their science, married it to the specific moral and sociopolitical project of the new socialist state, and gave a positivist and optimistic spin to the question of state help to morally defective children. A close reading of the defectologists'writing in the 1920s reveals how these experts constructed convincing images of themselves as upright deliverers of state help and of their clients as entitled recipients. First of all, Kashchenko emphasized the Soviet state's obligations concerning the welfare of deviant children. "Without the help of the socialist state;' he contended, "no child can receive those rights which must be granted for his correct upbringing and education:' 36 He was also keen on demonstrating the political and economic advantage for the state in engaging "the war against defectiveness" as if it were "a war against a national tragedy:' 37 Relating individual suffering to the good of the entire collective, this old expert in child psychiatry warned the state that a subject "with a crippled will and unbalanced emotions" did not fit with the interests of Soviet society as a whole, because this individual "slows down the construction of socialist life:' Thus, the "underdeveloped" child had to become "fully-fledged"; the "heavy ballast" had to turn into a person "able to work:' 38 Other defectologists agreed. For instance, in 1929, Tat'iana Pavlovna Simson argued that it was not only possible but also vital for the Soviet state to transform a "neuropathological child ... into an enterprising subject rich in creative tendencies:' 39 In a 1926 coauthored book, the defectologists G. V. Murashev and Kashchenko used industrial imagery to remind the Soviet authorities of the duty to correct defective children: When a worker notices some unused material or part of a machine abandoned in the factory's yard, the next day we read in the newspaper about the need to call the careless administration to account for this waste. Can we remain silent when it is our precious reservoir of fighters and builders of communism that perish ?40 In other words, Murashev and Kashchenko compared the failure to fix defective children to committing one of the worst economic crimes in the Soviet Union. This similitude allowed them to frame the issue of help to this population as a priority economic task.

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Picture this scene: the tools of a blacksmith or a sowing machine or a bicycle are thrown out in the street and rust under the rain. All these objects seem to us so necessary and so valuable that we would not walk by indifferently. But what if a child is neglected? The mechanism of his brain seems unusable ... and we just walk by.... But this happens because we don't know the value of these mechanisms ... we are unable to use them correctly and advantageously.... Thus, even if you see in the child only the most perfect machine, then it is purely for the economically correct usage of this machine that we must know it. ... We cannot throw to the wind what represents great value. 41 Undoubtedly, images and claims borrowed from rational management approaches resonated well with Soviet officialdom (not only in relation to children but also when dealing with unmarried mothers and people with disabilities, as we will see in more detail in chapter 4). Yet defectology's most effective thrust was elsewhere. Speaking and writing as scientists, the defectologists of the 1920s introduced a dimension that was escaping other well-intentioned activists-the scientific certainty that the shortcomings and incorrect traits of behaviorally deviant children could be corrected. This sound, "scientific" conclusion was based in a sophisticated interpretation of the most controversial theories of the time. Although the defectologists paid heed to the heredity paradigm and admitted that "anomalies of the personality and perverted tendencies and inclinations" could derive from "predispositions" and potentially lead to criminality, they ultimately located the genesis of children's defects in a finely interwoven net of"sociopathological" and "bio-pathological" causes. Strongly believing that the social milieu had huge significance in the formation of children's personalities, Kashchenko stated that "the influence of heritage is not unique and not unconditional:' The transmission of certain diseases and dysfunctions to one's offspring was not an absolute truth for the defectologists-in fact, they claimed that sick parents could have healthy children. The predispositions set up by nature were subjected to a complex reworking under the influence of teachers, friends, and school in general. Urban conditions and broken families were taken to have a deadly impact on children. Parents' mistakes-such as the creation of a suffocating family atmosphere, abrupt changes, and mood swings-destroyed the correct functioning of children's nervous systems and produced all sorts of defects. Finally, darkness in the house, humidity, and dirt-"both the physical and the moral kind"impeded children's physical and intellectual growth. In Kashchenko's view,

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all these sociological factors determined "whether the sick genes (boleznennye zachatki) that the child received from his progenitors would become stronger and develop further" or, conversely, whether a child born "without the burden of heritage" would develop defectiveness. Kashchenko went so far as to argue that the presence of"sick or incorrect traits" frequently owed its origin exclusively to the historical context. 42 It was not a coincidence, said Kashchenko in 1923 at the organizational meeting of a Society for the Study and Liquidation of Child Defectiveness and Neglect, that antisocial forms of child defectiveness such as crime and subversive conduct had grown exponentially after the tragedies of wartime mobilization, death, exile, famine, poverty, and ethnic hatred-a phenomenon that in his opinion had panEuropean and even "global" ramificationsY Since heredity was not decisive and social conditions carried greater weight in the formation of "insufficient personalities;' the society that generated moral defectiveness in its children had both the duty and the ability to cure it. 44 As Kashchenko put it, "child defectiveness is first of all a social vice ... and the struggle against it must be based on encompassing social interventions:' 45 Writing about "difficult" children in 1924, the psychiatrist and sexologist Aron B. Zalkind similarly argued that "difficulty is not in them, but in a sick environment, which must be made healthier:' 46 In the introduction to Simson's book Neuropathologies, Psychopathologies, and Reactive Conditions of Early Childhood, the editorial board of the State Medical Press explained that children's psychic dysfunctions were "caused by a poorly organized social environment, which creates conflict in the child's psyche and induces incorrect habits:' 47 This line of reasoning entailed a call to change the environmental circumstances that could precondition mishaps in children's personalities. As Kashchenko and S. N. Kriukov argued in a coauthored book, If an abnormal, monstrous environment cripples the child, creates unsuccessful and nervous children, moral monsters and so on, then a healthy one-one that is adapted to the peculiarities of the child and that is willing to take him into account-cures him and reeducates him. Positive influences, the two defectologists continued, "washed away" hereditary defects. 48 They"rationally uproot the undesirable results of inheritance;' echoed the journalist M. Ballas. 49 Both the defectologists' critique of the social conditions that caused children's moral defectiveness and their demand to change them were politically

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charged statements. Kashchenko had been arguing for the importance of social factors since 1912, when he published the first Russian textbook on defectology, Defective Children and the School. However, in his later monographs Nervousness and Defectiveness (1919) and Exceptional Children (1926), he explained children's moral defects through Marxist materialist analysis. In particular, he located the foundation of moral defectiveness in a society that was not harmonically organized in class terms. Both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie had features that, although at opposite extremes, amplified the percentage of defective children. "It is not only Tsar Hunger who creates a sick and defective child. He is helped by Tsarina Luxury:'so The street, with all its temptations and bad influences, marked the path of an escalating process of moral defectiveness that touched upon all classes. Indeed, Kashchenko had seen cases of juvenile hooliganism, feeble-mindedness, and psychopathology among middle-class children as well as among poor workers' offspring. This application of Marx to the discipline of defectology entitled children from all classes to state help, because it identified all of them as suffering victims of the old social order. As we will see in chapter 5, this discourse would cease to be appealing to the Soviet leadership by the mid-1930s, when the state proclaimed it had erased all traces of the past, but problematic children were still roaming the Soviet streets. To make the most effective claims of scientific legitimacy, Kashchenko insisted that the study of the social factors causing child defectiveness needed to have not simply a qualitative, but above all a quantitative character. He devised a "social profile" in the form of a graphic table as a method for the numeric calculation of a child's development. The social profile uncovered the "scientific" laws that supposedly regulated the relationship between the socioeconomic base and the psychophysical constitution of young Soviet subjects. Throughout the 1920s, various professionals praised it as a rigorous, complete, and objective method to study children's moral defectiveness. 5 1 Some doctors complemented it with other types of experimental examinations. For instance, the defectologist V. A. Artemov, who in 1927 began to manage an experimental psychological laboratory attached to the Medico-Pedagogical Station, used a test known as "natural experiment" to study such topics as morally defective children's reactions to visual and audio stimuli, their "emotional reactions and associations:' their "motor reactions:' and their "entire behavior:' 52 A. M. Shubert performed tests on the level of defective children's intellectual development. 53 G. V. Murashev suggested a program to investigate defective children's "social behavior" by gathering and analyzing their "collective reactions:' 54 E. V. Gur'ianov

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elaborated an empirical method to pin down children's defects in reading, writing, doing mathematical calculations, and performing various types of manual work. 55 V. V. Bunak and S. N. Kriukov invented the pedogram, a passport-type document that was supposed to make children's personality traits and inherited features immediately legible. 56 Following pan-European positivist theories that encouraged the use of diaries to "trac[ e) the connections between the physical and the psychological;' the defectologists recorded their scientific observations on a daily basis. 57 These observations included measurements of school performance, psychological tests, descriptions of physical development, x-ray images, and the results of chemical-bacteriological analysis. 58 If personal diaries are experiments on the Self, 59 then the defectologists' journals were experiments on the Self of the deviant Other. Kashchenko even proposed a scientific formula to define the defective child's Self (I = S+ R+P, where I stood for individuum, S for stimulus, R for reaction, and P for production) 60 and stated that "before placing any demand on the child, the pedagogue should know precisely-as a doctor knows a diagnosed disease-that each child is an individuum:'61 As Kashchenko and Murashev explained in their contribution to the Pedagogical Encyclopedia of 1927: As much as it is impossible to cure a sick person without having determined his disease and without having established a precise diagnosis, so it is impossible to straighten and correct the insufficiencies of an exceptional child, if we do not study the nature of his deviation from the norm, if we do not give a faithful assessment of the personality of the given individual child. 62 Thus, the Russian defectologists followed in the steps of other scientists all over the world in believing that the child's personality-its identifying physical and moral qualities as well as its deviations from the norm-could be scientifically measured. For them, compiling social profiles, pedograms, and diaries was a means to attain knowledge over undisciplined and recalcitrant minor patients, and thereby to expand their regulatory powers over both the children and society at large. Scrutiny, legibility, and surveillance, however, were not the exclusive goals of defectology. The scientific collection of experimental data on nonconforming children was also "the most rational means" to advocate for help on their behalf. 63 It allowed the defectologists to present child defectiveness as "insufficiency" or "lack;' construct children with subversive behaviors as suffering individuals rather than delinquents, and diagnose the causes of their suffering in the environment rather than in

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the genes. As we will see in the next chapter, holistic knowledge of the child attained through scientific methods was pivotal not only in crafting the construction of deviant children as entitled others, but also in implementing the very practice of help in the Medico- Pedagogical Station. Science was the engine powering the defectologists' "ardent desire to help:' 64 In comparison with the taxonomy of help devised by the Commissariat of Social Assistance, the defectologists' scientific corollaries offered a more attractive method for dealing with the thorny question of deviant populations' social rights. Since the defectologists' constructions were allegedly derived from scientific principles, these doctors and pedagogues could frame their assessment of deviant children's entitlements as logical and dispassionate judgment. Kashchenko and his colleagues turned difficult children from a problem of law and order into a scientific issue, from the object of police attention into the terrain of scientific inquiries and medicopedagogical interventions. Through this scientific discourse, they advanced powerful arguments about difficult children's entitlement to social services and care, while also corroborating the premise that these children were not normal subjects and could be normalized only through expert intervention. In the moral order proposed by Kashchenko, the defectologists were the "vanguard" teaching all the others how to "respect children's rights:' 65 As we will see in the sections below, Russian medical experts played an important tutelary role also in the social defense of single mothers and disabled men. In relation to them too, doctors claimed for themselves the authority to shape notions of rights and to impose the boundaries within which deviant subjects could enjoy these rights.

3.2. Doctors, Good Female Helpers, and Helpless Orphan Mothers The immediate postrevolutionary years were a time in which war, famine, disease, and malnutrition, but also pervasive conditions of social upheaval harshly affected the Russian female population. Traditional understandings of gender clashed with radical shifts in social relations, and single mothers found themselves at the epicenter of a crisis of gender and sexuality. 66 Indeed, while the 1918 Code on Marriage, Family, and Guardianship had legalized divorce and made it easily obtainable for Russian women, the radical assault on the family as an institution and the vision of free unions embodied in the Code also had a definite social cost. As historian Wendy Goldman has

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pointed out, the weakness of the marital tie, the ease of obtaining divorce, and the freedom of sexual relations of the post -1917 years ended up harming many women who were abandoned by their husbands without any means of support and who often carried the burden of child care alone. 67 As we know from unmarried mothers' petitions, many of them were in such a dire economic position that they could find material relief only by prostituting themselves. The Soviet authorities recognized that economic conditions as well as new gender and sexual mores were producing a mass of single mothers. They also believed that these women were weak, na'ive, and fundamentally "unable to personally defend themselves ... and claim their rights:' 68 To provide maximal assistance and tutelage to its helpless female population, the new Bolshevik government decided to set up a number of state institutions. The Commission for the Improvement of the Work and Life of Women (Zhenotdel), for instance, was asked to guarantee legal equality and independent productive labor to the dark and "uncultured" women living in the new Central Asian republics or belonging to ethnic minorities. 69 The defense of Russian women as single mothers, instead, was entrusted primarily to the Mother and Infant Department. As we have seen in the case of Zolotova-Sologub and other petitioning women, local Zhenotdel sections did receive requests for monetary help from single unemployed mothers and quite often even satisfied them with small one-time subsidies or acted as patrons on these women's behalf with other state agencies. However, the mundane provision of material help to jobless unmarried mothers was not supposed to be the primary competence of the Zhenotdel, because it distracted its activists from the task of political and cultural education of the non-Russian female population.7° On the contrary, the Mother and Infant Department was mostly interested in the material problems that unemployed lonely mothers faced in their everyday lives. 71 This organization's initial administrative standing within the Commissariat of Social Assistance might have been the reason for its strong involvement in questions that the Zhenotdel dismissed as "banal everyday help" (sotsbytovshchina). When the Mother and Infant Department began its work in January 1918, its main goal was officially formulated as providing Soviet women-married as well as single-with an "all-inclusive" type of help that would allow them to perform their primary social function, namely to deliver and raise children. 72 To accomplish the "social protection of motherhood;' this agency's administrators chose to move in three main directions: ( 1) legislative work directed at defending pregnant women and breast-feeding

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mothers; (2) education on issues of maternity and child care; and (3) organization of special facilities where mothers could be assisted practically and "rational" baby-care could be concretely implemented. 73 The Social Assistance Commissar at that time, A. Vinokurov, thus detailed the responsibilities of the Mother and Infant Department. First of all, it had to organize consultation points for pregnant women, milk-stations for newborn babies, Homes for Mother and Child, nurseries, shelters for abandoned newborn babies, free canteens for pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers, and a system of patronage including home visitations. Second, it needed to train qualified female social workers, assign them to all these facilities, and regularly check on their work. This organization was additionally required to elaborate policies of labor protection and to check on their implementation in collaboration with the Department of Labor Inspection. Finally, it had to conduct "cultural enlightenment work'' among Soviet women/4 In practice, in the first two years of its existence the Mother and Infant Department oriented its work mainly toward the distribution of foodstuffs and the provision of cash to buy fabric, soap, shoes, and objects of baby care. This situation changed in 1920 when the Mother and Infant Department was moved to the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Health. The leaders of the Soviet health care agency began to criticize the framing of single motherhood simply as economic assistance to needy women. In their opinion, the provision of subsidies to unmarried mothers had so far been "a dispersion of funds, which does not give any help to mothers:' 75 Instead, taking the Mother and Infant Department into its fold, the Commissariat of Health aimed to impart "a correct medical organization" to the field of single mothers' protection. Doctors-so it was argued-could determine monetary subsidies better than social workers, because they could precisely calculate the due date of a pregnancy and therefore better understand when financial help was most urgently needed/ 6 In December 1920, the chair of the Mother and Infant Department, Vera Pavlovna Lebedeva, proposed that all of this agency's facilities be headed by a doctor and include an expert midwife or a nurse familiar with lactation techniques. 77 Leadership positions in the various provincial, district, city, and neighborhood sections of the Mother and Infant Department began to be assigned almost exclusively to medical professionals. Only the nuts-and-bolts administration and daily economic management were to be left in the hands of individuals with nonmedical backgrounds, such as social workers and Zhenotdel members. The economic aid function of the Mother and Infant Department was not to be completely forsaken, but this function had to stay within the Commissariat

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of Social Assistance, where it was assigned to a Provisions DepartmenU8 In short, the change in institutional jurisdiction was supposed to modify the content of this agency's work by introducing a stronger attention to medical issues (a process that we will observe again in the post-World War II years). 79 In fact, the 1920 move from the Commissariat of Social Assistance to that of Health created a great deal of confusion concerning which institution was supposed to provide what type of help. Especially in the provinces far away from Moscow, puzzled activists wondered "who has the right to this or that form of subsidy" and, ultimately, found themselves compelled to perform duties both as medical professionals and as social workers. 80 Evgeniia Anatolevna Balakshina and Anna Nikitichna Markova are two good examples of the activist-cum-physician working for the Mother and Infant Department in its early days. These two women had very different types of training and professional aspirations. Balakshina was born around 1885 and had graduated _from a medical school before the Revolution. When she began working in the Perm' Mother and Infant Department in the fall of 1920, she did not have any affiliation with the Bolshevik party. She was a stout advocate for the professionalization of gynecology, the training of expert midwives, and the fight against underground abortions. She also had a strong interest in eugenics and neurology. Indeed, for a few months between November 1921 and July 1922, Balakshina held positions of responsibility both in the Perm' neurological hospital and in that city's women's consultation and birth clinic. 81 Markova belonged to the same generation as Balakshina (she was born in 1886), but had much stronger connections to the Bolshevik Party and owed her formal medical education mostly to the Soviet government. With only a middle school degree in hand, between 1903 and 1907 Markova had worked as a rural teacher in Perm' province. Then, in 1918, the completion of specialized midwifery courses in the city hospital gave her the opportunity to attend Perm' State University's medical school. In April1921, when she was still studying to become a doctor, the local authorities recruited her for work in the Mother and Infant Department and sent her to Moscow to receive political training. When Markova came back to Perm' in November 1921, she devoted herself to the welfare protection and the medical care of her city's unmarried mothers. 82 Their different trajectories notwithstanding, both Balakshina and Markova came to see medical and social assistance services as two related, crucial components of, the "social protection'' of Soviet single mothers. They both viewed the Mother and Infant Department as "a defender (zashchitnik)" intervening "every time that the interests of a mother are infringed:' 83 They

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imagined themselves as agents of Soviet help assisting single mothers by solving their individual medical and housing problems, but never turning single motherhood into a private domestic matter. Following the Bolshevik leader Aleksandra Kollontai, both Balakshina and Markova emphasized that single motherhood was a social and collective issue, and that the "single woman-mother" (odinokaia zhenshchina-mat') was "a social unit;' "part of a class;' "a social asset;' and "the joy of a working people:' 84 As such, Soviet unmarried mothers were entitled to a broad range of social rights, including medical care, financial help, and access to productive work. Their engagement in "socially useful work" and "in the construction of the new Soviet life" should happen without renouncing motherhood. 85 Thus, combining the functions of medical experts and social workers, these two activists in Perm' strove to define a new relationship between reproduction, motherhood, and waged labor as compatible fields of activity for single mothers. Balakshina and Markova were not alone in their endeavors. Many other activists in the Mother and Infant Department believed that Soviet single mothers should be entitled to "all-inclusive" state help and emancipated from old forms of oppression and exclusion. At the same time, the personnel working in this agency also held quite condescending attitudes toward their charges and, somewhat paradoxically, perpetrated patriarchal views of gender through their work on behalf of single mothers. For instance, the activists of the Mother and Infant Department often defined unmarried mothers as "orphaned" (besprizornye). This word, commonly used for minors, functioned when applied to adult women as a synonym for abandonment, loneliness, and lack of male protection. As much as a besprizornyi rebenok was a child deprived of parental care and educational discipline, so a besprizornaia mat' was a woman without a male breadwinner who could care for (and control) her. Single fathers-who in truth constituted a much smaller group than the mass of single mothers and were mostly widowed men-were never presented as a problem and never called "orphaned"; that is, they were never seen to need protection. In the wake of the Revolution and Civil War, the condition of female orphanhood and neglect was seen as "a typical phenomenon'' of the Russian urban population. The "typical" orphaned mother was a city-dweller who had been abandoned by her husband and now found herself in a state of need. In later years, the image of the orphaned mother equally referred to Russians and nonRussians, urban and rural women. 86 However, it tended to acquire different nuances when applied to non-ethnic Russians or to peasant women. For instance, the "single Oriental woman'' (odinokaia zhenshchina-vostochnitsa)

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who had left her patriarchal household was considered unable to find a job on her own and therefore particularly vulnerable to prostitution: "They don't hire her anywhere; she is not a member of the union; the only income left to her is prostitution:' 87 The unmarried peasant woman, especially the poor and the landless, was frequently represented as a helpless and fundamentally irresponsible mother who, during the high season of agricultural work, would "leave her offspring to the whim of fate:'ss In other words, the Mother and Infant Department perceived the undesired survival strategies of poor single mothers not only from a gender-specific perspective, but also from a perspective of Russian ethnic moralizing and urban superiority. In addition, help to orphaned mothers was ultimately a means to protect the future generation of Soviet workers. As we saw in chapter 2, a series of labor regulations formalized the link between mothers' rights and the campaign against child mortality by explicitly defining care during pregnancy as the first step to lower infant mortality rates. Popular slogans in the mid1920s ordered: "Attentiveness and care to pregnant women! They carry the future generation inside them:' 89 The doctors and activists of the Mother and Infant Department further popularized this idea. For instance, in a brochure programmatically entitled The Protection of Motherhood and How It Must Be Realized, a certain Doctor G. L. Grauerman wrote: During pregnancy, childbirth, the days after delivery, and the period of breast-feeding, the mother and her child ... need protection .... All mothers ... have the right to protection (pravo na okhranu), which should be granted to them by the social collective for the service that they perform. 90 These words point to two interconnected key principles of the Soviet right to be helped in the eyes of experts and social workers of the time. First, help was not a form of philanthropy, but a state duty. Second, the right to be helped was also a citizen duty. In the case of single mothers, this right was granted in exchange for their reproductive labor. This meant that they were entitled to free and readily available health care, but they were also responsible before the collective for their sexual and reproductive health as the carriers of the next generation of workers. In emphasizing women's social obligations as mothers, Soviet activists placed upon the state the duty to defend their interests and health, but also compelled women to put the needs of the collective before their individual ones. Soviet single women had the right and the obligation to contribute to the growth of the population:

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by virtue of their reproductive contributions they were granted the right to receive social assistance and put their children in care facilities. At the same time, their reproductive performance was subject to social control and sometimes to outright punishment. Like the defectologists of the Medico- Pedagogical Station, Doctor Grauerman grounded his "rational view of the defense of motherhood" and "its economic and social importance" in scientific research. 91 He invoked science to combine pregnancy hygiene and discussions of sexual health and, most importantly, to prove that both sexual and reproductive activities made women physiologically weaker, more prone to suffering than men, and therefore more entitled to help. Indeed, the doctors/activists of the Mother and Infant Department often depicted the fecund female body as diseased and suffering. In this body, reproductive health was rare and always defined negatively as the absence of a series of sexual diseases. 92 Their writings implied a gendered connection between sexuality and sickness, whereby promiscuous men actively spread disease and helpless women passively suffered from it. This was a global early twentieth-century approach to poor women's ill health as a medical status that defined their deservedness, but also reinforced female dependency and undermined women's efforts at self-sufficiency. 93 In the Soviet Union, the medical diagnosis of pregnancy gave women the right to be helped, but also turned them into vulnerable creatures. The two-edged process of entitling single mothers to state services while also weakening them is clear in a letter that a certain Doctor K. Zviagin wrote to the Perm' social assistance section on June 25, 1920. He explained what diseases of the female reproductive system should excuse women from working duties and entitle them to social assistance: It is rare to find a woman who has a totally healthy sexual apparatus. The main reasons for this are the following: (1) deliveries and miscarriages are very often the causes of various diseases; (2) the huge spread of gonorrhea among men ... is a cause of infection for many women and for this reason their whole sexual apparatus is brought to total destruction .... In addition, if we take into consideration the generally weaker physiology of the female organism in comparison to the male one, as well as the periodic loss of blood (menstruation), which is physiological but nonetheless is often accompanied by all sorts of pain-all this gives grounds to assign women significantly lighter demands in the area of physical work than those assigned to men. Thus, no heavy physical work ... should be assigned

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to women. This should be granted for the sake of saving the health of the mothers of the future generation. 94 Balakshina echoed Zviagin by arguing that "the "normal" development of a girl's reproductive system, her pregnancy and maternity, can happen only under proper working conditions:'95 And Grauerman added, "poor women who live by their work should be given the chance to recover their strength after delivery.... It is necessary to let them rest as much as possible:' 96 Again, the level of care provided to single mothers and the rate of child mortality were seen in a relationship of proportional dependency: rested mothers produced healthier babies, while worn -out women gave birth to a feeble and defective generation. Both mother and infant were the doctor's burden. As the head of a local health care department in Perm' province, a certain Dr. Iakhlakov, argued in March 1923, it was the doctors' responsibility to tackle "the almost complete ignorance of women concerning issues that closely concern them, such as the protection of children's and mothers' health, hereditary and acquired diseases, and the problem of infectious diseases that can affect the whole familY:' Like many of his contemporaries, Iakhlakov conceived the mother's body as a habitat for the life and development of the child. In his view, by taking women under its tutelage from the very act of conception, the Mother and Infant Department was supposed to "simultaneously observe the life of the pregnant woman and that of the fetus, the changes in the woman's organism together with the development and the growth of the fetus:' Additionally, the Mother and Infant Department had to "show pregnant women a correct way of life for the correct development of the fetus:' Childhood diseases (especially "rachitic syndrome" and "idiotism'') were believed to be consequences of the mother's incorrect way of feeding. The logical conclusion was that doctors had to protect and control the life of the mother during pregnancy, after delivery, and until the end of the lactation period. 97 In the same manner, Grauerman insisted that during pregnancy women regularly go to the doctor and closely follow his [sic] suggestions and orders. Not only did he define as "ignorant" those women who did not visit a doctor for the whole nine months of pregnancy, but he also threateningly warned them that they would "pay" for their carelessness with their own lives and those of their children. 98 Furthermore, Grauerman emphasized that single mothers' behavior immediately after delivery could be very "irrational" and thus necessitated "the unwavering control of the midwife:' 99 Balakshina agreed that the inability of single mothers to take care of and

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feed their children in the correct way was one of the main causes of the "colossal" infant death rate. Consequently, she defined "the struggle against mothers' darkness, their views, and prejudices" as the fundamental task of the Mother and Infant Department. 100 A report from the mid -1920s linked culturedness (kul'turnost') to lower mortality rates among newborn children and, as a final result, to the improvement of the national economy: "The more cultured the nation, the less mortality in it ... and the lower the mortality, the more able-bodied workers we will have and possibilities to achieve the material well-being of the nation:' 101 The doctors working in the Mother and Infant Department wished to wrest childcare from women's hands because they deemed single mothers incompetent. To female darkness, ignorance, irrationality, and (sometimes) outright hysteria, they opposed the "rational therapy" and "rational help'' that corresponded to "the contemporary requirements of science" and that only medical professionals could offer. 102 According to Max Weber, an important expression of modern rationality (as opposed to "traditional" ways of knowing) was precisely the development and application of scientific principles that transformed older social practices. 103 The Mother and Infant Department's self-presentation as the guardian and practitioner of rational knowledge entailed rejecting women's own experience as inadequate vis-a-vis the new medical information. Rational medical help to single mothers was made urgent by the panic surrounding the increasing rate of maternal and infant mortality. In addition, it nicely fit with the wider health campaign that ridiculed belief in folk medicine and vilified the networks to which women had traditionally gone for advice. After the Revolution, popular practices of female care were increasingly labeled with disparaging terms such as "quack medicine" (znakharstvo ), "popular midwifery" (povituchestvo), and "old women's medicine" (babnichestvo). 104 As Tricia Starks has argued, the maternal health campaigns "hoped to rob women of authority in matters of child rearing and replace mothers and fathers with the male doctor and his new, scientific, Soviet lifestyle:' 105 In the case of the Mother and Infant Department, however, the gendering of the agents of this modern and scientific help was not a simple matter. Out of ten doctors working in 1926 in this agency's facilities in Perm', eight were women and, in general, the profession of doctor was becoming increasingly available to all Soviet women. 106 At the same time, leadership positions were still imagined for men and public roles were associated with masculine abilities, while women were portrayed as auxiliary figures, the mere dispensers of a form of rational help that could be conceptualized and legitimized

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only by male doctors and authority figures. For instance, in 1921, the Social Assistance Commissar Vinokurov had encouraged women to apply for jobs as nannies-not as doctors-in the facilities managed by his commissariat. 107 As the evidence analyzed in this section reveals, the women activists of the Mother and Infant Department did not contest the official construction of help that assigned a well-defined hierarchical position to the actors involved in it: pregnant unmarried women and single mothers were the helpless receivers of aid; female social workers channeled state assistance and appeared as "his [the doctor's] good helpers" (ego khoroshie pomoshchnitsy); physicians, higher administrators, policymakers, and political leaders were at the head of the chain of help and stood for the state as the ultimate male breadwinner. In occupying positions that were imagined for the normative male agent of help, the women-activists of the Mother and Infant Department often took up male personalities as the only means to receive credit and recognition. They made all possible efforts to be more competent and energetic, more stubborn and persistent than their male colleagues, thereby adopting, in Susan Reid's words, "narrative and compositional devices [that] reproduced their subjection to patriarchal authoritY:' 108 Ultimately, this hierarchical representation of the agents and subjects of help reveals what were believed to be the distinguishing features turning a deviant woman into an entitled Soviet female subject. Suffering and subjection to ordered reproductive and motherly labor gave single unemployed women the right to be helped. Disciplined behavior and loyalty to male power (embodied by the doctor but in fact emanating from the state) allowed women-activists to overcome the position of the helpless woman and adopt a new model of womanhood, one intrinsically affiliated with the Soviet state.

3.3. The Striving Disabled of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf An active advocacy movement among Russian blind and deaf people had emerged only after February 1917. In the months following the overthrow of the tsarist monarchy, two groups of disabled activists-the Union of the Blind and the Union of the Deaf-Mute-sought to harness the revolutionary potential of the moment by campaigning for the legal emancipation of their constituencies. Early organizers protested against legislation that imposed legal guardianship over adults with physical impairments. Using the liberal

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language of civil and political rights, they advocated for the endowment of "full legal status" (polnopravie) and the recognition of disabled people's juridical "equality" (ravnopravie) with the able-bodied. In this initial legal flare-up, the juridical status of the blind and deaf almost exclusively occupied the attention of Russian disability advocacy. 109 After the October Revolution and the constitutional conferral of equal legal rights to people with disabilities in July 1918, the status of the two Unions underwent some important changes. They gradually ceased to be independent forums for the articulation of their constituencies' requests to the state and became more integrated into the Soviet administrative system. Already at the Second Congress of the Deaf-Mute in October 1920, the majority of delegates suggested passing their organization's leadership over to the state. For instance, the future chairman of the Society of the Deaf, Pavel Alekseevich Savel'ev, argued that the Union of the Deaf-Mute was impotent and unable to advance the defense of an uncultured constituency in any effective way. Therefore, continued Savel'ev, their organization should be closer to the state apparatus and include in its leadership able-bodied representatives from the Commissariats of Social Assistance, Education, Health, and Internal Affairs. 110 The deaf activist Sergei Ivanovich Sokolov went so far as to recommend that the functions of the Union be completely absorbed into other state agencies. In his opinion, there was no point in creating a "parallel private apparatus;' since "the state is stronger than the Union and does everything for the deaf-mute:'n 1 A similar desire for centralization was expressed by the leader of the blind association, Boris Petrovich Mavromati, in a letter to the Council of People's Commissars dated October 1923. The Society of the Blind, explained Mavromati, wanted to work out a program that could be uniformly applied to all organizations of the blind and thereby avoid "arbitrary experiments on the blind:' The uniform improvement of the everyday life of the blind, in Mavromati's view, had to be carried out through the state's central institutions. 112 Within a few years from these statements, both Unions became All-Russian Societies, were endowed with officially approved statutes, and were included in the system of invalid producers' cooperatives (the Society of the Blind in 1923 and the Society of the Deaf in 1926). Both organizations were incorporated within the Commissariat of Social Assistance, under whose leadership and control they continued to operate throughout the Soviet period. Perhaps because they were part of a republic-level commissariat, they never became All-Union agencies. However, their congresses in Moscow were attended by delegates from Ukraine, Georgia, the Northern Caucasus, Ossetia,

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Ingushetia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Belorussia, and Bashkiria, and they functioned as models for the organizations that would later be established in the other republics. 113 Besides the question of centralization and absorption within a strong and supportive state apparatus, another fundamental issue of the entire period between the Revolution and the outbreak of the Second World War was how to transform these organizations from small cohorts of welleducated people to societies with mass recruiting capacity. Statistics on the total number of the blind living in the Soviet Union around 1923-1926 are very divergent: some indicate around 235,000 blind people, while others increase the number to 472,000 and even 800,000. 114 Specific statistics for the Russian Republic indicated a blind population of 165,000-170,000. 115 Membership in the Society of the Blind was quite small compared to these numbers: in 1925-1926 it included 8,781 members and 33 provincial sections.116 By 1932, the number of members had increased to 31,320, but in 1940 it decreased to 20,848. 117 Concerning the Soviet deaf, their total number in 1920 was calculated to be around 250,000. 118 Although a 1926 census officially counted 27,000 deaf people in the Russian Republic, the Society of the Deaf argued that this number was incorrect because it considered only a few provinces, and proposed instead 73,000 as a more realistic calculation. In 1929, the Society of the Deaf had recruited only 7,000 of them through its 64 local sections. 119 By 1932, membership increased to 25,000 and the number of provincial sections reached 120Y0 In 1938, the Society of the Deaf counted between 36,000 and 39,00 members in the whole Russian Republic, but this number corresponded to only 55 percent of the Russian deaf population at that time. 121 As we will see in chapter 6, the Second World War would greatly change these two societies' dynamics of census and recruitment. The membership of the two organizations was quite diverse in terms of demographics and the nature of disability: the Society of the Blind included all types of blind as well as visually unimpaired who were active in the field of help to the blind; the Society of the Deaf counted among its members deaf, speech-impaired, and hard of hearing. The levels of education could also be very different as both societies included illiterate, semiliterate, and literate individuals (whether in the Braille alphabet or in the regular one). The urban and rural constituencies strongly diverged one from the other and the help offered to them was very different. Finally, there were various age cohorts and professional backgrounds among the members of these societies, and they all had different specific needs. Besides the differences,

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Figure 3.02. Blind People in the RSFSR Recorded number of blind people

Members of the Society of the Blind

1923-1926

165,000-170,000

8,781

1932

unknown

31 ,320

1940

unknown

20,848

Source: GARF, f. 422, o. 1, d. 2, I. 1; d. 4, l. 3; d. 12, l. 2; Ibid., f. 413, o. 1, d. 75, l. 5 and l. 22; Rezoliutsii i postanovleniia V Vserossiiskogo s"ezda slepykh sostoiavshchegosia 25-30 sentiabria 1932 g. (Arkhangel'sk: Tipografiia n.1, 1933),4.

Figure 3.03. Deaf People in the RSFSR Recorded number of deaf people

Members of the Society of the Deaf

1926-1929

27,000-73,000

7,000

1932

unknown

25,000

1938

66,000-71 ,000

36,000-39,000

Source: GARF, f. 511, o.1, d. 3, ll. 3-4; d. 8, I. 5; and d.13, 1.1; d. 18,1. 27; Ibid., f. 413, o. I, d. 29, l. 29 and 36; and I. Nagovitsyn, without title, Sotsial'noe obespechenie 3-4 (1933), 4-5.

however, there was something strikingly common in the way the activists and members of these agencies understood their social rights as opposed to the many blind and deaf who never joined the two societies. Throughout the early Soviet and Stalinist years, the institutional history of both societies was characterized by tensions surrounding disabled activists' partial control of their own interests, the need to run their decisions past the agencies of central planning, and the desire to fully integrate their workshops within the organizations of the able-bodied. (These were strains that, as we will see, had some parallels at the level of individual disciplinary normalization.) In particular, by the mid-1920s, when the state took into its hands the provision of welfare services more firmly, blind and deaf activists were denied the ability to organize themselves in independent groups. But

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being consolidated within the structures of Soviet governance was a curse and a blessing at the same time. On one hand, the young Russian disability advocacy movement had to give up autonomy and its members had to undertake social activism within state-run associations. On the other hand, the two societies strengthened their status and acquired enough legitimacy to enter an intense dialogue with the state's ideological apparatus. Interacting with social assistance leaders and policymakers as insiders, the societies' activists were able to advance approaches to the Soviet blind and deaf that positively differed from traditional attitudes toward disability and that legitimized disabled people's right to be helped without completely denying their agency. At the discursive level, the activists of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf strove to achieve the goal of entitlement without disempowerment by employing constructs that had significant currency with the Soviet authorities, such as the rejection of philanthropy and the goal of self-transformation. Both societies understood private, philanthropic help as a process that cut off any right and doomed the blind and deaf to a state of hopeless and inescapable idleness. To distinguish the positive help offered by the Soviet state from pre-1917 forms of charity, disability activists attributed clumsiness and passivity to the prerevolutionary disabled and described them as individuals living in a prison of darkness and using begging as the only way to support their pitiful existence. The members of their organizations, instead, were instructed to "overcome" darkness and prove to the able-bodied that they were not helpless citizens. 122 Among the blind, the related ideas of rejecting charity and overcoming invalidism inspired both the old-guard disability rights advocates and original founders of the Society of the Blind in the early 1920s and the new cohorts of activists that emerged later in the Stalinist years. For instance, I. V. Popov was extremely vocal and adamant in denouncing any form of charity for the Soviet blind. A jurist by training and active in the blind movement already before the October Revolution, in 1923 he had been elected into a Council of the Blind of the city of Moscow and had become one of the most enterprising organizers of the new All-Russian Society of the Blind. Besides being a member of the Society's presidium, he also led a special bureau devoted to the development of commercial and productive activities among the blind. Unfortunately, at the end of 1925 Popov was strongly criticized for the commercial agreements he had signed with the former owners of some factories. In what became known as a first round of purges in the Society of

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the Blind, Popov was accused by his own fellow activists of excessively trusting alien elements such as former proprietors and specialists. The fact that he was not a party member certainly did not help him maintain a leadership position within the society. 123 However, when the First Congress of the Society of the Blind met in April1925, Popov was still in good standing and received the invitation to pronounce the congress's opening speech. On that important occasion, he criticized the treatment of the blind in tsarist Russia: The old order isolated the blind, threw a piece of bread at them, and put them on church charity (paperti). Some were isolated, doomed by lack of education and by people's prejudices. Others were excluded from life by the imperialist and civil wars, which shut them up in hospitals and shelters. 124 Some twenty years later, when the Society of the Blind found itself in a very different sociopolitical and economic context and under the leadership of a different type of activist, the rejection of philanthropy would still lie at the heart of its self-presentation. The Society's chairman at that time, Vasilii Andreevich Medvedev, had become blind in 1922 at age twenty, and then received special education in the Central Musical Technicum for the Blind. Throughout his adult life, Medvedev had been employed in various workshops and factories managed by the Society of the Blind, until he became its chairman in October 1943. 125 He could not possibly have any direct experience of how the blind were treated under the tsars. And yet, he always opened his most important interventions by condemning the condescension and disabling nature of prerevolutionary charity to the blind. For example, he clearly made this point in 1949 in a letter to the Society of the Blind of the German socialist party in Berlin: The old imperial Russia blocked all paths and ways to the blind, condemning them to begging and a dark life ... in front, to the right, and to the left stood only enemies: the state, the church, a reactionary "public opinion;' and unwanted patrons. 126 The image of roadblocks surrounding the blind and leaving open for them only a path going backward indicated that the prerevolutionary blind were not only the victims of disease and poverty, but also of a political system that deprived them of any possibility to be mobile and advance forward. Under these circumstances, continued the activists' argument, the lot of the

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disabled could be nothing other than indigence, ignorance, otherness, and isolation from the full-fledged members of society. Both blind and deaf activists imagined the disabled of the past as desperately crying: "accept us as people:' 127 In their opinion, the greatest need of any person with physical impairments was to feel a close spiritual link with the able-bodied, but philanthropy prevented acceptance and connection. In other words, because the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf aimed at achieving mutual awareness and integration between the world of the able-bodied and that of the disabled, they agitated against any form of help that would have excluded their constituencies from the supposedly healthy Soviet social body. This was the main reason they rejected not only Christian compassion, but also the enlightenment principle of humanismbecause the private initiatives of single individuals could never turn into a substantial advocacy for the rights and duties of blind and deaf people. In light of their desire for integration, it might seem paradoxical that these blind and deaf activists often related physical disability to a lack of culturedness (nekul'turnost'). As a member of the Society of the Blind said in 1925, "Blindness prevails in the uncultured layers of our societY:' 128 In fact, associating disability with lack of culturedness allowed these activists to re-imagine blindness and deafness as forms of backwardness that could be surmounted. The societies' activists wanted first of all to move their members out of the dead end in which people with disabilities had been so far perceived to be, and then include them in the emerging Soviet world of life, culture, and knowledge. This was the world that had been promised to all the former downtrodden, and the disabled laid claims to it too. For instance, agitating for educational rights, disabled activists explained that education was a state's duty toward "the dark ones:' a form of help identical to the state's project of reeducating the uncultured masses of peasants and non-Russian ethnic groups. Disabled people's access to education was mandated by nothing less than the Party's political orientation. 129 The activist and deaf education expert Georgii Iosifovich Grinberg was among the most vocal supporters of educational rights for the deaf. Not much is known about him. Later in life, he became affiliated with the Leningrad Research-Scientific Institute for Diseases of the Ear, Throat, Nose, and Speech (Leningradskii Nauchno-Issledovatel'skii Institut po bolezniam ukha, gorla, nasa, i rechi) and created a test to measure levels of hearing impairment that is still in use in Russia today. 130 Yet, in the immediate postrevolutionary years, he seemed to be more interested in issues of disability rights than in scientific research. The letter that he wrote to Lenin in

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August 1920 is a clear example of how deaf activists related disability to lack of culturedness. Grinberg informed the leader of the new Soviet state about the "very dark and illiterate" conditions of the Russian deaf population. Referring to Lenin's campaign against analphabetism, Grinberg complained that "no one talks ... about liquidating illiteracy among deaf-mutes:' He proposed to raise "the question of the deaf-mute" at meetings of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Executive Committee. His formulation-"the question of the deaf-mute" -echoed other hot issues of the time, for instance the "woman question:' the "sexual question;' or the "peasant question:' This construction emphasized the darkness of the Russian deaf and made them into problems-i.e., objects of a "question'' whose resolution was an important aspect of the socialist remaking of everyday life and hence would ultimately benefit the larger collectivity. Presenting himself as "a Communist;' Grinberg linked his political views to the duty to "dedicate all my energy and knowledge to the deaf-mute people:' He concluded the letter by arguing that "the Revolution" required him to take up activist responsibilities. 131 In the writings of the two societies, both blind and deaf individuals were portrayed as waiting for the light of knowledge and labor. For instance, in a 1924 book by the activist Sergei Golovin (about whom I will say more in the next chapter), visually impaired people appeared as ignorant, engaged in irrational activities, and fundamentally unable to express themselves because all their senses were somehow shut down. They had only "a mute reproach in their blind eyes:'m This reprimand was directed at the able-bodied, well-educated, and employed members of the collective. It was a reminder of the latter's duty to help the disabled by providing them with vocational training and jobs. Similarly, in a 1924 poem titled "Rays of Light;' the deaf printshop workers of the Arnol'do-Tretiakovskii Institute represented themselves as living in an "underground corner;' a "forgotten'' space "far away from enlightened life:' And yet, while they recognized their ignorance and distance from the rest of society, they also insisted that they were "thirsty for light" and identified the manager of their workshop as the person responsible for providing the help that they sought. Aspiring with all their energies toward the light of labor, the authors of this collective poem expressed optimism concerning their future emancipation from the oppression of congenital defects. As they wrote: "The defects from birth/ will not be fully oppressive'' ("Defekty ot rozhden'ia /ne budut tiagostny vpolne"). 133 In other words, disability activists felt that they had to convince the able-bodied that the blind and deaf, although presently dark and silent, greatly aspired

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to knowledge and could indeed gain access to the life of culture and work that was supposedly led by the rest of the country. As the activist Konstantin Baranov had said in the summer of 1917, "The mind of the deaf-mute, with the passion of fire, strives forward:' 134 At the First Congress of the Society of the Blind in April1925, the activist Popov made an important addition: "There is no physical dawn for us, but there is another one-the light of labor, the light of Communism:'m In 1928, the social assistance inspector Pavel Pavlovich Pochapin (himself a man with speech disabilities) lamented that those who did not know the deaf looked at them as inferior, unfit, and essentially unable to perform professional or social functions. "Of course;' argued Pochapin, deafness is a hindering circumstance, and it can indeed seem a defect in the performance of some functions .... But in reality, deafness is not only a neutral circumstance, but even a positive quality. For instance ... the deafmute have a greater talent for graphic arts. 136 According to Pochapin, deaf people could better focus their attention than the hearing. Although they "still need to work on themselves, they can achieve a high level of intellectual development:' Again, Soviet activists did not deny the backwardness of the deaf, but rather cast it as surmountable. As Pochapin put it, "The deaf-mute are able to develop and reduce the distance between themselves and normal people:'m Other members of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf agreed with Pochapin that it was possible to establish closer contacts between the disabled and the able-bodied. In a 1924 open letter to her "dear comrades;' an able-bodied woman-worker and activist within the Society of the Deaf explained that speechlessness and deafness did not hinder "the ardent heart of a worker" from beating under the shirt of the deaf man laboring by her side on the shop floor. Disabled colleagues, averred this woman, "perform their work silently and do not react to what happens around them:' However, "if you look closer, then you see how life pulsates in them: a silent life, but nonetheless filled with social interests:' In this portrayal, the working ability of the deaf was not lower than that of the able-bodied. Truly, deaf people's introversion was an obstacle to closer integration between them and the able-bodied, but this woman tried to shift the blame onto the able-bodied who "work side by side with [the deaf] without knowing and understanding them:' 138 Incongruous as it might sound, the Soviet disabled needed help, butas opposed to single mothers-they were not helpless. While prior to the

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October Revolution the press had portrayed the disabled as aggrieved and ill-starred, 139 after 1917 the main idea was that the disabled, although still in a state of darkness, in fact had the potential to contribute to the socialist state as much as the able-bodied. The activists of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf realized that if the disabled were to appear as helpless and incurably falling behind the fast pace of change, they would evoke only feelings of pity or scorn for their wretchedness. The Soviet disabled were constantly asked to "walk at a pace with the able-bodied along the path to reinforce the achievements of October;' 140 to "be on a par" (naravne), and at times even to "be higher" than the able-bodied. These and other similar slogans constantly repackaged a discourse that denied helplessness and insisted on equality with the able-bodied population in the fields of socialist construction and culture. 141 Commenting on portrayals of the blind in theatrical plays, an activist said: "The blind person should not appear as helpless or implausible [nepravdopodobnyi]. To the contrary. He should merge into the real reality surrounding him:' 142 The disabled activists of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf wanted to correct people's misunderstandings about the physically handicapped and erase the traditional identification of blindness and deafness with weakness of intellect, insanity, invalidism, and infantilism. Ultimately, however, this change in popular attitudes was not supposed to happen by intervening with the able-bodied and eradicating their prejudices, but rather by normalizing the disabled. As Lilya Kaganovsky has suggested by analyzing the celebration of disabled bodies in socialist realist books and movies, the Soviet invalid could become normative only by striving to perform at the same level as the able-bodied, i.e., by striving to normalize. 143 It was never the able-bodied who came to share the life of the blind and deaf, but rather the disabled who were to "be brought closer to normal fellow citizens" 144 and "become normal citizens" through schooling and the acquisition of working skills. 145 As the celebrated Soviet defectologist Fedor Andreevich Rau once argued, education made the disabled "human in the full sense of this word:' 146 As much as this construction entitled people with disabilities to the same educational and job opportunities available to the able-bodied, it is difficult to ignore the profoundly oppressive assumptions that infused it.

••• To define child behavioral deviance as defectiveness, single motherhood as orphanhood, and disability as backwardness meant to shape the identities

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of both the givers and the receivers of Soviet help. 147 Indeed, by emphasizing lack and requiring expert intervention to compensate for it, these constructions allowed Soviet help-oriented professionals to represent themselves as the agents of justice. They also facilitated the entitlement of vulnerable populations to social rights without truly questioning their marginalization. Because of their defects, people with impairments, unmarried single mothers, and wayward children appeared as the "permanent other;' the "deformed object" of care, which is "continually subject to reform" and yet permanently fixed in its deformity. 148 While the defectologists legitimized the curative treatment of problematic children, they also framed child deviance as a malady that should be cured under their control. In the discourse of the Mother and Infant Department, attribution of dependency pointed to the defects of single women (above all their frailty and irrationality), but also to their fundamental reproductive efforts. In this way, it not only supported single mothers' right to be helped, but also reinforced their inequality and justified patriarchal oppression. Although the capability argument articulated by the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf challenged the view that disability and dependency were synonymous, it still failed to be an effective weapon against social inequality. In fact, this argument implied that Soviet blind and deaf people could be accepted into the body social only when they strove to normalize. In the activists' constructions (as much as in the official taxonomy of help and the invalids' petitions), the Soviet deviant subject emerges as an individual living with lack, need, and pain, while also striving to build communism under the guidance of an authority. On one hand, this process reveals that normalization (imposing a certain model identity to the point that it is internalized as liberating) is a form of violent subjection. On the other hand, since normalization requires abnormality, this process also exposes the ambivalence of Soviet subjectivity-namely, that it was produced by multiple actors in the moment of differentiation. As we have seen in this chapter, at the hands of the selected organizations, activists and experts participated in the creation of a spectrum of Soviet subjects who had the right to be helped, but who also stood in subordinated positions vis-a-vis both the agents of help and the ideal-although perhaps nonexistent-"normal" subject. In this chapter we have also seen that the ways in which the activists defined their target populations fit very well with the Marxist-Leninist ideological line and the Bolshevik government's sociopolitical goals. First, the activists' understanding of the right to be helped aligned with the state's

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desire to handle social questions with a secularized approach. In addition, the premise that children's moral defectiveness, women's helplessness, and men's disabilities were determined by biological and social factors made it possible to intervene and correct them, transforming both their individual Selves and their existence within the collective. Finally, the type of social activism that characterized these organizations promised that both the state and the experts would be directly involved in the economic and demographic growth of the country. In short, this activism seemed a viable way to provide social protection to marginalized populations because it was aimed not simply at defending the well-being of vulnerable individuals, but also at sustaining the interests of the Soviet state. It is for all these reasons that after the Revolution many Russian experts received institutional and moral support from their government. Taken together, the chapters in this section have mapped out the human predicaments, the institutions, the agents, and the key discursive tenets that emerged around the issue of help in the Soviet Union in the first decade after the Revolution. I have argued that the official categorizations of invalids and pensioners, the narratives of entitlement crafted by the petitioners, and the activists' representations of deserving otherness combined to inform new notions of social rights and socialist morality. In the next section, I will pay closer attention to the dynamics of change in the practice of Soviet help between 1918 and 1950. I will discuss the unexpected meanings that discursive constructions acquired when they were put to the test in contingent situations and reveal a moral order that was forged in the uneven interactions between political power, various social forces, and the aspirations of individual marginalized people.

CHAPTER 4

11

HOMES OF WORK AND LOVE" (1918-1927)

R0 U B LI N G T EN S I 0 N S AN I MATE D the drive to help deviant, nonworking subjects by integrating them in the "big, loving, and hardworking family" of Soviet socialism. 1 As we have seen in the pre' vious chapters, the material help provided by the Commissariat of Social Assistance could be motivated by humanitarian impulses, but it could also be an invasive form of control and discipline. The defectologists, the social workers and doctors of the Mother and Infant Department, and the activists of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf were faced with the dilemma of enabling their constituencies' emancipation and protecting their individual human dignity while also channeling their transformation into "normal" subjects. These conceptual strains made the actual practice of social protection a mined terrain. It was precisely in the sites where vulnerable populations received care that the Soviet paradox of rights and control most starkly manifested itself. The right to be helped was neither a fixed and stable hegemonic discourse nor a homogeneous field of social action. Not only did it lack internal conceptual coherence, it was also constantly reforged in the competing practices of the actors involved in it. As we will see in this chapter, in the years between 1918 and 1927, the challenge to realize rights and implement them in ways that were both rational and humane constituted the biggest anxiety that vexed Soviet social activists. The negotiations and compromises made in addressing this anxiety revealed the limits of the Soviet "loving and hardworking family:' The activists of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf, for instance, struggled to define the meaning oflabor as a social right and rational welfare policy for people without the capacity to work. In line with the official doctrine that disabled people's involvement in the labor market was the best form of assistance because it guaranteed them economic self-sufficiency, these two Societies conceptualized help as the provision of jobs. They also largely equated the right to be helped with the right to work. This was a rational management approach that promoted disciplinary practices of social assistance and pushed for the normalization of those who seemed outside the norm of the

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productive, able-bodied worker. Yet blind and deaf activists praised labor not only as a means of economic subsistence, but also as a positive source of social inclusion and personal fulfillment. By emphasizing the affective dimension of socialist labor, in their early advocacy the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf were able to sustain a precarious balance between economic rationality and humanitarian motivations in the practice of Soviet help. For the defectologists, anxieties coalesced in the aspiration to help deviant children by correcting their defects in "free and creative ways:'z In the Medico-Pedagogical Station, morally defective boys and girls were supposed to find a rejuvenating and healthy environment, where they could pursue their individual interests but also achieve rehabilitation and reintegration into the collective. In other words, the defectologists strove to combine the forging of fit and useful subjects with the care for the psychological aspects of these children's existence. They often mentioned joy as a correctional tool and personal happiness as the outcome of children's labor in the station's workshops. In their view, scientific expertise could be effective only if combined with sympathetic approaches toward difficult children. Their reeducation projects indeed gave not only a positivist but also a humane thrust to the Soviet process of remaking. In the end, however, the everyday regime of care to which these experts subjected young defectives lacked any spontaneity, and joy was more an aspiration of the defectologists than an emotion experienced by the children themselves. The limits of rational management in realizing the rights of deviant subjects were perhaps most blatantly exposed in the practice of assistance to unemployed single mothers. While doctors and nurses were supposed to give "all their love" to unmarried mothers and build mutual trust between them and the Soviet state, 3 in the facilities run by the Mother and Infant Department the right to be helped merged with the management of women's intimate lives and reproductive labor. The ideal of trusting love between the agents and subjects of Soviet help never materialized in women's clinics and Homes for Mother and Child. But neither did the exercise of complete control over women's sexuality and maternal feelings. Supposedly "helpless" women were in fact frequently able to thwart the state's demands on their labor as mothers, and thus upset the regime of care and control more than defective children or disabled men ever could. The years between 1918 and 1927 emerge as a time when the practical realization of social rights was riddled with moral ambiguities. As Alexander Etkind has argued about this period, "the place once occupied by

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traditional norms and behavioral regulations (i.e. religion, law, and tradition) is left vacant, and science is hastily drafted to fill the vacancY:' 4 In their discursive constructions as well as in their practice of help, Soviet social activists used science and rationality as masculine forces offering moral criteria by which feminized and infantilized "others" were to be helped. In addition, having emptied the institution of the family of its kinship support function, the Soviet government strove to create an ideologically suitable new family grounded not only in love, but also in work. Social activists in the 1920s experimented in the making of new families for deviant subjects, but the relations they encouraged ended up resembling the old family structure, with its deep-rooted patriarchal model. The sites of help managed by the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf, the defectologists, and the Mother and Infant Department became "homes" where pseudo-families reproduced hierarchies of ability, generation, and gender, and where the emotional needs and individual rights of each member were always aligned with the interests of the larger collective. 5 Finally, the activists' desires for rationality and humanity contrasted with a reality of devastating social breakdown. Everyday conditions on the ground posed practical hindrances to the ideal of attentive care. They also disrupted the most rigid and oppressive aspects of the regime of control entailed in the Soviet right to be helped.

4. 1• The Rationality and Humanity of "Work-Oriented Help" The term "work-oriented help" (trudovaia pomoshch') was first used in relation to adult deaf people's welfare by the activist Elena Smirnova in July 1917, when the All-Russian Union of the Deaf-Mute held its First Congress. At that time (as we have seen in the previous chapter), deaf advocacy largely revolved around issues of legal emancipation; but Smirnova nonetheless argued that labor occupied a "dominant position" among the concerns of the Russian deaf community. In her view, having an occupation was a crucial means for the deaf to satisfy their material as well as their spiritual interests. 6 A few years later, labor became the absolute primary goal of deaf activism, the most important of all the rights that the Society of the Deaf was claiming for its members. In fact, the most radical activists went so far as to completely exclude any form of help that was not work-oriented. For instance, one of the "theses" pronounced at the Meeting of the Deaf-Mute in 1926 read:

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The material help provided by the state to the deaf-mute can be directed only at their job placement and must take the form of assignments of credits and subsidies to the cooperatives .... Taking into consideration the possibility of complete assistance through employment, there should not be any support in the form of pensions or placement in the facilities of social welfare. This activist further defined job placement as "the only rational form of assistance" to the deaf.? · Blind activists too contended that the only possible solution to blindness as a social problem was "work-oriented assistance" (trudovoe obespechenie).8 When a representative of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection (Rabkrin) suggested that the Society of the Blind adopt the slogan "Not pity for the blind, but work;' the activist Afinogenov agreed: "Let's advance the question of the blind along the tracks of labor:' 9 The lives of the blind were to be improved not by means of compassion, but through the acquisition of accessible trades and employment in productive activities. This type of assistance, the activist Viktorov added at the Second Plenum of the Society of the Blind in August 1925, had to be approached "in a scientific waY:' 10 As two units under the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf were particularly aware of the importance that this agency-and the Soviet government in generalattributed to labor as a rehabilitative tool. Yet, when they defined work as "the first line of struggle against begging;' 11 they were not merely repeating official formulations. They were also creatively proposing practices of help that were economically rational, integrative, and humane at the same time; that conferred agency to the disabled; and that encouraged the community of the able-bodied to look at them no longer as in-valid and miserable subjects of charity but as "fit" (zhiznesposobnye) for the new Soviet lifeY Together with the right to work, blind and deaf activists usually emphasized their communities' entitlement to equality in accessing resources and social services-medical care, elementary as well as higher education, social insurance for those who had a job, and social assistance for the congenitally disabled. They also demanded welfare mechanisms that would account for the psychology and the emotional difficulties of blind and deaf individuals. Ultimately, through the idiom of "job placement" (trudoustroistvo ), blind and deaf activists were asserting their right to dignified conditions in both "life and labor" (trud i zhizn')Y

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One of the most exhaustive explanations of how the right to assistance and the right to work were supposed to work together in practice came from the pen of doctor Sergei Selivanovich Golovin. As an activist and expert in ophthalmology, Golovin had been advocating for job placement as a means to endow the blind with rights since his 1910 book On Blindness in Russia. 14 His 1924 opus, The Contemporary State of Social Help to the Blind, was very much in line with the theory of defectology that was in vogue at that time. Indeed, Golovin did not conceive blindness as the expression of an unreformable nature, but rather as a social disease that could be treated or remedied. Labor seemed to him the best cure to correct both the physical and the psychological defects of adult blind people: not only did work result in concrete "material outcomes;' it also led to "spiritual and moral achievements" for the blind. 15 Based on this view, Golovin argued that Soviet special schools and homes for the blind should perform a set of complex functions that included the provision of higher education as well as involvement in industrial work. Funded exclusively by the state and integrated within the system of defectological facilities, the sites of help to the blind promoted by Golovin were supposed to function as employers or job placement agencies, while also supporting the spiritual interests of those they assisted. Golovin had seen a model for this type of institution in the German facilities for the blind that he had visited during a research trip in the fall of 1923. As he had observed, German schools for adult blind people not only offered an education of the same quality as that provided in regular state schools, but also taught a large range of trades. For instance, in agrarian schools for the blind, practical and theoretical curricula aimed to enable the students to run an autonomous agricultural enterprise of small dimensions and thereby "lead a comfortable life:' Endorsing the German model, Golovin also argued that the blind should study foreign languages because they offered additional professional skills. 16 Among the many facilities that this progressive Russian doctor had visited in Germany, one had particularly impressed him: a special production department organized within the Siemens factory in Berlin for the exclusive employment of blind men. This initiative had been developed by Paul H. Perls, the author of a German bestseller titled The Rehabilitation of Disabled Veterans in the Factory: Therapy through Work. 17 Perls looked at disabled people as objects of scientific examination whose impairments could be compensated for and whose employability could be guaranteed by applying modern medicine, technology, and rational management. 18 Thanks to "therapy through work;' enthusiastically explained Golovin in his

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booklet, blind and maimed men could perform "fruitful work ... just like the healthy ones:' 19 Golovin was also careful to explain the material advantages for the industries employing the blind: after having acquired the proper skills, the blind gave the same "impeccable output" as the able-bodied and their work did not cause any loss to the factory. In fact, the blind could produce even more than the able-bodied because their very disabilities shielded them from the visual distractions of the external world and allowed them to focus more intensively on their work. 20 Emphasizing the "agility, precision, and determination'' with which the blind operated "complex and even frightening machines;' 21 Golovin attributed to visually impaired persons the most important qualities of the modern industrial worker. In other words, this activist used industrial work as a criterion to equalize the blind with the seeing and even enhance them in comparison with all those who were scared by the complexity of modern industrial technology. He did not deny the activists' discursive construction of the blind as backward, but added that through the mastery of technology the blind would overcome backwardness and become "normal:' As scholars Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov have remarked, this claim permeated artistic representations of the time in which persons with disabilities were presented as "working busily in manufacturing workshops and participating in "normal" life with the help of modern technology and the tireless control of doctors, engineers, consultants, and production managers:' 22 For Golovin, industrial work had an extremely positive influence not only on the material existence of the blind but also on their emotional wellbeing. The captions to some illustrations in his book drove home the classic message mens sana in corpore sana-when the muscles develop, both the physical and mental health of the person will improve. And indeed, averred Golovin, the mood of the blind improved significantly through industrial work; they felt more peaceful, more energetic, and even physically stronger than when they worked in artisan workshops. 23 While artisanal work did not give the blind any material security because it took up all their waking time but gave them only a miserable income, industrial labor was "happier and healthier:' As Golovin put it, The blind person feels that he reaches perfection in his work, that he acquires equal worth as the able-bodied ... that he will always be offered a job that will feed him, and that he will be useful to other people as well.

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While "nothing demoraliz[ed] and discourag[ed] the blind more than the forced state of doing-nothing;' having a job made blind people confident that they were appreciated and gave them energy. 24 As these passages reveal, the feelings of the disabled occupied an important place in Golovin's blueprint for the provision of help to Soviet visually impaired men. However, his text was imbued with an inner tension concerning affective approaches to the blind and, in particular, the idea of compassion. On one hand, this Russian ophthalmologist adopted Peds's motto "work, not compassion'' (Arbeit, nicht Mitleid) and insisted that "compassion, which evokes only charity, has become an offense to cultured people:' On the other hand, he claimed that "compassion and understanding are necessary as the impulse for active, resolute love:'zs Labor appeared as the instrument to cut the connection between compassion and charity without severing that between compassion and love. For Golovin, an "ardent, resolute love to the human person'' had to pervade both the idea and the practice of help to the disabled; it had to permeate all the measures of labor safety and care for the blind. 26 This strong emotion did not have any affinity to Christian thought but rather derived from socialist morality: while the former did not guarantee social rights, the latter was a superior and rational doctrine that led to real social justice. Golovin defined Peds's department for the blind as "a home of work and love" and offered it up as a model for the emerging Soviet practice of help to the disabled. Using Bolshevik jargon, he wrote that this was a place where "fairytales had come true'' and "the impossible had turned into reality:'27 The photographs included in his book testified to these achievements, but they also dramatized their uniqueness to the German industrial giant Siemens. Indeed, all the pictures in Golovin's book showed German facilities! Despite official Soviet discourse presenting the socialist state as the only political system able to realize social rights in practice, postrevolutionary Russia lacked this type of dream-industry, and physically impaired people were often denied the necessary support to escape from the humiliating grip of private charity. The Societies of the Blind and the Deaf did try to organize specific workshops for their constituencies-first independently (in 19261927) and then within the Industrial-Consumer Union of Invalids or VIKO (in 1928-1930). Both attempts, however, proved unsuccessful. In particular, the transfer of the two societies' workshops to the Union of Invalids led to the bankruptcy and closure of many enterprises. Although special schools for blind children did exist, no institution was fully capable of retraining

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newly blinded adults in the years between 1918 and 1927. At best, blind people obtained a basic education and some vocational training. A few blind individuals worked in trades such as basket weaving and broom production, but most led lives of economic poverty and social marginalization. Against the promises of socialism, in the postrevolutionary Soviet Union it was still the traditional family that took care of the blind. Deaf activists advanced arguments very similar to those proposed by Golovin in relation to the Soviet blind. For instance, in a 1928 leaflet condemning the isolation of the deaf from the rest of society, Po chapin asserted that deaf people's "personal satisfaction'' came from "their working link with society:' Therefore, continued Pochapin, "we cannot tear off from normal life a great number of people who could enter the family of workers on common ground:' 28 In a 1928 article titled "Five Wishes" and written under the pseudonym of Boris Volgin, the chairman of the Society of the Deaf, Pavel A. Savel'ev, articulated an analogous proposition. Two of his "wishes" were: to give not only literacy, but also vocational qualification, and thus turn the deaf-mute into industrial workers ... and to create conditions of work in which the labor of the deaf-mute would be completely utilized and there would be mutual understanding between the deaf-mute and the hearing workers. 29

As these quotations reveal, normalization into a standard exemplary subjectivity (i.e., turning into industrial workers) and egalitarian integration in the social body (i.e., "entering the family of workers on common ground") still functioned in dynamic tension in the discourses of Soviet disability activists in the late 1920s. And yet, something very important had changed since Golovin wrote his book in 1924. The coexistence of work and love in the lives of Soviet people with disabilities no longer appeared so seamless. As we will see in the next chapter, "love" was dropped from the activists' agenda after 1928, and both the emancipatory integrating component and the disciplinary normalizing side of their programs were to take place exclusively through labor.

4.2. The Limits of the Defectologists' "Hardworking and Loving Family" Among the defectologists' young patients at the Medico-Pedagogical Station in Moscow was a "psychoneurotic" girl called Nastia. Born on April

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22, 1906, Nastia had begun life surrounded by the love of her parents and two older siblings. Her life had been happy and materially comfortable until 1913, when, at the age of seven, she became an orphan and moved into the house of an aunt. It was at that point that she began to be increasingly different from her peers and appeared to her aunt as "difficult to rear:' Unable or unwilling to take care of her troubled orphaned niece, the aunt took Nastia to the Medico-Pedagogical Station at 8 Pogodinskaia Street. There Nastia was diagnosed with "moral defectiveness" and was required to join a group of sixteen boys with "pathological psyches" and "personality defects" who had also just been admitted for rehabilitation. 30 According to the defectologist Murashev, when Nastia and the other children first walked from the busy street along the Moscow River into the Station's large park of conifers, "they immediately felt as though they were leaving the noise of the city behind the gates:' 31 We don't know how Nastia actually felt the day she entered the Medico- Pedagogical Station for the first time. Yet, a series of poems that she wrote later during her stay in this institution reveal that she was not so happy and peaceful as Murashev thought she should feel under the benevolent care of a state agency run by experts. In the poem "Sad Thoughts;' for instance, the then fourteen-year-old Nastia struggled to make sense of her suffering. Yes, I must suffer for a long time Still six years have to go by And the heart will resound with joy When their end will come. Then I will go to my dear town To be a teacher there And there, with all my energy, I will love Varia and Irochka. I will often work there And eat the bread of my labor. Then the scolds of a sick soul I will no longer fear. 32 The repetition of the word "there" indicates that Nastia did not locate happiness in the Medico-Pedagogical Station, but rather projected it into a different space and time. She hoped to accomplish a speedy reeducation

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through her conscientious work and leave the defectologists' institution as soon as possible. Her dream was to go back to her hometown, find a job, and enjoy the love of her siblings. Working and loving her family, Nastia would have rejoined the "normal" life that all the other members of the nascent Soviet society were supposedly living. She would no longer feel remorse for her "defective" morality, but would rather turn into an acceptable Soviet subject. As it turned out, Nastia was a good patient: upon completion of her reeducation, she left the defectological facility and sought to build her happiness by working in a local library. The doctor who had cured her took pride in the girl's accomplishments. As he wrote, "I was able to completely correct her neurasthenic personality. Of course, some neurasthenic traits remained, but still, I was able to make Nastia socially fit:' 33 Like Murashev, the Perm' defectologist Zhan Genrikovich Putnin emphasized that "the whole environment" in his Psychoneurological SchoolSanatorium was set up "to protect the psychic and physical health of the children:'34 However, in their letters home, his young patients expressed quite different feelings. Nikolai Kivkin and Boris Bogatov, for instance, wrote that they were provided with enough food and warm clothes, but this was not sufficient to make them happy. They wanted to go home and threatened to run away if their mothers would not come to rescue them. 35 Indeed, Boris, Nikolai, and eleven more children attempted to escape from Putnin's SchoolSanatorium in the school year 1927-1928. Most of them were caught by the defectologists before they could go too far. A few children made it back home but were soon unceremoniously shipped back to Putnin by parents with little patience for their "moral defects:' 36 As the father of ten-year-old Stanislav Okloto claimed when he sent his son back to the defectologists, "Stanislav has a propensity for vagrancy and has run away from home already several times, disappearing for weeks or even months .... Don't send him back. Send him to some special therapy or to a home for defective children:'37 These stories dramatize the ambiguity of the moral order conjured by the defectologists. They reveal that, in practice, their idea of a "hardworking and loving family" and their vision of a "healthy" environment did not always nurture joy in the children themselves. As a modern and humane science of help, defectology had the enlightened mission of transforming defective youth from suffering deviant subjects into corrected and socially useful members of the new "proletarian family:' 38 Yet this science did not guarantee the children's well-being in the process. One of the reasons Nastia did not like the Medico-Pedagogical Station was probably the surveillance to which its young residents were constantly

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subjected. Upon admission to the Station, all children underwent an initial diagnostic evaluation of medical and psychological nature in order to determine to which living pavilion they should be assigned. 39 Everything in them was scrupulously searched for defects: their entire bodies, past experiences and present behaviors, intellectual development, verbal skills and artistic abilities, moods and wishes, emotions and worries, phobias and interests, their social skills, ethical outlook, and sense of aesthetics. Examinations and "observations" (nabliudeniia) continued throughout the children's stay in the Medico-Pedagogical Station. As we have seen in chapter 3, every day the defectologists registered their comments on the children's psychic life in their clinical journals. Anthropometrical measurements and photographs, interviews with their parents, and pedagogical remarks were also regularly made. Finally, a report on their "psychophysical personality" and "sodaprofessional suitability" was compiled when the children left the station. This report went either to the parents or to the state institution to which the children were subsequently assigned. The gaze into the children's worlds continued even after their release since the defectologists argued that the former users of their facilities still needed "moral and material support" in taking their first independent steps. Archival records reveal that doctors and pedagogues often attempted to keep in touch with their former students. 40 The strongly disciplining dimension of children's everyday schedules could have been another source of unhappiness. The defectologists offered to their young clients a "rational and hygienic sanatorium regime;' which entailed a "precisely elaborated system of therapeutic-pedagogical interventions:'41 The typical day started at nine in the morning: the children woke up, washed themselves, and cleaned their rooms; then they drank tea and, until ten, stayed under the care of a tutor. Afterward, the children were passed on to the head teacher, who read with them and carried out "conversations:' At two in the afternoon the children had lunch and then spent the rest of the day in the courtyard, resting and playing under the supervision of a tutor. In the evenings, from six to eight, they worked again with a teacher. At eight they had dinner and at nine they went to sleepY Unbalanced, nervous children with unstable personalities were believed to receive crucial help from an unchanging order of daily activities. Morally defective boys and girls played games, participated in storytelling and reading activities, went out for excursions, watched performances, attended art and music classes, took singing lessons, and did physical exercises.43 Indeed, Soviet defectologists assigned great importance to physical education: as Golovin contended in relation to adult blind men, Kashchenko

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too argued that the education of the body's movements nurtured both the intellect and the emotions. 44 Over-exertion, on the other hand, was considered harmful for defective children, and physical labor was not supposed to be grueling. Rest and sleep were essential: after lunch the children took a nap and the duration of the night sleep was longer than that of "normal" children of the same age group. The relative proportion of work time and free time was measured precisely, and strict control was applied to the balance between intellectual and muscular activities. Prolonged sleep, the alternation of work and rest, open-air play for four to five hours a day, sufficient space in the lodgings, extracaloric nutrition (by the standards of the time)-all this was part of what the defectologists called "physical and psychic hygiene:' It facilitated the development of the child's nervous system by acting on it almost as a chemical formula that changed the pernicious influences of the "unhygienic" surrounding environment. 45 Believing that children's nervous health could be significantly upset by bad sexual habits, the defectologists strove to avert them in all possible ways. Strict vigilance, "frank talks" about sex, a healthy regime, cleanliness, psychological therapy, and even loose clothes were all methods with which the staff of the Medico- Pedagogical Station "fought against abnormalities" in the realm of children's sexuality. 46 For instance, one boy was brought to Kashchenko's special school because he showed interest only in sex: No matter what he looked at, with whom he talked or on which topic, everywhere he strove to see the sexual act and always wanted to talk about the sexual act. In addition, all his drawings and the objects that he made with clay were obscene. The defectologists "sublimated" the boy's sexual impulses into intellectual interests by giving him books about the lives of animals and plantsY Another child showed a "premature development of sexual instincts" and was "cured" by turning his attention to theater (the child was asked to create the setting for Alexander Pushkin's play Boris Godunov with decorations and representations of all the play's characters). In a third case, a child's "deformed development of sexual emotions" was corrected by redirecting his interest to religious themes. Initially, the boy was asked to copy old icons and create small models of churches. However, in the growing antireligious mood of the 1920s, religious subjects were not a good alternative to sexual anomalies, and the child's attention was further shifted toward the neutral terrain oflove for animals and interest in natural sciences. 48 In all these cases,

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it was "a poorly organized environment" that encouraged autoeroticism and other supposedly pathological sexual activities. As Simson explained in her 1929 book on moral defectiveness in children younger than five, All things that cause dissatisfaction in the child-hunger, impatience, unsatisfied desires, anger-can trigger autoeroticism. When the child is hurt, he sticks the fingers in the mouth and sucks; when he is angry, he forcefully touches his genitals, etc. In short, the child rewards himself for negative affective moods, compensates by providing joy and satisfaction to himself. 49 The pedagogical lesson derived from this observation was clear. It was not useful to limit the children's sexuality by beating or otherwise punishing them, because violent measures of restraint only caused conflicts in their psyche. Rather, "having correctly organized the environment, it is necessary to turn [the child's] erotic energy toward the productive and creative awareness of the surrounding world:' so In the Medico- Pedagogical Station, all activities inside and outside the classroom employed a combination of pedagogical, psychoneurological, and purely bodily interventions that the defectologists called the "complex" or "combined" method (kompleksnyi metod). 51 Similar to the didactic program that Golovin hoped to realize in the facilities for the blind, the "complex method" was the means for a reeducation and correction that transformed the motor apparatus, the senses, the speech, the intellect, the aesthetic taste, and-most importantly-the social orientation of the child. Emma Widdis has argued that the project of sensory reeducation cannot be detached from the holistic transformative project that was part of the revolutionary mission.SZ For the defectologists, sensory education and all the other components of the combined method "made the behavior of the child normal and straightened it in social terms:' 53 As such, this pedagogical approach perfectly fulfilled the professed goals of defectology as the best practice of help to behaviorally deviant children-namely, to correct their shortcomings and turn them into socially fit subjects. The above description of the Medico- Pedagogical Station reveals the invasiveness of the defectologists' practice of help. Identical methods were used in the Perm' Psychoneurological School-Sanatorium and other defectological facilities of the time. This, of course, triggers our empathy for the sad girl Nastia and the morally defective boys who tried to run away. Still, we should consider that the lives of Soviet children diagnosed with moral defectiveness were not so grim in comparison with those of many

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other Soviet children living on the streets or in the labor colonies managed by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. In the defectological homes, the intrusiveness of the experts' diagnostic and educational methods and their discipline's normalizing goals were mitigated by truly integrating and humanitarian aspirations. The defectologists always insisted that no child was to be locked up in a punitive institution. The facilities for morally defective children should be neither prisons nor factories, but simply children's homes-relief institutions with didactic-educational purposes. Isolation rooms and other prison-like forms of punishment horrified Kashchenko as "unfounded and cruel ... monstrous antipedagogical educational measures:'54 Contemporary admirers of defectology praised this discipline for having "the marvelous simplicity of an authentically scientific thought" in which accurate observations combined with attention and love toward difficult children. 55 Simson reminded the educators working with out-ofmainstream boys and girls to take into account these children's "stronger need for love" and give them "attention and affection'' in greater measure than to their "normal" peers. 56 Similarly, Putnin argued that one of the most important methods to discipline morally defective children was to establish an emotional connection between the child and the pedagogue: the latter had to gain the child's trust by using a sensitive and attentive approach. 57 Kashchenko and Murashev wrote that "there is no education without heart, without love and care for the child:'ss Thus, while scientific knowledge was crucial, it could lead to the correction of children's defects and their rebirth into a socially useful life only when combined with a heartfelt, loving attitude. Both love and science echoed ideas that were at the very heart of the Soviet project. Defectological practice was supposed to implement both of them in order to realize difficult children's social rights (while also making them fit for socialist life). To achieve their integrative goals, the defectologists believed it fundamental to provide morally defective children not only with general education but also with specific working skills. Indeed, profitable job placement was an agenda of disability activism not uniquely for adults. It also applied to many other types of defectives-adults and children, men and women, physically impaired as well as "mentally retarded" and "difficult:'59 Kashchenko argued that, through labor, "abnormal children cease to be invalids and are joined to the socially useful and creative work of the Soviet people building the communist society" 60 (but this statement could easily have been pronounced by Golovin or any activist of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf). While the facilities for moral defectives should not

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be places "where the children ... become the soulless gears of a huge mechanism:'61 they should also diverge from the old-style shelters where spiritually demoralized children dissipated the financial resources assigned to them. The Soviet homes for morally defective children were to be a humane and rational investment in future young citizens, educated in the spirit of"conscious work, respect for themselves and others, faith in the future and in their strong, young energies:' 62 The defectologists' attempt to combine labor with children's selfconfidence, personal motivation, and other positive emotions was certainly directed at creating future productive subjects who would enjoy the hard work of building communism. However, the desire to inspire "creative joy" and "feelings of self-worth''63 in otherwise unconfident young people reveals an attention to these children's well-being that cannot be completely subsumed under productivist motives. Kashchenko once stated that "children's joy and laughter are so precious that any children's institution should encourage and protect them like the pupil of the eye:' 64 The defectologists looked for didactic materials that might appeal to children's interests and sought to provide their wards with diverse experiences, believing that the joy that the children would thus feel could improve their whole psyche. 65 For instance, after admitting a boy who "did not show interest for absolutely anything and did not want to engage in any activity;' the defectologists observed and studied him for some months, watching keenly for signs of his better nature. One day, during a visit to a museum, they noticed that the child was curious about hieroglyphics. The defectologists built their didactic program around this first manifestation of interest. Soon the child's apathy disappeared, and within some years "the boy turned into a talented historian:'66 Thus, each morally defective child was to be normalized, but "without dragging him forcefully by the ears until he fits into the norm:' 67 As the defectologist I. Kiselev recommended, in the Soviet establishments for morally defective children, the correction of individual personalities should not happen by "ironing out" children's distinguishing traits, but rather by looking for ways to make individual characteristics perform useful work for the rest of society. 68 In this respect too, defectology strongly differed from Makarenko's methods of reeducation. For the latter, the cultivation of a sense of collectivityeven through the use of coercion-was the exclusive strategy to reform the individual. Makarenko did wish his "colonists" to be happy, but true human joy for him could rest only in the collective and in children's sense of duty toward it. As he wrote in The Pedagogical Poem:

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In my paper on discipline, I allowed myself to doubt the correctness of the then commonly accepted assumption that punishment produces slaves, that it is necessary to give full space to the child's creativity.... I allowed myself to state my positive conviction that, until the collective is built ... the educator ... must not shy away from coercion. I also argued that we should not base education on [children's] interests and that the education of the sense of duty is often in contradiction with the interests of the child, especially as he understands them. I demanded the education of a tempered, solid person, who can perform unpleasant work and boring work if the interests of the collective require it. In sum, I argued for the creation of a strong, and if necessary even severe, inspired collective, and only on the collective I set all hope. My opponents threw at me the axioms of pedology and danced all around "the child:'69 The defectologists did "dance all around 'the child;" because for them a noncoercive, individualized education based on personal interests was not in contradiction with the goal to develop collective habits and "the social ideal" in allegedly antisocial children/0 As Simson wrote, "in the process of work in a collective, the child must believe that he can realize his 'Self' in a positive sense:' 71 In a rationally organized and scrupulously planned but also loving environment, each deviant child could find "the best field to work on the defective forms of his behavior:' 72 Everything in the Medico- Pedagogical Station-from the pavilion living arrangement to classroom work and recreational activities-was oriented toward helping the individual child while also forging him into an upright member of the communist collective. The defectologists' use of art is another telling example of how an approach both scientific and humane was to facilitate the emergence of "social emotions" without denying the individual/3 Kashchenko contended that music, dance, and theater "capture all of us and compel us to experience collective emotions"; they"draw people together ... like the members of one family"; they "put them in unison:' Experiences such as singing or reciting poems all together constituted the ground for bringing individual children closer to the collective. Indeed, for the defectologists, art education was not supposed to breed "passive aesthetes;' but rather raise full-fledged members of communist society and "fighters for its ideals:' Again, to understand the specificity of the defectologists' approach to art, it can be useful to quote Makarenko's words on theater. He wrote: Theater was not our enjoyment or hobby, but our duty, an inevitable social contribution ... From the point view of the colony's interests, it was

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irrelevant what part one or another colonist took in the play-he was supposed to do what was required of him. 74 Instead, Kashchenko praised art as the manifestations of children's individual creativity and taste. Artistic endeavors were valuable for the defectologists precisely because they gave space to individual vocation, but at the same time provided children's labor with social significance. Art prevented abnormal children from developing feelings of unworthiness that would further estrange them from the larger social body. 75 This approach is yet another indication that defectology's ultimate goal was not to exclude social degenerates, but to adapt problematic personalities to the socialist living environment. In their practice of help, reeducation happened for the sake of both the individual and the collective. Finally, the limits and inner moral tensions of a practice of help that was supposed to be pleasurable and corrective, individualized and socially useful at the same time are evident in the story of the Pushkino summer camp. Established in 1926 in a village in the Moscow hinterland, this facility was meant to be a site where enjoyable activities such as playing outdoor games, going for long walks, swimming, rowing, working in the vegetable or fruit garden, and cultivating flowers corrected behaviorally deviant children.76 Unlike the Medico-Pedagogical Station, the Pushkino camp was also a space where educational work was imbued with the social goal of serving the rural population. By having morally defective children read aloud to illiterate peasants and help rural nannies take care of small babies, the defectologists became implicated in the Soviet government's massive campaign to transform the backward Russian peasantry. Difficult children left the urban defectological facilities and went into the countryside to perform work in it and for it. No longer punished and isolated from life, these nonconforming young people were now closely connected to the new socialist society/7And yet, this process subtly and dangerously reversed the directionality of Soviet help: the "poor and suffering" targets of the state's regime of care became, in Kashchenko's own words, "of great help to the state:' 78

4.3. 11 5chools of Motherhood" or 11 Homes of Squabble and Parasitism"? As we have seen in chapter 3, the doctors and social activists of the Mother and Infant Department espoused the principle that pregnant women and mothers without a male wage earner had the right to be protected by the

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Soviet state. When it came to realizing this right in practice, they recommended implementing protection as a "school of motherhood" (shkola materinstva). This phrase indicated a body of health information, advice, and practical assistance providing a blueprint of socialist help to single mothers. Because it established a model of reproductive conduct and shaped maternal behavior, the school of motherhood was not only a practical method to realize single mothers' right to be helped, but also a crucial component of the Soviet program of "cultural enlightenment" in the realms of sexuality and parenthood. On one hand, it was of great import to the Soviet project of reeducating backward social groups; on the other hand, it fit nicely with the humanitarian motives informing understandings of social rights. Not unlike the medicopedagogical approach to defective children and the didactic plans proposed by Golovin for blind men, the school of motherhood was a medical and reeducational program grounded in the ideals of love for the recipients of help and stimulation of their (reproductive) contributions to the collective. In the years between 1918 and 1927, the school of motherhood was practiced in various facilities managed by the Mother and Infant Department, such as the women's outpatient clinics (zhenskie konsul'tatsii), the homes of Soviet women themselves through the institution of patronage (patronazh), and the Homes for Mother and Child (Doma Materi i Rebenka). In these three sites of help, Soviet doctors and activists strove to implement their mixed humanitarian and disciplinary aspirations vis-a-vis single mothers. The latter, on their part, frequently refused and displaced both aspirations through their everyday actions. The women's clinics were educational institutions tasked with instructing Soviet women on matters of sexuality throughout their lives, from puberty to menopause. They were supposed to counter all sorts of incorrect views among women and teach them proper sexual and gynecological hygiene as well as infant care. They were also centers of prophylactic medicine that provided qualified obstetrical emergency help and performed preventive physical exams on pregnant women and their children until the age of two. 79 The combined educational and prophylactic tasks of these facilities-as well as their double goal of helping and disciplining-are clearly revealed in their approach to abortions. Although between November 1920 and June 1936 abortion was legal in the Soviet Union, the clinics of the Mother and Infant Department pursued a determined campaign against women's willful interruption of pregnancy. Soviet district doctors indicated that aborting persons included mainly two types of women: peasant "unmarried girls" who were ashamed and afraid of their parents; and adult women who were not

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in an officially registered union or had been abandoned by their husbands. Unaware of the superiority of modern science over traditional medicine, both types of women risked falling victim to the village healing-woman. In addition, both unmarried girls and abandoned adult women were believed to be ignorant about Soviet alimony laws and therefore unwarrantedly anxious about the material means by which they could raise their children. 80 Since the main reason pushing women to perform abortions was thought to be their "absolute economic, social, and legal helplessness;' the clinics had to be sites of both relief and propaganda. Indeed, the medical personnel working there strove to save women from the risks of underground abortions by agitating about the damage that this procedure caused to the female organism and by advertising contraceptive measures. 81 Some activists recommended directing the propaganda effort also at men by launching a campaign for their involvement in the support of children. However, this sort of agitation never convincingly took off, as the state did not make any serious attempt at changing men's roles in the household. 82 Breast-feeding is another telling example of how the clinics of the Mother and Infant Department provided extremely important and useful social services to single mothers, although always under conditions of clear regimentation. As any new parent knows very well, nursing is a complicated process, and new mothers-especially unmarried ones-face real difficulties when trying to breast-feed their infant children. In the Soviet context, unsuccessful lactation could easily lead to the baby's death. As a 1923 slogan declared: "Ignorance of proper breast-feeding kills 1.5 million newborns every year:' 83 Social workers in the Mother and Infant Department were aware of all this and strove to assist single mothers in ways that-as they thought-would be the best for their target population. The already mentioned Doctor Balakshina wrote that "under the direction of a doctor, every mother can learn to feed her baby and take care of him:' 84 And yet, because this learning process was difficult and time consuming, not all unmarried mothers wanted to go through with it. The activists attempted to encourage Soviet women to attend lactation classes by making them a condition for the reception of social assistance rights. Thus, in order to receive a subsidy in cash, single mothers had to go twice a month to the clinics and let the medical personnel of these facilities check on the progress of their breast-feeding. In the absence of clinics, special commissions of trusted female workers were asked to verify that subsidized single mothers were indeed nursing their babies and doing it properly. 85 In other words, while nursing was defined as natural, it was also portrayed as a skill. As such, it was subject to inspection

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and eventual correction at the hands of the doctor and the midwife. By giving suggestions, showing pictures, and demonstrating how to use various objects of baby care, Soviet experts aspired to teach skilled care even to illiterate single mothers. Women who, after all this agitation, still decided not to breast-feed, were defined as "irrational mothers" (nerazumnye materi), incorrigibly harming their children. 86 Along with reasons related to the problem of infant mortality and poor health among Soviet children, breast-feeding played such an important role in the practice of assistance to single mothers because it related to one of the biggest ideological dilemmas of the Soviet social welfare and health systems. Namely, how was socialism to liberate women from the burden of exclusive care for their babies while also preserving the physiological bond between mother and child? Expert consensus among European physicians of the time celebrated breast-feeding as a means of reducing infant mortality, because it avoided the dangers of unsterilized bottles or spoiled milk. 87 Soviet doctors recognized truth in this view, but also straddled the gap between concerns for babies' survival and the socialist doctrine of women's emancipation. Combining the state's material assistance with the experts' didactic interventions sounded to many activists in the Mother and Infant Department like the best solution to this thorny issue. As Grauerman argued, by receiving economic help together with education, "lonely rejected women" who "hated" their newborns would keep them, nurse them, and develop an emotional attachment to them, while also becoming equal, fully integrated members of the nascent Soviet community. 88 Around 1926, in connection with the ratification of a new Marriage and Family Code, women's clinics were officially renamed "comprehensive clinics" (razvernutye konsul'tatsii). The name change was meant to indicate that these institutions offered multiple forms of welfare without compartmentalizing among gynecological, educational, economic, and legal help to single women. In particular, through a special "juridical section;' the comprehensive clinic was supposed to assist women by offering legal defense and advice on questions concerning their rights. 89 Although the establishment of juridical consulting offices alongside the medically oriented ones seemed to be a step toward a stronger practice of legal protection, many among the social workers of the Mother and Infant Department were skeptical. They contended that female legal ignorance prevented homeless and husbandless orphan-mothers from taking advantage of the rights granted them by Soviet laws. Because they lacked any legal awareness, women constantly put themselves in difficult positions. As the Supreme Court explained,

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Sometimes the woman plaintiff absolutely does not know the name of the father who left her and the child to the whim of fate. And sometimes, due to illiteracy, she indicates the defendant's address too vaguely. 90 Given this view, it is not surprising that even after the establishment of the comprehensive clinics, the activists of the Mother and Infant Department kept their focus on prophylactic and pronatalist educational work (rather than tackling legal issues). According to an activist from the city of Pernl, these centers' key goals remained: To improve the gynecological condition of pregnant women, raise their culturallevel ... prepare their homes for the delivery or for the return from the hospital, and teach women how to care for the baby to come. 91 Without making any reference to women's social rights as unemployed single mothers, the author of this 1926 report simply required the women's clinics to conduct "conversations" on female hygiene, deliveries, menopause, sexual life, abortions, baby care, and breast-feeding. Cultural enlightenment was supposed to occur every time single women looked at the wall newspapers, pictures, posters, and educational exhibits that decorated the premises of the clinics. In addition, didactic show trials were sometimes organized involving mothers who abandoned their children. 92 In sum, the number one task of the "new" comprehensive clinic remained to serve as a school of motherhood and as a site of surveillance over women's sexual and reproductive behavior. True to its purpose and administrative standing within the Commissariat of Health, the Mother and Infant Department would continue to pursue this double humanitarian and disciplinary goal throughout the following decades. However, the fulfillment of these functions proved to be almost impossible due to unmarried mothers' lack of cooperation. Most of them simply refused to visit the clinics on a regular basis. In March 1927, for instance, the Perm' office of the Mother and Infant Department attempted to organize a clinic in the Ocherskii industrial settlement, but this enterprise turned out to be rather unsuccessful. The clinic was not popular at all because, as an activist put it, "the women still prefer to turn for advice to the village midwives:' 93 Scorned activists explained women's rejection and underuse of the clinic by reference to the lack of culture in the Soviet female population. 94 It seems plausible, however, that many women cleverly used the clinic as a sort of medical ambulatory, where they went to receive

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specific medical assistance or new prescriptions for their medicines, not unsolicited advice. 95 The institution of patronage appeared as a potential solution to the doctors' and activists' concerns as to whether single expectant women and lonely mothers actually followed their instructions. The leader of the Mother and Infant Department, Vera Lebedeva, described patronage as "an apparatus of transmission and supervision" and assigned great responsibilities to the so-called "patronage sisters" (patronazhnye sestry). These were supposed to be a "transmission belt" (provodnik) running between doctors and single mothers and conveying the defense of motherhood and infancy as a matter of socialist right. 96 Although the Mother and Infant Department contended that the patronage sister was not the philanthropist of old times, her very practice of help makes one wonder if, in fact, the old functions of charitable patronage had not been simply incorporated into the Soviet state's system of social assistance. Like her homonymous counterparts in other countries, the Soviet patronage sister was supposed to visit women in their homes, investigate the conditions in which single mothers lived, and then educate them. First of all, she checked out the baby, the crib, the clothes, and the food; wrote down all her observations on an "investigation form" (obsledovatel'nyi list); and passed her notes over to the doctor. The sister's investigations were to be even more accurate and frequent with the children of sick mothers, children raised by nonbiological mothers, sick children, and all children living in "bad, antihygienic conditions:' Secondly, the patronage sister had to acquaint the mother with the most elementary norms of hygiene and baby care by practical example. This included going into the "dirtiest" -and most intimate-spaces of single mothers' lives and performing household chores for them. The patronage sister swept and washed the floors, dusted the household objects, rearranged the furniture in the rooms, and let fresh air come in. She practically demonstrated techniques for breast-feeding, bathing, and diapering the baby, warming up the milk, cleaning the pacifier, cooking baby-food, and providing basic medical care. When single mothers lived in particularly dire economic conditions, the patronage sister was allowed to provide them with free objects of baby care, such as small bathtubs, bassinets, thermometers, pacifiers, and medicaments. The main purpose of this material help was to give mothers the possibility to execute all the "indications" of the doctors. Finally, the patronage sister directed the mothers to the clinics and, in subsequent visitations, checked whether they were implementing the doctor's recommendations in the correct way. Through all these interventions, the patronage sister was able to counter

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single mothers' "harmful customs and superstitions and thereby help the reduction of children's disease and death:' 97 According to this narrative, Soviet women were so "benighted" that they needed to be shown how things should be done. As doctor A. N. Rakhmanov said in a speech titled "Deliveries and the work of [the Mother and Infant Department's] sections;' the patronage sister "infuses health, life, and light in the darkest settings:'98 While single mothers were perceived as the carriers of dirt, damaging habits, backward superstitions, disease, and (paradoxically) death, the patronage sisters were the makers of cleanliness, comfort, and life. Although this type of social service might have been welcomed by some women and certainly facilitated the reduction of infant mortality and disease, it also dramatized the "dream of purity" and order that Zygmunt Bauman-building on Mary Douglas-has found at the heart of modernity. 99 The patronage sister embodied the attempt to concretely help deserving poor women, while simultaneously agitating for the transformation of their deviant subjectivity. To achieve this objective, she was supposed to become the closest person to the mother and the child. As Lebedeva explained, the sister's tasks required love for her work and, more importantly, great tact and patience in approaching unmarried mothers and convincing them to listen to her advice. "Complete trust" was to govern the relationship between the mother and the sister. As Lebedeva emphasized: The sister visiting a Soviet family in its home ... should not give orders or reproach the mothers when they make mistakes in the care of their children .... The questions that the sister poses to the mother about the care and the feeding of the child should not sound like a police interrogation. The patronage sister should establish intimacy with women and their children "in a consistent, but gentle and tactful manner:' Soviet help to single mothers, averred Lebedeva, was successful "only when the family meets the sister with a happy smile, looking at her as a good helper:' 100 Discussing welfare in post-socialist Latvia, Liene Ozoliqa has argued that authoritarian welfare states function at the level of affect as much as they do at the level of formal rationalities. As such, writes Ozoliqa, they strive to "create intimate bonds tying together the state and its subjects:' 101 This argument definitely applies to the ideal practice of help to which the Mother and Infant Department aspired in the 1920s. And yet, in everyday life, the relationship between the activists and their assisted was very rarely the patient, trustworthy, and affectionate rapport mandated in the official

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instructions. 102 Humanitarian and educational ambitions notwithstanding, the sisters' inspections could turn into drastic interventions that destroyed single mothers' households. This is precisely what happened to Iranda D'iakova, an indigent unmarried mother living in Perm' province. Iranda, her child, and her elderly mother occupied a room in a damp, cold, and dirty basement. Their only source of income was the money the grandmother made by begging on the streets. When the patronage sister visited them in their home, all that she could see was violence, disease, and insanity. The old woman "beats the child awfully:' while the daughter beats the old woman because she beats the child .... The child's mother appears healthy, but in fact she is covered with sores ... Judging from how she talks, we can conclude that the child's mother is not completely normal and the old woman too is not normal. A neighbor confirmed this assessment and added the accusation of rudeness: young D'iakova "speaks horribly, like a cab driver, and the old mother is not less rude:' The activist's conclusion was clear: "We must take the child awaY:' The solution, however, was not immediately implemented because the child was out on the streets begging with his grandmother. 103 A third important site where single mothers accrued their rights to material support while receiving lessons in motherhood and experiencing the regimentation of their sexuality was the Home for Mother and Child. This facility provided residential assistance to unmarried mothers for a period that included two months before and two or three months after childbirth. In his brochure, The Protection of Motherhood and How It Must Be Realized, Doctor Grauerman defined the purpose of these Homes as giving to the abandoned lonely woman ... the possibility to rest from her usual heavy work and her worries about the future so that she can gather energy for the upcoming important act-the delivery of a new citizen. 104 To put it differently, women without men were entitled to physical and spiritual care, but their social rights were conditional upon their reproductive contributions. In addition, while initially all poor (neimushchie) and single (odinokie) pregnant women could be admitted to the Homes, this vague condition-that is, being needy and alone-was qualified more narrowly in the mid -1920s when the Mother and Infant Department attempted to limit access to its Homes only to single women without housing (bespriutnye).

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The network of Homes for Mother and Child was rather small (only ninety facilities of this type existed by 1929-1930), and when the rate of female unemployment peaked in the mid-1920s, the ever-growing cohort of unemployed single mothers was encouraged to put their children in state nurseries without seeking shelter for themselves in the Homes of the Mother and Infant Department. 105 As it often happened in Soviet socialism, a progressive-sounding right was restricted both by the state's sociopolitical goals and its objective penury of resources. Each Home for Mother and Child was designed to host around twenty single women, their children, and the personnel in charge of assisting them. This institution was supposed to be a model community that combined moral improvement (cleanliness, order, thrift, and sobriety) with reproductive and mothering success. Thus, parasitism was inadmissible and the principles of mandatory collective work and self-help regulated the daily regimen. Although a janitor (preferably of the female sex) performed the heaviest chores, all other cleaning and mothering duties were left to the women-residents themselves. They did the laundry, cleaned the grounds of the home, and took turns cooking. After delivery, they fed the babies, changed their diapers, and gave them baths under the surveillance of experienced nurses. Only in the six weeks immediately before and after delivery were women excused from physical work. Some Homes had a workshop and a library with literature on the protection of motherhood and infancy. 106 No woman residing in the Home could receive visitors from the outside. 107 The spirit reigning in the Home-"the character of its inner life;' as an activist put it-was supposed to be that of a "comradely family;' in which resident single mothers would not feel like the wards of the old shelters, but like contributing members of the socialist family, performing useful and disciplined labor in the field of motherhood. Indeed, these women were not only required to care for their own children, but also assigned the "state responsibility" of nursing a certain number of orphaned infants who were regularly placed in the Homes for Mother and Child. 108 In the capacity of wet nurses (kormil'tsy) permanently living in the Homes, these women were the target of "Instructions" that strictly regulated their life and labor. These documents reveal both what the wet nurses were instructed to do and what they did in reality. For instance, while the activists strove to discipline the wet nurses into having their meals at fixed times, the women wandered to the common kitchen whenever they wanted. Informed by the usual view of single mothers as unhealthy and unclean, the "Instructions" pedantically reminded the wet-nurses of a series of hygienic norms: to wash their hands

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and breasts before and after each nursing session; to let a few drops of milk fall before giving the breast to the baby; to keep their hair and their clothes clean. Another sign of the activists' profound mistrust toward these women emerges in the regulation of their free time: the wet nurses could leave the Home every afternoon to take care of personal business, but they had to be back by six; after dusk they were allowed to leave the Home only in groups and under the vigilance of a staff member; they were required to be in their beds from midnight to six in the morning. Lonely women were often seen as inclined to practice prostitution, and this schedule was clearly oriented at preventing women's free use of their sexuality. Finally, since "the feeding of children is a job;' upon admission to the Home the wet nurses were tested for two probationary weeks: they would remain only if they turned out to be fit for the position. In addition, although these women were allowed into the Home as single mothers and together with their children, they were asked to leave their own children in the nursery and visit them only during the lactation sessions. 109 The investigation of the body was a reality of the Home for Mother and Child that applied to all its female residents. Like the defective children that lived in Kashchenko's Medico-Pedagogical Station, single mothers too were the object of constant "observations" and "checks" at the hands of medical experts. During their entire stay in the Home, women were "meticulously visited" and "subjected to detailed general and gynecological inspections:' Their genital areas were shaved and disinfected; their entire bodies were cleaned with soap and warm water; they were dressed in sterile clothes and provided with sterile sheets. While gynecological visits were supposed to be rare, scrutiny of the external surface of single mothers' bodies was recommended as frequently as possible. If the institution's personnel had even the slightest suspicion that a woman was sick, they placed her in isolation. 110 Indeed, single mothers suffering from any infectious disease were not welcome in the Homes. For obvious reasons, syphilitic women were isolated and returned to their mothering and breast-feeding duties only after having been cured. Mothers with tuberculosis were allowed to feed their babies, but not to care for them. ]] 1 Women who were receiving medical care in psychiatric hospitals were admitted to the Homes only as long as they proved "calm, conscious, and with a lot of milk in their breasts:' 112 Despite these detailed "Instructions;' the Homes for Mother and Childlike the women's clinics and the patronage visitations-did not effectively accomplish their tasks. Several reports written by the inspectors of the Mother and Infant Department throughout the 1920s drew pictures of

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disastrous sanitary and economic conditions in which the Homes could offer neither real rest nor significant education. The directors of these facilities strove to exploit women as providers of milk in exchange for a miserable shelter, and women dragged their feet and made all possible efforts to offset the social controls envisioned by the Soviet state. A case in point is the Home for Mother and Child in Perm: Located on the second floor of a two-story stone building in the center of the city, this facility had space to accommodate up to twenty women and their children. However, there were not enough bedsheets and the available underwear for both women and children was very limited: there were only eighteen shirts, most of which were torn; there were no bras, panties, socks, scarves, or shoes; there were very few diapers. The oven did not work properly and filled the rooms with smoke. The walls needed to be repainted and the leaking roof demanded to be fixed. Women hung wet diapers on a rope in a poorly furnished kitchen. There were no bathrooms inside the building: heavily pregnant women as well as mothers who had just delivered had to walk through a yard filled with trash (since there was no garbage dump and the trash spread all over the yard) to reach a cold and dark cabinet that functioned as toilet. 113 Under these conditions, it is not surprising that many women "bring their babies, leave them there to be raised, and go away. They prefer to attend some kind of courses or classes:' 114 Indeed, when unemployed single mothers sent petitions to the Perm' section of the Mother and Infant Department or to the local social assistance bureau, they most frequently requested to receive financial support to raise their children by themselves, to be given a job (since the state advertised employment as the best welfare solution!), or to have their children placed in state nurseries. As a twenty-five-year-old unmarried woman wrote in 1928, "I am without a husband, I have a two-month-old child, and I don't have any means of subsistence. But a mother must raise her child:' This woman asked to be hired in any kind of position that would give her the possibility to take care of her child autonomously. 115 Very rarely did women ask for admission to the Home for Mother and Child. In the Perm' archives, I came across only two such requests, both of which were characterized by a sense of extreme desperation. The first one (dated June 6, 1928) was from a hired agricultural laborer (batrachka) who sometimes worked also as domestic servant and did not have any fixed place of residence. The second (dated June 13, 1928) was from an illiterate single mother who declared, "I absolutely have nothing to eat and no close relative:' 116 Still, even when poverty and despair forced them to seek admission to the Home for Mother

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and Child, single mothers strove to keep some agency over their lives and attempted to take the management of this state institution as much as possible into their hands. The activists, on their part, viewed orphan-mothers as "an undisciplined element lacking both skill and will to work:' In their opinion, when women ran the Homes for Mother and Child without the help of medical personnel, they automatically turned these facilities from schools of motherhood into "home[s] of squabble and parasitism;' from sites of supervision and education to places of"anarchy" with a "corrupting" influence on the Soviet female population. 117 In sum, the rational and humane care foreseen in the official documents of the Mother and Infant Department rarely occurred in the reality of Soviet life. First of all, Lebedeva had no way to know whether the staff of her agency's scattered provincial sections was indeed performing its work with the required love and managing women's rights with the supposed rationality. Secondly, unmarried mothers themselves very often disrupted the regime of care and control that was imagined for them. Single women could have definite desires for upward mobility, and, even when they decided to stay in uncomfortable state institutions, they did not wish to be completely pinned down to the maternal roles forced upon them by doctors and activists.

••• In this chapter we have seen that the entanglement of rights and control in the practice of Soviet help between 1918 and 1927 was not free of moral anxieties. Inside modern industrial enterprises for the blind, the Medico- Pedagogical Station's beautiful park, and the Homes for Mother and Child, a form of help was supposed to be practiced that combined rational management with love, joy, trust, and respect for deviant subjects' rights. However, the scientifically justified and humane approaches employed in these sites ended up being rather invasive ways of remaking deviant individuals for the benefit of the collective. This was one of the fundamental tensions animating Soviet activists' drive to help problematic populations by integrating them in the Soviet community. In order to be full-fledged, worthy members of the Soviet social body, economically non-active individuals had to show themselves as striving subjects who earned their access to rights both through suffering and by virtue of contribution. In the end, one wonders how much spontaneity and joy in fact infused blind men's "happy" industrial labor, children's "laughter;' and single mothers' "happy

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smiles;' when all this happiness was pursued for the purposes of normalizing abnormal subjects. These paradoxical tensions-between rights and controls, integration and normalization, humanitarian empathy and rational management, chaos and order-would continue to trouble Soviet practices of assistance regarding deviant populations in the years to come. However, with the shifts in ideology, politics, and economy of the period after 1928, the repressive strains would prevail over the saving and enabling ones. As we will see in the next chapter, the onset of Stalinism brought with it significant changes in the concepts of normal and deviant. Much of the initial moral wavering was passed over in silence, and the stick of Soviet help was bent more decisively away from rights and toward harsher labor discipline. While suffering and need became less significant as categories legitimizing help, full working capacity came to be perceived as the exclusive feature that could possibly turn adult disabled people as well morally defective children and unmarried mothers into integral members of the Soviet working family.

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H E RIGHT T 0 be helped underwent an important reorientation in the years between 1928 and 1941. As contribution became the almost exclusive category that legitimized this right, children, men, and women suspected of labor-shyness and unproductive behaviors were excluded from social services. All candidates for the pensioner status were now largely perceived as malingering subjects taking advantage of the generosity of the Soviet state. This reorientation was the effect of both a changing economic context and a new political culture. In this chapter, I will first analyze how a series of new social assistance policies and constructions of deviance impacted the self-fashioning of marginalized individuals in their claims for state help. Then I will discuss the extent to which mid-level activists and experts were involved in shaping approaches to social rights that had originated in the higher echelons of power. Indeed, the members of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf, the activists of the Mother and Infant Department, and the defectologists affiliated with the Commissariat of Education remained pivotal actors in determining the moral order of Soviet socialism under Stalin. Blind and deaf activists, for instance, fully embraced the official redefinition of disability as remaining labor capacity and actively mobilized it in order to obtain equal working conditions for their constituencies. Their fundamental aspiration continued to be the recognition of the Soviet blind and deaf as fit persons with the right to belong. However, their efforts had little success, because heightened productivism and political stigmas led to a suspicion of the disabled as being less worthy workers, ultimately to be excluded from the Soviet workforce. Professionals in the fields of child deviance and the protection of motherhood also operated in a climate of suspicion that enhanced the inimical juxtaposition of loyal working subjects and all sorts of in-valid ones. In the case of behaviorally deviant children, the myth of a Soviet happy childhood compelled party ideologues to abjure defectology as a science of help and

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rehabilitation. In its place, the state began to promote measures that punished undisciplined boys and girls who "disorganize the production process:' Finally, the activists of the Mother and Infant Department continued to proclaim the rights of single mothers to state help, but they took "trust" away from them and made all possible efforts to impose labor on the alleged shirkers of productive and reproductive duties. Whether by reinforcing the oppressive side of Soviet help or by striving to counterbalance it, the activists of the 1930s kept imparting meaning to the notion of social rights. Their practices determined the concrete effects of the Stalinist realignment of social policy on those citizens who most urgently needed help and most strikingly deviated from the imagined norm.

5. 1. New Policies, New Fictions, and New Ways of Claiming Rights Although job placement and full employment had been part of the Soviet state's welfare philosophy since its very inception, under the conditions of NEP-era unemployment, relatively accessible social assistance pensions had been used to encourage the aged and the infirm to leave the factories. In the 1920s, unemployment laws granted the right to state assistance to all citizens who were registered with the labor exchange offices and who could prove that they were indeed looking for a job and did not have any other means of subsistence. In principle, help could legally be denied only to the unemployed who had quit their jobs, refused jobs offered by the labor exchange, had incomes "on the side;' or engaged in private trading. This situation, however, began to change with the pressure for industrialization of the late 1920s. Labor shortages replaced unemployment as the principal labor problem, and the entire population became a valuable pool of workers that the Commissariat of Social Assistance must not dissuade from finding employment. Indeed, when in 1930 unemployment was officially "liquidated;' an entire category of applicants was formally eliminated and the earlier legislation on help to the unemployed was basically nullified. From then on, anybody who did not have a job was to be excluded from Soviet help. 1 In addition, compared to the NEP years, the period between 1928 and 1931 was a time of scarcity in consumer goods. The party leadership sought to minimize the obligations of welfare agencies by supplying deficit goods such as grain and housing only to those people whose productive labor served the interests of a rapidly industrializing and increasingly mobilizing state.

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Dorena Caroli has shown that even social insurance for industrial workers was severely curtailed in 1931,2 The new conditions of the labor market significantly impacted social policies toward people with physical disabilities. In the late 1920s, policymakers started to emphasize that the most important task of the Soviet welfare agencies was to enable the inclusion of the disabled in the workforce. For instance, a 1930 directive of the Council of People's Commissars required the Commissariat of Social Assistance and its affiliated organizations to strengthen the provision of help to the disabled through job placement. As the directive claimed, "This type of welfare better aligns with the goals of the Soviet government:' 3 Then, in 1931, new laws were issued that significantly modified the ways in which the Commissariat of Social Assistance was supposed to provide material help and social services to the disabled. These laws touched upon the order of assignment, the rules on how to write petitions and the type of documentation required to accompany applications for help, the size of pensions, and the methods for paying them. Furthermore, the new legislation encouraged the doctors of the medical expert commissions to focus their examinations no longer on the applicants' lack of labor capacity, but rather on their remaining ability to perform duties and their potential for retraining and learning alternative forms of employment. 4 Finally, in 1932, the Soviet disability classification was officially reduced from six to three categories, and the medical expert commissions were moved from the Commissariat of Health to that of Labor (and then inherited by the Commissariat of Social Assistance in 1937). The new diagnosis of a person's physical impairments as degrees in the capacity to work represented a judgment of employability that, in the productivist ethos of the 1930s, was morally laden. 5 As these changes were taking place in the field of social assistance, the Soviet state introduced a passport system that criminalized all segments of the population without housing and work. Various forms of aggressive pressure were increasingly enacted against men, women, and even children who putatively refused to work and did not pursue useful and respectable livelihoods. Mass police sweeps sent to prison anybody suspected of vagabondage, begging, and prostitution. Historians agree that it was largely the need to stabilize the new industrial labor system introduced by the FiveYear Plans that determined this new repressive attitude toward homeless people, work-shy vagrants, beggars, prostitutes, unemployed individuals, and disobedient youth. In addition, the processes of collectivization and dekulakization had created a mass of uprooted peasants. Gathering them

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up and removing them from the rest of society appeared as an acceptable practical solution, because it restricted dangerous subjects who threatened the public order. 6 Especially after 1936, the existence and lifestyle of these people became a challenge to the official statement made in the Constitution that Soviet society had laid the foundations of communism. Repressive approaches to dealing with deviance were at that point bolstered both by the constitutional sanction of the right to work as the fundamental social right of the Soviet citizenry and by the unquestioned myth that work in the socialist state was an option available to everybody. The new labor market and the new political culture of the late 1920s had important repercussions also on the construction of Soviet deviant subjectivity. As much as "the enemy" was a broad category that underwent constant redefinition/ so "the deviant" was an unfixed and elastic concept. As we have seen in previous chapters, the terms "labor-incapacitated invalid;' "morally defective child;' and "helpless orphan-mother" encompassed subjects who were perceived as deviating, but also suffering and still striving, and therefore having the right to be helped. After 1928 these terms still indicated "needy" individuals, but they increasingly moved toward a model that implied culpability for need. They began to denote irreversible criminal personalities, suspicious and sinister elements, and demonized "others" whose anti-Sovietness necessitated policing, disciplinary punishment, and excision from the body social. Paradoxically, the "poor and suffering" recipients of social assistance pensions were now closely matched to the socially harmful members of the Soviet collective. Besides giving them shelter, social protection meant compelling them to work and containing their threat to society. Indeed, in August 1929, a joint directive of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian Republic established a network of closed-door institutions for the "work-oriented reeducation" of "adult orphans:'s One such facility opened in Omsk in October 1935 and included among its first residents "the orphan Efrosiniia Petrovna Anikina, age 42;' "the temporarily-fallen-in-need Koz'ma Lavrent'evich Grebennikov, age 38;' and an unnamed "destitute, age 79:' 9 Their reduced existence in the Omsk workhouse was far removed from the idea of rational and humane help that social activists and experts had pushed for in the 1920s. Thus, with the onset of Stalinism, the two faces of Soviet help-rights and control-began to be justified by a series of illusions. Since the planned economy had vanquished unemployment and the Constitution had proclaimed the right to work, any disabled man or woman who could not find

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an occupation was personally responsible for his or her situation of poverty and social distress. Since alimony and legal defense were a right guaranteed to every unmarried mother, there was no real need for abortion. Since the healthy Soviet environment produced only "normal" children, their right to a happy childhood needed to be protected against the behaviors of criminal youth. As a result of these illusions and perverse syllogisms, help became a policy of compulsion for all those who deviated from the upright norm. Along with official policies, socialist realist fiction too reflected the illusions of Stalinism. In 1932, Nikolai Ostrovskii's bestseller How the Steel Was Tempered featured a disabled character who overcame terrible impairments and accomplished superhuman achievements not only thanks to his individual qualities, but also and above all thanks to the conditions made available to him in the Soviet order. The book's protagonist, Pavel Korchagin, became the most famous literary embodiment of a particular type of normative disabled, one characterized by constancy, endurance, will to sacrifice his own health and body for the sake of the collective, and unflickering loyalty to the Stalinist regime. After the Second World War, other exemplary invalids would join the famous Pavka: for instance, the amputees Aleksei Meres'ev from Boris Polevoi's 1946 novel The Tale of A Real Man and Colonel Aleksei Voropaev from Petr Pavlenko's 1947 book Happiness. 10 All these texts popularized the idea that people with disabilities should never fall into invalidism and charity. They precluded a discourse of state help as gift, rather grounding assistance in a specific social contract. Namely, the Soviet state granted rights to the disabled only when the latter strove to overcome their disability and their implicit deviance by engaging in productive and socially useful labor. As we know from previous chapters, the rejection of philanthropy had been the motto of blind and deaf activists since the very establishment of their societies. In the 1930s, however, this idea was not simply exchanged in the rather narrow circles of blind and deaf advocacy and preached to the choir of those who already believed in it. It became one of the key messages of the literary and cinematic productions of socialist realism. On their part, when ordinary invalidy made claims for social justice under Stalinism, they seemed to agree with the notion of a social contract that regulated their rights, duties, and relations with the Soviet state. At the same time, they also modified this idea, separated it from the fictions (literary and legislative) of the 1930s, and related it to their concrete predicaments of poverty and marginalization. Their petitions did not celebrate the heroism supposedly inherent in physical impairment, nor did they recount

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any final victory over handicap. First of all, this was an effect of the genre. While people's petitions for help certainly contained an important lifestory autobiographical component, they did not follow the rules of social realist autobiographical fiction as a genre. They were not Bildungsromane that involved the elaboration of a coherent narrative organized around the conceptual category of labor and coming to a positive resolution. Second, because employment was rarely offered to disabled individuals suspected of not fulfilling production quotas, the story of overcoming disability through labor did not reflect the petitioners' real experiences of life. Third, fashioning their Selves in a heroic and triumphant light would have preempted claims to help via suffering and need. Instead of heroes pursuing edifying experiences, the letters that common invalids wrote to the Commissariat of Social Assistance portrayed flailing and decrepit individuals. They drew attention to the dark side of deprivation and self-denial. The story of a man from Omsk province is a good illustration of this. On December 2, 1935, this petitioner (whose name was not legible in the archival record) had an accident and was taken to the hospital. There he was diagnosed with a broken jaw and serious damage to the nerves of his left shoulder, head, and spine, all of which led to the paralysis of the left side of his body. The medical expert commission that initially examined him recognized this man as "hopelessly sick'' and gave him the second category of disability. A few months after the accident, however, he was reexamined and moved to the third category. Finally, in September 1938, a new examination found this man to be completely healthy. 11 Contesting the experts' opinion, this Omsk inhabitant claimed that his hand had "dried out" and lost sensation from the elbow to the fingers; he lamented that he could perform only limited movements and could not move three fingers at all. In addition, his nervous system was in "a bad state" and, because of his broken jaw, he could not eat anything solid. The medical expert commission replied by saying that he had a job and this was sufficient proof for them to find him healthy. The man wrote: Yes, now I make 250 rubles a month, but the VTEK [medical expert commission] did not see me when ... I did not work because I was not in the condition to work, and I am forced to work by the fact that I cannot continue to eat poorly. This is deadly to me .... I will not be able to continue to work for a long time or to have a more serious job. And evidently, soon, I will again have to leave my job for some time. But I don't know on what I will survive. 12

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The embodied relation that this man established between his labor and his suffering as legitimizing categories of the right to be helped was much more complicated than the constructions advanced in the fictions of socialist realism. At the height of the purges, all deviations that altered the image of positive socialist achievement required violent eradication. As Nataliia Lebina has shown in relation to social anomalies such as recidivist-drunkards, under Stalinism behaviorally deviant members of the social body were accused of political and ideological unfitness, their blemishes painted in political overtones. 13 In this context, it became crucial for petitioning invalidy to demonstrate political steadfastness despite the fact that they had endured a life of hardship. Many uninsured help-claimants still identified themselves as "old revolutionar[ies]" and presented physical disability and disease as the results of"revolutionary work:' 14 For instance, in 1935, Matvei lvanovich Gromov wrote the following petition to the Omsk section of the Commissariat of Social Assistance: Natural old age and a dissipated health, the damage of the tsarist prisons, and the serious wounds received during the Civil War ... put me ... in a desperate situation and forced me to turn to the above-mentioned agency of the SOVIET WORKERS' STATE [capita/letters in original] with the request to give me all possible help.... I nurture the deep hope that the request of an old revolutionary of the SOVIET WORKERS' STATE will be satisfied by the provision of help in such difficult days of my life. 15 Similarly, in 1938, a fifty-year-old man called Kozlov strove to break two crucial associations entailed in the politicization of deviance: one was the connection between physical and ideological weakness; the other was the equation of destitution with political enmity. As he explained to the chairman of the Omsk executive committee: The Bolshevik spirit is strong in me. Material torments did not let me deviate (skloniat menia) to the side of the enemies; until my death, I will stay loyal to the party of Lenin and Stalin under whose flag I defended the Soviet state as a former Red Army soldier. 16 In the mid- to late 1930s, many personal pensioners stopped receiving this privileged type of social assistanceY The most frequent instances concerned people who had been previously condemned by Soviet tribunals

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or were suddenly unmasked as politically unreliable. According to the law, sentenced and imprisoned individuals lost not only their allowances, but also the possibility to be reinstated in the rank of personal pensioners after release from prison. This predicament had befallen a man called Ipat Aleksandrovich Iakovlev. He had been receiving a personal pension for exceptional military service during the Civil War, but in 1937 he was arrested and spent five years in prison. Upon release, the auditing commission of Perm' province refused to renew his right to a personal pension not only because he had been arrested, but also because "he [had] turned out to be a morally unstable person:' 18 Similarly, in 1937, the personal pensioner Evtikhii Dmitrievich Kliuev was deprived of his social assistance rights when it emerged that he had been an anarchist during the Civil War and, even more dangerously, had recently hosted in his house a political exile. It no longer mattered that the disabled Kliuev had been imprisoned by the tsarist regime, was fifty-two years old, did not have any job, and needed to support a family of two children and a wife. Kliuev was accused of"insufficient understanding of the political decisions of the Party and political instability (neustoichivost);' as a result of which his personal pension was taken away. 19 Only very rarely could people deprived of personal pensions reacquire the right to be helped. In my research in the archives of Moscow, Perm', and Omsk, I found only one such case: Mukharam Suleimanov, a blind man of Tatar origins living in Perm' province. His personal pension was suspended in 1937 due to "unverified data" and then miraculously reassigned and even increased in 1941. 20 Thus, in the late 1930s arrest was a sign of political instability, which in turn was conflated with moral instability and unworthiness. In order to have their personal pensions reinstated, invalidy attempted to escape both the political and the moral features of the enemy and rather fashion their Selves in ways that still conformed to subject positions favored by the state. For instance, the former personal pensioner and now unmasked "anarchist" Evtikhii Kliuev protested the decision of the Omsk social assistance section by making the following argument: The followers of Kolchakov, the White-Guardists, the children of merchants and other enemies of the people, and the criminals who managed and still manage the executive committee in Ishim [Kliuev's place of residence, today part of Tiumen' province] do not like the fact that the government of the Russian Republic pays a personal pension to me, the son and grandson of a carpenter, a former political prisoner and a Bolshevik. 21

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In her analysis of people's petitions for the reinstatement of political rights, Golfo Alexopoulos has described how the disenfranchised "sometimes identified others as aliens and antisocial Soviet elements." 22 As Kliuev's letter suggests, this observation could be applied also to the many disabled people who in the late 1930s were deprived of their personal pensioner status. Kliuev shifted political stigmas and social fears away from his persona, thus attempting to reverse the accusation of politically instability. He also argued that the decision to divest him of his personal pension "is based on lies, cheating, and gossip:' 23 In another letter, Kliuev added details to his autobiography that helped him deny any association with the Whites, minimized his involvement with the old regime, and instead emphasized his military, labor, and social services under the Soviets. He explained that, in twenty years since the establishment of the Soviet state, he had committed "not even a small mistake:' Although in 1921 he had left the party, he had remained "a Bolshevik and a Stalinist:' Deviations (political and moral) were to be found not in him but in the inspector of the Omsk social assistance section: He is a drunkard, a debauchee [razvratnik], foul-speaker [matershchinnik], and degenerate in all respects [razlozhivshiisia vo vsekh otnosheniiakh] ... he spreads demoralization, disorder [razval], and degeneration [razlozhenie ]. Kliuev's conclusion was clear: this whole affair was a "big lie" and the decision to withdraw his pension was "unfounded" and "illegal:' Unfortunately for him, the Ishim and Omsk executive committees thought otherwise. 24 In sum, the official policies and the literary works of the 1930s constructed the "path to work'' (trudovoi put') as a trajectory of entitlement and emancipation that would unfailingly lead all deviant subjects to economic self-sufficiency, social integration, and personal happiness. This discourse asked all the abnormals of Soviet society to keep striving in order to be counted among the entitled citizens. However, in their claims for the right to be helped, disabled men and women emphasized that work was not only a potential medicine against poverty and exclusion, but also a source of pain and impairment. At the height of the Stalinist drive for industrialization and sociopolitical mobilization, marginalized people's letters to power described bodies and minds that had exhausted all sources of energy. They presented a Self that was entitled to help precisely because of psychophysical exertion. But how did the activists and the experts respond to this? How did they mediate between the stance advanced by the state and the interventions of

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ordinary invalidy? And what concrete results did their activism have under the harsh conditions of Stalinist socialism?

5.2. The Exclusionary Outcomes of Work-Oriented Help for the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf In a 1935 article titled "The Deaf-Mute Are Socially Valuable People;' the activist G. A. Iusfin asked the following provocative question: "Just because a person has lost an organ such as the sense of hearing or vision, is he less than a person ?" 25 The question in itself was not new. The activists of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf had been raising it since the very inception of their advocacy movements. What seemed to have changed over the years was the answer to it. Initially, the two societies had lobbied for integration and respectability by arguing for the ability of their constituencies to develop intellectually and to overcome their backwardness. Disabled activists had campaigned for a fully adequate quality of life-emotionally fulfilling, worthy of human dignity, and marked by minimal justice. The inequalities they had protested against rested in all realms of everyday existence, such as health care, nutrition, education, and employment. By the mid-1930s, instead, disabled activism was marked by a narrow focus on vocational training and productive occupational skills. Integration came to mean above all the chance to perform one's allotted duty as builder of socialism on an equal footing with the able-bodied. This change is clearly reflected in how Iusfin and other disabled activists used the term "valuable:' For them, the attribute polnotsennyi was the opposite of defektivnyi. While the latter word indicated a lack or deficiency, the former signified a completeness of value or fitness. Adopting this terminology, the activists of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf implicitly contrasted people with impairments (defekty) to whole persons. While the affirmation of "wholeness" and "fitness" had animated Russian blind and deaf communities since the Revolution (and have remained one of their key goals throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet periods), what changed in connection with the new Stalinist political culture was the semantic field encompassed by "value." After 1928, the content of this term progressively shrank from a broad sense of human worthiness to the idea of disciplined loyalty and economic usefulness to the Soviet state. As a deaf activist stated in November 1931, "We should ... become valuable citizens who properly perform the directives of our party:'26 To have full value (polno-tsennost')

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was increasingly equated with having full working abilities (polnaia trudosposobnost'); it could be acquired only by fulfilling output quotas in Soviet factories. 27 The resolutions issued by the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf at their congresses between 1929 and 1932 replicated the spirit of the FiveYear Plans. 28 For instance, at the Fifth Congress of the Society of the Blind in September 1932, this agency concluded that "all physically healthy and able-to-work blind people must be involved in the construction of socialism:' This meant that the blind had to transform themselves into qualified personnel for the new centrally planned state industry: they had to organize into production brigades and engage in socialist competition and shock work. 29 This was the productive life that the rest of the country was allegedly living, and the disabled claimed participation in it in order to be considered as worthy subjects. This narrowly productivist understanding of valued subjectivity significantly restructured the type of help practiced in the two societies. In the early 1930s, both organizations reopened the workshops that had gone bankrupt in the previous years, but this time they decided to give a more rigid and formal structure to them. The resulting so-called "educational-production" or "production-training" workshops (uchebno-proizvodstvennye masterskie or UPM) were supposed to have a homogeneous cohort of students, implement specific curricular plans, respect deadlines, and offer adequate stipends. In these workshops, blind and deaf adults were to receive enough training in performing technical work and operating industrial machines to eventually make the transition to state enterprises. Most activists envisioned the production-training workshops as sites where they could implement help to their constituencies in relatively autonomous ways. However, in the mid-1930s, the Soviet state adopted a centralizing policy whereby all semiindependent agencies were either forced to dissolve or asked to join the state apparatus in a relationship of clear subordination. The Societies of the Blind and the Deaf were not exceptions to this trend. As historian Claire Shaw has remarked, in the mid-1930s attempts were made to downsize the Society of the Deaf and transfer deaf services to the trade unions. 30 In May 1935, the production-training workshops of both societies were transferred to the direct control of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, which now ran them through a department called Productive Enterprises Administration (Upravlenie Proizvodstevnnymi Predpriiatiiami or UPP)Y Then, at the end of 1937, production exigencies compelled another change of jurisdiction: the Council of People's Commissars moved the educational and productive enterprises of the blind and the deaf away from the Commissariat of Social

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Assistance to the Commissariats of Local and Light Industry and asked the latter to collaborate with other economic organs-such as the Textile Industry Commissariat, the All-Union Council of Producers' Cooperatives, and the All-Russian Union of Disabled Persons' Cooperative Associations-in order to fulfill quotas in the hiring of disabled citizens. 32 Accurate and reliable statistics on the number of blind and deaf people with a job in the 1930s are difficult to obtain. In his official declarations concerning the right to work of people with disabilities, I. A. Nagovitsyn, leader of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, mentioned vague numbers that made little sense without a context for comparison. Thus, in 1932, he boasted that the system of invalid cooperatives employed "more than 150,000 disabled, who participate with their labor in the common construction of socialism and who are provided, under Soviet legislation, with the same salary as healthy people:' 33 This number, he explained in a 1933 article in the official bulletin of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, included 20,000 blind and 25,000 deaf. 34 The Society of the Blind

Figure 5.01. Workshops for Blind and Deaf Adults in the 1930s Society of the Blind

Early-{ 1930s

Included productive training enterprises for the blind

Society of the Deaf Included productive training enterprises for the deaf

Commissariat of Social Assistance

1935i

Society of the Blind Society of the Deaf Productive Enterprises Administration Managed all educational and productive workshops for the blind and the deaf

Commissariat of Local and Light Industry

1937 ._______

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reported more precise numbers: in 1932, it calculated that out of 31,320 registered members, 15,222 had a job and 2,274 were studying in the production-training workshops. 35 Beyond these data, however, the stories preserved in the archival record uncover a rather grim picture of disabled people's training and employment. For instance, in 1933, a representative of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection visited the trade school for the blind in the village Verkhnie Mulli in Perm' province and found the vocational education offered in this facility to be "completely unsatisfactory:' Due to a lack of specialized housing, the school could not admit enough students. Instructors, teachers, and administrators mismanaged the school by stifling socialist competition and keeping production output at low levels. In addition, the teaching staff made illegal use of the school's resources for their personal advantage: the instructors appropriated and hoarded the material belonging to the school and used its machinery to produce items for sale to private clients; the teachers increased their wages at will; and the director, Beliakov-who was well known in the entire province for his drinking problems-simply embezzled school money. Since the school accountant, the disenfranchised Bushkonets, did not keep any proper records, the school's overblown operating costs were unverifiable. More seriously, as the Inspection's representative contended, the students felt isolated from the social and political life of the country and from the most important issues of the day. 36 The changes in the administrative standing of the blind and deaf workshops that took place in 1935-1937 did not seem to improve these chaotic and arbitrary conditions. On the contrary, they worsened them. After responsibility for the enterprises of the blind and the deaf was moved from the Commissariat of Social Assistance to the Commissariats of Local and Light Industry, most meetings of the local social assistance sections passed over in silence any issue related to the vocational education and employment of the disabled. 37 Furthermore, both invalid cooperatives and local industries became increasingly reluctant to hire disabled workers on an equal basis with the able-bodied. Even when they did hire blind and deaf people, they often refused to set up the technical, safety, and housing conditions that would have guaranteed productive efficiency. 38 While the Union of Disabled Persons' Cooperative Associations offered jobs to a certain number of disabled individuals, other economic agencies systematically disregarded employment plans when it came to people with physical impairments. This is clearly illustrated in the distribution of jobs to the blind in Omsk province in 1938.

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Figure 5.02. Distribution of Jobs to the Blind in Omsk Province in 1938 Employed in the Union of Disabled Persons' Cooperative Associations Employed in the Commissariat of Local Industry Employed in the workshop of the Commissariat of Social Assistance Employed in other unspecified organizations Unemployed

145 40 2 10 722

Source: IsAOO, f. 437, o. 9, d. 568, I. 120.

Finally, although the Council of People's Commissars had ordered respect for the occupational profiles of blind and deaf workers, soon after the 1937 jurisdictional transfer many handicapped people working in the invalids' workshops began to be replaced by physically unimpaired workers. The story of the Zeroes factory in Leningrad dramatizes this trend. This establishment produced electric engines. When the Society of the Blind managed it in the early 1930s, Zeroes employed 350 blind people. But when the factory was moved to the jurisdiction of the Commissariat of Local Industry and then to the Commissariat of the Machine-Tractor Industry, the blind stopped being considered the main cohort of workers. Production was no longer set up with their peculiarities in mind, and their number began a rapid decline, dropping from 350 to 158 by the end of 1939. At that point, the blind who still worked for Zeroes were mostly employed in the factory's delivery department and, when this closed, their number further decreased and finally equaled zero. 39 As the labor market became increasingly saturated in 1939-1940, Zeroes's fate befell many other invalids' enterprises. In the town of Balakovo (in Saratov province) there were 37 employed blind in 1939, but only 11 remained in 1940. In the neighboring towns of Vol'sk and Balashov, the number of employed blind went respectively from 70 to 46, and from 40 to 7. A high rate of firings occurred in 1939 also in Krasnodar province: 397 blind had worked in the enterprises of local industry, but their number decreased to 284 in 1940. The knitwear factory of Tambov had 94 blind people working on its premises in January 1939, but by August of the same year only 70

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blind remained there. Some representatives of the Commissariat of Social Assistance and the Chairman of the Society of the Blind V. A. Medvedev investigated the causes of the blind's exodus from this factory. According to their findings, 9 people had been fired for violating the enterprise's labor discipline, while 15 blind had left "of their own volition" because they had been moved to positions for which they had no training and because their salaries had been significantly lowered. 4° Contrary to the recommended quotas, as the social worker Dmitriev lamented in 1940, "no more than 25 percent of the employable blind" were actually employed. 41 Deaf people had less trouble finding and keeping a job because their disability put fewer constraints on employability in industrial production. However, data about the vocational training of this population reveals a similarly disturbing picture. In 1939 only 1,869 individuals (out of around 39,000 members of the Society of the Deaf) attended polytechnics and production-training workshops. 42 Categorically refusing to hire blind individuals, a factory director declared: "The blind are worthless workers ... they don't fulfill the norms"; and the head of the Tambov provincial section of light industry echoed: "We need quality of production; the blind cannot give it to us:' 43 Since data on the production quotas of handicapped versus able-bodied workers are contradictory and unreliable, we cannot determine whether the underlying motives behind the unemployment of disabled people lay in the relative productivity of the two groups of workers, in the managers' prejudices about the abilities of blind and deaf people, or in a combination of both these factors and other conditions of Soviet economic life in the 1930s. Available evidence shows that abuses, squandering of public funds, embezzlement of state money, untrained and unqualified management, shortage of raw materials, frequent power outages, scarcity of adequate machines, and organizational chaos undermined the efficiency of many Soviet enterprises. In the case of blind and deaf workshops as well as for many other invalids' cooperatives of that time, wastage and stealing combined with an objective lack of financial means at the disposal of local social assistance administrators and the constant shifting of jurisdictional lines. These conditions rendered economic self-sufficiency and decent levels of productivity practically impossible for most invalid production-training workshops. 44 In addition, central administrators drafted production plans that did not consider the peculiarities of the disabled labor force and their requirements for safety measures and specialized housing. Soviet engineers projected technologies that had only the able-bodied in mind, and the workshop directors forgot

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that they managed not factories per se but special training units. While much of the blame for violating labor regulations and treating the disabled and the able-bodied unequally certainly rested with local enterprise directors, the latter shared responsibility with policymakers who put too much emphasis on fulfilling production plans and demanded an ever-increasing growth of industrial output. It must also be recognized that the managers' prejudices had not only economic but also important ideological roots, especially in a period defined by social fears and political stigmas. Although the Five-Year-Plan economy aimed to employ the labor of all individuals, the blind and the deaf were still considered as among the most backward groups of Soviet society, intrinsically different from the able-bodied and unable to partake in the common economic and political life of the country. Blindness represented a visible defect perturbing the image of the healthy body politic. Although neither visible nor directly impinging on a worker's productive abilities, the communicative isolation of deafness also caused problems when the deaf attempted to enter the workplace. Their lack of hearing abilities was assumed to impair mental competence and preclude full social participation. 45 As a certain V. Iachmenev wrote for the wall newspaper of his work group in 1940, even in those rare cases when the deaf worked side by side with the able-bodied, they still felt as "strangers" (chuzhie) on the shop-floor. "A schism" (raskol) separated deaf workers from the collective of healthy workers, and past bad experiences made them fear their able-bodied comrades. 46 As Claire Shaw has shown, the parallels between deafness and political fallibility were no less troubling than unfulfilled production quotas.47 According to Iarskaia-Smirnova and Romanov, "doubt over the reliability of disabled people, their personal responsibility and the authenticity of their impairment were leitmotifs that passed from posters ... and films into social reality and ultimately the everyday lives of ordinary Soviet people:'48 In short, despite Iusfin's claim in his 1935 article that the disabled "are socially valuable people;' under Stalinism blindness and deafness were not simply physical impairments; they became suspicious behaviors that dangerously correlated with anti-Sovietness. To these Others of Stalinist society was refused even the opportunity to perform contributive labor as builders of socialism. The end result of this vicious logic was the denial of any real chance at integration. Thus, the story of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf between 1928 and 1940 reveals that unemployment, discrimination, and abysmal conditions of everyday life practically shattered any emancipatory strength entailed in the

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idea of work-oriented help. And yet, disabled activists continued to embrace and mobilize this idea. They struggled against managers' prejudices and insisted that the disabled could keep the same pace in production as the able-bodied and even become shock workers and Stakhanovites.49 The problem, both societies averred, was not in the incapacity of the blind and the deaf to work, but rather in their inability to attain work. Disabled activists lamented the wasted labor force of the disabled and pointed the finger at various economic agencies for not respecting the mandatory hiring quotas. In their relationship with the Commissariat of Social Assistance, they tried to exert pressure on issues of pensions and vocational training. They also requested to be assigned functional buildings and demanded more funding so that they could purchase better machines and fulfill production quotas despite shortages of raw materials and frequent production interruption. 5° As Ia. Mokronosov, the director of the Omsk section of the Society of the Blind, explained in a letter to the USSR Supreme Soviet in Aprill939, blind people were asking nothing else than the realization of the rights granted to them by "the October Socialist Revolution and the decisions of the Party and the State:' 51 Deaf activists made this point too: as they hailed the 1936 Constitution in the pages of their official bulletin, The Life of the Deaf-Mute, they emphasized that Soviet legislation gave them access to work by right. 52 To exhort the Soviet authorities to live up to their promises of equal employment, fair working conditions, and decent salaries, some blind and deaf activists used the same threats of socioeconomic anomie that we have seen in the petitions written by individual unemployed invalidy. For instance, the Sverdlovsk section of the Society of the Blind declared that, if the Commissariat of Social Assistance refused to help them find work and continued to deny special funds to their work group, they would "engage in criminal activities such as fortune-telling and begging:'53 Blind activists in Moscow, on the other hand, declared their loyalty to the Soviet state and its work discipline by reporting to the police a number of blind men and women who undertook alternative ways of life. As they claimed, these were "loafers who love easy money" and "drunken hooligans"; none of them wanted to work and, even when offered several jobs, they simply rejected them, wishing only to live in poverty and engage in unproductive activities. 54 In fact, these statements tell us little about the desires of the individuals whom they claimed to describe, but rather speak volumes about the activists' own motivations and fears, their representation of the disabled as different but striving subjects, and their narrow construction of human value and worthiness for people with disabilities. Believing that

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employability was their strongest weapon to legitimize their constituencies' social rights, disabled activists used it despite its ineffectiveness and without any substantial criticism of its inner contradictions and limitations. Their discourse and practice of help dangerously aligned with the economic and political shifts of Soviet socialism under Stalin and, in the end, contributed to nurturing that order's most exclusionary outcomes.

5.3. The Compulsion to Perform (Re)Productive Labor In the late 1920s, the desire to put deviant citizens to work at the least expense to the state began to characterize not only policies toward disability, but also approaches to homeless and "orphan'' mothers. A series of directives and instructions issued by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars mandated strengthening assistance to this population exclusively through employment. In particular, these documents entrusted the Mother and Infant Department with the management of a new network of workfare facilities: workhouses (trudovye obshchezhitiia), craftwork cooperatives (kustarnye arteli), and various types of collective industrial enterprises specifically set up for unmarried mothers. The new establishments were supposed to raise single mothers' work skills in order to fight a long list of undesirable behaviors that the Soviet authorities closely associated with celibate motherhood-prostitution, abortion, child abandonment, and parasitism broadly speaking. 55 In December 1930, a joint circular letter drafted by the Commissariats of Social Assistance and Health made this point even more clear. As it explained, while the residents of these facilities were entitled to the provision of monetary help in case of temporary inability to work, as a rule not money but labor should be provided to all "the indigent, orphans (adult), and women engaged in prostitution or on the verge of it:' Only labor, the document continued, provided "the means to reeducate them and inculcate in them working habits:' 56 In response to these ordinances, the activists of the Mother and Infant Department changed the ways in which they identified help to single mothers. The best form of assistance ceased to be education in parenting (the "school of motherhood") and rather became women's engagement in productive labor. The then director of the Perm' section of this agency, Klavdiia Vasil'evna Grebneva, claimed that single pregnant women needed above all to "be taken away from the street" and put into work-oriented institutions that would teach them occupational skills. 57 As we know from previous

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chapters, the path from "the street" -with all its associations of begging and labor desertion-to sites of industrial production had been the key direction of Soviet help to deviant subjects since 1917. However, in the late 1920s, the street no longer appeared as a space where violence, ignorance, and exploitation made people into victims entitled to defense, and where deviance was the result of the backwardness to which tsarism had condemned the most vulnerable classes. Rather, the street began to emerge as the willful choice of a deviant Self, and compulsory labor appeared to social activists as well as to political leaders as the only solution to the problems that originated in the individual. In this context, for both single pregnant women and disabled men, work ceased to be a means to achieve social emancipation and to fulfill one's emotional aspirations along with economic needs. Work became an end in itself. The workshop for homeless women that opened in Perm' in 1928 is a good example of the new meaning of labor in the activists' practice of help to single mothers. Its mission was: "to inculcate working habits in the mothers, teach them a trade, give them a trade, find them a job, and along with this prevent them from abandoning their children:'ss The workshop admitted fifteen single mothers with children between three and twelve months old and let them reside in its dormitory for a period of three to six months. Here, as in the Homes for Mother and Child, the principle of self-service (samoobsluzhivanie) ruled the workshop's everyday life. Each mother performed chores in the communal areas: they cleaned the rooms, cared for the children (under the supervision of a "Red sister"), washed the laundry, heated the stove, carried the milk from the milk station, etc. However, to avoid the "anarchy" that had emerged in the Homes for Mother and Child, the Mother and Infant Department now established more rigid controls on women's labor. If unmarried mothers proved unfit for the jobs taught to them, abandoned their children, found a source of permanent income outside the workshop, failed to respect the rules of the facility, or proved guilty of wrongdoings of any kind, they would be immediately expelled. Besides offering shelter, as the Homes for Mother and Child had done so far, the workshop also endeavored to compensate women's work with a symbolic ten-ruble monthly salary. In line with the principle that the dorm's residents should cover their own expenses, the income made from the sale of the goods produced there did not go directly to the women, but was used to maintain the dormitory itself and provide women with some cash upon leaving the facility. If women produced an income higher than the set norm, the surplus money was given to them as an incentive to production. 59 Thus

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grounded in discipline, financial self-sustainability, and engagement in productive labor performed in a collective environment, the working dormitory of the late 1920s called single mothers to be self-sufficient while also attached to a collectivity of workers. Both the virtue of self-maintenance and the commitment to the interests of the larger society became preeminent in the practice of Soviet help to deviant subjects. Conversely, any assistance that might dull the impetus for productivity or put it in the service of the individual was excluded from the forms of legitimate help. Unlike other deviant citizens' labor, however, single women's productive contribution to Soviet society was imagined as both material and biological. The Mother and Infant Department had not only to "inculcate" productive skills in husbandless women but also to eliminate any condition that could prevent them from performing their allotted reproductive duties. To achieve both ends, this agency's activists began to place particular emphasis on a form of protection called "sociolegal help" (sotsial'no-pravovaia pomoshch'). This consisted in the provision of legal and economic assistance for the purposes of fighting abortion and child abandonment. The first systematic attempt at organizing this type of help took place in 1932 in the Grauerman birth clinic in Moscow. 60 As readers might remember, Dr. Grauerman had been among the first postrevolutionary experts who advocated for single mothers' rights to state help. Yet the fact that a birth clinic was named in his honor should not mislead us. In this and other birth clinics of the 1930s, the "orphan mother" was no longer benignly perceived as the economically weak and emotionally unstable creature that Grauerman had described in his 1918 brochure, but was rather seen as a malicious female subject who desired to escape reproductive labor. Several programmatic booklets and manuals on sociolegal help drove this point home by characterizing unmarried pregnant women as both "suffering" (neblagopoluchnye) and "suspicious" (podozritel'nye). For instance, in a book published in 1936, the already mentioned activist Sofiia Kopelianskaia portrayed single pregnant women as rightfully entitled to help. However, she also matched them with a series of untrustworthy and socially anomalous subjects: underage pregnant girls who came from the countryside to the cities with the specific goal to terminate their pregnancies or get rid of their newborn babies; women without permanent residence and stable jobs (especially female domestic servants); all pregnant women who had unhappy family relations and experienced negative conditions of everyday life (especially women who were alcoholics); and-last but not least-women with sexually transmitted infectious diseases. 61 They all

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reflected the horrifying image of the sexually active and under-controlled woman who wanted to avoid pregnancy at all costs and who was willing to abandon her newborn baby. Sofiia Kopelianskaia is a very intriguing and mysterious figure. To the best of my knowledge, she did not leave any written memoirs, and no historian has so far been able to fully tell her life story. In the early 1920s, Kopelianskaia was an inspector of the Commissariat of Social Assistance. In that capacity she campaigned for the social rights of a series of "helpless" social groups, including the elderly, the sick and the injured, defective children, and single mothers. 62 In the mid-1930s, she was still relentlessly lobbying for state assistance to all these groups as a right (although we don't know what her institutional affiliation was at that time). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Kopelianskaia was leading the Socio-Legal Offices of the Mother and Infant Department and of the Central Pediatric Institute of the Academy of Medicine. As we will see in the next chapter, she continued to be very active and vocal in the field of social policy, especially in relation to sociolegal help to unmarried mothers. Unfortunately, I have not been able to uncover evidence clarifying how this woman could persist in her advocacy on behalf of these deviant social groups despite all the turmoil and recriminations that surrounded them over the entire period from the Revolution through the postwar years. Her public writings seem to suggest the image of a pragmatic mid-level social worker who was moved by a genuine desire to protect the most vulnerable members of her society, but who was also ready to conceptualize them in nonemancipatory and marginalizing ways, if that could get them the help they needed. Kopelianskaia's 1936 brochure The Defense of the Rights of the Child in the Soviet Court was as much about children's rights as about state help to their mothers. It was undergirded by a tension between the humane impulse to provide support to unmarried pregnant women in the terrifying moment of delivery and the representation of these women as abnormal deviations threatening the whole Soviet social order. It is worth remarking that this book came out in the same year in which abortion was made illegal again in the Soviet Union after fourteen years of decriminalization. 63 As we have seen in the case of blind and deaf people, this was a time of heightened suspicion toward all possible deviant behaviors and of violent enforcement of strict rules of daily life. Being a crucial component of the Stalinist gender order, women's personal relationships could not possibly escape the state's technologies of governance. Even a staunch advocate for single mothers' rights such as Sofiia Kopelianskaia now had to highlight the policing side of Soviet

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social services along with their caring side. In her "practical manual;' Kopelianskaia asked sociolegal workers to carry out constant surveillance over the behaviors of women living alone or in unregistered unions. These social workers were supposed to monitor single women's visits to the abortion commissions and set a schedule for follow-up appointments at the proper medical facilities. They were also required to visit unmarried pregnant women and single mothers in their homes, investigate their intimate relations, and clarify the reasons prompting them to interrupt their pregnancies. Espousing the traditionalist view that conflict characterizes all informal and unregistered partnerships between men and women, Kopelianskaia contended that only the assuaging intervention of qualified sociolegal workers would prevent abortions. Without a husband by her side, supporting her during labor and sharing with her the joy of bringing their child into the world, an unmarried woman was bound to have a terrible birth experience. Therefore, Kopelianskaia asked the sociolegal workers to be at the very bedside of all unmarried mothers during delivery. As she wrote, The presence of the sociolegal worker at the bedside of this type of puerpera has the goals of averting the possibility of a crime, making single motherhood easier, and, above all, identifying among all the other puerperae the one who needs immediate help. Indeed, there are mothers who not only do not spontaneously turn for advice and help, but even hide certain circumstances. 64 Like many other social workers and experts of the time, both in the Soviet Union and in the West, Kopelianskaia thought that unmarried women's psychological state during labor and birth compromised their ability to recognize what was in their best interests. 65 Only the sociolegal worker's supervising presence could reliably prevent child abandonment and convince single mothers to undertake the obligation of maternal labor. Not necessarily minatory and certainly conducive to achieving safety in birth, this type of help nevertheless adversely affected women's authority and agency. Between 1936 and 1940, a mixture of care and vigilance over women's reproductive behavior was recommended also in a series of directives, instructions, and circular letters issued by the Commissariat of Health. 66 As these documents explained, when single expectant women still wanted to obtain abortions despite all the help that the Soviet state made available to them, the sociolegal workers of the Mother and Infant Department had the duty to report their cases to the office of the procurator and collaborate with

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the police organs in conducting investigations. In these statutory texts as much as in Kopelianskaia's 1936 brochure, the injunction to surveil single mothers-to-be was inseparably bound to the goal of defending their rights. We know that this paradoxical linkage had underpinned unmarried mothers' right to be helped already in the early Soviet period. However, while in the 1920s the connection between control and rights was warranted by women's helplessness and legal ignorance, under Stalinism it was a sense of mistrust toward single mothers that justified police vigilance over them so that they could enjoy their right to motherhood. The lying and malicious shirkers of productive and reproductive labor had to be controlled and disciplined more than helped to achieve social justice and emancipation.

5.4. The "Liquidation" of Morally Defective Children Heightened control, labor discipline, and outright punishment became the engines behind Stalinist social policies also in relation to behaviorally deviant children. As the romance between the defectologists and the political authorities came to an end, the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs emerged as the most important agent in the handling of troublesome children. The purpose of social policies toward this population now shifted from correction and inclusion to expulsion from the social body. This new approach, Juliane Furst has commented, was "determined to eradicate the juvenile problem through spatial separation rather than to solve it through policies of integration:' 67 Indeed, practices such as bringing difficult children to the countryside and having them work side by side with the peasants were now replaced by the complete isolation of supposedly dangerous criminals from the supposedly healthy Soviet environment. By the late 1930s, the impulse to excise definitely won out over what Furst has called "the narrative of salvation:'68 If any redemption was still possible for Soviet out-of-mainstream youth, it could happen only within the framework of compulsory labor. 69 This change was gradual. Until the early 1930s, the Soviet state continued to give financial support and public praise to defectology as a modern scientific enterprise for the reeducation of suffering children. For instance, after a particularly well-attended and successful defectological conference in May 1926, some officials in the audience remarked that this discipline was "extremely valuable and useful:' 70 In the following year, an inspection of the Medico- Pedagogical Station similarly concluded that this institution "carries

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out extraordinarily valuable and necessary work;' which "corresponds to the principles of the Soviet school:' 71 In the defectological facilities of Moscow and Leningrad, research continued to be conducted on a wide spectrum of morally defective children: boys and girls characterized by "elevated nervousness;' "instability;' and "psychopathological disturbances;' but also ordinary underage law-breakers and undisciplined children. The major agenda of this research did not change either: the defectologists still strove to demonstrate that children's behavioral anomalies existed in a relationship of mutual dependency with unhealthy environmental conditions and could be fixed through medicopedagogical measures of prophylaxis and intervention. 72 When the directors of the children homes of Moscow province met in congress in 1933, they wholeheartedly embraced the defectological approach to the issue of "difficult childhood" and insisted that all children with deviant behaviors were in reality"socially neglected" young individuals in need of pedagogical help. 73 In particular, the Commissariat of Education's activist Vasilii Isidorovich Kufaev contended that pedagogical work in the facilities for difficult children must have not punitive and exclusionary goals, but rather transformative and integrative ones. In his view, "deviations from normal behavior" and all sorts of"antisocial and anti-Soviet traits" -such as aggression, deceit, and criminality-were not inborn in children, but rather acquired under the influence of the street -or, to quote Kufaev, when "the coating of the street layers over them:' Conversely, if "liberated" from the "habits and traditions of the street" through "protection and education;' difficult children too could become real communists-workers, builders of the socialist economy, and fighters for socialist culture. Following the defectologists, Kufaev emphasized the reeducability of behaviorally deviant children and proposed a pedagogy that treated them with sensitivity, established mutual trust between them and the educators, and valued their positive qualities, individual interests, and feelings/ 4 Of course, children's labor occupied an important place in this reeducational and reintegrational process. Especially after the onset of the Five-Year Plans, the Commissariat of Education put a lot of emphasis on affiliating its homes for difficult children with various industrial enterprises and collective farms/ 5 However, in Kufaev's view, labor constituted only one of the many components of a complex individualized pedagogical approach. While defectology remained the method of reeducation preferred by most activists within the Commissariat of Education, in the late 1920s a competing punitive approach began to be pushed by the Commissariat of

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Internal Affairs and to challenge the preeminence of defectology in quite serious ways. In December 1927, Makarenko's F. E. Dzerzhinskii labor commune was officially put under the jurisdiction of the Ukrainian state political police (GPU) and, by 1930, the Russian Commissariat of Internal Affairs counted seven more labor colonies for minor recidivists-lawbreakers. 76 These developments produced anxiety in several activists. For instance, intervening at the Third All- Russian Congress on the Defense of Childhood in May 1930, the Procuracy worker Ia. A. Perel' lamented that "the measures adopted toward minor lawbreakers have turned out to be much harsher than those for adults:' He criticized the isolation of children in carceral facilities, because neither real pedagogical work nor effective vocational training happened there, and because these establishments did not facilitate the children's return to the "working community:' The labor colonies' staff members were "rude;' screamed at the children, beat them, and, in one case, had driven a child to commit suicide. Perel"s conclusion was clear: the children living in the labor colonies-which, as he emphasized, included vagrant children along with "neurasthenic" and "psychoneurotic" boys and girls-were not receiving help and education but were only becoming more "corrupted:' 77 Similarly, in June 1932, some administrators within the Commissariat of Education recognized that the collectivization of agriculture had increased the mass of orphan and homeless children. An expansion of the network of defectological institutions, they argued, would be a better way to address this problem than moving behaviorally deviant children to the labor colonies of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs/ 8 As Chairman of the Children's Commission, the long-time supporter of social medicine Nikolai Semashko also expressed concern about the stronger involvement of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs in the handling of deviant youth. 79 The competition between defectology's rehabilitative and integrative paradigm and the exclusionary and punitive one advanced by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs was resolved in favor of the latter in 1935. In May of that year, a joint directive of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the Communist Party titled "On the liquidation of child orphanhood and abandonment" moved the thrust of social policies from curing the deep-seated causes of children's defects to punishing hooliganism, debauchery, and the tendency to steal among the young Soviet population. This shift of emphasis squarely put child criminality-instead of social neglect -at the center of attention. Those who used to be defined by the scientific terms "morally defective" and "difficult" were now unceremoniously called "criminal elements" (prestupnye elementy). The reasons for

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their homelessness and vagrancy were identified in their own willful choices to leave their parents and run away from the state's facilities. In addition, the directive brought about a redefinition of functions for all the agencies concerned with child welfare. Specifically, all homes for orphaned, poor, and "difficult-to-raise" children (but without criminal convictions) became the responsibility of the Commissariat of Education; special homes for children needing prolonged medical therapy were put under the direction of the Commissariat of Health; isolation homes, labor colonies, and intake facilities for law-breakers were to be managed by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs; and a new network of institutions for physically and mentally defective children was established under the direction of the Commissariat of Social Assistance. The directive also specified that "difficult-to-raise" children could not attend regular schools; it required the enforcement of strict work discipline in. all children's homes; and it insisted that working habits should be "inculcated" in all "abnormal" children. 80 A few months later, in September 1935, another directive of the Council of People's Commissars and the Party Central Committee mandated the move into schools and homes "with a special regime" of all defective children between nine and fourteen "who systematically infringe school discipline, interfere with instruction, and negatively influence the other students with their antisocial behavior:' 81 Both documents encouraged the adoption of"measures of decisive struggle" against children's everyday behaviors that could be perceived as "antisocial:' Criminal convictions, which according to these directives determined whether "difficult-to-raise" children should be interned in the Commissariat

Figure 5.03. Child Welfare After 1935 Child Welfare After 1935

Commissariat of Education

Commissariat of Health

Commissariat of Internal Affairs

Commissariat of Social Assistance

Homes for orphaned, poor, and difficult-to-raise children without

Homes for children in need of prolonged medical therapy

Isolation homes, labor colonies, and intake facilities for law-breakers

Homes for physically and mentally defective children

criminal convictions

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of Education's homes "with a special regime" or in the labor colonies of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, 82 began to be given out with increasing liberality. Indeed, in the mid-1930s a series of edicts on juvenile disobedience and delinquency made children as young as twelve fully responsible for various criminal acts and introduced the death penalty for underage offenders. 83 The then leader of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Genrikh Iagoda, mandated replacing the old Commissions on the Affairs of Minors with a special Department of Labor Colonies for Minors (Otdel trudovykh kolonii dlia nesovershennoletnikh) and suggested that it absorb from the Commissariat of Education all its homes for difficult children. The police were charged with the "systematic seizure from the streets of all orphaned, abandoned, and vagrant children'' and with "the struggle against child hooliganism ... begging, speculation, and the harassment of other citizens:' 84 As opposed to Kufaev's approach, in this discourse the street was no longer an unhealthy environment that caused social neglect, but rather a public space that was dirtied by "freely roaming orphans" and that the police needed to "clean up:'ss In short, the carceral and repressive ways that both social activists and scientists had criticized just ten years before were now again in full swing. In the summer of 1935, while he was issuing these ordinances, Iagoda also asked the police to combine "firmness" and "strict and rational discipline" with "the most attentive, sensitive and caring attitude toward the children:'86 As he wrote, The organs of the NKVD [Commissariat of Internal Affairs] must show maximal attention and sensitivity when they arrest and isolate minors; they should not turn this business into naked repression, but rather act in such a way that the isolation and the sentencing of incorrigible minors be an instructive example for other orphans. 87 Yet, archival documents and published memoirs testify that neither rationality nor humanity were part of the everyday experience of those children who passed through the labor colonies of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. 88 The defectologists' sophisticated methods of reeducation found no application in the establishments managed by the Chekists. Nobody cared to assign children to different groups in accordance with their degree of defectiveness. Production skills were to be taught to the colonists, but the value of labor in reforging them was closer to what Steven Barnes has described in relation to adult Gulag prisoners than to the defectologists' notion of work therapy. 89 Punishment rooms were an accepted measure of "educational

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influence;' and children could be held in them for up to ten days without permission to "smoke, sing, make noise, knock, and so on:' Finally, particularly troublesome children, those who would not subject themselves to the educational methods of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, could be expelled from the regular colonies and sent to a "labor colony with a particularly strict regime" located in the northern town of Arkhangel'sk. 90 In 1937, more labor colonies of the so-called "closed type" were set up for "recidivists, run-aways, hooligans, and disorganizers of the production process"; and in 1939 an expanded network of closed-door institutions called izoliatory implemented an even stricter regime to "inculcate discipline, labor, and everyday culture skills in each child:' 91 In other words, after 1935 behaviors such as street brawling, offending passersby, and catching free rides on the city's public transportation could lead Soviet children to be apprehended by the police and shipped to remote locations where they would live in a regime of complete isolation. Children like Nastia, Nikolai Kivkin, Boris Bogatov, and Stanislav Okloto (whom we met in chapter 4) would have probably been among them and found themselves without any pedagogical experts to offer them help. Some historians have remarked that the Stalinist commitment to all-out industrialization caused a loss of status and social influence for members of the intelligentsia such as doctors and pedagogues. 92 In the specific case of the defectologists, the theorization of children's moral deviance as the effect of a defective environment made these experts' position even more precarious. Their idea that children's defects had social causes was necessarily a meditation on the context in which Soviet children were growing up and could easily lend itself to indictments of that contexU 3 When the country was still believed to suffer from the consequences of the tsarist heritage and a brutal Civil War, the defectologists' professional skills were considered crucial in healing damage in the first generation of Soviet children. However, when the 1936 Constitution proclaimed that the foundations of communism had been laid, defectology's emphasis on the environment's negative influence on the children's Selves could no longer be accepted. The Soviet social order could not possibly be identified as a scientifically proven cause of child abnormality, and the individual alone became the source of all forms of deviance. Rather than looking for the social factors that determined suffering in the Soviet minor population, state policies now mandated that minor recidivists and waifs with personality problems be held completely responsible for their antisocial acts. In addition, the unfortunate existence of damaged boys and girls seemed a blatant contradiction to the

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official claim about the ideal happy Soviet childhood. It was the pressing ideological need to keep up illusions against the devastating effects of collectivization, industrialization, and growing political terror that impeded the continued reliance on the defectologists as a professional vanguard teaching respect for deviant children's rights and providing them with rational help. On July 4, 1936, the Party resolution "On the Pedological Distortions in the System of National Education'' castigated the pedologists for conducting "false experiments" and "an endless number of investigations" with the deplorable goal of finding a maximum number of pathological dysfunctions in Soviet children, their parents, and the social environment. 94 Although this directive explicitly targeted only pedology, it also incriminated defectology by implication, as a closely related discipline. The defectologists too were accused of looking for excuses to offer special help to ordinary undisciplined children. After this directive, "physically defective" boys and girls continued to be legitimate targets of medicopedagogical interventions. However, the "morally defective" and the "difficult" ones ceased to receive any attention because, as Party ideologue A. A. Zhdanov stated in August 1936, "We have liquidated the category of the difficult:' 95 The works of Kashchenko and other defectologists were removed from the shelves of Russian libraries; the topic of moral defectiveness was erased from the list of permitted research questions; and the very issue of how to reeducate difficult children would not be raised in Soviet pedagogical literature until the late 19 50s-early 1960s. 96 All the pedagogical experimentation that the defectologists had undertaken in the previous years under the aegis of the Commissariat of Education became suspicious; and not only the Medico- Pedagogical Station in Moscow but also many other model experimental schools (the so-called obraztsovye or opytno-pokazatel'nye shkoly) were either dismantled or absorbed into more traditional educational facilities and punitive systems. 97 In 1938, there remained in the city of Moscow only four homes with a special regime that were managed by the Commissariat of Education. They catered to a population of 276 "difficult" children, while in the same year 20,166 boys and girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen were placed in the labor colonies of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. 98 As Gulag administrator A. P. Lepilov reported in 1940, around 150,000 children had passed through this commissariat's labor colonies between 1935 and 1940, although only 68,927 of them had criminal convictions. 99 In the same year, Soviet security chief L. P. Beria informed Stalin that "many children who should be educated in schools and homes with a special regime [of the Commissariat of Education] are not placed there ... and end up on the courts' benches:' 100 It seems that

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after the directives of 1935-1936, the Commissariat of Education was no longer interested in protecting the rights of behaviorally deviant children and let the Commissariat of Internal Affairs become the most prominent institutional player in the handling of troublesome youth. Only a few children with non-normative behaviors were able to escape the grip of the Stalinist police in the mid- and late 1930s. For instance, those among them who were labeled as "mentally retarded" could be sent to the facilities of the Commissariat of Social Assistance. There, the defectologists attempted to sustain the idea of redeeming abnormal children, but their efforts could be directed only at enhancing the employability of children with recognized cognitive disabilities. 101 Some psychoneurologists, such as Il'ia Davydovich Pevzner, director of the Moscow city psychoneurological dispensary, and his wife Raisa Borisovna Pevzner, proposed to treat difficult-to-raise children in facilities administered by the Commissariat of Health. 102 As we will see in the next chapter, it was largely through the advocacy of a few committed child psychiatrists that, in the aftermath of the war, behaviorally deviant children acquired again the chance to receive medicopedagogical help instead of punishment and isolation.

••• Against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the deepening political crisis of the Western capitalist world, Soviet socialism in the 1930s was said to offer all the proper conditions for any man, woman, and child to realize their social rights. If poverty, displacement, and social distress still existed in the Soviet Union despite all the achievements of the communist system, the blame was certainly not to be placed on structural or environmental factors, but rather on personal ones. As Igal Halfin has remarked in relation to political deviance, the weak and wicked will of the individual was increasingly scrutinized under Stalinism and made accountable for any deviation in the happy existence of the Soviet people. 103 As we have seen in this chapter, both political authorities and social activists sought explanations for physical, gender, and behavioral deviance in individual citizens' lack of moral fiber and disinclination to provide for themselves. This approach harshly penalized children who differed from the model construction of Soviet childhood, because it made them responsible and therefore punishable for their abnormal behaviors. It also clearly limited the choices of single mothers, who were no longer simply seen as the victims of negative family and everyday conditions, but also as the shirkers of both productive and reproductive labor.

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In the case of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf, the shift from external environmental influences to a concept of the Self that privileged individual will transformed disabled people's productive contributions into the exclusive vehicle for achieving social integration. Alternative ways of providing assistance and facilitating inclusion and justice were foreclosed, and when employment was not accessible, the blind and the deaf remained inevitably excluded from the Soviet social body. Ultimately, in a period defined by social fears and political stigmas, disability remained ominously associated with personal fallibility, and the managers of Soviet enterprises would not take the risk of hiring subproductive invalidy. The imposition of forced labor on vagabonds and beggars had been a feature of the social policies implemented by many industrializing and modernizing states since the nineteenth century. It assumed a sharpened, repressive character in all the authoritarian regimes of the interwar period. Like the Soviet Union, fascist Italy and Nazi Germany combined their welfare programs with propaganda and mobilization initiatives. They too created highly centralized state agencies and claimed a monopoly on all the activities in which assistance merged with political socialization, social discipline, and public order. 104 Unlike the Soviet Union, however, Italy and Germany advanced a formal justification of social inequality. For instance, when the Nazi government came to power, it abolished special education tout court and recognized flaws in mental and physical development as legitimate grounds for euthanasia. In interwar Italy and Germany, health-related and demographic policies were explicitly bent to the logics of political and racial discrimination. Eugenic practices in these two countries were underpinned by cynical philosophies of social Darwinism whereby "superfluous" members of the body social needed to be eliminated. 105 As David Hoffmann has argued, if both the Nazi and Soviet governments "began to excise what they viewed as malignant elements, it is still a vital distinction that the Soviet government did this on a class basis, rather than using biological or racial criteria:' 106 Indeed, in contrast to the Italian and German racialized social policies, the Stalin Constitution proclaimed that all citizens enjoyed social rights equally. Of course, this was an effect of ideology: fascism could obsessively appeal to an exclusive form of social solidarity, while communism needed to maintain the rhetoric of universalism. Although various scholars have emphasized the emptiness of this rhetoric and the fayade nature of the Constitution's commitment to welfare, it remains notable that deviant subjects such as troublesome children, single mothers, and blind and deaf people were not targeted for systematic annihilation in the Soviet Union.

CHAPTER 6

AMASSIVELY TRAUMATIZED POPULATION" (1941-1950)

II

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I TH TH E STAL I N I ST shift toward repressive social policies, poverty and distress had turned from reasons for providing state assistance into signs of dangerous anti-Sovietness, and productive labor had become the only category entitling Soviet deviant citizens to enjoy social rights. The outbreak of the Second World War, however, made it impossible to further sustain this approach to economic need and social vulnerability. Under the pressures of demographic cataclysm, physical devastation, and health care crisis, suffering acquired a new positive light: it was seen as a shared experience of the Soviet people that required the socialist state's positive intervention. Indeed, around 1943-1944, the Soviet government began to issue new policies purporting to grant help to social groups that had been ignored or targeted for punishment in the previous decade. After the exclusionary and punitive paradigm of the 1930s, in the postwar years official state discourse once again represented the unemployed and needy pensioners-be it single mothers, recalcitrant street children, or people with disabilities-as the objects of the humanitarian help emanating from a benevolent state. 1 Several historians have remarked that, despite this rhetoric, the new postwar social policies had inconsequential or even negative outcomes in the everyday lives of Soviet people, failing to stem the tide of suffering and revealing the halfhearted nature of the late Stalinist social assistance measures. In addition, as others have noted, after a few years of relative openness and relaxation, in the early 1950s Stalin attempted to silence consideration of any negative consequence of the war. The Soviet leadership consciously excluded images of juvenile delinquents, nonconformists, disabled and psychically disturbed people from the official representation of postwar life-a process that for many deviant citizens enhanced the sense of exclusion, stigma, and isolation. Finally, considering postwar social policies from the point of view of the state's motivations, some scholars have concluded

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that in late Stalinism any humane, rights-giving, and moral dimension was always subordinated to high-priority political and economic exigencies, while positive changes in the conceptualization and implementation of welfare happened only under Khrushchev. 2 This picture changes if we instead continue to explore the right to be helped as a field of consciousness and action that was forged in the dialogues among social activists, political authorities, and individual subjects. Throughout the 1940s, many among these historical actors pushed for a reconceptualization of the labor-need relationship in legitimizing the welfare rights of marginalized populations. Activists affiliated with the Mother and Infant Department, experts in child deviance, and various members of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf campaigned to heal the terrible damage generated by the war in the bodies and psyches of their target groups. Precisely through their calls to cure "a massively traumatized population;' 3 activists and professionals delineated a new set of material and moral rights. At the same time, they also strove to return all the deviants to labor and thereby supported the political leadership's desires to reconstruct the economy, rein in social chaos, and reestablish core socialist values. In this chapter, I argue that the advocacy for deviant subjects' right to be helped was an important facet of the "relaunch" of Soviet socialism after the excesses of the 1930s and the upheavals of the war. 4 It reflected both the positivity of rejuvenating the Soviet moral project and the deep contradictory dynamics inherent in that project. As we will see, the social activists of the 1940s reintroduced many of the humanitarian beliefs of the postrevolutionary decade, advocated for an inclusive social order that better fit a victorious socialist country, and revamped the moral legitimacy of the communist doctrine. But they also reaffirmed Soviet socialism as an incongruous combination of emancipatory rights and harsh controls, liberating transformation and coercive normalization, and self-empowerment through discipline and loyalty. In line with a trend that we have seen in previous chapters, the interdependent relationship of rights and controls most explicitly manifested itself in social policies toward husbandless pregnant women and single mothers. During the war, when this population swelled to enormous proportions, the Soviet state's usual concerns about abortion and child abandonment acquired new urgency. In addition, this long-standing worry combined with new anxieties about the increase of sexually transmitted diseases and their damaging effects on women's reproductive capacities. For Soviet political leaders, it became literally vital to identify those women who needed help

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and to provide them with timely and effective assistance. 5 This approach had both positive and negative consequences for Soviet single mothers themselves. On one hand, it led to a significant expansion of their legal rights to subsidies and welfare services. It also drew some attention to single mothers' emotional problems together with their material difficulties, and reversed again the perception of unmarried mothers from willful skimmers of labor to rightful claimants of help. On the other hand, a strongly medicalized image of women as pathological and victimized sufferers undermined their authority and agency in sex, birth, and motherhood. It also, once again, promoted help for the purpose of restricting women to their "essential" maternal roles. In the end, the aspiration to heal "gynecologically sick" female bodies and help unmarried expectant women become happy mothers was yet another way to establish surveillance over their sexuality and labor. While this dynamic asserted a moral order that emphasized single mothers' rights, it also worked to reaffirm a traditional gender system after the open-endedness of the war. Medicalization was at play also in postwar social policies toward behaviorally deviant children, and for them too it had mixed effects. Medicalized understandings of child deviance replaced social dangerousness with psychic trauma and thereby facilitated the reintroduction of humane approaches to undisciplined children. Indeed, the diagnosis of "psychic sickness" -as much as the label of "moral defectiveness" that had emerged after the First World War and the Revolution-acknowledged the suffering of wayward children amid their ambivalent reception by a state concerned with disorder and a war-weary populace. Linking children's puzzling behaviors not to their maliciousness but to tangible external events, this medical identification guaranteed them sympathy and social services. By foregrounding the curability and reeducability of nonconforming youth for the sake of society, it provided a positive alternative to criminalizing representations and repressive models of treatment. At the same time, the concept of the "psychically sick" child made children's rights depend on claims of victimization, reduced various types of affective and social distress to fixed pathological categories, and imposed normalization as the only path to social integration. As several scholars have theorized, institutional stays in psychiatric facilities reify patients' identities as the abnormal subjects of protection and surveillance. 6 Because of all these factors, the postwar medicalization of child behavioral deviance was both a humanitarian endeavor and an expert discourse that aimed again to spread the regulating power of medicine into Soviet society.

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Along with women's diseased bodies and children's traumatized psyches, male veterans' physical impairments too epitomized wartime disruption and brought suffering back into focus as a basis for social rights. Yet, more than the reproductive dysfunctions and psychological disturbances of women and children, soldiers' disabilities also dramatized the contributions of young men who had laid down their able bodies in acts of military bravery. Their sacrifices on the battlefields turned them into heroes as well as victims, and their psychophysical pain could be emphasized in ways that did not necessarily deprive them of meaningful agency. Their rights, in other words, were not upheld by exclusive reference to suffering and victimhood, but also by the argument that they could continue to contribute if provided with the state's economic and moral support. Specifically, in this chapter I will focus my attention on how the Society of the Blind rearticulated its long-standing construct of job placement. As we will see, postwar blind activists rejected the productivist obsession of the 1930s and advocated for affective well-being and real equality along with the provision of jobs. Choosing employability over medicalization, even professional ophthalmologists tried to avoid the disempowerment of medical diagnosis. And yet, their postwar discourse was not devoid of dangerous implications. First, it maintained the close imbrication between blind people's rights and the projects of social control, discipline, and normalization that we have observed in the preceding decades. Second, it relaunched the enabling sides of the right to be helped only in relation to a very specific group of disabled people-young males who had lost their sight in battle. The postwar advocacy of the Society of the Blind assumed cohesion of identity, opinion, and purpose among blinded veterans. It also created hierarchies of entitlement that distinguished disciplined blind veterans from the motley mass of Soviet invalidy. As European governments and societies worked to reinvent themselves in the wake of a brutal war, medicalization and employability appeared to many as suitable ways to approach the task of reconstruction. For instance, medicalized views of single women's wartime sexuality, fears concerning the spread of venereal disease, and the urgency to increase birthrates characterized the postwar gender politics of many countries/ The need to restore children's psychological stability obsessed European specialists as well as ordinary citizens and, in Britain, led to recognizing a condition termed "maladjustment" as a new official category of child disability. 8 Furthermore, the British postwar state shared the Soviet state's preoccupation that untrained veterans with disabilities would add to the ranks of the begging and delinquent. Most European policymakers understood job placement

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as a vital social policy for both individuals and nations, while associations of the war blinded in many parts of the world advocated for occupational rehabilitation programs as the best reintegration strategy for disabled exservicemen.9 Even the increased focus on emotions and the need to control them medically for the sake of postwar reconstruction was not unique to the Soviet Union.' 0 As I will discuss in the epilogue, several European countries approached the reconfiguration of social assistance as an important component of their economic, sociopolitical, and cultural remaking after the turmoil of the war. However, there was an important difference between the Soviet Union and other European countries of that time. While, for many of the latter, reconstruction implied breaking with the recent past and seeking new legitimacy in the future," the USSR was committed to rebuilding its moral and sociopolitical order along the tracks of socialism. The rights granted to unemployed single mothers, behaviorally deviant children, and disabled men were supposed to be evidence of the superior morality of victorious socialism in comparison with both the fascist regimes defeated in the war and the competitive model offered by the capitalist democracies. In line with the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism and the rhetoric of the Stalin Constitution, state assistance to these populations was framed neither around individual citizen rights nor in reference to universal human rights. Rather, the only possible guarantee for the realization of real justice continued to be state intervention. Welfare in late Stalinist Russia did not turn into a combination of private, state, and volunteer initiatives as it did in other European countries. The deviant subjects' right to be helped remained a form of biopolitical governance happening exclusively within state institutions. After the war, this right was animated both by the socialist agenda of emancipatory justice and by the goal to stabilize the mobility of potentially disgruntled social groups.

6.1. "Gynecologically Sick" Women Changes in social policy toward single mothers began in 1944. On July 8 of that year, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet ratified the decree "On strengthening state help to pregnant women, mothers of many children and single mothers:' 12 In response to it, several state agencies issued circular letters, directives, and ordinances that identified single mothers as a social group particularly entitled to state help. ' 3 Indeed, while the July 8 decree

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abolished the right of unmarried mothers to appeal to the courts for the purpose of establishing paternity and obtaining maintenance from their children's fathers, it also made up for the loss of support from biological fathers by expanding assistance from the state. 14 In the circumstances of the war, when it was difficult to track down lines of paternity, the state aimed to protect both a depleted male population and a more vulnerable female constituency. The new social policies introduced in 1944 granted many new benefits to single mothers and emphasized prophylactic medical help along with economic and juridical assistance. Insurance pensions for all women who had a work record of at least three months (instead of seven months as in previous legislation) were at the core of the new policy, but larger social assistance pensions and various types of subsidies were foreseen also for pregnant women not legally entitled to insurance rights. If a single mother had three or more children, she was permitted to receive subsidies both as unmarried (odinokaia) and as mother of a large family (mnogodetnaia). If she got married and the subsidy had been assigned before the marriage, she could retain the right to state help. In addition, the new social protection measures expanded the network of facilities of institutional care. While the old Homes for Mother and Child continued to be crucial sites of help for unmarried pregnant women, the workhouses of the 1930s were no longer mentioned in the official documents. Instead, strong emphasis was given to new "special rest homes for needy pregnant single women and exhausted breast-feeding mothers:' 15 Finally, the children of single mothers acquired priority access to nurseries and children's homes. This new set of rights was widely publicized in the press throughout the 1940s. 16 Commenting on the unprecedentedly vast scope of the July 8 decree, the chairman of the city executive committee of Alma-Ata (now Almaty, Kazakhstan) said: "The decree is very good, but it's impossible to fully carry it out." 17 Faced with the difficult task of executing all the decree's bold new policies in a context of limited resources, several activists chose to subordinate sociolegal help to the care for women's reproductive health. The doctors and administrators of the Commissariat of Health (renamed Ministry of Health after 1946) did not hesitate to interpret the new laws as a signal to revitalize medical service and to push for obstetrical and gynecological help as the number one task in the broad field of assistance to single mothers. 18 The activists of the Mother and Infant Department, instead, had a harder time deciding how to implement the new social protection policies. On one hand, the 1944 directives mandated assisting needy single mothers in all possible economic and juridical questions, and women themselves claimed "all

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types of rights" in their petitions to the Mother and Infant Department-not only medical care, but also state subsidies and other forms of material help, housing, alimony, divorce, fostering, and adoption. 19 On the other hand, this agency was a subdepartment of the Commissariat of Health and therefore had to follow its umbrella institution's medicalized interpretation of unmarried mothers' needs. The archival record reveals that, in the end, the personnel staffing the facilities of the Mother and Infant Department gave preeminence to medical help over legal advice and monetary assistance. For instance, in 1945, only 26 percent of approximately 1,400 women's clinics offered sociolegal help alongside medical services. 20 Among the many factors leading postwar activists to prioritize medical help was the panic (both real and imagined) over all single women's wartime disorderly sexuality and the related spread of venereal disease. Already in October 1942, two documents issued by the Commissariat of Health specified that each women's clinic should include a special office for "gynecologically sick" women and mandated that "gynecological disease" be understood broadly as a field including a vast spectrum of pathologies: toxicosis of pregnancy, preterm deliveries, stillbirths, postpartum septic infections, infertility, gonorrhea, syphilis, and any "dysfunction of the female sexual sphere:' 21 After 1944, the phrases "gynecological woman'' (ginekologicheskaia zhenshchina) and "gynecologically ill" (ginekologicheskie bol'nye) were frequently used in this commissariat's writings. For instance, the All-Union Commissar of Health, Georgii Andreevich Miterev, mentioned the special needs of "gynecologically and otherwise sick'' women in his "Ordinance to the USSR People's Commissariat of Health'' dated September 7, 1945.22 Two months later, the United Plenum of two subdepartments within the Commissariat of Health-the Council of Therapeutic-Prophylactic Help to Children and the Council for Obstetrical and Gynecological Help-decided to "improve the quality of therapeutic-prophylactic help to gynecologically sick women:' 23 Thus, by the end of the war, all Soviet single women could enjoy greater entitlement to health care. However, the medical investigation of their sexual apparatuses and internal organs was not completely neutral. Together with the discovery of an increasing number of"pathological cases;' the medical gaze also exposed all the backwardness that allegedly plagued the private lives of needy unmarried puerperae. In April1946, opening a conference "On the Public Health Consequences of the War and the Measures for their Liquidation;' Nikolai A. Semashko stated that venereal disease was widespread in the Soviet female population, especially among single women who had lived in the territories occupied

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by the Germans. 24 1he medical evidence for Semashko's thesis was provided during the conference by two members of the Central Research Institute for Skin and Venereal Diseases, Dr. E. M. Gol'dzil'ber and Dr. I. S. Isaev. They both insisted that syphilis and gonorrhea, which in their opinion had almost disappeared in prewar Soviet cities, had now resurged as a "legacy of the Hitlerite horde:' 25 The Soviet environment was healthy before the war, averred the two physicians, and the "explosion'' of sexually transmitted diseases had been brought from the outside. 26 Armed with statistics and medical terminology, Gol'dzil'ber and Isaev explained how German soldiers had infected Soviet "women and girls" by forcing them to join brothels and provide sexual services to the Nazi soldiers. After contracting venereal diseases, Soviet women tried to hide their pathologies because they feared that the Gestapo and the SS would place them in prison hospitals, send them to forced labor camps, or even kill them. The draconian German methods of struggle against syphilis had pushed this venereal disease underground and had deprived women of the opportunity to heal their bodies. Together with the evils of the German occupation, Gol'dzil'ber also blamed "the mass mobility of the population'' for the growth of syphilis among single women. However, both he and his colleague Isaev conveniently avoided mentioning the sexual violence perpetrated on women by Soviet soldiers. 27 In the narrative advanced by Gol'dzil'ber and Isaev, women's diseased reproductive systems as well as their "horrible moral pains" entitled them to the provision of "all-encompassing" medical help. 28 This help was to be offered to them in their best interests, even when women themselves did not seek it out by their own initiative. Indeed, both doctors believed that unmarried sick women were too "afraid" to take autonomous action. One year after the war was over, after the occupied territories had been liberated, and after the evacuees had been returned to their homes, lonely and suffering women still concealed their pathologies. Therefore, claimed Gol'dzil'ber and Isaev, they needed to be identified and helped by knowledgeable and compassionate experts. Of course, married women were raped, too, and they too could carry disease. But their returning husbands were imagined as taking up the simultaneous roles of protectors and supervisors. In the case of single women, instead, the double duty of helping and controlling fell exclusively upon the state. As activists and experts tirelessly repeated in the immediate postwar years, victorious socialism had to meet this responsibility neither through additional mistreatment and violence (as the Germans had done) nor through random private philanthropy (as in the capitalist world), but through systematic, state-sponsored, mass medical examinations. 29

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The director of the Research Institute of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Rostov province, D. S. Baranovskaia, agreed with Gol'dzil'ber and Isaev. In the years between 1946 and 1949, she and her colleagues had conducted several mass prophylactic visits of sexually active female citizens. Their examinations had proven that "the self-sacrificial labor;' "the inadequate nutrition;' and "the serious moral worries" experienced by single women during the German occupation had created the conditions for their vulnerability to disease and enormously damaged their health. Based on the premise that Soviet single women had both contributed to the war effort and suffered because of it, Baranovskaia joined Gol'dzil'ber and Isaev in emphasizing the state's responsibility to "give special attention to restoring the health of these women" and to "liquidating the consequences of the war in the realm of gynecological disease:' 30 To solve the public health crisis among the Soviet female population, at the beginning of 1948 the head of the Department for Obstetrical and Gynecological Help, 0. D. Matspanova, suggested avoiding the dispersion of resources among several agencies. Instead of keeping the comprehensive clinics of the Mother and Infant Department as independent facilities with multiple tasks of medical as well as legal and economic help, she advised absorbing them into the obstetrical wards of regular hospitals. 31 The AllUnion Minister of Health, Efim I. Smirnov, agreed. In May 1948, he issued an ordinance that dismantled the comprehensive clinics of the Mother and Infant Department and merged them with facilities that provided only medical helpY Single mothers' right to be helped was now firmly relegated to the sphere of medicine, where the suffering body became the main source of legitimacy and access to state assistance was marked by the humiliating experience of having to use one's biology as a resource to win social rights. 33 What happened then to the practice of sociolegal help to unmarried mothers? As we have seen in the preceding chapters, sociolegal help had its roots in the "juridical sections" established within the clinics of the Mother and Infant Department in 1926 and then formalized as "offices" (kabinety) in 1932. Already in August 1943, an instructional letter signed by Deputy Minister of Health Mariia Dmitrevna Kovrigina had amended previous regulations on the activities of these offices. Kovrigina had argued that, in conditions of war, sociolegal workers should focus their attention on "pregnant women who find themselves in the Pregnancy Pathology wards:' 34 Then, after 1948, the sociolegal offices were absorbed into the hospitals' delivery wards and completely deprived of their original functions. Even Sofiia Kopelianskaia, who in the previous decade had staunchly advocated

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for legal and economic help to single mothers, now declared that this form of assistance had become "an organic component" of obstetrical help and was to be practiced exclusively within "gynecological and obstetrical facilities:'35 Sociolegal workers still had responsibilities that required familiarity with legislation on the protection of single motherhood. Indeed, in principle, sociolegal workers were still supposed to provide abandoned mothers with legal assistance in issues of alimony and in the assignment of state subsidies and pensions. They were also required to improve the everyday lives of unmarried mothers in relation to housing and the placement of children in day care facilities. In reality, in most clinics, the employment of experienced nurses and midwives was preferred over that of individuals with formal juridical education. 36 Furthermore, since the sociolegal offices did not have their own budgets but depended on the allocation of money from the city and district sections of the Ministry of Health, they were often practically unable to provide material relief even to the poorest single mothers. 37 For all these reasons, by the end of the 1940s, men and women hired as "sociolegal workers" had largely moved away from the provision of professional legal services and the assignment of subsidies, and rather had become more involved in the medical activities of venereal dispensaries, abortion commissions, and birth clinics. As historian Chris Burton has remarked, in the postwar years the function of the doctor and that of the social worker fused into one, especially in relation to the prevention of criminal abortions. 38 A 1948 document on sociolegal help stated that providing material assistance to poor unmarried mothers-to-be was a form of"real help" only insofar as it convinced them to continue their pregnancy. 39 The utilization of single mothers' social rights as auxiliary tools in the state's biopolitical project to raise the birthrate and preserve gender order should not come as a surprise at this point. We have seen that the Soviet state had been worried about declining birthrates since its very inception and then had sustained pronatalist policies throughout the early Soviet and Stalinist periods. The ambiguous connection between rights and control had emerged in the writings of the Mother and Infant Department already in the 1920s and then continued to underpin professionals' and activists' practice of help in the 1930s. What was truly new in the postwar years was the attempt to relaunch some of the most humane components of single mothers' rights that had characterized the initial period of advocacy and that had disappeared with the criminalization of abortion and the general Stalinist turn to repressive social policies. 40

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The reinjection of compassion into single mothers' rights can be clearly observed in Kopelianskaia's 1950 book entitled Socio-Legal Help to Mother and Child. Here Kopelianskaia explained that state assistance to women was meant first of all to restore the fecundity of their war-damaged bodies; secondly, to counter abortions; and finally, to ascertain that single mothers would keep their babies and properly breast-feed them after release from the birth clinics. Thus, Kopelianskaia repeated the old message that women's rights, bodies, and labor should be managed for them by experts and activists who knew women's best interests and who worked in close association with the state. 41 But Kopelianskaia also emphasized that vigilance over single mothers should be carried out in a humane way that accounted for their psychological needs. In addition, she portrayed single expecting women and unmarried mothers in a much more positive light than in her 1936 book on the same topic. The "single mother" was now no longer represented as a dangerous antisocial element willfully departing from the upright path of her gender responsibilities. To the contrary, the "single mother" had an "ardent desire" to bring her pregnancy to term and raise her child, but was "scared" and "nervous" about the prospect of being a single parent. Her travails as a victim of the war entitled her to "help" and "moral support:' 42 Emphasizing women's feelings and reminding her readers of the "intimate nature" 43 of single mothers' problems, in this 1950 manual Kopelianskaia adamantly requested that social workers establish an empathetic relationship with their clients. Earlier, in a brief 1945 article, Kopelianskaia had explained that the birth of a child could "provoke tears and pain instead of joy" if the staff of the state facilities did not help single mothers "sensitively, attentively, and in a timely waY:'« Now, she repeated that it was "painful" and "embarrassing" for a single woman to talk about issues related to her sexualityY Therefore the social workers should be cautious and understanding, gain her "trust;' predispose her to be open with them, and "let her understand that together with help she receives friendly support:' Kopelianskaia encouraged sociolegal workers to create the correct atmosphere for "soulto-soul conversations;' to "hit the right tone;' and to "show patience, perseverance, and kindheartedness:' They were also supposed to take seriously the personality of each unmarried puerpera and adopt "a maximally individualized approach'' to them. 46 As she repeated at several points throughout the book, Some [women] need to be cheered up, others to be calmed down, and others to be sent to the doctor. Questioning them demands patience,

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tact, compassion .... 47 It is necessary to avoid anything that might scare [a woman] away from the clinic ... and instead use tact and a warm, informal approach. 48 Indeed, continued Kopelianskaia, "lack of tact can cause damage and traumatize the woman's psyche:' 49 As we will see in the following section, the concept of psychic trauma was frequently used by Soviet child psychiatrists in the years between 1945 and 1949 in order to find causal explanations for children's deviant behaviors. In her 1950 book, Kopelianskaia incorporated this notion and argued that undesirable, undisciplined behaviors among single mothers-such as "nervously asking questions, making aggressive remarks, or remaining stubbornly silent"-were indications of "hidden worries" and should be dealt with delicacy instead of violence. 50 According to Chris Burton, although the state asked the doctor to play the role of the investigator as well as that of the informant, and although some doctors certainly "participated in efforts to police reproduction;' many "balked at taking up the interrogator's role:' 51 Similarly, Mie Nakachi has observed a "tension" in the postwar abortion surveillance system "between strict enforcement and preventive care:' 52 In her handbook, Kopelianskaia instructed sociolegal workers and physicians that they should not hide information from the procurators, but she strongly rejected any "investigation function" (sledstvennye funktsii) for the sociolegal offices of the Mother and Infant Department. 5 3 Instead, she revamped the idea of mutual trust between assisted women and social workers, contextualizing this idea in the negative circumstances of the war, which included "nonformalized marital relations, family conflicts, [and women's] disease:' 54 In addition, while Kopelianskaia asked the sociolegal workers to exercise control over unmarried women's reproductive choices and discipline them into being dutiful mothers and compliant patients, she also recognized that some activists might have doubts concerning the ethics of "meddling with the private lives of individual people:' To solve this moral conflict, she explained that "the investigations conducted by the sociolegal offices ... are not an intrusion in the private lives of the citizens against their will. They take place in the interests of the examined individuals:' Regular check-ups through patronage visitations allowed nurses not only to sustain contact with women who otherwise might "slip through;' but also to reinforce "friendly relations" with them. 55 In the end, however, the most effective realization of single mothers' social rights still required banning their autonomous actions and placing the power to evaluate and judge in the activist's hands. Kopelianskaia argued

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that "the woman often cannot precisely determine what type of help she needs and she does not fully know her rights:' Furthermore, "It is often difficult for her to orient herself among the many institutions [of help] :' 56 Commenting on women's admission to the Homes of Mother and Child, Kopelianskaia wrote: In view of the promiscuous and fluid disposition of these women and the possible manifestation of nervousness in their moods ... it is necessary to establish such a system that provides discipline and order ... The infringement of rules and schedules, any delay in feeding the child, [and] the refusal to work without a serious reason should lead to the women's expulsion [from the Home]. 57 Finally, any "willful departure and arrival (sometimes in the middle of the night and late for the breast-feeding session) and the uncontrolled reception of visitors" were identified as inappropriate practices on the part of single mothers. 58 Although Kopelianskaia recognized the "hidden worries" and fears of single pregnant women and recommended empathy toward them, she still expected these women to exhibit discipline and defer to the activists' superior knowledge. 59 Thus, women's atavistic ignorance about their rights, their helplessness, and their darkness combined with their wartime gynecologically sick status and their disorderly mobility to make not only support for them but also control over them into two entwined facets of their rights. This was in line with the long-standing socialist understandings of rights not as autonomously wielded freedoms, but as the conditions for the realization of effective social justice. In contrast to the 1930s, in the postwar years these conditions were decided and implemented by the positive interventions of well-meaning experts and benevolent political authorities. 60 Indeed, abortion would be legalized again in 1955. Kopelianskaia's writings of the late 1940s and early 1950s can be interpreted as one of the forces undermining the trend toward criminalizing unmarried women who chose abortions.

6.2. "Psychically Sick" Children With the outbreak of the war, some child psychiatrists proposed the argument that children's deviations from normative conduct were neither the outcomes of a negative social environment nor the willful choices of

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incorrigible individuals, but rather pathologies of the psyche caused by the upheavals of the war and their brutal repercussions on children's lives. 61 As early as 1941, leading medical institutions in the field of pediatric psychiatry began to conduct research on the impact of various wartime "psychogenic experiences" on the behavioral and affective disturbances of the Soviet minor population. 62 They discovered that air raids, evacuation, occupation, threats on one's life, prolonged confinement in German concentration camps, witnessing human death and material destruction, losing family members, and simply feeling lonely had produced "frightening impressions" and "emotional over-stress" in Soviet children. As a result of all this, many young boys and girls now lagged behind in their psychophysical growth, school performance, and general ability to fit within society. The child psychiatrist Tat'iana Simson, who had been active in this field since the postrevolutionary years, now insisted that it was above all because of wartime "damaging influences" that a child's personality "could deviate from the correct path:' 63 In truth, Russian psychiatrists had remarked on the traumatic origins of several child pathologies since at least the 1920s. 64 However, the psychiatric literature of the 1940s made war-induced traumas into the number one cause for what once had been called "moral defectiveness" and now appeared as "psychic disease:' In this body of work, the term "trauma" had several meanings. It was understood as both the occurrence and the consequence of infections, organic lesions, and physical injuries of the brain. It was also the outcome (or the "residual phenomenon") of negative situations and experiences-that is, a "psychic shock" that caused changes in one's behavior. 65 Simson described children's memories of the occupation as memories of an "experienced trauma" that hugely damaged the development of their psyche. 66 The psychiatrist Gruniia Efrimovna Sukhareva was particularly interested in the connection between somatic conditions (especially severe wartime physiological deprivation) and children's psyche. For instance, in the introduction to a 1945 collection of essays titled Issues of Wartime Psychiatry, she strove to assess the correlation between various "personality-driven, psychological, and cerebral-biological components" in shaping "psychic trauma:' 67 In another article in the same volume, she wrote that "psychotrauma (psikhotravma) [is] a chain of traumatizing moments that induce emotional exhaustion:'68 Likewise, in an article submitted to the journal Neuropathology and Psychiatry in December 1946, Sukhareva repeated that children's behavioral deviations and personality defects were nothing other than "reactions to psychic trauma:' 69 The psychiatrist E. E.

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Skanavi also used the term "psychotrauma'' in relation to Soviet out -ofmainstream adolescents, describing the "massive and reoccurring" character of this phenomenon during the war as follows: They see family members dying, being shot or hanged; they lose all property; they are exposed to constant gunfire. In the majority of cases we can see situations that directly threaten teenagers' lives: the arson of their izbas ... the threats to hang them, the beatings, etc. For entire weeks, these teenagers find refuge in the woods, in the trenches. They suffer from hunger.7° At the 1946 conference "On the Public Health Consequences of the War;' during which Soviet gynecologists discussed women's venereal diseases, the child psychiatrist Osipova stated that children's dysfunctions were determined not only by physical suffering and injuries to the head, but also "by a heterogeneous psychotraumatization related to the wartime environmenf' 71 By 1948 these ideas seemed to have gained high currency among Soviet child psychiatrists. Indeed, a collection of essays published in that year under the title Problems of Contemporary Psychiatry advanced "wartime psychic trauma'' as the number one explanation for postwar children's behavioral abnormality. 72 To put it differently, the deviant child was constructed no longer as a criminal but rather as a victim under the threat of developing psychic diseases. This new discursive articulation of deviant childhood was particularly evident in the psychiatrists' descriptions of the symptoms through which psychic abnormality manifested itself. These included dysfunctions of the digestive, respiratory, cardiovascular, urinary, and motor organs as well as sleep problems, phobias, tics, and speech disorders. Pathological habits (such as finger-sucking or masturbating) and obsessions (fixation on certain ideas or repetition of certain movements) were also considered symptoms of psychic disease. More pertinently to our discussion, medical experts believed that inclinations to run away from home, lie, steal, and damage objects were not simply manifestations of a loosely defined "pedagogical difficulty" or signs of criminal antisocial conduct, but rather indications of a real pathological process. 73 Out-of-mainstream children were now again seen as "suffering;' "highly vulnerable;' and "in need of help:' "Fear" held these damaged children "in its grip;' and their deviant behaviors were "the outcome of weakness, not the malicious infringement of discipline:' 74 This representation belongs to the same semantic field as that of the postwar single mother: both psychically sick children and gynecologically sick women

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were war victims suffering from psychological and corporeal diseases. In addition, psychiatric doctors frequently argued that, although they had observed the most extreme manifestations of child deviance during the war, traumas continued to occur in peacetime. They originated from incorrect educational methods such as intimidation, threats, beatings, reproaches, and other punishments that oppressed already weak and traumatized children, forcing them to retreat into themselves and become alienated from the collective/5 Since the strong psychological shocks of the war had triggered all sorts of pathological reactions in Soviet youth, punitive methods would only exacerbate these reactions, to the detriment of the entire society. In place of punishments, the postwar experts proposed to talk about these shocks. For instance, in a 1947 popular brochure on this topic Simson wrote: The mothers and educators of those children who have experienced the fascists' bestiality and the murder of their loved ones should understand that it is wrong to avoid talking about these experiences. To the contrary, the more the child talks about the subjects that oppress his psyche, the faster and more complete will be his recovery from these serious sources of stress/6 While several historians have remarked on the erasure of psychological trauma in the Soviet public sphere of the late 1940s,77 this evidence reveals a different aspect of the postwar reconstruction. It shows that psychiatric specialists addressed not only the physiological but also the affective and psychological dimensions of children's losses, related them to the deviant traits of psychically sick children, and encouraged adults as well as children to talk about them. At first glance, this seems to contradict the late Stalinist disawoval of the negative consequences of the war. Indeed, the psychiatrists' sluggish, depressed, indolent, passive, indecisive, and timid, but also extremely agitated, disinhibited, rude, fussy, and stubborn minor patients ostensibly undermined the ideal Soviet exemplary subject. In reality, these disturbed children offered one of the few opportunities in the postwar Soviet Union to discuss problems that could not possibly be associated with "normal" Soviet subjectivity and, in the end, legitimized the latter's continued existence after the catastrophes of the war. Soviet officialdom was well aware of the massive traumas experienced by its population, but at the same time it absolutely needed to sustain the image of an active, energetic, emotionally stable, disciplined, and work-oriented Soviet subject.

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As Semashko had proclaimed in 1946, the Soviet person "quickly recovers from the massive turmoil that he experienced during the years of war"; 78 he plunges into the work of reconstruction and shows off his bodily scars as a measure of heroism. In this discourse, I would suggest, the deviants had their own specific place: they became the much-needed repository of all the fears, weaknesses, and psychological problems left over from the war. In relation to children, the attribution of negative features to those of them defined as "psychically sick'' helped preserve the myth of a "normal" and typically happy Soviet child. Within this discourse, medicopedagogical help reacquired a preeminent role over punishment and excision from the body social. Psychiatric help now appeared as the cure that would erase the disjunction between the lives of a few "pathological" youths and the supposedly ideal existence of all other Soviet children. Postwar psychiatric literature was replete with examples of the joyful return of Soviet children to "normalitY:' In this respect, the child psychiatry of the 1940s and the defectology of the pre-1936 period strongly resembled each other. Conceiving of children's deviant behaviors as components of a clinical picture, both disciplines argued that scientific observation was the key to understanding "the child's personality" and changing it "in the right direction:' 79 Like the defectologists, the postwar child psychiatrists were not simply defining the children's personalities as "sick:' They were also giving scientific proof of the "rich compensatory possibilities" of these personalities. For instance, the child psychiatrist Bashkova recognized that teenagers who enjoyed vagrancy and did not show interest in work were "personalities with pathological behaviors;' but she also suggested that scientific "processes of compensation'' could preserve what was still intact in their psyche and transform them into "socially valuable persons:'so In her 1949 brochure written for the general public, Simson agreed that child nervousness was not "a deep destruction of the child's psyche;' but rather "a functional destruction;' which was "relatively easy to liquidate by adopting proper medicopedagogical measures:' 81 In line with the Soviet understanding of labor as a rehabilitative therapy, these "measures" continued to include a certain amount of physical work, but the postwar specialists contended that deviant children needed first of all a restful regime that could strengthen their physiology. In a 1945 article on the consequences of fatigue on children and adolescents, the child psychologist Kononova identified "heavy, exhausting work'' as a cause of "physical over-exertion and emotional hypertension:'sz This remark was not casual: young workers forcefully conscripted into the labor force were the second largest group of children

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committing criminal offenses (after war orphans). 83 Without denying labor's rehabilitative power and joyfulness, Soviet medical experts now pointed out the potential cost of overwork. In other words, pathological behaviors could be cured through work, but too much of it resulted in further pathologies. This notion would have been inadmissible in the 1930s, since it might have implied psychic dysfunctions in the Stakhanovites and shock workers of the Stalinist industrialization drive! In line with their predecessors in defectology, the postwar child psychiatrists also claimed that any "irritating phenomenon'' potentially leading to indiscipline had to be replaced with competing sources of interest that would create a positive "emotional connection with life:'84 Didactic activities in facilities for psychically sick children had to be particularly appealing. As Skanavi wrote, The material that we use with these children must be emotionally rich and selected with the goal of satisfying the children's interests .... The sick child should occupy an active position in the pedagogical process, and the latter should invigorate sick children's creative aspirations. 85 Arguing that deviant children needed "freedom to play and enjoy;' the child psychiatrists of the 1940s recommended a combination of labor therapy and play therapy. Playgrounds were to be available in all facilities alongside "curative-productive workshops:' Amateur performances, puppet shows, artwork, rhythmic gymnastics, and sports were also among the methods used to correct children's defects. Music was considered to have a calming influence on the psyche of sick children. 86 Thus, after the denunciation of pedology and the discrimination against defectology in the mid-1930s, medical science once again pushed to treat deviant children with affection, care, and patience. The medical cures proposed by the Soviet child psychiatrists of the postwar years were supposed to return psychically sick children to society while also accounting for their individuality. Their pedagogy was in principle able to transform these children while avoiding additional traumas, suffering, and unnecessary inhibitions. In fact, betraying the simultaneous loving and disciplining dimensions of her medicalized approach, Simson argued that psychically sick children required "on one hand, a caring and careful approach; on the other hand, an ongoing, systematic forging [zakalivanie, as of steel]:' 87 The enmeshing of care and control can also be seen in Kotina's description of the children's bedrooms in the P. P. Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital:

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The bedroom is a place where the child must behave in an organized and calm manner. The nurse teaches the sick children how to make beds, precisely fold clothes, put shoes in their place, accurately cover themselves with sheets, and be quiet. But at night she must compensate for the absence of a close, loved person: she must caringly cover the sick child, check how he sleeps, calm him down if he feels afraid or anxious, [and] patiently sit by his side.88 This passage clearly reveals that Soviet activists' humane aspirations continued to coexist with the drive to discipline and normalize. For them, the subject bearing the right to be helped was a suffering and pathological child who nonetheless could be healed and corrected; a child who deserved to live a full emotional life, feel worthy, and be integrated in productive labor. While entitled to pursue his/her vocation, this child was also supposed to "bend to the discipline required by the working collective" and, in the end, achieve personal happiness in the act of subordinating his/her Self to the interests of the larger society. 89 Finally, it must be noted that postwar child psychiatrists pursued children's welfare to the same degree that they extended their science's regulatory powers into the realm of social policy. This is illustrated by the fact that these experts did not limit themselves to scholarship, but also engaged in a public campaign to reestablish pediatric facilities of "psychoneurological help:' They contended that the outbreak of military confrontations had interrupted the curative work conducted in a small but stable network of specialized schools and hospital-like residential institutions. Help to wounded soldiers had acquired priority; most child psychiatrists had been mobilized in the army as military doctors; and, in the nonoccupied areas, the majority of the facilities previously functioning as children's neuropsychiatric sanatoria had been turned into military hospitals. Worried about this situation, already before the end of the war Sukhareva and Osipova officially addressed their superiors in the Commissariat of Health with an alarming "Report:' In layman's terms, they explained that the "moral traumas;' the shocks, and the suffering induced by the war in the young generation made the issue of neurological help very urgent. They insisted that the Commissariat of Health had the duty to put behaviorally abnormal boys and girls back on its agenda and claimed that psychiatric expertise should play a larger role in the struggle against abandonment and minor delinquency as well as in the resolution of all legal issues involving children. 90 The psychiatrists-cum-activists A. I. Dobrokhatova, Z. A. Solov'eva, and E. N. Khokhol' agreed; they called for a round table

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in which the Commissariats of Health, Education, and Social Assistance would discuss the postwar reorganization of special educational facilities for neurologically sick children. 91 Revamping the combination of biology and social science that had characterized defectology, these specialists talked about the "sociopsychiatric nature" of child criminality and insisted on the need to replace punitive labor colonies with medicopedagogical facilitiesneuropsychiatric ambulatories, sanatoria, clinics, and colonies managed not by Chekists but by child psychiatrists. 92 Although the psychiatric hospital has been famously criticized as a "total institution" sharing modes of functioning and signification with the modern prison, 93 in the Soviet postwar years children's institutionalization in specialized medicopedagogical facilities was a more benign form of removal than their detention in the punitive colonies of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Since the category of"difficult children" had been erased from the agenda of pedagogical research and advocacy in the mid-1930s, medicalization through emphasis on trauma seemed the only available counter-discourse to carceral confinement, punishment, and repression. It is against this background that recalcitrant children's medicalization and institutional placement must be assessed in the Soviet context. Certainly, the pathologizing label of "psychically sick" took agency away from children and parents, implied the need to exercise constant surveillance in their lives, and created hierarchies of psychic health that reinforced the centrality of a perfectly rational, emotionally composed, and economically active subject. Yet, besides these constraining and disciplining features, trauma-as a discourse-entitled otherwise marginalized children to social services and empathy. A structural reform of the children's colonies managed by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs would occur only in 1956. Nevertheless, psychiatric experts' interventions in the 1940s combined with the realities of the wartime demographic and public health crisis to set in motion change in official attitudes to misbehaving children. 94 In 1943 and 1945, two instructions of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs on how to address child criminality reminded the personnel managing the intake centers of a caveat that was foreseen already in the 1935 directives but so far had been passed over in silence. This was the notion that children suffering from psychic dysfunction should be placed in the facilities of the Commissariat of Health. 95 In a 1945 report, the procurator of the city of Moscow, A. N. Vasil'ev, called for a more substantial involvement of pedagogues (instead of policemen) in the struggle against child vagrancy. 96 In 1946, an ordinance of the Commissariat

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of Social Assistance mandated local agencies to establish closer connections between this commissariat's homes and the psychiatric offices managed by the Commissariat of Health. 97 While new legislation passed in 1947 on theft and misappropriation featured draconian punishments for even the most minor offenses, two reports written by Minister of State Security V. S. Abakumov in 1948 and 1950 explained that the majority of homeless, vagrant, begging, and thieving children were either orphans whose parents had died during the war or children who took to the streets due to their teachers' mistreatment and their parents' neglect. 98 As an evil imposed by external enemies on the healthy Soviet environment, the war provided a framework to deflect blame for deviance not only away from children's malicious choices, but also away from the sociopolitical order of Stalinism.

6.3. Tragically Blinded Veterans Although the Soviet state officially recognized between 2.6 and 2.8 million disabled servicemen, the real number of physically impaired soldiers was probably over 18 million. 99 Among them, the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf respectively counted 15,394 war blind and 3,137 war deaf. 100 As a certain Dr. Ia. D. Grossman recognized in 1946, these numbers represented very small percentages in relation to the absolute totality of soldiers wounded during the Great Patriotic War (respectively 1.4 percent and 0.4 percent in his calculations), but they acquired huge importance if read against the distribution of injured servicemen by category of invalidity. Soldiers afflicted by blindness in one or both eyes constituted 84.9 percent of all the invalids of the first category, while speech-impaired and deafened men made up a good 10.4 percent of this category. 101 Of course, these statistics are unreliable and imprecise. The postwar censuses of the blind and the deaf living in the provinces of the Russian Republic were incomplete. In addition, the two societies had major reasons for twisting numbers in their correspondence with the higher state authorities. Finally, these figures did not consider the many cases in which blindness, deafness, injuries to the spine, and loss of limbs occurred together. Beyond their truthfulness, however, these data are still historically significant in at least two respects. First, they reveal the emergence in the 1940s of a newly recognized cohort of blind and deaf individuals-the so-called war blind (voennooslepshie) and war deaf (voennooglokhshie). Second, they show that war-induced impairments were measured in the same way as congenital

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Figure 6.01. Blinded and Deafened Soldiers of the Second World War Total number

War blind 15,394

Percentage of the totality of wounded soldiers

Percentage of the invalids of the 1st cat.

1.4

84.9

0.4

10.4

(out of 78,839 blind)

War deaf

3,137 (out of 106,772 dea~

Source: GARF,f.413, d. 347,1. 20; d. 1195,ll. 2, 10,and 27; d.1480,l.2; d.1481,ll. 5-7; Ia.D. Grossman,"Problemy mediko-sanitarnogo obsluzhivaniia invalidov otechstvennoi voiny;' in Sanitarnye pos/edstviia voiny, 89-116.

and work-related handicaps; that is, in terms of remaining working ability. Acquired blindness, in particular, appeared to have a highly labor-incapacitating nature. As such, it was perceived as a significant facet of the postwar social and public health crisis. Together with "gynecologycally sick'' women and "psychically sick'' children, the war blind made palpable the weight of suffering and compelled activists and authorities to reconceptualize the relationship between contribution and need as the two key categories legitimizing the right to be helped in the Soviet moral order. While the problems of war-deafened soldiers did not seem to receive special attention among activists and social workers, 102 help to blinded veterans had been raised as an important issue already during the SovietFinnish war of 1939-1940. At that time, a Military-Medical Commission of the Leningrad Military District established a close collaboration with the Department of Defectology of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute and strove to provide specialized assistance to this population. The rehabilitation and welfare plan put together by these two agencies was in line with the understanding of help as job placement that had hitherto been sustained by both the Society of the Blind and the Commissariat of Social Assistance. It entailed the teaching of the Braille alphabet and other retraining activities aimed at quickly returning blinded veterans to productive labor. It also foresaw the organization of special residential institutions where blinded veterans could go after treatment in the military hospitals and mandated the provision of independent housing for those men who had families. 103 Following the German invasion in the summer of 1941, assistance to blinded soldiers acquired even more urgency. Documents drafted jointly

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by the Central Military Department of Health Care and the Commissariat of Social Assistance in August -September 1941 mandated immediate and maximal outreach to this category of wounded servicemen. "All their needs, all their demands ... we need to solve them before they ask for their resolution;' stated a representative of the social assistance agency. 104 Local cells of the Society of the Blind were required to get in touch with military hospitals and reach out to every single soldier who had lost his sight in battle. Yet, despite this urgency, relief policy for the blind remained consistent with the prewar period's narrow workfare understanding of state assistance. Throughout the war, circular letters issued by the Commissariat of Social Assistance recommended training the newly blind in simple manual jobs in accordance with the demands of the labor market. 105 "To recover their health and to return them to work'' were confirmed as social policy priorities vis-a-vis this group of disabled people in a directive of the Russian Council of Ministers dated April30, 1946. 106 Some blind activists, however, argued that work with the war blind should entail a new form of social assistance, radically different from the activities hitherto conducted among the society's ordinary members. As they stated at a Plenary Meeting in October 1943, the key novelty of help to blinded veterans was to be the "affection'' with which social activists approached the "new comrades:' Only a loving and caring atmosphere, commented one activist, "would immediately turn them away from self-destruction ... and toward a new style of life:' 107 These activists did not dispute the old lore that help to the blind was motivated by their loss of working abilities and consisted in the acquisition of new vocational skills. For instance, Ivan Fedorovich Glazykin, the chairman of the Moscow city section of the Society of the Blind, stated that "because our comrades lost one sense, which is fundamental for working ... and because they need to acquire a trade, it is necessary to organize help for them:' 108 But now the passage from ablebodied-ness to blindness was also recognized as a very painful psychological process during which the newly blinded person needed not only work but also "affection'' and comradeship. As a blinded veteran-turned-activist put it: "I know it from my own experience. I suffered not one but many years. Yet, finally, thanks to the fact that I felt I was among comrades ... I could go from a seeing style of life to a non-seeing one:' 109 Emblematic of the new humane and psychological dimension of postwar blind advocacy was the attention that some activists began to pay to the theme of sexuality. While family life was never discussed as a significant issue in the Society of the Blind's debates of the 1930s, during the war and in

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the immediate postwar years several members brought marriage and family to the fore, frequently discussing sexual relations as an important source of happiness for young blind men. Married blinded veterans were very worried; experience was showing that the acquisition of blindness during military service caused romantic unions to fall apart. Unmarried veterans were concerned too. As the war blinded Aleksandr Fedorovich Malyshev would later recount in his memoirs: "Many are ashamed of their injury and believe that it is impossible to meet a woman in these conditions:'uo In 1943, a member of the Society of the Blind cheered up his fellow activists by saying, "Many comrades are getting married. This, in reality, has nothing to do with our debate. However, when a comrade builds a family, he does not care anymore about his blindness and becomes active:' 111 The "debate" to which the activist referred was a conversation on how blind men's return to the labor force would also mean a resurgence in their happiness. The comment on "getting married" reveals the new priorities of blind activism: blind men should stop being worried about their disability and simply find a job and a spouse. As Juliane Furst has noted, while in the 1920s sexual love had been a battlefield "where different visions of revolutionary society struggled with each other;' by the 1940s romantic love "was accepted as a given .... No radical voices demanded either complete sublimation of one's emotions to the Revolution or sexual liberation in the name of revolutionary iconoclasm:' 112 For blind activists too, intimate relationships emerged as a fully legitimate desire-provided that these relationships did not lead blinded veterans astray into an exclusive private life. This set of aspirations (to find a job and then get married) was informed not only by economic rationality, but also by the idea that true emotional power rested in the sphere of labor. According to the socialist framework of thought, work gave rise to myriad emotional experiences and led workers to feel "genuine attachment" toward their working collectives, because the latter provided social opportunities alongside food, housing, and medical care. 113 Indeed, the postwar activists of the Society of the Blind contended that together with professional rehabilitation blinded veterans would recover also "the capacity to laugh, joke, enjoY:' 114 In their postwar writings, they used the phrase "feeling alive" very frequently. Often, they paired together the verbs zhit' (to live) and trudit'sia (to work), as a slogan that-despite its vagueness-created a sense of unity and homology. At times, the word trudoustroistvo (job situation or job placement) was replaced by the term zhizneustroistvo (life situation or, literally, placement in life). 115 This semantic turn further indicates that work was not merely an economic activity,

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but rather an emotional experience that (especially for young men) shaped personal identity. It is important to understand, however, that the emotional regime evoked by blind activists in the 1940s was not subversive or threatening to the emotions set up by official Soviet culture. While it recentered the personal, the blind activists' emotional regime continued to operate within a strictly defined and normalizing framework that was set by the able-bodied of Soviet society. 116 The idea that the war blinded had the right to be happy both in the professional and private realms of their lives was the central theme of a 1946 best seller titled The Return of the Blinded to Professional Life. Its author was the well-known ophthalmologist Boris Ignat'evich Kovalenko (1890-1969). A defectologist by training, Kovalenko had worked first with children with learning disabilities and then with the morally defective children of a labor colony for underage criminals. When he became blind in 1921, Kovalenko continued to work in the field of defectology but turned his attention to the issue of blindness. It is at this point that he specialized in teaching the blind and began to work with blind children in Smolensk. In 1929, he became director of the Department of Tiflopedagogy of the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad and, after the war, was promoted to the position of chairman of the Department of Defectology in the same institute. 117 In the book The Return of the Blinded to Professional Life, this accomplished scholar addressed a popular audience. He explained that, although the loss of sight was a tragic event that profoundly affected any man or woman who experienced it, there was no reason to regard blind individuals as persons permanently excluded from the ranks of life. As we know, Soviet blind activists had pushed this argument since their society's foundation (see chapter 3). Precisely twenty years earlier, in 1926, this point had also been emphasized by the ophthalmologist Sergei Golovin in his book The Contemporary State of Social Help to the Blind (see chapter 4). But in 1946, after the exclusionary policies of the 1930s and the devastation of the war, it seemed that the claim about blind people's social integration needed to be advanced yet again. It also seemed that this argument needed to be requalified in reference to the new conditions of Soviet life and in relation to the large new cohort of blinded veterans. (Indeed, Kovalenko wrote about help to "the blinded" rather than to the general "blind"). Moving away from the obsessive focus on production quotas and the imperative for the blind to fulfill them in order to be considered as equals, Kovalenko again mobilized modern science and used it to rehumanize labor. He insisted that specialized pedagogical methods and technologies of rehabilitation replace social

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fears, prejudices, and mistrust in approaching blinded veterans. Thanks to ophthalmology and specialized techniques of teaching, averred Kovalenko, the blind could study and work "as equals with the visually unimpaired;' and this provided for a "valuable life:' 118 In the footsteps of Golovin and the other defectologists of the 1920s, Kovalenko celebrated labor not as a value in itself or merely in view of an economic necessity, but rather as a means that made human life worth living. Based on Kovalenko's own experience of life as a blind man and on his work with blinded veterans, The Return of the Blinded to Professional Life offered the blueprint for a practice of help that strove to heal ex-servicemen's psychophysical pain and return them to joyful labor. According to this program, help to blinded soldiers began in the military hospitals where an army of doctors, nurses, specialized pedagogues, activists from the Society of the Blind, and ordinary blind civilians provided "medical therapy to the damaged eye" and "help to the man who had become blind:' 119 Specialists and activists were supposed to involve the blinded soldiers in "conversations" that focused on the educational and professional opportunities still available to them. These "conversations" had the main goal of dissuading blinded veterans from engaging in begging, not so much because charity would have been in the end useless to solve their economic problems, but above all because this practice would have led them to apathy and fatalism. 120 As in the case of "traumatized" children and "frightened" single mothers, the communicative approach entailed in the conversations with the war blind had a definite psychotherapeutic ring. These talks were not supposed to be "interrogations" causing further traumas in the blind, but rather inspirational chats that infused courage and gave moral support to otherwise depressed and withdrawn patients. "Sensitive and tactful" pedagogues helped former soldiers mobilize all their energies to fight against the consequences of blindness. They avoided creating false hopes for the reacquisition of vision: "The war blinded should know the truth in order to step on the right path;' wrote Kovalenko. 121 And yet, the truth was revealed gradually: at each new meeting, the doctor talked about the loss of sight in a more definite manner, carefully selecting his words and employing the right intonation. "Avoid hurried talk;' recommended Kovalenko, "and rather wait for the reactions and answers of the blind man; pay attention to his face:' 122 What brought joy to the blind or, on the contrary, worried and displeased them, their desire to see, and all their emotions were given great consideration. Feelings such as "deep humiliation;' "anxiety;' "desperation;' "hopelessness;' "self-pity;' and'"shyness" were to be overcome because they provoked only

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"fruitless, sad thoughts" -and, I would add, because they were inappropriate for the imagined Soviet reality. Instead, a properly conducted conversation was supposed to encourage self-confidence. As social worker Muratov from the Commissariat of Social Assistance had stated at the October 1943 meeting of the Society of the Blind: "In the military hospitals the war blinded ... must receive the message that they are not lost men:' And a blind activist had immediately echoed, The comrades must understand that they are not dead people, that in the Soviet state everybody ... is a worthy individual. ... Say it loud that you are not lost people, that you are the best people, useful to the country. 123 In her study of late Stalinist youth, Juliane Furst has remarked that many adolescents in the postwar years "perceived a lack of usefulness as equivalent to social death:' 124 Physical disability definitely heightened young people's doubts about their usefulness to the collective and made their search for participation in Soviet life even more difficult. Thus, Kovalenko preached to his patients: ''A man is a man not because he sees, but because he is able to grow culturally, work, and be useful to society. Although this is more difficult for the blind, it is absolutely possible:' 125 With its load of intense frightening experiences, the war was compelling various activists to account not only for productive labor, but also for affect and psychology when they designed their social assistance programs. At the same time, however, emotive responses to the tragedy of disability were not to be displayed for a long time. Under the supervision of doctors and activists, fear was to be managed and the inward Self of the disabled was to be reintegrated into the social fabric. After discharge from the military hospitals, the war blinded usually went to boarding homes for the disabled, to special residencies and sanatoria for the blind, or back to their families. If admitted to a state facility, the war blinded were automatically granted access to further medical services, clothes, meals, and 25 percent of the social assistance pension to which they were entitled (the rest would either go to their dependents or, more frequently, be withheld by the Commissariat of Social Assistance). 126 Kovalenko, however, recommended that the local social assistance agencies admit to facilities of institutional care only those rare blinded individuals who could neither go back to their old jobs nor be retrained. In his opinion, the homes and sanatoria for the disabled were dangerous places: they imposed a regime of forced inaction, and this was the primary enemy of every blind

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person. Those who started with "rest" frequently turned into "invalids" who would require constant care and be painfully dissatisfied with their lives. "This happens;' wrote Kovalenko, "because [the shelters] do not create the conditions for work, which [the war blinded] need above all:' 127 According to Kovalenko's daughter (who frequently assisted him in his work with the war blinded), her father considered it crucial that each blind veteran work at his full potential, without discount for his disability: "Otherwise people go to pieces, gradually become wrapped in the mold of 'invalidism; lose faith in their strengths, [and] begin to expect and demand 'concessions for their blindness:" 128 To facilitate professional requalification according to this philosophy, Kovalenko organized special rehabilitation courses for blinded veterans first in Leningrad and then in Perm', where he and other defectologists were evacuated in the fall of 1941. Kovalenko's program ran for five years, was attended by approximately three hundred blinded veterans coming from different parts of the Soviet Union, and conferred degrees of completion upon eighty-six of them. The students admitted to the courses were entitled to a stipend of 225 rubles on top of their disability pensions. They were also granted housing in the dormitory of the Perm' Pedagogical Institute and had access to its canteen. In principle, Kovalenko's courses had the goal of preparing the war blinded for admission into institutes of higher education. In fact, they strove above all to restore the psychological balance that blinded men needed to resume productive and personally fulfilling lives. Besides literacy in Braille and the acquisition of a solid general education, great significance was attributed to independent spatial orientation and personal care. 129 Time and again, these skills were believed to be absolutely necessary for the blind not only in order to find a job but, most importantly, to prevent feelings of helplessness and physical vulnerability, to be autonomous in everyday life, and to grow intellectually. As the program's graduate Aleksandr Malyshev recalled in his memoirs, A desperate, wounded man started the courses by learning to walk independently on the streets and finished them as a self-confident, composed person, who oriented himself well not only around the city but also in life, among other people. 130 While the postwar understanding of blinded veterans' right to be helped certainly emphasized their suffering, it also strove to avoid their further marginalization and disabling. "As soon as they convince themselves that

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they are not helpless, not desperately lost:' averred the activist Shisha in 1943, the war blinded "immediately acquire authority" and become carriers of culturedness to the collective farms and the factories. 131 As the activist Sysoev put it, the war blinded "are the best men in the factory.... With weapons in their hands they defended our country. In the same manner, they provide examples of labor enthusiasm:' 132 And the chairman of the Tatar section of the Society of the Blind, Khamidulin, echoed: "There are [former] political workers and commanders among the war blinded. Now that they have become blind, they cannot be commanders anymore, but they can be lawyers:' 133 Having risked their lives for the fatherland and returned blind from the front, the new postwar cohort of blind activists felt entitled to a prominent place in the economy of the country and in the consciousness of the people. 134 Soviet social activists kept repeating that "in the Soviet state, everybody ... is a valuable person ... with the right to have a place in life:' 135 When they felt deprived of this right, they loudly protested: "What about us? Are we only stepchildren? ... Don't we also need those rights that are given to all citizens?" 136 These questions received an official answer in 1949, when the Deputy Minister of Social Assistance, Nyrkov, declared, In our country, the blind is a citizen with full legal rights. Our state destroyed the century-long representation of the blind as oppressed and useless people, as a burden for humanity.... Our country has created unlimited opportunities for employing the creative energies and intellectual abilities of those who have lost their sight. 137 These words should not sound particularly surprising: Soviet authorities had made declarations about disabled people's equality of rights and opportunities since the Revolution of 1917. What sounded new was that Nyrkov suggested measuring inclusion not only by looking at job placement data, but also by asking whether the life of the blind had attained stability after the disruptions of the war. 138 Both victims and heroes, emotionally vulnerable and resourceful, sufferers and contributors, impaired but still strong and skillful, blinded veterans embodied the much-searched-for balance between labor and need in legitimizing the right to state help in the Soviet moral order. Unlike the "gynecologycally sick'' woman and the "psychically sick'' child, the "war blind" was an Other who could be entitled to help without being pathologized and completely deprived of the ability to act. This discourse and practice of

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help tapped into the most humane and emancipatory sides of the socialist ethos of work and the doctrine of social rights. It provided a terrain on which to cultivate again socialism's moral legitimacy after the repressive social policies of the 1930s and the atrocities of the war. However, this articulation of the right to be helped was not devoid of ambiguities. It was crafted for a particular type of subject and foresaw a trajectory of suffering, healing, and reintegration that closely bound his rights with pliancy to labor discipline and political loyalty. The postwar period's ideally entitled Other was a young and male individual who had received education and vocational training as an able-bodied person in peacetime, then acquired both blindness and special merit during the war, and finally joined the active ranks of the Society of the Blind. There, he received a job, moral support and friendship, as well as political and cultural enlightenment; he was involved in various art circles; and even took occasional trips to sanatoria and tourist resorts. The advent of blindness for this specific subject was portrayed as a great tragedy, which had derailed him from his upright life path and which he could overcome through discipline, hard work, endurance, steadfastness, and resilience of body and spirit. In sum, after the Second World War, the cost of service legitimized social rights for those who had laid down their able-bodied-ness in acts of military bravery. Unfortunately, this meant that the rights of war invalids were prioritized over the rights of other kinds of impaired bodies: men who were born with disabilities or had acquired them in nonmilitary and non-workrelated circumstances; all blind women, elderly people, and children; as well as the many disabled young men who did not correspond to the image of the hero devoted to the fatherland. These other disabled were forced to live in the shadow of the exemplary blinded veterans. They ended up having less room in the postwar period for adding their voices and uttering their own experiences of bodily dismemberment and marginalization.

6.4. Stubbornly Deviant Subjects In contrast to the ideal entitled subject and the ideal trajectory of help imagined by social activists, the Soviet Union in the 1940s was crowded with homeless, poor, and disabled people who were neither properly requalified nor hired or assisted according to the specifications of the welfare agencies. Some of them were assigned low-skill and miserably paid jobs, but most were simply left to their own devices. Unable to conform to the

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requirements of the workplace and unhappy with run-down working dormitories, many unemployed men and women of the postwar period chose "an exit option'' -in Svetlana Stephenson's words. 139 They went out on the road and looked for opportunities in the unregulated informal economy, where they survived by begging, selling postcards, fortune-telling, singing, playing the accordion, or prostituting themselves. Despite the Soviet government's promises and the intentions of well-meaning activists, these men and women lived an everyday reality of impoverishment, disenfranchisement, and neglect. They constituted a mass of not only suffering but also potentially disgruntled and certainly disorderly people who lived outside the state's field of vision and care. Their ways of life were dangerous under Stalinism. In chapter 5, we have observed this phenomenon in relation to the 1930s, when unemployed and homeless people were penalized for violating the passport regime or for begging and parasitism. As other scholars have shown, in 1951 the Soviet state initiated a new large and systematic campaign against all "parasites:'' 40 However, in the years between 1943 and 1950, life courses that deviated from the norm were generally addressed through a more lenient approach. For instance, while in 1940 the Moscow section of the Society of the Blind had reported to the police a number of begging blind, in 1943 the chairman of the Tambov section of the Society of the Deaf argued that the activists' duty was "to care" for such unemployed invalidy. As he stated, "The [nonworking] deaf-mute is one of us, and we should not turn him in to other agencies, such as the police:' 141 This deaf activist from Tambov was not an exception in pitching care over control during wartime and in the immediate postwar years. As we have seen in the preceding sections, the activist Sofiia Kopelianskaia, the child psychiatrist Gruniia Sukhareva, and the blind ophthalmologist Boris Kovalenko were similarly urging social workers to avoid assuming investigative functions vis-a-vis the targets of their social programs. But how could they help the many Soviet men and women who stubbornly escaped legibility and chose to remain deviant despite the state's efforts at transforming them? Indeed, keeping count of the Soviet disabled and recruiting them into the official organizations of Soviet help was not as easy as it seemed. When the social worker Muratov counted between 6,000 and 8,000 war blinded individuals in October 1943, he also admitted that the Society of the Blind was able to recruit only 1,543 of them and place on the job around 12 percent of those. As he laconically commented, "We don't know where the other invalids of the patriotic war are and what the

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war blinded do:' 142 The recruitment and job placement statistics reported for 1949 were slightly better but still revealed the large number of blind people unwilling (or unable) to fit with the activists' idea of blind subjectivity. According to the numbers presented in figure 6.02, around 51 percent of the identified blind were members of the All-Russian Society of the Blind. However, this information does not reflect the imbalance between Moscow and the rest of the country when it came to issues of recruitment. While in 1949 the Moscow section boasted 3,086 members out of 3,250 identified blind, in the provinces of Chuva, Tambov, and Penza the percentage of blind people recruited by the Society of the Blind was as low as 17-22 percent. 143 Things did not look better for the Society of the Deaf, which in 1943 estimated that around 3,000 deaf lived in Moscow, but only 1,433 were members while the others were "left out of sight and not involved in labor:' 144 In 1949, some activists complained that the deaf living in the countryside were unwilling to become members because, in their opinion, membership in the Society of the Deaf did not offer any benefit. The Society had by then recruited only 56 percent of the estimated deaf people living in Russia. 145 Local social assistance workers often lamented that the unemployed and disabled people of their regions "do not settle;' preferring to freely move around the country. As one administrator wrote around 1943-1944:

Figure 6.02. Recruitment and Job Placement Statistics of the Society of the Blind in 1949 Total

War blinded

Identified

71,605

14,542

Members

37,519

9,200

Placed on the job

28,886

n/a

4,198

n/a

448

n/a

Stakhanovites Activists

Source: GARF, f. 413, o.1, d. 1480, l. 2 and 4; d.ll95, 11.2-3, 10, and 13; d. 1754,11. 1-16 and 54.

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We must put an end to these volatile job-changers (letuny), who flit not only from one enterprise to the other, but also from one corner of the Soviet Union to the other.... They tour dozens of cities and walk into dozens of [social assistance] sections making all kinds of trouble .... We must stop these people who move from one boarding home to another within one province and throughout the Soviet Union, alone or with their entire families. 146 In a report drafted in July 1944, T. P. Semenova and V. P. Tubanov, inspectors of the executive committee of Omsk province, wrote about the war disabled: "They come, they demand, they receive:' No census was kept of them, no vocational retraining and no job placement were offered to them. 147 The Minister of the Interior S. N. Kruglov confirmed this situation in a letter dated June 8, 1946, to Beria. Kruglov explained that, in the city of Moscow, many blind and deaf people, women with small children, and vagrant teenagers undertook begging because they found themselves in extreme material need. When the police arrested them, they sent these vagrants to the agencies of social assistance. However, as Kruglov wrote, "having received a voucher to a home for invalids and money for . the train ticket, they never go to these homes and continue to practice begging:' 148 Russian memoirs and fictional literature about the postwar period are also filled with images of"samovars" (as mobility-impaired men were colloquially called at that time) asking for alms in markets and train stations. In the novel Dreams of My Russian Summers, Andrei Makine thus recounts his grandmother's encounter with a group of disabled veterans in 1947: A man without legs, installed in a kind of box on wheels, advanced toward her, his one arm outstretched. "Now then, my lovely, spare a little ruble for the invalid:' ... The outskirts of the market were swarming with disabled soldiers-with these "samovars:' Trundling along in their boxes, some equipped with little wheels with rubber tires, some with simple ball bearings, they confronted people at the exit, asking them for money or tobacco. Some people gave, some hurried past, yet others let fly a curse, adding in reproving tones, "The state supports you already.... Shame on you!" 149 The narrator also reports that these young men on makeshift wheelchairs were "visibly drunk" and had "slightly mad eyes:' They disrupted the social order with their "shouting and brawling:' They were brutal and aggressive

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to each other and bitter toward the able-bodied. In reality, they fought "to be revenged on life;' but in the process they disoriented and scared uneasy passersby. As the protagonist's grandmother further comments: "People prefer a soldier either to be gallant and smiling or else ... dead on the field of honor:' 150 The above evidence illuminates several points. First, the authorities' intention in the mid -1940s was not so much to arrest and punish, but rather to provide some orderly relief to a motley mass of needy subjects. Second, in the eyes of a war-weary population, crippled young veterans were a nuisance at best and a parasitical presence at worst, harassing passersby and exploiting the support of a benevolent state. Third, the supposed targets of the state's benevolence could have very different ideas on how to use or reject the social policies designed for them. One example of invalidy's defection of the state's help in the 1940s was the refusal to undergo regular medical visits. As we know, examination by the medical expert commissions was required in order to maintain disability status and the related rights to assistance. But we also know that these commissions operated arbitrarily, and that their decisions could bring additional hardship into already very difficult lives (as we saw happen to a disabled man from Omsk in chapter 5). Avoiding the required medical examinations with a series of excuses, deviant citizens made clear choices about what they believed was in their best interest. For instance, in 1944, the invalidy of the second category I. P. Chizhov and I. A. Dudkin explained that they could not keep their appointments with the medical expert commissions because they were traveling. Likewise, L. G. Fokin delayed his reexamination for a period of five months because-as he declared-he was busy delivering foodstuffs to the market. When the medical expert commission of Moscow province went to visit A. M. Turin and A. I. Shustikov in their homes, the two disabled men were not to be found; neighbors said that they had gone to the nearby village to trade. 151 Questioned by the social workers on the reasons for their avoidance of the medical expert commissions, other disabled simply explained that they did not have any time for cumbersome examinations. Indeed, the entire procedure required staying in line to register for the examination and then going back and forth to the commissions' offices several times before actually being visited by a doctor. A certain Lebedev from the town of Perovo (in Moscow province) declared that he had gone to the local commission's office on April 27, 1944, and had been ordered to come back on July 1. When he went again on that date, he was asked to come back on July 5 and only on that date was he finally examined. 152 The waiting

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time could be up to one month in Ivanov province. 153 Furthermore, anybody going to the medical expert commissions needed to have a referral from his/ her family doctor. But, again, in order to receive the referral, a person had to waste one or two days in the polyclinic or the doctor's ambulatory. Most paradoxically, in Omsk province, the local medical examination office charged money for its services! 154 If the medical expert commissions were arbitrary and unpredictable, why should have people with disabilities approached them systematically and seriously? Female unemployed invalidy of the third category preferred to avoid medical examination, renounce the feeble chance of being assigned a disability pension, and rather apply for rations (paek) as dependents. 155 Male invalidy of the second category often decided not to undergo reexamination because they were afraid that they would receive the third category and be forced to work. By refusing to be reexamined, they attempted to fall outside the reach of the Commissariat of Social Assistance, while at the same time preserving their documents of invalidity. In addition, this stance allowed them to retain the right to change their minds and turn to the state for help when they (not the authorities above them) desired to do so. One telling example is I. M. Alekseev, from the town of Pushkino in Moscow province. This man underwent medical examination in July 1943 and received the third category for a period of three months, after which he was supposed to be visited again. He went to the office of social assistance only one year later, in June 1944. At that point, he was asked why he had not undergone the examination when he had been supposed to and what he had done for a living. Alekseev answered that he had sold used shoes in the market, a job that allowed him to make up to 400 rubles a day. He had also worked as farmhand in private vegetable gardens and plots of land. However, in the summer of 1944 he had decided to present himself at the offices of social assistance because, as he stated, "this free life (volynka)" had bored him and now he wanted to have a stable form of employment. The archival record does not reveal whether Alekseev was successful in obtaining a job. 156 In 1949, the director of a production-training workshop for the blind in the town of Ivanovsk contended that "the invalids of the first and second categories don't want to work:' 157 We have no way to know whether this was a flimsy argument to justify discriminatory hiring politics or a reflection of disabled people's desires for mobility, freedom, and better jobs. On one hand, there is evidence that enterprise managers and local social assistance workers continued to disregard the right to work of people with disabilities. On the other hand, if we consider that the average monthly salary of a blind

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person working in a production-training workshop in 1950 was around 330 rubles per month (as compared to the able-bodied average wage of 650 rubles) and that their working and housing conditions were quite miserable, it seems plausible that many blind people chose to trade privately or beg for a living instead of being stably employed in the formal economy. 158 Thus, when asked if he wanted to be involved in "productive work;' a disabled man called A. P. Burtsev declared that he did not work and would never work. 159 Of course, these statements must be approached critically. Rather than simply indicating people's desires, they reveal the anxieties of those who questioned them and recorded their answers. As Paula Michaels has remarked in relation to Soviet medical records about birthing women, it was the doctors who "chose what questions to ask, judged the value of the answers, and balanced women's evaluations against physician observations:' Similarly, in recording unemployed people's testimonies, social activists too "served as arbiters" of their experiences. Like the physicians discussed by Michaels, they crafted assessments for official reports (otchety) to which deviant citizens had no access. 160 Yet, this filtered and anecdotal evidence also suggests that the marginalized and socially stigmatized "others" of Soviet society exercised agency in relation to their social rights. They pushed for their understanding of the right to be helped by describing individual experiences of poverty and disability in their letters to power. They also asserted authority over their bodies and lives with their everyday pragmatic choices. We must also recognize that renouncing free mobility and taking residence in a state facility did not necessarily mean embracing the socialist work ethic and the tight regime of discipline that came with institutionalized care in the Soviet Union. For instance, while the memoirs composed by some of Kovalenko's students testify to blinded veterans' conscientious labor, the archival record reveals that striving overachievers were a minority among them. It is telling that the courses' pedagogical council frequently recommended supervision of the war blinded. At a meeting on October 1, 1941, Kovalenko himself complained about "some cases of infraction of work discipline:' He wrote about blind veterans who skipped classes, were late, did not do the homework, refused to participate in class discussions, or simply dropped out and went back to their homes. 161 Reading the unpublished notes preserved in Perm' in the archive of the courses' graduate Aleksandr Malyshev, we encounter references to "hooliganism and debauchery" as well as the confession that "not all our comrades have distinguished themselves by their loyalty:' 162 G. N. Vishnev had serious problems studying and was caught cheating several times; V. F. Omel'ianenko

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was expelled from the courses because he failed various exams and missed 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 he went to the bathhouse instead of going to classes. 163 In January 1943, Kovalenko complained that some students were interested neither in socialist competitions nor in trade unions or youth organizations: they worked little and only if forced to. 164 Some veterans disagreed with Kovalenko's principled view that the blind should not receive economic assistance on grounds of their blindness. 165 Finally, in the fall of 1942, a group of ten blind students expressed doubts concerning the real advantages for the blind in completing a professional requalification course. They decided that it would be better for them to become musicians, because it would allow them to perform for money on the streets. 166 Blind men who enjoyed the bathhouse more than difficult requalification classes or who desired to play the accordion in a public market instead of becoming history teachers were deviant subjects. They deviated from the position of the striving invalid that the activists were attempting to define for them within Soviet society. Certainly, blind musicians cheering up the soldiers at the front were celebrated by the Soviet state as war heroes. 167 It is also true that the Commissariat of Social Assistance organized special schools for blinded veterans to become professional performers. 168 However, Kovalenko claimed that music was a "backward tendency" and a "disorganizing influence" whenever it tempted the blind to make a living by performing for alms. 169 In other words, when music was not tied to patriotism, education, and joy in collective work, it became as negative as the bathhouse: it represented a dark, irrational, and destructive choice, because it challenged the activists' bid to integrate the blind into the fabric of an imagined community of disciplined and hardworking Soviet subjects. Thus, although the postwar discourse and practice of help advanced by the Society of the Blind was not narrowly medical, it still focused on the bodies and psyches of disabled men as objects of correction. What the blinded students of Kovalenko's courses were able to do, and how they felt, was not supposed to be their own choice. When these blinded former soldiers sought different paths to entitlement and empowerment, activists responded with increased discipline. The heroes of the front could easily become outcasts and, indeed, Kovalenko expelled "the musicians" from the dormitory when they defied his influence and threatened to seduce the other students into nonconformist activities. The blind activist Glazykin, who in 1943 had loudly proclaimed blind people's rights to state help, had also specified that only a

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closely managed form of assistance would return the war blinded to lives of value. 170 All these social activists made rights conditional on the willingness to conform to a certain norm of respectable deviant subjectivity. Time and again, the right to be helped was intrinsically bound up with forms of control that channeled individual aspirations and streamlined them according to the demands of the state and the larger society of the "normals:'

••• This chapter has shown that in the years between 1941 and 1950 less coercive policies were relaunched to realize the social rights of Soviet deviant subjects. Underlying their right to be helped now were both humanitarian horror in the face of wartime devastation and the demands of demographic, economic, and social reconstruction. Postwar social activists emphasized not only the socioeconomic entitlements of those they assisted but also their affective needs, seeking more humane ways to respond to personal and social distress after the traumas of the war. And yet, together with this renewed moral thrust, the postwar right to be helped was also animated by the political urge to replenish the labor force, bridle social mobility, and reestablish strict controls. Indeed, postwar social activists aimed at preserving order rather than achieving change. They wondered how to reconcile the individual desires of the Soviet deviants with their subjugation to constituted authority. Concluding that adherence to duties and norms guaranteed the rightful order that made personal happiness possible, they largely aligned individual rights with the state's goal of rapid recovery and with the celebration of loyal and hard-working subjectivities. In the end, while the great suffering of the war made it easier to redeem various deviant subjects from the accusation of anti -Sovietness, labor still underpinned their access to state help. Unemployed and unmarried mothers, children who behaved differently, and men with labor-incapacitating impairments were firmly kept in subordinated positions. Their right to be helped was more positively affirmed in late Stalinism than in the 1930s, but it was also clearly inscribed within normative narratives and subject positions defined by gender, ablebodied-ness, labor, and discipline. While reconstruction in other postwar European countries entailed breaking with the past and searching for a new legitimacy, in the Soviet Union it meant above all a "return to normalcy" -to use Sheila Fitzpatrick's phrase. 171 As we have seen in this chapter, Soviet gynecologists' discussions about the diseases that weakened women's reproductive systems and the

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psychiatrists' research on the traumas that shattered children's nerves did not spell criticism of the socialist system. Similarly, when disability activists highlighted the economic rights and the emotional needs of blinded veterans, they did not denounce the total ineffectiveness of the Soviet postwar social policies. None of the activists we have encountered in this chapter wished to undermine the moral legitimacy of Soviet socialism. Rather, they strove to confirm and revamp it. Their efforts were aimed at reaffirming a moral order that had gone astray with the excesses of the 1930s and the atrocities of the war. At the same time, the moral legitimacy of Soviet socialism had never existed in a vacuum, but always in relation to the competing morality of the West. As we will see in the epilogue, changes in the European and global moral order after the Second World War created new dilemmas for Soviet definitions of social rights and the mandate to preserve the supposed moral superiority of socialism.

EPILOGUE

THE RIVALRY WITH THE WEST AND THE SOVIET MORAL ORDER

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N DEC EM BE R 1 9 4 9, in a "Note on the elaboration of a unitary law on pensioning;' Minister of Social Assistance Aleksei Sukhov called for a reform of the pensioning rights of all Soviet uninsured citizens. 1 His "Note" set off a process of change in the field of social protection that would coalesce in 1956 with the extensive reforms of welfare, health, education, and housing introduced by Nikita Khrushchev. This process of change led to a few legislative and conceptual innovations, but it did not alter the distinctive features of the right to be helped that we have observed in this book. It is with a brief analysis of the debates over social rights during this time of change and with a glance ahead at social rights in late socialism up to Gorbachev's perestroika that I wish to conclude my account of the Soviet right to be helped. This final discussion serves two functions. First, by situating the changes of the early 1950s in the broader European framework of the "welfare state" and the global context of attitudes toward human rights, I wish to remind us that the rivalry with the West was one of the most significant points of origin of Soviet notions of rights. Second, by indicating some important continuities in the socialist framework for understanding the rights of deviant citizens, I invite readers to reflect on the allegiance to the moral order of socialism across political and chronological boundaries.

Social Rights and the Moral Rivalry with Capitalism In the Soviet Union, the debate over social rights always took place with an eye on the West. As we have seen in chapter 1, since the very aftermath of the Revolution, the Bolshevik government had proclaimed social equality within a structure that guaranteed access to a regulated system of welfare. Instead of the condescension and stigma of private charity, Soviet social assistance was supposed to provide emancipation to all suffering citizens

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who strove to transform their deviant Selves through productive work. Throughout the Stalinist years, Party leaders kept touting the Soviet welfare system as a beacon of progress, justice, and humanity. The right to be helped, Party propaganda averred, was the positive feature that distinguished Soviet socialism from any other political order in the world. On their part, social activists echoed this claim and emphasized the superiority of the Soviet conception of rights over the capitalist one. As a member of the Society of the Deaf stated in a 1928 article on the Prague International Congress of the Deaf-Mute, "The rights of the deaf-mute are limited on that side of the border:' but "in the USSR they are not limited by anything or anybodY:' 2 In the "imperialist countries;' agreed a certain Professor Fink in 1935, deaf people did not have any rights and led a miserable existence of begging and exploitation. In fact, added Fink, the "fascists" denied to the deaf even the right to exist. 3 Uninsured and unemployed petitioners, as we have seen in chapter 2, picked on this message too. They embedded it in their contingent experiences of suffering and measured against it the very legitimacy of the Soviet moral order. For instance, in 1935, the mother of a deaf girl called Valechka insisted that her daughter had the right to be raised as "a fit citizen of our socialist state and Fatherland, not as the backward half-idiots that grow up in the capitalist countries:' 4 Capitalism, in other words, functioned as a foil to socialism. While the former was "synonymous with world imperialism, the senseless slaughter of the First World War, goose-stepping militarism, and Great Depression unemployment;'s the latter held the promise of world peace, job security, and social justice for all. After the Second World War, however, the terms of comparison for the debate over social rights significantly changed. The unprecedented disarray caused by the war put pressure on several capitalist countries to formulate better social policies. It also led them to shift the meaning of welfare away from a corporatist contributory model toward increased concerns for citizens' well-being and egalitarianism. 6 In Britain, for instance, the Beveridge Plan of 1948 showed commitment to a national minimum level of social provision and strove to achieve it through an interconnected system of social insurance, social assistance, free health care, and full employment. France tended to adhere more firmly to a contributory insurance model grounded in occupationally based schemes and earnings-related benefits. Yet there too, the Director General of Social Security Pierre Laroque made efforts not only to extend social insurance, but also to change its fragmented patterns into a more unified model. Similarly, the Portuguese government attempted to rationalize its welfare system through reforms that strengthened central

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agencies, introduced a more uniform regulation, and linked insurance to the assistance and health sectors/ Governments across the continent chose different ways of implementation (from the liberal to the social democratic), but they all considered the new "welfare state" to be a fundamental element of the democratic order of postbellum Europe. 8 They were convinced that a more significant involvement of the state in issues of social protection would relegitimize the discredited nation-state while also preventing the reemergence of extreme-right movements and their manipulation of the economic consequences of the war. The bitter experience of the Depression, the growing mistrust in the market economy, and the fact that populations had been mobilized by the promise to receive social reform after the war were additional important factors leading to the emergence of the welfare state. In short, in the postwar context, it was vital for all European governments to persuade their citizens that a new age of peace was at hand and that social justice would be realized together with the reconstruction of cities, bodies, and psyches. 9 While these changes were occurring in Western Europe, the Soviet government was experiencing a range of serious difficulties. Domestically, as we have seen in chapter 6, the Soviet Union was desperately grappling with a mass of itinerants without fixed income, disabled veterans, traumatized orphans, and beggars and prostitutes displaced by the war. Internationally, the late 1940s saw the beginning of the Cold War and its struggle for the minds and the hearts of the people. In addition, after 1945 the Soviet Union was faced with the task of passing its paradigm of welfare over to the countries of Eastern Europe. 10 Against the improved welfare systems that the capitalist countries were offering to their citizens and the new challenges that troubled the Soviet government, the party propaganda machine found it increasingly difficult to spread a simple narrative of unique Soviet benevolence. However, the moral superiority of socialism continued to be pivotal to the self-identification of the Soviet state and therefore needed to be sustained at all costs in the eyes of both internal and external audiences. It was in light of this new rivalry with the West that the Soviet government undertook a reform of its own welfare system. In his 1949 "Note;' Minister Sukhov declared that it was absolutely necessary to curb the widespread illegality that had hitherto characterized the system of social assistance in the Russian Soviet Republic. In order to do so, he proposed to assign monetary help according to a more homogeneous and simplified scheme. As he wrote, "The sizes of the pensions for disability, old age, and loss of breadwinner must be established in the same percentage for all the categories of assisted

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individuals and correspond to the levels thus far applied to military personnel and their families:' In addition, Sukhov recommended identifying in the state budget-rather than in the local budgets-a unified source of financing for the payment of all pensions. 11 Prompted by the minister's "Note:' in 19 50 mid -level administrators in the local sections of the Ministry of Social Assistance began to streamline their pensioning departments and attempted to reduce confusion in the ways they assigned pensions to uninsured individualsY Likewise, in 1951, delegates at the First All-Russian Conference of Social Workers in the Field of Pensioning discussed how to implement the pensioning legislation in a more consistent manner. Echoing Sukhov, they came to the conclusion that the current laws had to be simplified and unified. They also requested the establishment of a special training system for social workers and the introduction into the Pensioning Department of a legal section staffed by juridically qualified personnel. 13 As we have seen in this book, both petitioners and bureaucrats had complained about the malfunctioning of social assistance throughout the early Soviet and Stalinist years. Their grievances concerning the squandering of resources, the lack of clarity in legislation, duplications and delays in the management of petitions, and various other infringements of legality had been a sort of background noise accompanying the workings of the Pensioning Department. Sometimes their complaints had led to the reevaluation of specific applications, but they had never prompted any systematic attempt at solving the structural problems plaguing the Soviet system of social assistance. In 1949-1950, however, this long-standing trickle of complaints combined with the pressure created by the new European landscape of welfare, pushing the Ministry of Social Assistance to take serious steps toward the unification of the existing array of piecemeal schemes. Thus inspired by domestic forces of change as much as by international developments in welfare, Sukhov's call for "legality" (zakonnost') would later be taken up by Khrushchev and turned into a keyword of his reform program. 14 Along with the beginning of the "welfare state;' another international trend of the late 1940s significantly informed changes in social policies and debates over social rights in the Soviet Union: the emergence of human rights as a global idiom of justice. First in 1944 with the Philadelphia Declaration issued by the International Labour Organization, and then in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, the idea of human rights articulated a dedication to social reform and justice on a global scale. Social rights now became inseparably united to human rights and brought into a form that was binding

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under international law. 15 These changes created new challenges for the Soviet Union and greatly threatened its bid for incontestable moral superiority in the realm of social rights. Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights entailed a new politicallanguage of global justice that was diametrically opposed to Soviet understandings of rights. As Elisabeth Borgwardt has written, the Declaration identified the autonomous individual "as the ultimate object of protection by the international community, with individuals in turn having responsibility to that communitY:' 16 This led to a new rights paradigm, which linked rights talk to individual (mostly political and civil) entitlements codified in international instruments. The Soviet Union, as we know, had a very different conception of rights, one that linked rights talk to collective social protections inextricably bound to the state and to the ideal of emancipation embodied by communism. 17 While the West defined human rights as universal (despite their origins in the political culture of the United States), the Soviet Union spoke of rights within a logic that could not transcend the socialist state as the exclusive guarantor of justice. It was precisely because of the differences between the Soviet understanding of social rights and the antagonistic political language introduced by the Universal Declaration that the Soviet delegates at the UN General Assembly abstained from supporting the final document. 18 From the pages of Pravda, Soviet political leaders expressed criticism of the "formal-juridical character" of the Western human rights project and claimed that it was ultimately incapable of realizing rights in practice. 19 However, the legitimizing power of the term "human'' in the 1948 Declaration was so strong that it could not simply be negated. The construct of human rights was so relevant to questions of moral legitimacy that the Soviet government needed to offer its own interpretation of it and, possibly, incorporate its moral force within the socialist conception of social protection. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Soviet Party ideologues as well as prominent professionals and social activists began to make increased use of terms such as "humaneness" (gumannost') and "humanism" (gumanizm) in order to foster positive change in Soviet social policy without derailing from the tracks of socialism. For instance, the well-known psychiatrist Vladimir N. Miasishchev opposed the "authentic humanism" of the "Soviet socialist society" to the emptiness of Western "declarations" about "human dignity" in these terms: Only in a society ... in which the recognition of human value is not a declaration hiding contempt for the human person but a real fact, only in that

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society can we have the widest opportunities for the authentic development of the self.... That society is the society of socialism, which has liberated man from the capitalist artifices and given him authentic human dignity. It is the Soviet socialist society, at the foundation of which is the noble idea of authentic humanism. 20 In other words, rights were the product of a very domestic socialist humanism, which Miasishchev and others construed as an alternative to Western ideas of human rights. Similarly, while the 1952 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia avoided including any article on the Universal Declaration or on human rights, 21 it offered a long definition of "socialist humanism:' The latter constituted "the care for the satisfaction of all the spiritual and physical needs of the working man, his freedom, dignity, and honor;' and as such represented a form of "authentic humaneness." Socialist humanism, explained the encyclopedia entry, had replaced capitalist "illusions and abstract dreams of human happiness" with the concrete rights "about which many generations of people have dreamed: the right to work, education, and rest:' 22 All these assertions, from the article in Pravda to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia's entry and Miasishchev's speech at a psychology conference, betrayed a definite anxiety over the imperative to safeguard the Soviet understanding of rights against the new idiom of the Universal Declaration. While human rights were emerging as the new utopia in most of the Western world, socialist humanism was the Soviet counterargument for the improvement of societal and individual well-being. Operating in dynamic relationship one with the other and through mutual borrowings and realignments, the competing constructs of human rights and socialist humanism would set the moral terrain for understanding rights and economic security in the second half of the twentieth century. 23 In sum, the welfare state and the concept of human rights constituted sources of morality that competed with the Soviet right to be helped. Albeit in different ways, they both threatened the Soviet claim to moral superiority and global guidance in the field of justice. As such, they both had an impact in the years between 1949 and 1956 in modifying the Soviet government's conception of its social protection system and the ways in which it was presented. It was in response to the dual threats of the welfare state and human rights, as much as vis-a-vis domestic pushes for reform, that Party leaders, social activists, and experts made new reassurances about the "legality" and "humaneness" of the Soviet regime of rights.

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Social Rights and the Allegiance to Socialism The reforms launched by Khrushchev in 1956 have generally been described as a turning point in the field of social welfare and the beginning of "a new era in income security;' when the injustices of the previous decades were "rectified;' social improvements acquired real significance, and rights became finally effective in people's lives. 24 This interpretation of Khrushchev's reforms and the philosophy of legality and socialist humanism informing them is very much in line with Khrushchev's own denunciation of Stalin's cult of personality and his portrayal of his own leadership as a radical break with Stalinism. However, while the Khrushchev-era reforms certainly introduced legislative innovations (such as the restructuring of the peasant mutual aid institutions) and attempted to make social rights more universally accessible, 25 they did not constitute a complete rupture with the past. As we have seen, they had been heralded by debates over rights and social policy developments occurring already in postwar Stalinism. More importantly, they modified neither previous ideas of social rights nor attitudes toward deviant social groups. In fact, the distinctive features of the Soviet right to be helped, which I have discussed in this book for the period between 1917 and 1950, lived on until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and continued to make the rights of the deviants a complicated blend of emancipatory aspirations, benevolent care, and disciplinary control. Altering these features would have meant opening to criticism the socialist framework for understanding justice and entitled subjectivity. This was a risk that Soviet political leaders never dared to take. 26 First, the pillar of social policy under Khrushchev and Brezhnev remained the right and the duty to work. Neither liberties autonomously wielded by the individual nor simply privileges bestowed by a paternalistic state, social rights continued to be the outcome of reciprocal obligations between the state and its citizens. The former had to provide jobs, education, vocational training, and political as well as cultural stimulation. Moreover, the state had to imbue social assistance with humanity and scientific rationality: those in need of help were not supposed to be humiliated, oppressed, and locked away forever; nothing was to degrade or dehumanize them; nor was there supposed to be any sentimental coddling toward them. On their part, deviant individuals were expected to eagerly embrace the hard labor of transforming their Selves and building socialism with the rest of the collective. In practice, this meant that official welfare discourse in late socialism continued to privilege the worker over the citizen: insurance coverage was

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still conditional on holding paid employment and social assistance for the uninsured still constituted a second-tier system. Furthermore, despite the introduction of better welfare policies for collective farm workers, social protection under Khrushchev and Brezhnev largely continued to ignore the diversity of the Soviet population and the variety of needs specific to different social milieus. For instance, a patriarchal order was still robustly inscribed in social policy because legislation was tailored to the fully employed male and followed a persistent family-centered, male-breadwinner model. Second, the tension between rights and control did not relent: entitlements still came at the price of discipline and the deviants had to become "normal" if they wanted to attain inclusion. Applicants recognized as "labor-incapacitated pensioners" were eligible for the extended protections foreseen by the new legislation on social assistance: material help in the form of subsidies, provision of foodstuffs and other consumer goods, placement in the state's facilities of care, assignment of prostheses, medical therapy and rest, and opportunities to continue their education and perform jobs appropriate to their psychophysical conditions. At the same time, the pensionery continued to be the targets of great surveillance, subjected not only to better-regulated care but also to constant demands for conformity and mainstreaming. In order to claim rights, economic security, and social integration, the physically disabled (who were still called invalids) remained faced with the challenge of inserting themselves into able-bodied-centered discourses. The services in charge of helping marginalized populations, such as medical doctors and other experts, continued to participate in the construction of positive or negative representations that led unemployed and uninsured people in the Soviet Union to oscillate between entitlement, discipline, and humanitarian treatment. In short, for a great number of people living at the margins of the Soviet norm, welfare in late socialism remained both protective and oppressive. It simultaneously empowered and segregated because it offered opportunities for emancipation from poverty, but also buttressed hierarchies of subjugation. Finally, the implementation of social rights continued to be informed by strictly Marxist premises. Soviet leaders continued to reject private philanthropy and religious charity, and the central planning of the economic and social order remained the bedrock for social welfare. Social policies such as the universal provision of health care, child allowances, free secondary education, and subsidized housing still assumed the total efficacy of the state as the sole entity able to secure social justice, general prosperity, and personal amelioration.

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Despite official discourse, however, social rights in late socialism did not have their birth exclusively in the state but rather continued to be forged in the confluence of official institutions and people's activism. Indeed, while political authorities refrained from revising the key ideas and practices underlying the Soviet right to be helped, people in the late Soviet periodas much as in the postrevolutionary and Stalinist years-pointed out the ambivalence of these ideas and practices. Petitions for state assistance remained the most important venue for uninsured and unemployed citizens to enter into a dialogue with state leaders and negotiate the meaning of rights and deviance. As we have seen in chapter 2, this dialogue had well-defined limits. Petition-writers did have the ability to bring their own understandings and definitions, denounce the injustice of their personal situations, and emphasize the inner incongruities of the Soviet order. Nonetheless, the very genre of the petition for state help prevented them from undermining the moral legitimacy of that order and challenging the normalizing forces that animated it. In search of a language with a greater capacity for formulating justice demands, some marginalized people in the late Soviet period would turn to Western discourses of human rights. Most prominently, at the end of the 1970s, Iurii Kiselev and Valerii Fefelov founded the Action Group to Defend the Rights of the Disabled in the USSR. This organization combined disability advocacy, the defense of social rights, and political dissent in new compelling ways. 27 Historians still need to explore how deviant and marginalized people in the late Soviet years conceptualized the morality of socialism as a framework of response to their demands for justice. Did they offer a revised Marxist humanist reading of rights? Did they articulate a political critique of the Communist regime? Or was their advocacy for social rights based in antipolitics and the disillusionment with competing utopian ideologies?28 These are questions that have relevance not only for historians, but also for scholars of contemporary social policies as well as for disability activists. It is my hope that this book might provide a set of theoretical and analytical tools to address these important questions and help define the rights of the 'deviants' in more emancipatory ways.

Timeline of Welfare in Russia and the Soviet Union

1861 Accident insurance law to cover miners in the Ural region 1903 The law "On compensation to the victims of unfortunate accidents" forces entrepreneurs to pay subsidies to their workers for loss of working ability due to accidents on the job 1912 New insurance laws expand the range of circumstances under which workers are provided with pensions and subsidies 1912 Sixth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party: Lenin advances the key principles of state assistance in a socialist regime 1912 The child psychiatrist Vsevolod Kashchenko proposes to use the word "defective" as a scientific term to define children with disabilities and mentally disturbed youth May 1917 The Provisional Government establishes a Ministry of Public Philanthropy November 1917 The Bolshevik government establishes a People's Commissariat of Public Philanthropy 1918 First Soviet Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship January 1918 Abolition of prison incarceration for minor delinquents and establishment of the Commissions for Minor Affairs; "morally defective:' deaf, blind, and "mentally retarded" children are sent to state facilities of defectological reeducation managed by the Commissariat of Social Assistance; the Mother and Infant Department begins its work within the Commissariat of Social Assistance April1918 The People's Commissariat of Social Assistance begins operating as an independent agency July 1918 First Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic: political and social rights are denied to all "nontoiling" social groups; people with disabilities are granted equal legal rights for the first time in Russian history August 1919 First official policies on family dependents 1920 The Commissariat of Education acquires a preeminent role in the field of defectological education; the Mother and Infant Department is moved from the Commissariat of Social Assistance to the Commissariat of Health

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January 1920 The Commissariat of Labor incorporates social assistance as one of its subsections March 1920 First mention of the category "personal pensioner" June 1920 The Commissariat of Social Assistance is reestablished with autonomous status at the RSFSR level November 1920 Legalization of abortion 1921 The Commissariat of Social Assistance moves from a unitary system of help to any individual uncovered by social insurance to a tripartite structure that provides different forms of social assistance to the peasants, the disabled, and the "pensioners" 1921 The Council of People's Commissars drafts the first Soviet program specifically aimed at people with permanent disabilities 1923 The Union of the Blind becomes the All-Russian Society of the Blind 1924 The political police agency begins to manage its own communes for underage hardened recidivists 1926 The Union of the Deaf becomes All-Russian Society of the Deaf; ratification of a new Marriage and Family Code 1930 Official "liquidation of unemployment": all laws regulating assistance to unemployed individuals are no longer in effect 1931 New social assistance laws 1932 Classification of Soviet disability is officially reduced from six to three categories and the medical expert commissions are moved from the Commissariat of Health to that of Labor; first systematic attempts to organize "sociolegal help" for unmarried mothers 1935 The Commissariat of Internal Affairs takes full control over the labor colonies for deviant children; the production-training workshops of the Societies of the Blind and the Deaf are transferred to the direct control of the Commissariat of Social Assistance 1936 Promulgation of the Stalin Constitution June 1936 Recriminalization of abortion July 1936 The Party resolution "On the Pedological Distortions in the System of National Education" denounces pedology and defectology 1937 The medical expert commissions are moved from the Commissariat of Labor to that of Social Assistance; the educational and productive enterprises of the blind and the deaf are moved from the Commissariat of Social Assistance to the Commissariats of Local and Light Industry 1939 The Military-Medical Commission of the Leningrad Military District and the Department of Defectology of the Leningrad Pedagogical

TIMELINE OF WELFARE IN RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION

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Institute collaborate to provide specialized assistance to blinded soldiers of the Russo-Finnish war 1941 Leading medical institutions in the field of pediatric psychiatry begin to conduct research on the impact of wartime trauma on Soviet children July 1944 The state introduces of new policies pertaining to single mothers May 1948 The comprehensive clinics and sociolegal offices of the Mother and Infant Department are dismantled and merged with facilities that provide only medical help December 1949 Minister Aleksei Sukhov calls for a reform of pensioning legislation 1955 Abortion is legalized again in the Soviet Union 1956 Under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union undertakes massive reforms in welfare, health, education, and housing, along with a structural reform of the children's colonies managed by the Commissariat of Internal Affairs

Glossary

Detkomissiia Commission for the Betterment of the Lives of Children Dom materi i rebenka Home for Mother and Child Kassy obshchestvennoi vzaimopomoshchi Public mutual aid funds Komissiia po naznacheniiu personal'nykh pensii Commission for the Assignment of Personal Pensions Koopinsoiuz Union of invalids' cooperatives Kustarnaia artel' Craftwork cooperative Mediko-pedagogicheskaia stantsiia Medico- Pedagogical Station Narodnyi komissariat gosudarstvennogo prizreniia People's Commissariat of Public Philanthropy Narodnyi komissariatprosveshcheniia People's Commissariat of Education Narodnyi komissariat sotsial'nogo obespecheniia People's Commissariat of Social Assistance Narodnyi komissariat truda People's Commissariat of Labor Narodnyi komissariat zdravookhranenia People's Commissariat of Health Obraztsovye or opytno-pokazatel'nye shkoly Model or experimental schools Otdel narodnogo obrazovaniia or ONO Department of People's Education Otdel okhrany materinstva i mladenchestva Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy Otdel pensionnogo obespecheniia or Pensionnyi otdel Pensioning Department Otdel sotsial'nogo strakhovaniia Department of Social Insurance Otdel truda Labor-exchange office Otdel trudovykh kolonii dlia nesovershennoletnikh Department of Labor Colonies for Minors Razvernutaia konsul'tatsiia Comprehensive clinic Sotsial'no-pravovoi kabinet Office of sociolegal help Sovet zashchity detei Council for the Protection of Children Trudovye doma or trudovye kommuny Labor homes Uchebno-proizvodstennye masterskie or UPM Production-training workshops Uchebno-proizvodstennye predpriiatiia or UPP Production-training enterprises

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Upravlenie proizvodstvennymi predpriiatiiami Productive Enterprises Administration Vrachebno-trudovye ekspertnye komissii or VTEK Medical expert commissions Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo glukhonemykh All-Russian Society of the Deaf-Mute Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo slepykh All- Russian Society of the Blind Vsesoiuznyi Tsentral'nyi Komitet Profsoiuzov All-Union Central Committee of Trade Unions Zhenotdel Commission for the Improvement of the Life and Work of Women Zhenskaia konsul'tatsiia Women's outpatient clinic

Notes

Notes to Introduction l. State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, hereafter GARF), f. 6983, o.1, d. 110,11.24-25. 2. Dorena Caroli, Histoire de Ia protection sociale en Union sovil!tique (1917-1939) (Paris: I:Harmattan, 20 10), and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). The first and so far most comprehensive study of the Soviet welfare system was Bernice Q. Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964). The argument about the ineffectiveness of social rights under Stalinism has been most recently advanced by Mark Smith, Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010). 3. Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 4. Anne Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Alan Ball, And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Dorena Caroli, J.:enfance abandonee et delinquante dans Ia Russie sovietique (1917-1937) (Paris: l:Harmattan, 2004); Catriona Kelly, Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007); and juliane Furst, Stalin's Last Generation. Soviet Post- War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 5. Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Frances Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007); and Mie Nakachi, "N. S. Khrushchev and the 1944 Soviet Family Law: Politics, Reproduction, and Language;' East European Politics and Societies 20, no. 1 (2006): 40-68. 6. E. R. Iarskaia-Smirnova and P. V Romanov, "Heroes and Spongers: The Iconography of Disability in Soviet Posters and Film;' in Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: History, Policy and Everyday life, ed. Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova (London: Routledge, 2014), 67-96; Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society 1941-1991 (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2008); Sarah Phillips, Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Post-Socialist Ukraine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011 ); Lilya Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Claire Shaw, "Deaf in the USSR: 'Defect' and the New Soviet Person, 1917-1991" (PhD diss., School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2010); and Beate Fieseler, "The Bitter Legacy of the 'Great Patriotic War': Red Army Disabled Soldiers under Late Stalinism;' in Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention, ed. juliane Furst (London: Routledge, 2006), 46-61; Fieseler, Die

Invaliden des "GrojJen Vaterliindischen Krieges" der Sowjetunion. Eine politische Sozialgeschichte, 1941-1991 (Habilitationsschrift, Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, 2003). A full-blown discussion of all these historiographical bodies would in itself require the space of a monograph. Throughout the book's chapters, I will provide references to the observations made by these historians both specifically in relation to the social groups under study and more broadly to the ideas of deviance and normalcy. 7. In Russian scholarship, these groups have been variously called "marginalized;' "liminal;' "peripheral;' "socially marginal;' "anomalous;' "a-social;' or "deviant;' and distinguished from the "politically marginal;' i.e., social groups that were marginalized for political reasons as class aliens.

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For a review of Russian works on the notion of social anomaly and the various terms used to discuss it in historiography and in the historical context, see E. Iu. Zubkova and T. Iu. Zhukova, Na "kraiu" sovetskogo obshchestva: Sotsial'nye marginaly kak ob"ekt gosudarstvennoi politiki: 1945-1960-e gg. (Moscow: ROSS PEN, 20 I 0), 5-14; Nataliia B. Lebina, "Antimiry: printsipy konstruirovaniia anomalii: 1950-1960-e gody;' in Sovetskaia sotsial'naia politika: Stseny i deistvuiushchie litsa, 1940-1985, ed. E. R. Iarskaia-Smirnova, P. V. Romanov, and N. B. Lebina (Moscow: 000 Variant, 2008), 255-265; and Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn' sovetskogo goroda, 1920-1930 gody: Normy i anomalii (St. Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva-Letnii Sad, 1999). 8. Didier Fassin, "Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France;' Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 3 (August 2005): 362-387 (366); and Fassin, "The Biopolitics of Otherness. Undocumented Immigrants and Racial Discrimination in the French Public Debate;' Anthropology Today 17,no.l (2001): 3-7. 9. Eliot Borenstein has talked about a "masculinization of society" after the Revolution, whereby the male, productive, science-oriented, and rational subject was the norm. Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). Stephen Lovell has outlined the importance of youth within the lexicon of the proletariat. See his "Soviet Russia's Older Generations;' in Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe, ed. Stephen Lovell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 205-226. See also Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia, 17-21; larskaia-Smirnova and Romanov, "Heroes and Spongers"; and Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was (Un)Made. 10. The literature on petitioning is vast. For a discussion of the advantages and problems of using Soviet citizens' letters as historical sources, see Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 10-12, and chapter 2, "Prisoners and the Art of Petitioning, 1953-1956;' 50-78. On social justice and petitions, see Aleksandr Ia. Livshin and Igor' B. Orlov, "Revoliutsiia i sotsial'naia spravedlivost': Ozhidaniia i real'nosti (pis'ma vo vlasti 1917-1927 godov), Cahiers du Monde russe 39, no. 4 (1998): 487-513; Christine Varga-Harris, "Forging Citizenship on the Home Front: Reviving the Socialist Contract and Constructing Soviet Identity During the Thaw;' in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: A Social and Cultural History of Reform in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2006), 101-116; and the special issue of Russian History!Histoire Russe 24, no. 1-2 (1997) edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick. 11. Alexopoulos, Stalin's Outcasts; Alexopoulos, "Soviet Citizenship, More or Less: Rights, Emotions, and States of Civic Belonging;' Kritika 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 487-528; Caroli, Histoire de Ia protection sociale; Varga-Harris, "Forging Citizenship on the Home Front"; Elise Kimmerling, "Civil Rights and Social Policy in Soviet Russia, 1918-1936;' Russian Review, 41, no. I (January 1982): 24-46; Douglas Rogers, The Old Faith and the Russian Land: A Historical Ethnography of Ethics in the Urals (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 12. For the concept of moral economy, see E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century;' Past and Present 50 (February 1971): 76-136; James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); and Barbara Alpern Engel, "Not by Bread Alone: Subsistence Riots in Russia during World War I;' journal of Modern History 69, no. 4 (December 1997): 696-721. 13. Katherine Lebow has called this embodied sense of entitlement to social rights "the conscience of the skin:' See her article "The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Polish Autobiography and Social Rights;' Humanity 3, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 297-319. Historian George Catkin has identified questions of human rights, moral worldviews, empathy, attitudes to poverty, and the treatment of vulnerable social groups as the areas and themes of so-called "moral history:' George Cotkin, "History's Moral Turn;' journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 2 (April2008): 293-315. See also Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 200 1). 14. GARF, f. 6983, o.1, d. 5, I. 62 and ibid., d. 110, l. 4, II. 13-14, and I. 18. 15. Ibid., d. 110, I. 4. 16. Jochen Hellbeck,Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). By subjectivity I mean the imagination of the Self in the political realm. In my approach, to study subjectivity is to investigate how the various ideological, social, cultural, and moral apparatuses monitoring one's usability within the collective dialogue with individual agency. The concept of subjectivity has offered many different paths through which historians have explored

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the Soviet experience. For a review, see Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, "Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective;' Slavic Review 67, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 967-986. 17. Polnyi pravoslavnyi bogoslovnyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar', vol. I (St. Petersburg: P. P. Soikima, 1912-1913), 339; and Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi Institut "Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia;' 1926-1947), 6:466-471,43:170-171, and 52:298-302. 18. Samuel Moyn, "On the Genealogy of Morals;' The Nation, April 16, 2007. See also Devin Pendas, "Toward a New Politics? On the Recent Historiography of Human Rights;' Contemporary European History 21, no. I (2012): 95-111. 19. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Foucault, History of Madness (New York: Routledge, 2006); Foucault, "Governmentality;' in The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow and N. Rose (London: New Press, 2003), 229-245. Particularly relevant to the study of social policies toward deviant subjects are Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1989) and Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975 (New York: Picador, 2003). See also Ladelle McWhorter, "Forward;' in Foucault and the Government of Disability, ed. Shelley Tremaine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), x-xviii. For an example of how historians of social policy have used the Foucauldian paradigm, see Susan Zimmermann, Divide,

Provide, and Rule: An Integrative History of Poverty Policy, Social Policy, and Social Reform in Hungary under the Habsburg Monarchy (Budapest: CEU Press, 2011). 20. Passin, "Compassion and Repression:' 21. Several studies of Soviet history have, to varying degrees, privileged this view. See, for instance, Peter Holquist, "To Count, to Extract, and to Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia;' in A State of Nations. Empire and NationMaking in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. R. G. Suny and T. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 111-144; Holquist, "What's So Revolutionary about the Russian Revolution? State Practices and New-Style Politics;' in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, ed. David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 87-111; and Holquist, "State Violence as a Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism;' in Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework, ed. Amir Weiner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 19-45. Dani~l Beer has emphasized Russian experts' punitive choices vis-a-vis deviant youth and argued that the project of Soviet modernity was framed in terms of cleansing. Daniel Beer, Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova has claimed that Soviet social policy mostly reinforced exclusion and marginalization. See, for instance, Iarskaia -Smirnova and Romanov, eds. Sovetskaia sotsial'naia politika: Stseny i deistvuiushchie litsa, 1940-1985; and Elena Iarskaia -Smirnova, Class and Gender in Russian Welfare Policies: Soviet Legacies and Contemporary Challenges (Gothenburg: Ineko, 20 II). 22. In this respect, my study is closer to the research of those scholars who have recognized not only the Soviet state's impulse to expel, but also the desire to save and reclaim. See in particular Juliane Furst, "Between Salvation and Liquidation: Homeless and Vagrant Children and the Reconstruction of Soviet Society;' SEER 86, no. 2 (April 2008): 232-258; Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex; and David Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011). 23. Laura Engelstein, "Combined Underdevelopment: Discipline and the Law in Imperial and Soviet Russia;' American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (Aprill993): 338-353.An important reference on this type of actors in the larger European context is Hugh Heclo, Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden: From Relief to Income Maintenance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 24. Lynne Viola's interpretation of Soviet local officials and Juliane Furst's description of Komsomol activists have been pivotal in shaping my understanding of social activists. See Lynne Viola, "Introduction;' in Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 1-16; Furst, Stalin's Last Generation, 309-320; and Furst, "Introduction. Late Stalinist Society: History, Policies and People;' in Late Stalinist Russia, 1-19. Similarly to Furst, I do not frame activists' interactions with state power in terms of resistance, but rather as dialogues. A definite linkage between activism, the defense of rights, disability advocacy, and dissent was not a specific feature of the early Soviet and Stalinist years, but would characterize the human rights movement of the post -Stalinist era.

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25. As I discuss in the Epilogue, the welfare revisions of 1949-1950 significantly foreshadowed the more thorough reforms of 1956. 26. The vision of Stalinism as "culture of the gift" has been first proposed by Jeffrey Brooks in the book Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), and then more recently by Mark Smith in the article "Social Rights in the Soviet Dictatorship: The Constitutional Right to Welfare from Stalin to Brezhnev;' Humanity 3, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 385-406. Linda Cook and Jolanta Aidukaite have argued that socialist states were paternalist states. Linda J. Cook, The Soviet Social Contract and Why It Failed: Welfare Policy and Workers' Politics from Brezhnev to Yeltsin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Jolanta Aidukaite, The Emergence of the Post-Socialist Welfare State: The Case of the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (Huddinge: Sodertorns Hogskola, 2004). While I do recognize elements of this vision in the story of the right to be helped, I do not identify citizens' responses to state welfare primarily as gratitude, but rather suggest considering them in terms of reciprocal obligations. Similarly, Mark Edele has described the "relationship of reciprocity" and the "bargain'' that existed between WWII veterans and the Soviet state in the 1970s. Edele, Soviet Veterans. 27. For instance, Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union. 28. V S. Andreev, Sotsial'noe obespechenie v SSSR: Sovetskoe pravo sotsial'nogo obespecheniia. Kurs lektsii, temy I- VIII (Moscow: Vses. iurid. zaochnyi in-t. 1969); Andreev, Sovetskoe pensionnoe obespechenie (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1966); and Malaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, vo!. 8 (Moscow: Aktsionernoe obshchestvo "Sovetskaia entsiklopediia;' 1930-1931 ), 239-241. 29. I am aware that this choice of archives and locations has left unexplored the important questions of how marginalized populations in the countryside claimed their social rights and what sense of entitlement existed among non- Russian ethnic groups, religious minorities, and in the other republics that formed the Soviet Union.

Notes to Prologue 1. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995). 2. According to Fiorenza Girotti, both social stability functions and religious or political ethical principles underpinned the logics of social intervention already in premodern societies. Welfare State: Storia, modelli, critica (Roma: Caracci, 1998), 18-24. For a discussion of the cameralist roots of social policy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see George Steinmetz, Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses, 19-29. 3. Bill Hughes, "Bauman's Strangers: Impairment and the Invalidation of Disabled People in Modern and Postmodern Culture;' Disability and Society 17, no. 5 (2002): 571-584; Douglas Baynton, "Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History;' in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33-57. See also Davis, Enforcing Normalcy; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; and Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966). On the discourse of defect in the early modern world, see Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum, eds. "Defects": Engendering the Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 4. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City: Anchor, 1961); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Hughes, "Bauman's Strangers"; Baynton, "Disability and the Justification of Inequality:' 5. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Oxford: Polity, 1991 ). 6. Hughes, "Bauman's Strangers;' 581. 7. Nadine Lefaucheur, "'At Risk Families' and 'Family Risks': A Brief History of Social Welfare Provision for Single Parent Families in France;' in Guillemard et a!., eds., Comparing Social Welfare Systems in Europe, val. 1 (Paris: MIRE, 1995), 419-438 (419). 8. On reproduction as politics in modern states, see Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, "The Politics of Reproduction;' Annual Review of Anthropology 20 (1991): 311-343; and Ginsburg and Rapp, "Reproduction as Politics;' in The Politics of Gender after Socialism, ed. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15-36. Almost all European and North American countries of the time developed specific government program to educate mothers, provide

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family allowances, and increase the birthrate. See Maria Sophia Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth Century Europe: Fascist Dictatorships and Liberal Democracies (London: Routledge, 1996); David Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); Jane Lewis, "Models of Equality for Women: The Case of State Support for Children in Twentieth Century Britain;' in Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare State, 1880s-1950s, ed. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (New York: Routledge, 1991), 73-92; Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics: Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Kristina Popova, Natsionalnoto dete: Blagotvoritelnata i prosvetna deynost na Sajuza za zakrila na detsata v Balgariya 1925- 1944 (Sofia: LIK, 1999). 9. Lefaucheur, '"At Risk Families' and 'Family Risks~' 10. Anna R. Igra, "Likely to Become a Public Charge: Deserted Women and the Family Law of the Poor in New York City, 191 0-1936;' Journal of Women's History 11, no. 4 (2000): 59-81. 11. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes. Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 154 and 159. See also Anne Skevik, "Meres, menageres, epouses et travailleuses: Les meres seules dans Ia politique sociale norvegienne;' in Comparer les systemes de protection sociale en Europe du Nord et en France, vol. 4, no. 1, ed. AnneMarie Guillemard eta!. (Paris: MIRE, 1999), 237-257, esp. 253-254. 12. In France, families with a divorced or single parent stopped being socially stigmatized as "deviant" and began to be recognized as a new family model only in the 1960s. Lefaucheur, '"At Risk Families' and 'Family Risks~' 419. 13. On the pan-European dimension of the discourse of degeneration, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and several chapters in the collection Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in South-Eastern Europe in 1945, ed. Christian Promitzer, Sevasti Trubeta, and Marins Turda (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011). For an example of how this theory spread in interwar Britain, see L. S. Penrose, A Clinical and Genetic Study of 1280 Cases of Mental Defect (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1938). 14. Nikolai N. Malofeev, Spetsial'noe obrazovanie v meniaiushchemsia mire. Evropa (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 2009). In particular on Hungary, see "Kursy eksperimental'noi psikhologii v Budapeshte;' in Voprosy pedagogicheskoi patologii v sem'e i shkole, ed. A. B. Vladimirskii, A. Orshanskii, and G. Fal'bork, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: n.p., 1912), 160. On Weimar Germany, see Erwin Lesch, Bericht uber den dritten Kongrej] fur Heilpiidagogik in Milnchen 2.-4. August 1926 (Berlin: Springer, 1927). On pre-fascist Italy, see G. Ferreri, "La dichiarazione di Ginevra;' I:Infanzia Anormale. Bollettino dell'Assistenza Medico-Pedagogica dei fanciulli anormali 18, no. 2 (May 1925): 25-27. On Britain, see Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class, and the Male Youth Problem, 1880-1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 83-118; Sue Wheatcroft, "Cured by Kindness? Child Guidance Services During the Second World War;' in Disabled Children: Contested Caring, 1850-1979, ed. Anne Borsay and Pamela Dale (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012), 145-157; and Wheatcroft, Worth Saving: Disabled Children During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 22-25. 15. Girotti, Welfare State, 25. The term "welfare state" usually refers to the systems of social protection that emerged after the Second World War. See Peter Flora and Arnold). Heidenheimer, eds. The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (New Brunswick, N): Transaction Books, 1981); and Arnold). Heidenheimer, Hugh Hecla, Carolyn Teich Adams, Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in Europe and America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983). 16. Walter Korpi, "The Development of Social Citizenship in France since 1930: Comparative Perspectives;' in Guillemard, Comparing Social Welfare Systems in Europe, 9-47. Esping-Andersen has put liberation from market-induced risks at the center of the post-World War II welfare state as it emerged in capitalist countries. G0sta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 17. Korpi, "The Development of Social Citizenship;' 16 and 24-25; Girotti, Welfare State, 152153; Greg Eghigian, "The German Welfare State as a Discourse of Trauma;' in Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930, ed. M. Micale and P. Lerner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 92-112. 18. Korpi, "The Development of Social Citizenship;' 28. 19. Susan Zimmermann, "Wohlfahrtspolitik und die staatssozialistische Entwicklungsstrategie in der'anderen'Hiilfte Europas im 20. )ahrhundert;'inSozialpolitik in der Peripherie: Entwicklungsmuster

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und Wandel in Lateinamerika, Afrika, Asien und Osteuropa, ed. johannes Jager, Gerhard Melinz, and Susan Zimmermann (Brandes and Apsel/Siidwind: Frankfurt, 2001), 211-237. On the transnational side of public social policy in Europe in the early twentieth century, see also Hartmut Kaelble, "Das europaische Sozialmodell-eine historische Perspektive;' in Das europiiische Sozialmodell: Auf dem Weg zum transnationalen Sozialstaat, ed. Hartmut Kaelble and Giinther Schid (Berlin: Edition Sigma, 2004), 31-50. 20. Emanuel Reynaud, "Complementary Schemes: Company Pensions in Germany and the United Kingdom;' in Guillemard, Comparing Social Welfare Systems in Europe, 203-239; Maurizio Ferrera, "General Introduction;' in Guillemard et al., eds., Comparing Social Welfare Systems in Southern Europe, vol. 3 (Paris: MIRE, 1997), 13-24. For a discussion of the variations among the insurance systems of Germany, Britain, and Italy between the 1880s and the First World War, see Girotti, Welfare State, 158-182. 21. Humphrey Richard Southall, "Neither State Nor Market; Early Welfare Benefits in Britain;' in Guillemard, Comparing Social Welfare Systems in Europe, 59-92; and Reynaud, "Complementary Schemes;' 219. 22. Korpi, "The Development of Social Citizenship;' 18-21; and P.-). Hesse, "Le 'modele' fran~ais: Comme un essaim de chauves-souris;' in Guillemard, Comparer les systemes de protection sociale en Europe du Nord et en France, 15-29. 23. Zimmermann, Divide, Provide, and Rule, 27, 67, and 90-96. 24. P. Abrahamson, "Le modele scandinave de protection socia!e;' in Guillemard, Comparer /es systemes de protection sociale en Europe du Nord et en France, 31-63; and Korpi, "The Development of Social Citizenship;' 17. 25. A. M. Guillen, "Welfare State Development in Spain;' in Guillemard, Comparing Social Welfare Systems in Southern Europe, 67-91. 26. Girotti, Welfare State, 174-182. 27. Ibid., 193-199. 28. Didier Renard, "The Relations between Assistance and Insurance in the Constitution of the French Welfare System;' in Guillemard, Comparing Social Welfare Systems in Europe, 93-113, esp. 94; and Hesse, "Le 'modele' fran~ais;' 22. 29. Didier Renard, ''Assistance publique et bienfaisance privee, 1885-1914;' Politiques et management public 5, no. 2 (1987): 107-128. 30. Korpi, "The Development of Social Citizenship;' 18. 31. Southall, "Neither State Nor Market;' 77. See also Reynaud, "Complementary Schemes;' 219. 32. Korpi, "The Development of Social Citizenship;' 27; and Girotti, Welfare State, 154. 33. Renard, "The Relations between Assistance and Insurance;' 95; and jane Lewis, "Introduction;' in Guillemard, Comparing Social Welfare Systems in Europe, 51-56. 34. Zimmermann, Divide, Provide, and Rule, 7. 35. Robert Castel, "The Model of the 'Employment Society;" in Guillemard, Comparing Social Welfare Systems in Southern Europe, 27-46, esp. 35; Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, State, and Social Welfare in Britain, 1830-1990 (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1994), 253; Susan Zimmermann, Priichtige Armut. Fursorge, Kinderschutz und Sozialreform in Budapest (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1997).; and Kaelble, "Das europaische SozialmodeU:' On the linkage between welfare and warfare, see Young-Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919-1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. 36. E. Grinda, "Rapport fait au nom de Ia commission d'assurance et de prevoyance socialesIl. Prestations;' Journal Officiel, DPCh, annex 3187, 1923, 33; and C. Chauveau, "Rapport fait au nom de Ia commission de !'hygiene, de I' assistance, de I' assurance et de Ia prevoyance sociales;' Journal Officiel, DPS, 1925, 1089, both quoted in Renard, "The Relations between Assistance and Insurance;' 103. 37. Natali Stegmann and Katrin Boeckh, "Veterans and War Victims in Eastern Europe during the 20th Century: A Comparison;' Comparativ: Zeitschrift fur Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesel/schaftsforschung 20, no. 5 (2010): 7-17 (15). See also joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001 ); Sophie Delaporte, Gueu/es Cassees de /a Grande Guerre (Paris: Agnes Vienot, 2004); Sabine Kienitz, Beschiidigte Heiden: Kriegsinvaliditiit und Korperbilder 1914-1923 (Paderborn, DE: Schiiningh, 2008); Verana Pawlowsky and Harald Wendelin, "Kriegsopfer und Sozialstaat.

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Osterreich nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg;' in Die Weltkriege als symbolische Bezugspunkte: Polen, die Tschechoslowakei und Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg und dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Natali Stegmann (Prague: Masarykiiv Dstav a Archiv AV CR, 2009), 127-146; and David A. Gerber, "Introduction: Finding Disabled Veterans in History;' in Disabled Veterans in History, ed. David A. Gerber (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 1-52. 38. Korpi, "The Development of Social Citizenship;' 13-14; and Zimmermann, Divide, Provide, and Rule, 121-122 and 133-137. 39. Lefaucheur, "'At Risk Families' and 'Family Risks"'; Zimmermann, Divide, Provide, and Rule, 136-137; and Zimmermann, Priichtige Armut, 24-25. Norway constituted the exception to this vision of single motherhood. Since 1919 a pension was paid in the city of Oslo to unmarried, separated, or divorced mothers with children under fifteen. The pension was taken away if single mothers remarried or if they lived together with another man and had children with this new partner. It could also be taken away if the women neglected their children. The pension was set at a level below the estimated cost of living and assumed that the mother would work to cover some of her needs. If the mother could not work, she had the right to a disability pension in addition to the single-motherhood pension. On a national level, this type of pension was ratified in Norway in 1964. See Skevik, "Meres, menageres, epouses et travailleuses;' 240-241. 40. Castel, "The Model of the 'Employment SocietY:" 38-39. 41. Ibid., 39. 42. Lewis, "Introduction;' 52-54; Renard, "The Relations between Assistance and Insurance;' 102 and 110. 43. David Hoffmann, "European Modernity and Soviet Socialism;' in Hoffmann, Russian Modernity, 245-260 (257). See also Hoffmann and Kotsonis, eds., Cultivating the Masses; Yanni Kotsonis, '"No Place to Go': Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia;' Journal of Modern History 76, no. 3 (September 2004): 531-577; and Kotkin, Magnetic

Mountain.

Notes to Chapter 1 1. Historical Archive of Omsk Province (Istoricheskii Arkhiv Omskoi Oblasti, hereafter IsAOO), f. 437, o. 9, d. 567, ll. 31-34. 2. "Doklad tov. Stalina I. V. o proekte konstitutsii Soiuza SSR;' Pravda, November 26, 1936, 1-6,(3). 3. For an analysis of how the right to welfare was presented in the 1936 Constitution, see Smith, "Social Rights in the Soviet Dictatorship:' Smith too has remarked on the "shifting relationship between paternalism and constitutionalism" in Soviet presentations of welfare rights after the promulgation of the Constitution; ibid., 386. 4. Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Hubertus F. Jahn, Armes Russ/and: Bettler und Notleidende in der Russischen Geschichte vom Mittelalter bis in die Gegenwart (Paderborn, DE: Miinchen, 2010). See also Nancy Kollman, By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 70. 5. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses, 31-33. 6. On turn-of-the-century Russian intellectuals' views of natural individual rights, see IvanovRazumnik, Istoriia russkoi obshchestvennoi mysli (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1914), vols. 1-2. On the defense of human rights from a philosophical point of view, see G. M. Hamburg, "Boris Chicherin and Human Dignity in History;' and Randall A. Poole, "Vladimir Solov'ev's Philosophical Anthropology: Autonomy, Dignity, PerfectabilitY:' both in A History of Russian Philosophy 1830-1930, ed. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2010), respectively 111-130 and 131-149. 7. B. A. Kistiakovskii, "V zashchitu prava: intelligentsia i pravosoznanie;' in Vekhi (Moscow: Tipo-lit. T-va LN. Kushnerev i Ko, 1909), translated in Canadian Slavic Studies 4 (Spring 1970): 36-59. See also Susan Eva Heuman, "Perspectives on Legal Culture in Prerevolutionary Russia;' in Revolution in Law: Contributions to the Development of Soviet Legal Theory, 1917-1938, ed. Piers Beirne (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 3-16. 8. P. I. Novgorodtsev, Pravo na dostoinoe chelovecheskoe sushchestvovanie: 0 prave na sushchestvovanie. Sotsial'no-filosoficheskie etiudy (St. Petersburg: M. 0. Vol'f, 1911), 3-13.

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9. Mark Steinberg, Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 19101925 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Steinberg, Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 200 I); Sergey Horujy, "Slavophiles, Westernizers, and the Birth of Russian Philosophical Humanism;' in Hamburg and Poole, eds., A History of Russian Philosophy, 27-51. On Russian popular conceptions of social citizenship during the revolutionary years, see also Aaron Retish, Russia's Peasants in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the Creation of the Soviet State, 1914-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. chapter 8. 10. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses, 39. II. V: A. Aralov and A. V. Levshin, Sotsial'noe obespechenie v SSSR (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel'stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1959), 8-9. See also Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 19-20. 12. Yanni Kotsonis, "'Face-to-Face': the State, the Individual, and the Citizen in Russian Taxation, 1863-1917;' Slavic Review 63 (2004): 221-246 (221). The relationship between rights and citizenship in imperial Russia is a heated topic of debate among historians. For competing treatments, see Eric Lohr, "The Ideal Citizen and the Real Subject in Late Imperial Russia;' Kritika 7, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 173-194; and jane Burbank, "An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire;' Kritika 7, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 397-431. 13. Piers Beirne and Alan Hunt, "Lenin, Crime, and Penal Politics, 1917-1924;' in Revolution in Law, 99-135 (128). 14. V.I. Lenin, "Materialy ko II s"ezdu RCDRP;' in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958-1965), 414; and Lenin, "VI (prazhskaia) vserossiiskaia konferentsiia RSDRP;' ibid., vol. 21, 146-149. See also Andreev, Sotsial'noe obespechenie v SSSR: Sovetskoe pravo, 8-11. 15. Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979); Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), esp. 82-1 04; Nicholas Riasanovsky, A Parting of Ways: Government and the Educated Public in Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New York: Viking Press, 1978); Engelstein, "Combined Underdevelopment"; Sandrine Kott and joel Golb, "The Forced Labor Issue between Human and Social Rights, 1947-1957;' Humanity 3, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 320-335; Lynne A. Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 31. 16. Paul Betts, "Socialism, Social Rights, and Human Rights: The Case of East Germany;' Humanity 3, no. 3 (Winter 2012): 407-426. 17. See also Guy Standing, "Social Protection in Central and Eastern Europe: A Tale of Slipping Anchors and Torn Safety Nets;' in Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies, ed. Giista Esping-Andersen (London: Sage, 1996), 225-255; and S. ). Collier, Post-Soviet Social: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, Social Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 18. Quoted in the anonymous article "Bred sumashedshikh;' Gazeta dlia vsekh, November 10, 1917, I. 19. Matthew Rendle, Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in Revolutionary Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 202. See also A. Dobkin, "Lishentsy: 1918-1936;' in Zven'ia: Istoricheskii al'manakh, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress, 1992), 600-628; and T. Smirnova, "Byvshie liudi" Sovetskoi Rossii: Strategii vyzhivaniia i puti integratsii, 1917-1936 gody (Moscow: Mir istorii, 2003). Golfo Alexopoulos has revealed that, despite the official denial of access to welfare, the disenfranchised kept pushing for their human rights and sometimes saw their demands fulfilled. Alexopoulos, Stalin's

Outcasts. 20. I. Z. Shteinberg, Nravstvennyi oblik revoliutsii (Berlin: n.p., 1923), 127. 21. V: Serogorokii, "Kak zashchitit'bednotu?;' Zvezda (Perm'), july 6,1920, 2. 22. This would remain at the heart of the Soviet conception of rights throughout the period under consideration. See, for instance, Nikolai Grigor'evich Aleksandrov, Sushchnost' prava: K voprosu o sushchnosti istoricheskikh tipov prava (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo iuridicheskoi literatury, 1950). See also Benjamin Nathans, "Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era;' in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2011), 166-190. 23. Fiirst, "Between Salvation and Liquidation;' 234. 24. Z. Lilina "Deiatel'nost' b. komissariata Sotsial'nogo Obespecheniia Severnoi Kommuny;' Zhurnal narodnogo komissariata sotsial'nogo obespecheniia 5-6 (June-july 1919): 59-64 (59). Lilina

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became director of the department of social assistance of the Petrograd Soviet in April 1918. Then, between 1920 and 1929, she held office in various departments of the Commissariat of Education. 25. Ibid., 64. 26. "Polozhenie o sotsial'nom obespechenii trudiashchikhsia;' dated October 31, 1918, in

Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii rabochego i krest'ianskogo pravitel'stva: Sbornik dekretov 19171918 gg. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1920), 230-236 (230). The decree on the liquidation of all philanthropic societies was issued by the initiative of the first Soviet Commissar of Social Assistance Aleksandra Kollontai. See Andreev, Sotsial'noe obespechenie v SSSR: Sovetskoe pravo, 69-70. 27. Sotsial'noe obespechenie za 5 let (30 apr. 1918 g.-30 apr. 1923 g.) (Moscow: Narodnogo komissariata sotsial'nogo obespecheniia, 1923), 9. 28. After 1933, the welfare needs of insured workers became responsibility of the All-Union Central Committee of Trade Unions. 29. Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 79. The literature on social insurance in the Soviet Union is vast. Among the most important contributions are Gaston Rimlinger, "The Trade Union in Soviet Social Insurance: Historical Development and Present Functions;' Industrial and Labor Relations Review 14, no. 3 (April 1961): 397-418; Sally Ewing, Social Insurance in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1912-1933: A Study of Legal Form and Administrative Practice (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1984); S. Ewing, "The Science and Politics of Soviet Insurance Medicine;' in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Susan Gross Solomon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 69-96; and Caroli, Histoire de Ia protection sociale. The literature on the welfare rights of Soviet uninsured citizens is not so well developed as the literature on social insurance. Based on a review of statutes on social security and tort claims, John Hazard had assumed that law on tort was the exclusive line of protection for uninsured citizens; see Law and Social Change in the USSR (Toronto: Carswell, 1953), 228-244; and The Soviet Legal System: Fundamental Principles and Historical Commentary (Dobbs Ferry: Published for the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law, Columbia University in the City of New York, by Oceana Publications, 1977), 437-438. 30. Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 80. See also Andreev, Sotsial'noe obespechenie v SSSR: Sovetskoe pravo; Andreev, Sovetskoe pensionnoe obespechenie, 8; and Pavel Stiller, Sozialpolitik in der UdSSR 1950-80 (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1983), 18-19. 31. Sotsial'noe obespechenie za 5 let, 9; Aralov and Levshin, Sotsial'noe obespechie v SSSR, 10; E. Astrakhan, Razvitie zakonodatel'stva o pensiiakh rabochim i sluzhashchim (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia literatura, 1971), 17; Andreev, Sotsial'noe obespechenie v SSSR: Sovetskoe pravo, 70; Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 80; and Caroli, Histoire de Ia protection social, 42. 32. As quoted in the article "Otchet o deiatel'nosti pensionnogo otdela Narkomsobesa;' Zhurnal narodnogo komissariata sotsial'nogo obespecheniia 5-6 (June-July 1919): 55-59 (58). 33. This decree was quoted in many circular letters addressed to the provincial sections of the Commissariat of Social Assistance. See, for instance, Perm' State Archive of Contemporary History (Permskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii, hereafter PermGANI), f. 557, o. 1, d. 60, I. 2 and II. 5-9. 34. Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 80; and Be ate Fieseler, "Razvitie gosudarstvennoi pomoshchi invalidam v Rossii ot pozdnei Rossiiskoi imperii do stalinskoi 'revoliutsii sverkhu';' in Opyt mirovykh vain v istorii Rossii: Sbornik statei, ed. I. V. Narskii eta!. (Cheliabinsk: Kamennyi poias, 2007), 49-64 (53). For a description of the overlapping functions of the Commissariats of Labor and Social Assistance in the first half of the 1920s, see A. Vishnevetskii, Razvitie zakonodatel'stva o sotsial'nom strakhovanii v Rossii (Moscow: Voprosy truda, 1926), esp. 92-93. On the jurisdictional conflicts between these two commissariats, see S. Ewing, Social Insurance in Russia and the Soviet Union. Other scholars have identified a conflict over the welfare of insured versus uninsured citizens within the Commissariat of Health. See Christopher M. Davis, "Economics of Soviet Public Health, 1928-1932;' in Health and Society in Revolutionary Russia, 146-174; and Neil W. Weissman, "Origins of Soviet Health Administration;' ibid., 97-120. 35. While the English term "pensioners" usually refers to elderly people, in the Soviet Union the word pensionery indicated not only the elderly, but more generally all individuals unable to work. See the entry "pensiia" in Bol'shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, val. 44 (Moscow: OGIZ RSFSR, 1939), 500-502; and the entry "emeritura i sotsial'noe obespechenie" in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar' russkogo bibliogra.ficheskogo instituta Granat, vol. 53 (Moscow: Vsekopromsovet-Mosoblpech'soiuz, 1936), 590-623. On the tripartite division of social assistance after 1921, see Sotsial'noe obespechenie za 5 let, 10-11; and Andreev, Sotsial'noe obespechenie v SSSR: Sovetskoe pravo. The latter book is also a good reference to understand

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the theoretical distinction between pensions and subsidies. For a description of invalids' cooperatives and mutual aid programs for peasants, see Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 54-56 and 59-60; Caroli, Histoire de Ia protection sociale, 107-1 09; and Stiller, Sozialpolitik in der UdSSR 1950-80, 36. 36. IsAOO, f. 1128, o. 2, d. 15, I. 3. 37. Among the most vivid descriptions of the inadequate state of the Pensioning Department is an "Akt" drafted by the head of the Solikamsk social assistance section (Perm' province) in january 1920. State Archive of Perm' Region (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Permskogo Kraia, hereafter GAPK), f. 9, o. 1, d. 121, II. 305-306. For examples of complaints about infringements of the laws on pensioning assistance in later years, see GARF, f. 413, o.l, d. 585,11. 10-11; d. 456, II. 77-78; d. 1632, I. 86; GAPK, f. 1137, o. 1, d. 74, I. 317; and IsAOO, f. 1128, o. 2, d. 18, I. 57. 38. IsAOO, f. 437, o. 9, d. 567, I. 135 and d. 152, I. 43. 39. Ibid., d. 568, I. 113. See also ibid., d. 568, I. 132; and d. 567, I. 101. 40. See the directives collected by Ia. A. Perel' and A. A. Liubimov in Sotsial'noe obespechenie detei (Moscow: Narkompros RSFSR Uchpedgiz, 1932), 32-34. 41. GARF, f. 413, o. 4, d. 357, II. 36-37. See also A. V Tikhomirov and V K. Khitev, Pensii i posobiiia (Moscow: Sovetskoe zakonodatel'stvo, 1931). 42. GARF, f. 413, o. 1, d. 1632, I. 41 and 42, undated; IsAOO, f. 437, o. 9, d. 567, I. 51, dated 1938. See also Aralov and Levshin, Sotsial'noe obespechenie v SSSR, 17. 43. Caroli, Histoire de Ia protection sociale, 118 and 89. The statutes of social insurance were first legally anchored in the Labor Code of 1922. 44. Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 50 and 83; Stiller, Sozialpolitik in der UdSSR 1950-80, 22. In addition, Stiller mentions that Soviet state figures and members of the army and the police enjoyed special rights within a self-standing system of social insurance that followed its own specific laws. Stiller, Sozialpolitik in der UdSSR 1950-80, 36-37, and Stiller, Die sowjetische Rentenversicherung 1917-1977 (Cologne: BOIS, 1979), 8-10. 45. See GARF, f. 413, o. 4, d. 357, II. 33-45 for the complete text of Sukhov's "Spravka:' 46. A number of scholars have discussed the importance of patronage in the assignment of assistance. Irina Paperno and Barbara Walker have noted that, in the fields of education, science, literature, and the arts, the interventions of members of the government and famous cultural personalities constituted a significant factor, often determining the survival of impoverished intelligentsia members. Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 91-94; and Barbara Walker, Maximilan Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Dorena Caroli has shown that the intervention of Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, was crucial in the assignation of personal pensions to Soviet teachers. Histoire de Ia protection sociale, 113. Elsewhere, I have argued that patronage played an important role in helping individuals accused of political crimes. Maria Cristina Galmarini, "Defending the Rights of Gulag Prisoners: The Story of the Political Red Cross, 1918-38;' Russian Review 71, no. 1 (January 2012): 6-29.

Notes to Chapter 2 1. I. Nagovitsyn, without title, Sotsial'noe obespechenie 3-4 (1933): 2-6. For a comparison, consider that in October 1918 there were 105,000 people on the roster of the Commissariat of Social Assistance. Sotsial'noe obespechenie za 5 let, 22; Aralov and Levshin, Sotsial'noe obespechie v SSSR, 12; Andreev, Sotsial'noe obespechenie v SSSR: Sovetskoe pravo, 73. 2. GARF, f. 413, o.1, d. 585, I. 9. 3. Ibid., I. 61. 4. IsAOO, f. 437, o. 9, d. 567, I. 59. 5. GARF, f. 413, o.1, d. 585, II. 10-11. 6. Caroli, Histoire de Ia protection sociale, 141 and 223; Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 55. 7. GARF, f. 413, o. 2, d. 274, I. 113. 8. See, for instance, lsAOO, f. 437, o. 9, d. 568, I. 52. 9. This category is rather well covered in the existing literature. I provide the necessary references and discuss the legislation regulating help to blinded and deafened soldiers in chapter 6. 10. I observed this phenomenon both in Perm' and Omsk provinces, where local social assistance sections only made recommendations about eligibility and then took care of the payments

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to the recipients, but final approval came from the local executive committees. See, for instance, GAPK, f. 1137, o.1, d. 265, II. 171-172; II. 1-45; 11. 154-156; and d. 266, II. 1-181; IsAOO, f. 437, o. 9, d. 568, I. 41. 11. For one of the few reports that described in some detail the category "others;' see GAPK, f. 1137, o. 1, d. 196, I. 2. See also Madison, Social Welfare in the Soviet Union, 49-62. 12. See the circular letters issued by the Commissariat of Social Assistance on December 5, 1929, and January 26, 1930, and the directive of October 4, 1929, quoted in Perel' and Liubimov, Sotsial'noe obespechenie detei, 36-37. 13. See also Stiller, Sozialpolitik in der UdSSR 1950-80, 21-22; Aleksandr Shamigulov, '"Vziat' vse, da i podelit'.. .' Voina i mir v organizatsii sotsial'noi pomoshchi gorodskomu naseleniiu v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti (po materialam Kazanskoi gubernii);' in Sovetskaia sotsial'naia politika 1920-kh-1930-kh godov: Ideologiia i povsednevnost; ed. P. V. Romanov and E. R. larskaia-Smirnova (Moscow: 000 Variant, 2007), 118-144; and Mauricio Borrero, Hungry Moscow: Scarcity and Urban Society in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1921 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 117. 14. !gal Halfin has made a similar point concerning Bolshevik constructions of real proletarians. From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000). 15. Christine Varga-Harris and Liene Ozoliqa-Fitzgerald have proposed a similar argument in relation to different historical contexts-respectively, Khrushchev's housing reforms and state welfare in post-socialist Latvia. Varga-Harris, "Forging Citizenship on the Home Front;' and Liene OzoliqaFitzgerald, The Ethics of the Willing: An Ethnography of Post-Soviet Neo-Liberalism (PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 2015). My understanding of subjectivity and agency has been influenced by Sherry Ortner's theory of the self-reflexive and embedded agent; see Anthropology and Social Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 16. Caroli, Histoire de Ia protection sociale, 20 and 36; Girotti, Welfare state, 147-182; Eghigian, "The German Welfare State as a Discourse of Trauma;' 103. See also Gerd Giickenjan,Kurieren und Staat machen: Gesundheit und Medizin in der biirgerlichen Welt (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985); and Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic, 1990). 17. Louis Melennec, Z:indemnisation du handicap (Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1997). 18. See, for instance, GAPK, f. 9, o. I, d. 121, 1.130. 19. GAPK, f. 9, o. 1, d. 109, 111, 112, 113, and 114 overflow with this type of petitions. See also Fieseler, "Razvitie gosudarstvennoi pomoshchi invalidam.'' Besides writing to the Commissaiat of Social Assistance, soldiers also addressed the Central Executive Committee and the Petrograd Soviet with thousands of letters demanding an improvement of their everyday life through the provision of material help. See Fran