The Right to Be Helped

Deviance, Entitlement, and the Soviet Moral Order

Maria Cristina Galmarini

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781609091965
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia rusa

"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?" Disabled single mother Maria Zolotova-Sologub raised this question in a petition dated July 1929 demanding medical assistance and a monthly subsidy for herself and her daughter. While the welfare of able-bodied and industrially productive people in the first socialist country in the world was protected by a state-funded insurance system, the social rights of labor-incapacitated and unemployed individuals such as Zolotova-Sologub were difficult to define and legitimize. The Right to Be Helped illuminates the ways in which marginalized members of Soviet society understood their social rights and articulated their moral expectations regarding the socialist state between 1917 and 1950.

Maria Galmarini-Kabala shows how definitions of state assistance and who was entitled to it provided a platform for policymakers and professionals to engage in heated debates about disability, gender, suffering, and productive and reproductive labor. She explores how authorities and experts reacted to requests for support, arguing that responses were sometimes characterized by an enlightened nature and other times by coercive discipline, but most frequently by a combination of the two. By focusing on the experiences of behaviorally problematic children, unemployed single mothers, and blind and deaf adults in several major urban centers, this important study shows that the dialogue over the right to be helped was central to defining the moral order of Soviet socialism. It will appeal to scholars and students of Russian history, as well as those interested in comparative disabilities and welfare studies.

Notes

Notes to Introduction

1. State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, hereafter GARF), f. 6983, o.1, d. 110, ll. 24–25.

2. Dorena Caroli, Histoire de la protection sociale en Union soviétique (1917–1939) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), 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, L’enfance abandonée et délinquante dans la Russie soviétique (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 Fürst, 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 Fürst (London: Routledge, 2006), 46–61; Fieseler, Die Invaliden des “Großen Vaterländischen Krieges” der Sowjetunion. Eine politische Sozialgeschichte, 1941–1991 (Habilitationsschrift, Ruhr-Universität 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. 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: ROSSPEN, 2010), 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: OOO 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. 1 (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; Iarskaia-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: Routledge-Curzon, 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 la 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. 1 (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 Cotkin 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 (April 2008): 293–315. See also Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

14. GARF, f. 6983, o.1, d. 5, l. 62 and ibid., d. 110, l. 4, ll. 13–14, and l. 18.

15. Ibid., d. 110, l. 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 the Soviet experience. For a review, see Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, “M...