Abstract
This article explores how blinded Soviet Second World War veterans faced the problem of social reintegration and adjustment to peacetime civilian life. Their suddenly acquired blindness compelled these men to craft new subjectivities. To give legitimacy to their desires for inclusion and equality, many blind veterans advocated integration through labour. While these men chose to operate within the hegemonic discourses of labour and ability, their status as blind veterans also altered the Soviet idiom of productive work and exemplary subjectivity. Using the highly scripted genre of autobiography, disabled individuals engaged with the standards of fitness promoted by the socialist culture of labour, but also reconceived work as a source of happiness and proposed an alternative model of Soviet subjectivity.
In the aftermath of the Second World War the Soviet state recognized between 2.6 and 2.8 million soldiers as disabled servicemen and decided to address this population's economic hardships and demands for social reintegration by emphasizing their right to professional retraining and job placement. 1 This approach – which was consistent with the Soviet pre-war understanding of social assistance to vulnerable social groups and also similar to contemporary European trends – was spelled out in a series of resolutions passed by the highest organs of state government. It was publicized as evidence of the state's beneficence towards wounded veterans. However, historical research assessing the outcomes of these welfare policies has shown that the majority of disabled veterans was neither properly retrained nor hired according to the specifications of the welfare agencies, but rather assigned low-skilled and poorly paid jobs, or simply left to their own devices and compelled to beg on the streets in order to provide for themselves and their families. 2
Rehabilitation and employment were particularly difficult to achieve for those Soviet men and women who had lost their sight on the battlefields and suddenly found themselves faced with a highly labour incapacitating disability such as blindness. The All-Russian Society of the Blind (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Slepykh, hereafter VOS) was the main organ responsible for their education, housing, specialized vocational training, and placement in various state enterprises and institutions. 3 Yet VOS had a hard time not only accomplishing the social reintegration of the new cohorts of blind people, but even simply keeping track of their growing numbers and recruiting them as fee-paying members. For instance, in October 1943 a social worker called Muratov suggested a hypothetical number of 6,000–8,000 Russian blinded veterans, but admitted that VOS had been able to enrol among its members only 1,543 of them and did not ‘know where the other invalids of the patriotic war are and what the blind-of-war do’. He also reported that, two years into the war, only 12 per cent of the ‘known’ blinded veterans had been placed on the job market. 4 In 1948, VOS had a census of 14,179 war blind, but registered only 7,747 of them in its ranks. 5 We do not know the true number of blinded ex-servicemen who were rehabilitated and employed according to their specialization, but, since their professional requalification and job placement happened mainly through VOS, we can assume that only around 50 per cent of the monitored blind veterans had any real opportunity to preserve professional status and income. The rest (and all those blinded veterans who were not counted at all in VOS's statistics) had a slim chance of resuming regular salaried work by their own efforts and ended up surviving by selling post-cards, fortune-telling, singing, and accordion playing in public markets and train stations. They remained out of the state's field of vision and were thereby deprived of their rights to social welfare. They shared with the other Soviet wounded veterans an everyday reality of impoverishment, disenfranchisement and neglect – experiences that certainly led many blinded veterans to feel anger, resentfulness and disillusionment.
In contrast with the grimness of the experience of war blindness that emerges from the archival record, some blind veterans' oral and written memoirs from the post-Stalinist and late Soviet period recount the lives of their authors as feats of labour leading to the overcoming of their disabilities, the achievement of social integration, and the attainment of personal happiness. How do we make sense of these proud success stories vis-à-vis the untold biographies of the many war blind who made a living by soliciting alms? Should we dismiss them as the atypical testimonies of a minority of overachievers which does not reflect the everyday realities of wider social strata? In my analysis of a sample of around fifty-five oral autobiographies and an approximately equal number of written recollections, I recognize that they are not representative of the diverse and generally negative experience of the Soviet war blind in the post-war years. Rather, I propose to engage with these documents as crucial sources to think about the appeal and the limits of the socialist discourse of labour in the self-fashioning of young men traumatically deprived of their working capacities. Choosing the widespread genre of autobiography compelled these men to embrace the language of productive labour and the mandate to overcome their disabilities. At the same time, within the constraints of hegemonic forms and constructs, grassroots blind autobiographers renegotiated a labour discourse scripted for the able-bodied and often twisted the idiom of labour to turn their ‘defects’ into advantages. As I ultimately argue in this article, their specific use of the discourse of labour within the genre of autobiographical narration allowed these blind men to fashion themselves as suffering but still striving subjects. This was a process that facilitated their social reintegration and even suggested new forms of exemplary Soviet subjectivity, although it did not substantially upset disciplining categories and hierarchies of normativity – the war blind ceased to be an ‘invalid’ only when he outperformed the able-bodied.
Most of the oral sources analysed for this project come from the collection The Veterans Remember – an audio book including memoirs, open interviews, and various kinds of autobiographical narratives recorded by the blind activist Vladimir Shestakov between the early 1960s and the late 1980s, and spanning memories from wartime to the onset of perestroika. In addition, I examined a number of oral autobiographies which are part of Shestakov's personal audio archive but have not been included in the compilation The Veterans Remember. 6 The written source base consists of blind veterans' memoirs that were published in the local press, collected in small volumes of fictionalized autobiographies, or printed as monographs. It also includes the unpublished autobiographies that I found in the State Archive of the Perm' Province and the Museum of the All-Russian Society of the Blind in Perm'. These archives are particularly rich in blind veterans' autobiographies because the city of Perm' hosted Dr Boris Kovalenko's requalification courses – a special programme for blinded Second World War veterans which operated between 1941 and 1946 and attracted around 300 blind ex-servicemen from all over the Soviet Union. 7 Drawing upon this source base, I will explore how blind veterans/activists constructed arguments for labour based upon the contradictions between socialist notions of work and embodied experiences of disability.
These blind autobiographers were a particularly upwardly mobile group among the Soviet war blind. They were relatively well-educated men who had become blind as young adults serving in the army and who had been better equipped than other blinded veterans (such as older men, women, or less educated rural inhabitants) to turn their disability into a positive life experience. They had been among the few war blind who completed professional requalification courses and learned how to read and write in Braille. 8 They had not only opted to pay membership fees for VOS, but also to work as activists within this Society and had moved on to careers in its administration. 9 In addition, they had been among the followers of a movement that Vera Dunham has identified as Voropaevism. This was a form of norm-busting Stakhanovism among the disabled that took its name from the fictional hero Colonel Voropaev and that, in 1948–1950, counted between 2,300 and 4,198 blind who fulfilled the planned norms of production to 200–300 per cent. 10 In short, these were men who had received exemplary care from the Soviet state and thrived on its discourse of labour as liberation from the burden of invalidism.
Besides the identity of their authors, the time of composition of these oral and written autobiographies is a significant contextualizing factor. While Stalin had attempted to silence any negative aspect of the war and to exclude images of war invalids from the official representation of post-war life, the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years saw the flourishing of new interpretations of the war and its place in the country's historical narrative. As Nina Tumarkin has argued, in the 1970s – when most of these memoirs were composed – the aging veterans' experience was used to ‘mobilize loyalty, maintain order, and achieve a semblance of energy to counter the growing nationwide apathy and loss of popular resilience of spirit’. 11 That time was also the beginning of a disability rights movement that agitated for greater opportunities in the areas of education, housing and work. 12 In this context, blinded Second World War veterans felt entitled to author autobiographies that addressed both blind and able-bodied audiences and that countered the exclusion, stigma and isolation of the post-war decade. 13
Thus, their recollections appear to fulfil several purposes. They were loci of historical memory, where the authors could track their selves in time and re-align their personal stories within the post-war sense of Soviet citizenship. They were empowering commemorative projects that celebrated blinded soldiers' ‘hard won victories’ alongside the accomplishments of other veterans. 14 They also strove to create a collective vision of the predicament of blindness and suggest ways to overcome this predicament. Certainly, these autobiographies were also offered as cultural scripts for the blind as well as the seeing: while the former were provided with a model of proper behaviour, the latter were stimulated to identify with the able-bodied auxiliary characters (be they friends, mothers, girlfriends, wives or educators). As didactic tales, they had the purpose of moulding mutual relationships between the able-bodied and the blind. Finally, these autobiographies were viable spaces to (re)construct one's disabled self and embed it in the social matrix. The focus of my analysis is on the latter function of blinded veterans' autobiographies as tools to fashion an acceptable subjectivity and thereby pursue the agenda of social reintegration and happiness.
In Russia as well as in other European countries, autobiography has been historically associated with modern ideas of subjectivity. Since at least the eighteenth century, members of disenfranchised groups have used autobiographical authorship to advance their claims for emancipation and viewed this goal as inextricable from embracing an array of shaping discourses (ideological constructs and official historical narratives, but also novels and other fictional genres). 15 Historian Diane Koenker has remarked that autobiographical statements formulated by Russian lower-class people are narrative texts whose construction ‘is influenced by cultural narrative models, by collective memory, by scripts already circulating in society at large’. 16 Other scholars of Soviet history have emphasized the ways in which certain models and archetypes shaped the autobiographical efforts of various individuals and social groups. Frederick Corney, for instance, has shown that ordinary Soviet writers were heavily edited by the collective in the process of narrating their memories of the October Revolution. Igal Halfin has argued that communist autobiographies required the voicing of a particular narrative of confession and conversion. Autobiographical narratives definitely served as an instrument for creating subjects for the Soviet state. Indeed, as Jochen Hellbeck has discussed, autobiographical practices and techniques of self-surveillance were a means for creating the New Soviet Man, because autobiographers internalized the goals of the ever progressing communist revolution. At the same time, when historians consider the autobiographies of war veterans – as Sean Guillory recently did in relation to Civil War veterans – it appears that ‘suffering, estrangement, hopelessness, powerlessness, dislocation, and near-death experience’ played a significant role alongside other more official factors shaping subject formation in the Soviet system. 17
Similarly, the blind autobiographies of the post-Stalinist period were subjected to conventions of form, content and goals which moulded their authors' construction of self. Blinded veterans/autobiographers knew that being deemed as ‘invalid’ (invalid) or ‘unable to work’ (netrudosposobnyi) conferred on them a set of presumed negative qualities (such as social isolation, psychological fixation on their personal misfortune, and economic dependency). 18 This stigma of invalidnost' (literally invalid-ness) moved them to embrace the official narrative of rehabilitation through work when they told their post-war life stories. Furthermore, the emotional stance required from all Soviet subjects in autobiographical narration was boldness and optimism, defiance of any difficulty, and faith in self-transformation. 19 Thus, blind autobiographers had to overcome any disenchantment, hopelessness, melancholy, powerless rage, or alienated withdrawal that might have impacted their psyche after the violent and traumatic event which blinded them. In short, despite the overwhelming difficulties of their situation and their mental and emotional suffering – what modern day psychiatry has termed Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome – blind memoirists had to reject invalidism, overcome labour incapacity, and kindle renewed hopes for happiness through labour.
In this complex autobiographical endeavour, Nikolai Ostrovskii and his fictional hero Pavel Korchagin came to provide a real life model and a literary standard. Ostrovskii was an iconic Soviet writer who suffered from ankylosing spondylitis, a disease that left him blind and virtually paralyzed. His semi-autobiographical novel How the Steel was Tempered featured the defeat of terrible disabilities through the path of labour. 20 As I show in this article, the most successful blind autobiographies were those that involved the elaboration of a coherent narrative composed on the model of Ostrovskii's novel and organized around the conceptual category of labour (however much or little labour reflected their ‘real’ life experiences). At the same time, reproducing a narrative form and a discourse that were ubiquitous and dominant in their society, blind autobiographers also told their particular stories of men who had been disfigured by the war, but had survived, tenaciously struggled for their right to belong, and successfully negotiated their reintegration into the collective. In their recollections, the so-called voennooslepshie (blind-of-war) embraced labour as the common language spoken by the Soviet able-bodied community and therefore as the tool to re-insert themselves into that society, but they also layered it over with specific economic and psychological issues pertaining to their condition as labour-incapacitated men.
‘Adding to’, writes Homi Bhabha, ‘serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification’. 21 Bhabha has defined the condition of subalternity and marginalization as the ‘dispossession and dislocation’ of ‘those who have to live under the surveillance of a sign of identity and fantasy that denies their difference’. 22 I believe that this conceptualization fits the blind autobiographers whose success stories I analyse in this article. Although better placed than other blind people to deal with their disability, these men were subaltern and marginalized vis-à-vis the able-bodied Soviet subjects because they had been dispossessed of their previous identity as healthy male workers. Traumatically blinded in military action and thrown out of the job market, they found themselves dis-located and had to find ways to re-locate their disabled selves. Interpreting their newly acquired disability and striving to overcome their frustration, depression and general exhaustion, blind autobiographers turned their injury into a chance to reflect on their social alienation and challenge their marginalized status as physically disabled. Like the young able-bodied diarists described by Jochen Hellbeck, these blinded veterans and VOS activists worked in their autobiographies to become worthy Soviet subjects, but they also struggled to expand understandings of worthiness and acceptable subjectivity. Indeed, with the seemingly smooth linearity of their success stories, the voennooslepshie employed the discourse of labour to argue that physical defects actually helped in creating exemplary subjects. While in the Soviet Union there seemed to be no space for the alternative perspectives of those without the capacity to work, precisely the theme of defect was used in these autobiographies as an instrument to redefine model subjectivity. ‘Working ability’ and ‘able-bodied-ness’ ceased to be unambiguous synonyms; blind activists compared themselves as disabled people to the hard working Soviet model subject, modified both images, and then integrated both into the social body. Their autobiographies had a clear propensity to spawn alternative role models and thus to become weapons against univocal constructions of subjectivity.
Ultimately, however, the potential for subverting hierarchies of normativity was constrained in these autobiographies by the very measures of value that blind activists imposed on their lives. Since their arguments were rooted in the denial of invalidism and impairment of function, they implicitly acknowledged that a person's capacity is relevant to the question of integration. As Douglas Baynton has remarked in relation to other contexts, this strategy was often used to deflect exclusion and marginalization, but it ultimately failed to challenge the assumption that disability is a legitimate reason for exclusionary practices. 23 In addition, these arguments reveal an inherently violent construction that, as Lennard Davis has explained, forces the disabled to perform successfully in order not to be viewed as disabled. 24 Because labour capacity was emphasized by the state's official disability policies as the privileged criterion for citizenship, blind autobiographers in the end did not engage in a counter normative project vis-à-vis the discourse of labour: just as their narratives drew attention to a different type of self, they still argued for equality with the able-bodied based on their capacity to work.
The Soviet case analysed in this article fits in the framework of analysis presented by disability scholars focused on the United States and Western Europe. Indeed, the intention of twentieth-century states to return disabled veterans to productive labour must be understood in relation both to the lived condition of disability and its function as a marginalizing and disciplining category. For instance, the interwar British and German states had deemed ‘curative work’ or Arbeitstherapie necessary for all groups of disabled individuals and particularly for the war invalids. Increasingly in the aftermath of the Second World War, governments of varied political persuasions upheld the commitment to guaranteeing disabled veterans' security through policies of full employment. 25 Similarly, in the attempt to come to terms with mental and physical war scars and in the urge for social reintegration, ex-servicemen worldwide have written narratives of outworking the society of the able-bodied that allowed a reversal of normal-abnormal status without challenging the very category of disability. 26
At the same time, Soviet narratives of traumatic blindness and post-war reintegration had their own specificities. First, although in all post-Second World War European countries the state's involvement in social welfare grew considerably in relation to voluntary sector charitable agencies, in the Soviet Union the state completely monopolized disabled veterans' reintegration. For Soviet blinded veterans/activists this meant that they could operate within a strong institutional background and harvest the discourses and practices of integration that had been long cultivated by an official state agency such as VOS. Second, although the healthy male body occupied a central place in Soviet society as well in other European countries, powerful literary and real-life models had the potential to make the disabled self equally normative. 27 Pavel Korchagin's triumph over disability not only suggested a happy end to the bodily and psychological havoc done by the war, but also represented a Soviet disabled self that could have meaning, value and historical significance (as long as he performed useful productive work and submitted to the discipline of labour). Finally, a significant specificity of Soviet blind autobiographies relates to the close historical linkage between autobiography and understandings of subjectivity. In comparison with bourgeois Bildunsgsromane that traced their authors' path from dependency to self-realization, blind activists' recollections indebted to the conventions of communist autobiographies placed considerable emphasis on mentoring and peer-pressure as key aspects of self-improvement. Thus, telling memoirs in Ostrovskii's vein allowed authors to import a conception of blindness that contributed to a strong and emblematic, but never autonomous disabled self. Whether able-bodied or disabled, the normative Soviet self was not a liberal subject.
Trudovoi put' as VOS Official Discourse
Since the Revolution of 1917, Soviet political leaders and various types of medical and legal experts had promoted ‘the road of labour’ (trudovoi put') as the pathway that brought all deviant individuals to an honest life of equal rights and integration. Through work, education, and correct ideological training, criminals abjured their past, while unsupervised single women and people with physical disabilities overcame their darkness and adopted a brighter way of life. 28 When VOS was founded in 1923 as the official state organ for the care of the visually impaired, it readily adopted the banner of blind people's socio-economic emancipation and integration through the road of labour. To its members, the Society promised employment either within its ‘didactic-productive workshops’, or in the invalids' cooperatives, the local industries, and the facilities of the People's Commissariat of Social Assistance. Although these efforts and promises had varying practical outcomes, VOS activists remained faithful to the discourse of labour as liberation from disability throughout the entire Soviet period. 29
This construct had particularly strong currency with the blinded veterans who entered the ranks of VOS's activists during the Second World War and in the immediate post-war years. Indeed, the value of labour – not only as a means of subsistence but also as one's unique key to inclusion and happiness – had been more dominant in their upbringing than in the socialization of earlier generations of blind people and the congenitally blind in their generational group. These were men who had grown up as able-bodied children under Stalinism. As such, they had been encouraged to seek incorporation in the economic life of their country and strive for professional accomplishments and quality of personal life. 30 After the war, their expectations of inclusion and happiness through work contrasted sharply with the acquisition of a particularly labour incapacitating and therefore stigmatizing and isolating condition – an important difference vis-à-vis a less incapacitating disability such as deafness, and in comparison with conditions that could be remedied with techno-medical interventions such as mobility disability. Suddenly excluded from the labour-oriented Soviet citizenship due to their newly acquired blindness, these men considered the traumatic loss of sight as a tragic event which had derailed them from their previous life path. Joining VOS with this experiential background, they insisted that disability had to be overcome and the blind had to go back to the ranks of the Soviet active workers to which they felt they essentially belonged. 31 As Aleksandr Malyshev put it describing his dismissal from active military service, ‘I ardently wanted to go back into the ranks of the builders of our life together with all the others’. 32 Another blinded veteran wrote: ‘All around us are our people, the Soviet people’. 33 These statements expressed the desire not to be left out. And employment seemed to this group of blind the only possible means to fulfil their aspirations.
Thus, the voennooslepshie embraced VOS's longstanding discourse of labour because it purported to address burning economic and social questions in an effective way. They also forged their own variation of the trudovoi put' whereby to be employed was not only the solution to material necessities and dreams of collective belonging, but also the pathway to emotional well-being. In fact, as blinded veterans/activists explained, the economic and psychological benefits of having a job were inseparable: they constituted the two sides of the coin of labour. As Aleksandr Patoka remembered, ‘for a blind disabled individual, labour is above all the foundation of his life, not only from a material point of view, but also morally. It is very hard for a person without sight to just sit at home’. 34 In his collection of blind people's life stories A Small Island of Light, the blind writer Ivan Gilev used a series of metaphors to express what he believed to be the meaning of labour for a blind person: work is ‘the wings of life’, ‘a song of life’, ‘youth’, ‘a source of light’, and ‘a ticket to life’. 35 Gilev's metaphors closely associate work and life, merging the two concepts into one inextricable ideal and lyrically suggesting that the commitment to work brings social and emotional rebirth.
Remembering their activism within the Perm' section of VOS in the post-war decade, several blinded veterans interviewed by Shestakov described the difficult conditions of the time and argued that the most urgent issue for the war blind was to create economically efficient productive bases. At the same time, they commented on the emotional significance of labour as they attempted to re-imagine their lives as blind men and regain confidence in themselves. For instance, Mikhail Chernytsin proudly remembered that a community of 80 blind people (‘all hardworking and always aspiring to work’) was able to establish a successful industrial enterprise in the city of Perm' and that, by 1953, this facility already employed 150 blind workers. More industrial enterprises were organized between 1944 and 1955 in the villages of Berezniki, Vereshchagino, Kungur, Lys'va, Chernushka, Nytva and Solikamsk. Chernytsin insisted that the blind had accomplished these feats of work thanks to their initiative, energy and spirit of independence – personality traits that guaranteed the success of their endeavours against a wall of indifference, social prejudice and objective difficulties, such as the post-war general penury of resources and the lack of financial support from the local administrative organs. As Cherdytsin succinctly put it reiterating the parallel between work and life, ‘here we worked and here we lived’. 36
Historian Sarah Ashwin has contended that the Soviet work collectives led workers to feel ‘genuine attachment’ toward them because they provided food, housing, medical care and social opportunities. 37 In the post-war decade, the dorms and ‘red corners’ that operated by some enterprises of the blind offered after-work recreation through art and music classes, choirs, concerts, dancing and theatrical clubs, chess games, sports and occasional tourist excursions. 38 It must be said that recreational activities have a more prominent space in the recollections of blind female veterans. In addition, these women explicitly located personal life-changing events, such as marriage and the birth of children, in the symbolic space of the enterprise. For instance, Lidiia Savel'eva said, ‘here I got married and gave birth to two daughters and a son’. 39 This way of remembering is certainly influenced by gender discourses of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years which encouraged women to find satisfaction in family and social life, while men's sense of realization was firmly located in the realm of salaried work. 40 Nonetheless, both male and female blinded veterans/memoirists nostalgically remembered that the blind lived ‘happily’, because an atmosphere of friendship and mutual help allowed everybody to overcome their many material and psychological difficulties. 41 Nobody would refuse to work, because they knew that they were working for their own sake and this awareness made them happy. 42 In short, adopting the discourse of the trudovoi put', blinded veterans cum VOS activists insisted that to work, study and participate in amateur art activities literally nurtured the blind and prevented them from feeling like outcasts.
The idea of hard work as an equalizing and integrating force permeates even the less idyllic recollections. Ivan Lukinykh, for instance, recognized that since he was hired in the blind enterprise of Nytva in 1953, he had experienced ‘both easy and hard times, happy and sad moments’. However, in the weekends and holidays when the whole staff of both disabled and able-bodied would gather at a ‘friendly, cheerful table covered with food … everybody was equal, independently from their working position, age, or disability’. 43 This image of happy conviviality based on equality reiterates in microcosm the argument in favour of blinded veterans' active participation in the workforce and, by extension, in the Soviet social body. In addition, this image is particularly significant because it does not come from the classic repertoire of labour iconic motives, but it is nonetheless directly related to labour, as though it were a by-product of it. The festive table covered with food emblematically captures the ideologically conditioned and ideal world painted in VOS activists' autobiographies – it was a world of material well-being, friendship, happiness and equality beyond hierarchies of work, generation or physical fitness.
The interesting point in all these descriptions is not so much the romanticized and nostalgic portrayal of the enterprises of the blind in autobiographies that were told and written decades later. More significant is the repeated use of terms indicating psychological well-being to describe not only leisure, but also a set of activities that were performed for work-related purposes. This language is indicative of the imbrication of two discourses, both of which were hegemonic and normalizing – the project of socialist labour and the construct of happiness for the Soviet blind. Blind autobiographers saw their identity entirely in terms of their place within the enterprise. They needed to believe in the solidarity of the work collective, for it was only there that they could lead a life of worth and dignity. Happiness and integration had been promised in return for dedication to the ideals and disciplines of labour. If the virtues of respectable blind subjectivity meant conformity to a set of disciplinary rules, the blinded veterans and VOS activists of the post-war decade proved prepared to conform.
Trudovoi put' as Master Narrative
The trudovoi put' – the road of socialist labour and the positive transformation that it implied – was not only an official state discourse endorsed by VOS and harnessed by committed blind activists. It also constituted a master narrative to remember and recount success stories. As such, it was a psychologically complex path that echoed elements of the socialist realist plot. It was the telling of an exemplary life in which an unreformed and uninitiated main character became able to profess a new moralistic way of life. In order to articulate new selves, this master narrative required the transformed authors to examine the development of their personality, recall where they came from, and who they used to be. These narratives were ritualized and repetitive, becoming a type of conversion story. At the same time, they also allowed their authors to pursue their particular agendas. 44
Adopting the Soviet narrative of transformation, blind autobiographers also strove to make it their own. They marked the arduous overcoming of their defects through signposts that were both intimately related to their traumatic blindness and part of the common set of experiences of the larger social body. The most significant of these signposts or turning moments were the military event that made them blind, the encounter with a mentor, and the first day of work. Because of their dual status as war victors and war victims (‘poor victors’ in Fieseler's words), 45 these blind activists cum autobiographers had a complex approach towards the war: on one hand, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ was a paradigmatic event that defined them in relation to a generation; on the other hand, it was a negative force that had disfigured their bodies and deformed their intimate lives. Labour, instead, was less ambiguously presented as the tool that helped them rebuild their selves, their homes and intimacies, while also allowing them access to the larger Soviet body social and strengthening the connection with the able-bodied. In short, autobiographical narratives marked by these recognizable signposts created a space where blind and able-bodied individuals participated in one another's lives and made them intelligible to both.
The trudovoi put' was a journey from negative to positive Soviet subjectivity that could not be accomplished solo. Indeed, despite the importance of initiative and individual hard work, the war blind could not possibly take all merit for their transformation. They had to acknowledge the help of either a state institution or a tutor who often stood for a state organ. This narrative mechanism performed a series of important functions: again, it inscribed the individual and his personal struggle within the collective (thus substantiating these blind men's desire for social integration); it recognized the blind men's subject position vis-à-vis the helping state (thus confirming loyalty to it); and, while praising an official or an institution for providing help, it also mandated the state's duty to provide services and the blinded veterans’ right to receive help. As a VOS activist put it, the state ‘has the duty to help the blind-of-war integrate into a full-fledged working life so that they could be useful to the socialist society and feel happy despite their serious physical disability’. 46
Besides institutional sources of help (VOS itself or the Commissariats of Welfare, Health and Education), blind memoirists often mentioned a mentor who guided the untrained war blind along the path of transformation.
47
For instance, when Nikolai Ermachok arrived in Perm', he had a hard time getting used to living in the dorm for the blind without the help of his family. The mentor Vasilii Shumilov – himself a blinded veteran – shook him out of his apathetic state with the following words: Why are you crying? What is this helplessness you are talking about? …what is it so bad that happened to you? There are interesting classes, you get a stipend. Everything will be worked out, Kolia, believe me…
48
The Soviet notion and everyday experience of collectivity was another important source of help for the blinded veterans walking along the road of labour. A spirit of friendship ruled in the veterans' collectives and was facilitated by the ideas of soldierly brotherhood. In addition, peer pressure convinced the more recalcitrant blind men to adopt a working life, thus functioning as a crucial levelling and disciplining mechanism. Some autobiographers emphasized VOS activists' common traits even in such aspects as the way they smoked or the clothes they wore. 49 According to the testimony of Ivan Kilikeev, entering a collective of young blind people who ‘lived together, studied together, and helped each other’, enabled all of them to successfully undertake their transformative journey. 50 Georgii Koriavko defined the trudovoi put' as ‘a long path, a very long path of both retreats and advances’. Stepping into it and acquiring new working skills was an achievement of the individual which he accomplished within the structures of the Soviet state, with the support of the collective, and under the control of a mentor. 51
The path of labour entailed both the requirement to be independent and the need to accept the care (and control) exercised over the disabled by the able-bodied. This tension emerges in the veterans' oral and written autobiographies every time the blind authors articulate what they desired and expected in their relationships with the able-bodied. The ‘able-bodied friends’ are often described as willing helpers in the most complicated matters of the blind's everyday life. In Perm', healthy students never refused to help the veterans. According to the blind memoirists, this was motivated not only by the general readiness to serve that characterized the Soviet people, but especially by the gratitude and respect that everybody felt towards the defenders of the country. Friendship with the blind veterans was portrayed as a great fortune and source of joy for the able-bodied. Blind memoirists wanted to imagine able-bodied young people as being proud of deserving the trust of a veteran. In these activists' autobiographical narratives, the healthy even tried to imitate the ex-servicemen looking up to them as older and more experienced friends. The voennooslepshie told them stories about their life before the war, the military service, and their experience at the front. In short, blind veterans portrayed themselves as a positive example for the able-bodied Soviet youth. At the same time, the blind insisted that teaching and influence went both ways. Hanging out with the able-bodied students, the war blind ‘started to worry about their appearance … copied the best manners and habits of their new friends’. 52 Stating mutual influence was a way of affirming integration and reconciling it with the mandate to accept the ‘attentive care’ of the state, its institutional agents, and its able-bodied population.
All these components of the trudovoi put' as master narrative can be observed in two emblematic blind autobiographies, that of the Second World War veterans and VOS activists Aleksandr Malyshev and Arkadii Shan'gin. The following section analyses their written and oral autobiographies as well as several journal articles about them. During the thriving veterans' movement of the Brezhnev years, these two men's biographies were repeatedly told – by themselves and by their contemporaries – because they served both as indicators and instruments of integration into Soviet society by way of self-transformation through the road of labour. Malyshev's and Shan'gin's stories provided paradigms of a positive journey which led blinded ex-servicemen from ‘dark thoughts and pessimism to a full-fledged and full-blooded life’. 53 They promised the overcoming of post-traumatic stress and the attainment of rich professional and intimate lives. Time and again, all this was achieved through ‘hard work’ as a ‘creative’ force that integrated the blinded veterans with the rest of the Soviet social body, but also channelled their aspirations and contended that their dreams could be realized only through discipline.
The Model Blind Subject: Aleksandr Malyshev and Arkadii Shan'gin
All of Malyshev's autobiographical recollections move fast through a life that was ‘nothing unusual’ until the traumatic acquisition of blindness.
54
That was the first turning point in his trudovoi put' – the moment when his narrative slowed down and the author could indulge in his self-presentation as a man genuinely confused by a stressful event. For instance, Malyshev vividly described the pain of realizing that he had turned blind. I woke up in the military hospital. It was dark. The eyes itch. I asked: ‘Is it night?’ A guy next to me answered: ‘It's day’.
55
When blind autobiographers described their experience in the military hospitals, they fashioned themselves as unable to imagine a future and desperately wondering how to ‘find a place in life’. The questions ‘how will I live now?’ and ‘what will I do?’ mark the moment of disclosure of truth about the soldiers' blindness in almost all the memoirs recorded by Shestakov. For a young Soviet man, permanent loss of sight and complete labour-incapacity meant ‘the crumbling of all plans and hopes as well as a future of personal unhappiness’. 57 This sentence summarizes all the anxieties coming with disability in Soviet society. First, it was an economic issue: what professional activities could a veteran engage in as a blind man? On what money could he live? Second, blindness threatened veterans with exclusion from the collective. While the wounds they endured on the battlefields represented the common experience of a generation of Soviet disabled ex-servicemen, their blindness precluded them from participating in the post-war reconstruction. Third, disability barred ‘personal happiness’, a phrase that often signalled the enjoyment of romantic and sexual life. As Malyshev put it: ‘Who will love you now? They will have only pity for you’. 58
The press offered three distinct representations of blind men: the passive and pitied invalid, the hero of Ostrovskii's novel, Pavel Korchagin, and – somewhere in-between – the common blinded veteran.
59
In the transitional moment between the doubts on how to live further and the determination to work on his disabled self, these three images fought a virtual battle in Malyshev's head. Initially, he thought that his fate was to be an invalid and live on people's alms. He remembered an old poor blind man from his village who: knocked at the villagers' homes asking for charity and, in the evening, having spent in spirits the money gathered during the day, lay at the gates of somebody's house. The people had compassion for the poor man, they had pity.
60
Feeling the desire to re-qualify himself as a positive subject, Malyshev resolved to ‘defeat the darkness that surrounded him’. 63 He applied to the History Department of the Perm' Pedagogical Institute and, with the onset of the academic year, ‘all the wavering and doubting … disappeared almost immediately’. 64 Malyshev devoted himself to school: studying and being involved in research completely absorbed him and made him feel happier and more confident. As the journalist Rikhter wrote re-telling Malyshev's life story, his student life was characterized by ‘the desire, the inspiration, and the complete faith that he could be useful’. 65
Intellectual activity became the defining concept in Malyshev's interpretation of his life as a blind man. After having completed his first university year with excellent grades, in the spring of 1945, Malyshev followed the encouragement of his history professor, German Zamiatin (i.e. the able-bodied mentor), and prepared a paper for a conference. Since he did not have any experience with academic writing, Malyshev felt as though he ‘had to walk literally in the dark’. Together with the fellow student Iasha Rozhkov, he visited all the libraries in Perm', read dusty newspapers, brochures, journals and monographs, and took notes in Braille. When the winter break started, he filled a big suitcase with these notes and went to his native village. For one month, Malyshev processed the gathered materials and dictated his thoughts to his father. When the day of the conference finally arrived, ‘it was not without fear that I walked to the tribune’. But the paper was well received and Malyshev even received a prize for it. 66
The conference presentation represents another important signpost in Malyshev's trudovoi put'. It fulfils similar positive functions as the first day on the job for the blind who found employment in industrial enterprises. Indeed, the success at the conference emboldened the blinded veteran and pushed him to continue his intellectual work by writing a doctoral dissertation in history. As with other hurdles, Malyshev did not deny the difficulty of writing, but rather emphasized his ability to surmount it (despite his blindness): ‘for one month I walked from one corner to the other, without knowing how to write the first line. But in the end even this Rubicon was passed’. 67 On 16 December 1953, Malyshev successfully defended his dissertation and later received the title of professor.
Arkadii Shan'gin's life story is in many respects similar to that of Malyshev. 68 He too graduated from the History Department of the Perm' Pedagogical Institute in 1950 and worked as middle school teacher until his retirement in 1986. And yet, Shan'gin's biggest victory over blindness was not in the field of education per se, but rather in the combination of teaching with sports and tourism. These fields of action – perhaps the most incongruous for a blind man – were in line with the state's rhetoric of physical culture and the perceived benefits of athletics for discipline among the citizenry. 69 They came to play a fundamental role in Shan'gin's struggle to find a place in life. Before the war, he used to go skiing, hunting and fishing with his younger brothers Iurii and Boris. After he became blind, Shan'gin kept practising these activities. Paradoxically, it was largely by working as an ‘instructor of children's tourism’ and conducting difficult skiing excursions with his pupils, that he turned his defects into advantages and overcame his disability. As Shan'gin put it in an interview with Shestakov, ‘wherever I dreamed to be, I have been’. And indeed, in 600 excursions – in summer and winter, by foot or on skis – Shan'gin covered approximately 6,000 km, literally crossing the Soviet territory, from the Urals to the Caucasus, along the lake Baikal and the river Don, from the Far East to Karelia. 70
In mediating between the ideal of Soviet veterans' masculinity and the autobiographer's traumatized state of blind man, Shan'gin's narrative mapped a new subject position. Indeed, his athletic and touristic work was endowed with the traits of positive masculinity – courage, persistency, honesty and self-sacrifice. But it was also recognized as a work that required extra consistency, intensity and willpower. To prove his capacity to perform on a par with (and above) the able-bodied male members of Soviet society, Shan'gin took upon himself all the organizational details of his trips, including the preparation of night shelters in the woods. 71 The Perm' writer Aleksandr Graevskii wrote that each of Shan'gin's trips was preceded by a painstaking work of preparation down to the last detail. 72 His fellow VOS activist Shumilov remembered the purposefulness and accuracy with which Shan'gin gathered materials on the Civil War battles in the Urals and only then led his students to visit these places. 73
Shan'gin never presented blindness as a source of insurmountable distress. On the contrary, he kept arguing that he experienced complete satisfaction from the performance of difficult and adventurous excursions. Recounting his many expeditions, Shan'gin proposed a narrative in which psychological well-being helped the blind recover from their physical problems, reverse the relationship of dependency on the able-bodied, and even become leaders among them. As Shan'gin once said: Of course, I was worried … often times I was alone, without a second teacher with me. But I see that so much depends on my mood and my behaviour. I have to control myself, to be a model … and I feel that the kids are following me and being inspired by me.
74
Soviet blinded Second World War veterans and VOS activists told their lives as ‘a struggle for the right to be in the first ranks of society’. 76 Malyshev and Shan'gin had fought this battle for inclusion very successfully because they had not accepted the hopelessness that was associated with the word ‘invalid’, but rather preserved a strong will and eagerness for action. The Brezhnev-era press presented this type of blind ex-servicemen as ‘our Soviet people’, who overcame the barriers that hinder ‘invalid men’ from engaging in ‘worthy labour’ and being at ‘the front of labour’. 77 As Malyshev wrote, ‘there are no cranky and pessimistic men among my comrades … They all passionately love their work and believe in it as if it were a medicine against spiritual and physical suffering’. 78 Blinded veterans/autobiographers did articulate feelings of fear and despair, but in the end catharsis occurred through labour: the negative feelings of pessimism and gloominess were transcended and the blinded veterans were restored to the community as communist and blind subjects. In their autobiographical narratives, Malyshev and Shan'gin repeated that blindness had not taken away from them any single joy of the life of healthy seeing men. They had a job that they enjoyed; they also had wives, children and many friends.
In its mutually constituting dimensions as official VOS discourse and master narrative, the trudovoi put' normalized the blind. It transformed disabilities into the best personality traits of the proper Soviet subject of the post-Stalinist period: young and strong despite his shortcomings; experiencing objective difficulty and suffering but never giving up on life; and always striving to pursue the ‘Purpose’, i.e. the creation of Communism. 79 Indeed, at a blinded veterans' reunion in February 1978, Malyshev and Shan'gin were introduced as ‘examples of the spiritual strength of the Soviet Man, his moral beauty and indefatigable devotion to the ideals of the Party and Communism’. 80 On one hand, this construct matched with the Soviet state's disciplining thrust and the need to create loyal subjects. On the other hand, this discourse could have an emancipating dimension. By using the theme of disability as an instrument to define Soviet subjectivity, the blinded veterans' variation on the trudovoi put' turned the ‘defects’ of a marginalized social group into advantages and thus presented a strong claim for their social re-integration.
The Undisciplined Other: Beggars and Baian Players
While the autobiographies composed by VOS activists testify to blinded veterans' intense and conscientious labour, self-possession, and discipline, the archival record reveals that the followers of Voropaevism were a minority and not all the war blind willingly embraced the Soviet work ethic. It is telling that the pedagogical council of Kovalenko's rehabilitation courses frequently recommending controlling the war blind. At a meeting on 1 October 1941, Kovalenko himself complained about ‘some cases of infraction of work discipline and lack of independent study’. Kovalenko wrote about blind veterans who skipped classes, were late, and did not do the homework. 81 G. N. Vishnev had serious problems studying and was caught cheating several times; V. F. Omel'ianenko was expelled from the courses because he failed various exams and skipped many classes without any reason; M. M. Trapitsyn, V. A. Lebedev, and I. N. Iurchenko frequently received poor grades; I. E. Kozhushkin was singled out for ‘blatant infractions of discipline’, because he went to the bathhouse instead of going to classes. 82 In January 1943, Kovalenko complained that some students worked little and only if forced to. They were interested neither in socialist competitions nor in trade unions or youth organizations. 83 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 have been better for them to become musicians, because it would have allowed them to perform for money on the streets. 84 In addition, some students disagreed with Kovalenko's principled view that the blind should not receive economic assistance on grounds of their blindness. 85 These sources hint at the limits of the discourse of labour to offer real inclusion.
In the early 1950s, disabled veterans using ‘alternative survival strategies’ were often rounded up and prosecuted as ‘anti-social parasitical elements’. 86 For blind activists/autobiographers, begging ‘invalids’ posed a serious discursive and conceptual problem: they challenged their bid to integrate the blind into the fabric of Soviet society and transform their defects into advantages. Most autobiographers addressed this problem in two ways. The first was simply to omit from their recollections the experiences of undisciplined war blind who did not fit with the master plot of the successful transformative journey. The second was to mobilize their experiences to create a blind Other, i.e. the alterity against which they measured their value and through which they gave a didactic purpose to their stories.
‘Our goal’, said the VOS activist Aleksandr Patoka, ‘was to give a job to those people and introduce them to socially useful work’. Patoka admitted that it was difficult to convince the renegade war blind to work in the invalid enterprises and sometimes the activists ‘literally and forcefully dragged these people to work’. He recounted cases in which some blinded veterans would work the first shift at the market – singing and fortune telling – and then come to the enterprise only for the second shift. However, as Patoka claimed applying the narrative arc of the trudovoi put' to the Other blind, ‘they gradually transformed themselves and began to work honestly and conscientiously’. 87 Malyshev expressed criticism towards the comrades who did not ‘distinguish themselves by their loyalty’ and fell into ‘hooliganism and debauchery’. 88 He definitely despised all the blind ‘singing somewhere in a train station hoping to hear the sound of coins falling in their hats from the hands of citizens with tender hearts’. 89 Gilev had a strongly critical approach towards the ‘loafers’ and ‘drunkards’ who travelled around by train, were too lazy to work, but did not feel any shame in sitting with an extended arm. 90 Blind baian players and beggars were portrayed by the exemplary blind either as poor men trapped in their passive lives (unaware of their strengths and how to channel their energy) or as parasites and vagabonds who did not want to learn any profession and submit to discipline. For the model blind, only the rejection of invalidism and engagement in useful labour could re-generate human dignity. 91 ‘The meaning of life’, wrote the ophthalmologist Kovalenko, ‘is not the search for the most advantageous situation – work less and get more. Only through work and a non-easy work can the blind make their lives into something worthy and win the respect of the people surrounding them’. 92
Thus, the negative assessment of the Other blind had the didactic purpose of teaching visually impaired people how to live as Soviet subjects. It reminded them that the willingness to work would have earned them not the pity, but the much desired respect, friendship and love of the rest of society. Only then could the blind sing – ‘not for the money, but for the joy of their souls’, 93 and knowing that ‘I play my note in the choir of labour’. 94 Portraying the begging blind in a negative light, VOS activists/autobiographers – who were themselves Others vis-à-vis the visually unimpaired – not only reinforced disciplining mechanisms of social control, but also expressed the aspiration no longer to beg for benefits.
Conclusion
Irina Paperno wrote that ‘memoir writing is an instrument of both self-creation and community building’. 95 Writing autobiographical narratives and recounting their memoirs into Shestakov's recorder, the blinded veterans and VOS activists of the Perm' province constructed themselves as disabled and yet acceptable and even exemplary subjects. Furthermore, they inserted their blind selves into the larger Soviet social (able) body. Their autobiographies presented life stories shaped by the traumatic loss of sight and the struggle to overcome blindness and be integral members of the Soviet community. While composing one's life for external audiences was conditioned by the dominant genre of communist autobiography and the hegemonic discourse of labour, these activists' autobiographical acts served also the specific purpose of mastering disability. They fundamentally helped them to re-align their lives and describe a self that strove to reacquire confidence. Through the trudovoi put', a self that had been shattered by the war became able to reconstitute itself within the socio-political community. While suggesting a parallel between blinded veterans' capacity for inclusion and their ability to work, the road of labour and Korchagin's model nevertheless did not challenge deep-rooted conceptualizations of disability as a marginalizing and disciplining category.
The blind activist Vladimir Shestakov has not yet written or recorded his own autobiography. So far, he has found purpose in collecting the stories of other blind men. 96 For him, to bring the war blind to compose autobiographies has been part of an agenda of reintegration that – tellingly – still needed to be sustained in the early 2000s. At a time of crisis, when the Soviet project had failed and neoliberal policy was scaling back social programmes for the blind, Shestakov saw the continued collection of blinded veterans' success stories as one of the most pressing tasks facing the blind community in Perm'. 97 The fact that this activist and most of his interviewees/autobiographers still believe that labour is the best strategy to imagine themselves as integrated citizens should make us reflect not only on the power of dominant discourses (and nostalgic memory), but also on the ways in which these discourses intertwine with the motives and cultural politics of marginalized social groups.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements and Funding
This research was assisted by a fellowship from the International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I owe special thanks to Vladimir Shestakov and the friends at the Perm' section of VOS. Earlier version of this article were presented at the Russian reading group of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at the ASEEES conference in fall 2011. I would like to thank all the attendees of these meetings for their questions. Special thanks also to Diane Koenker, Veneta Ivanova, and Louise Loe for their comments.