Deaf in the USSR

Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991

Claire L. Shaw

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501713668
• eBook ISBN: 9781501713781
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

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

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

CHAPTER 1

Revolutionizing Deafness

In October 1925, the fortnightly newspaper Zhizn´ glukhonemykh (Life of Deaf-Mutes) published “The Life of the Komsomol,” an article celebrating the fourth anniversary of a deaf communist youth organization in Saratov.¹ The article vividly described the party held to celebrate this milestone: the benefits that communism had conferred on deaf people were palpable in the descriptions of the newly decorated, cozy club, lit by electric lighting and hung with pictures of Lenin and other party leaders. Yet the focus of this article was the Komsomol members themselves. The young deaf people present were portrayed as active and cultured, “carrying out lively debates among themselves” and discussing the issues of the day. Local Party members gave speeches to enthusiastic applause and, after “The Internationale” had been sung in sign language, instructive plays, games, and entertainments continued well into the night.

This article, and others like it, attested to the early articulation of a model of deaf Soviet selfhood. These deaf komsomol´tsy clearly embody the traits of the ideal New Soviet Person as it was defined in the early Soviet period: conscious, educated, energetic, and devoted to the cause of building communism.² Even in this short article, however, it is clear that deaf citizens had not been fully assimilated into these revolutionary frameworks of identity. Although much is made of their engagement with the symbols and rituals of Soviet life, there is a palpable delight taken in the sense of a deaf community. The few hearing people at the party are clearly at a disadvantage, “separated from the deaf-mutes by the paucity of their sign language, alternated with lip-read explanations.”³ While unmistakably Soviet, the model self in this article is equally deaf and is thus both engaged in and distanced from the Soviet drive to remake the individual and society.

This chapter examines the development of this complex, hybrid model of deaf Soviet selfhood, from the revolutions of 1917 to the foundation of the All-Russian Association of Deaf-Mutes (Vserossiiskoe Ob´´edinenie Glukhonemykh, the first incarnation of VOG) in 1926. The story of how this community came to be challenges existing narratives of both deaf and Soviet history. As Susan Burch has shown, practices of national acculturation have historically been destructive for deaf communities. During the attempt to Americanize the deaf community in the late nineteenth century, she argues, an “array of experts and kin wanted Deaf people to give up their cultural community and to act ‘normal.’ ”⁴ As a result, gatherings of deaf people that foreground the cultural distinctiveness of their community are often framed as inherently subversive to the dominant social order. Soviet historical scholarship has tended to tell a similar story of the negative meanings attached to physical and behavioral “deviance” following the revolution, focusing particularly on the “excisionary violence” that removed such individuals from the nascent Soviet body politic.⁵ Yet as Choi Chatterjee has explained, “The Bolsheviks … based their vision of the postrevolutionary state on the inclusion of minority groups, particularly women, excluded from the liberal order.”⁶ The existence of a group of deaf komsomol´tsy, signing proudly at the very heart of the Soviet establishment, thus expands our understanding of the developing frameworks of selfhood and difference in the early Soviet period.

The creation of this new form of deaf Soviet identity is testament to the seismic shifts in legal and conceptual frameworks engendered in this period, which fundamentally revolutionized the ways in which deaf people sought to define themselves and were defined by the state and society. On one level, this transformation was practical: deaf people could finally shake off the legal constrictions of tsarist society, with its structures of tutelage and reliance on charity, and begin to direct and shape their own lives. On a conceptual level, though, this new direction was framed by the shifting conceptions of agency and the self being played out in Soviet society as a whole. Deaf individuals engaged with the subjectivizing practices of the early Soviet period, negotiating with Marxist ideology and the language of revolution to define the contours of their path to self-definition and agency.⁷ This dialogue with dominant social and cultural frameworks was influenced in no small measure, however, by the prerevolutionary experience of deaf people. The rejection of charity and state tutelage, and the demand, on an individual and a group level, for rights and citizenship, informed and shaped the ways in which deaf people responded to Soviet notions of subjectivity and social welfare. Sovietness was thus mediated by issues of normality, disability, competence, and the very definition of deafness.

Deafness before October

The revolutionary upheavals of 1917 proved a watershed for deaf people both in the promotion of new frameworks of self and society and in the rhetoric of liberation from the strictures of tsarist society. For the deaf in particular, revolution entailed a challenge to the dominant set of legal and conceptual understandings of deafness that had developed across Europe and beyond during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on Enlightenment discourses of the “interrelations between language, mind and human civilization,” teachers of the deaf in this period had tended to view deaf people as akin to savages, cut off from the civilizing effects of language and requiring active intervention in order to enable them to develop rational thought and moral understanding.⁸ Russian views of deafness were similarly embedded in these narratives, as evident in the first Russian-language work on deaf education, Viktor Fleri’s Deaf-Mutes (Glukhonemye), published in 1835: “What is life [for a deaf-mute] if he has to eke it out without participation in any of the treasures of the word, that most miraculous monument to the will of man and the employment of his capabilities? The word alone can console his faithless and troubled mind; it is through the word that his soul will be able to strive to reach the unshakeable foundations of life-infusing faith and strength-giving hope.”⁹

The correspondences between Russian and European (and later U.S.) narratives of deafness are perhaps unsurprising. Throughout the nineteenth century, Russian proponents of deaf education looked to Europe as a model. The first school for the deaf in Russia was formed after a chance meeting between the Empress Mariia Fedorovna and a young deaf boy, Aleksandr Meller, in Pavlovsk Park in 1804. Concerned for his education, the empress sent abroad for “one of the more famous professors, in order to establish a school for deaf-mutes in Petersburg.”¹⁰ She corresponded at length with the foremost French specialist of the day, the head of the Paris Institute of Deaf-Mutes, the Abbé Sicard, eventually persuading him to send one of his disciples, a certain Jean-Baptiste Jauffret, to lead the school, beginning in 1810.¹¹ The links between deaf education in St. Petersburg and the capitals of Europe continued throughout the nineteenth century. Successive directors of the school came to Russia from abroad, bringing their own theories of deafness and deaf education with them; textbooks on deaf education were translated into Russian from French, German, and English; and Russian state representatives were routinely sent to observe the newest techniques of deaf education in France, Germany, and Switzerland. Theories of deaf education were disseminated across the developing network of Russian deaf schools, including the Arnol´do-Tretiakov School in Moscow, founded by a St. Petersburg School graduate, I. K. Arnol´d, in 1860, and schools in Kharkov, Novocherkassk, Tsaritsyno, and Vitebsk.¹²

Thanks to these growing international networks of deaf education, Russia was also implicated in the “war of methods” that raged in the nineteenth century.¹³ This debate pitted the manualists, who argued for the use of sign language—the mother tongue of deaf people—in deaf education, against the oralists, who believed that oral speech and lipreading alone could enable deaf people to fully develop their mental capacities and take their place in society. While early proponents of deaf education had universally promoted manual signs as a valuable form of linguistic communication, one that granted deaf people access to higher forms of knowledge and religious truth, by the end of the nineteenth century sign language was increasingly viewed as a barrier to integration and education that condemned the deaf to a life as “foreigners in their own land.”¹⁴ For the most part, Russian educators explicitly charted a middle course between these two poles, acknowledging that while sign language should not be a goal of deaf education, it could certainly be a useful tool.¹⁵ However, following the infamous Congress of Milan in 1880, at which an international group of hearing educators decided to implement the oral method across Europe, Russian deaf schools made the transition to oralism, citing the perennial Russian desire “not to lag behind other countries.”¹⁶

This framing of the deaf as savages and the decision to move away from the use of sign language in deaf education has been widely interpreted in Deaf studies scholarship as an act of silencing and disablement, one that has had far-reaching consequences for the history of deaf communities worldwide.¹⁷ It is certainly true that this view of deafness had troubling effects for Russian deaf people, particularly in terms of their legal status in society. Beginning in 1833, deaf individuals were governed by Article 381 of the State Legal Code, which equated deaf-mutes with the insane and stipulated that they be held under guardianship until the age of twenty-one, and thereafter only registered as legally capable (pravosposobnye) after being examined by a so-called expert to prove mental competence.¹⁸ This quality was measured primarily by a grasp of the Russian language: the individuals in question were required to demonstrate that they could “freely express their thoughts” in order to have the right to “direct and dispose of their property with all others of majority.”¹⁹ They would have to read the relevant legal acts aloud, affirm that they reflected their will, and sign their name. The onus was therefore on deaf individuals to prove their own competence through oral speech and literacy in order to become independent citizens in the eyes of the law.

It should not be assumed, however, that this disenfranchisement had curtailed all forms of deaf social and cultural agency. Schools for the deaf may have perpetuated a vision of deaf people as objects of charity and educational intervention, but they also provided them with a platform for the development of new forms of activity and a growing sense of identity as a distinct cultural community.²⁰ In the first instance, education provided a path out of dependency. According to a subclause of Article 381, graduates of both the St. Petersburg and the Arnol´do-Tretiakov Schools were not required to undertake the usual examination to prove legal competence and could instead immediately enter government service as a civil servant (chinovnik) of the fourteenth rank.²¹ Of the seven pupils to graduate from the St. Petersburg School in 1870, for example, five were admitted to state service.²² Others, having been granted legal independence, entered private service, worked as artists or engravers, or ran their own businesses.²³ The St. Petersburg School built its own handicraft workshops in 1865, with the goal “to teach the poor deaf-mute some form of craft, [and] in this way to put into his hand the means to support himself after he leaves the school and lives independently.”²⁴ Educational establishments thus sought to help their pupils achieve some form of social independence and integration into hearing society.

The push for individual autonomy was complemented by a growing sense of deaf community developing within these schools. This community was fostered through the use of sign language and the development of visually-mediated deaf spaces in the interstices of deaf school life. In her memoir, Agrippina Kalugina, a pupil of the Arnol´do-Tretiakov School in the early twentieth century, explains that her school experiences accustomed her to the particular linguistic traditions of the deaf world, which offered her a means to overcome isolation and despair: “I wanted to learn to ‘speak with my hands.’ Masha Okunova, a girl with thick freckles and a kind, round face, taught me sign language patiently, day by day. New friends appeared: I began to run, play, and laugh again.”²⁵ Many pupils chose to remain as teachers after graduation, devoting themselves to educating further generations of deaf children. Even outside the schools, social links between former pupils remained strong. As a St. Petersburg School report remarked in 1907, “Young deaf-mutes, upon leaving their schools, are … unable to ignore their reminiscences and renounce their spirit of comradeship even after many years; they retai...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Terminology
• Glossary and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Revolutionizing Deafness
• 2. Making the Deaf Soviet
• 3. War and Reconstruction
• 4. The Golden Age
• 5. Pygmalion
• 6. Deaf-Soviet Identity in Decline
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography of Primary Sources
• Index