Russian Concepts of Disability After the Collapse of the Soviet Union
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! Wesleyan University The Honors College Participation and Isolation: Russian Concepts of Disability After the Collapse of the Soviet Union by Emily Hoge Class of 2015 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in History and Russian and Eastern European Studies Middletown, Connecticut April, 2015 ! ! ! Abstract Disability in Russia is and was legally defined through work capacity, specifically through labor capacity remaining. Because of the meaning of labor in the Soviet period, labor capacity was strongly connected to the ability to participate in community and collective. Not surprisingly, the inability to participate in the community resulted in isolation. Because trauma, in Russia, is defined as an experience that causes a person to be separated from the rest of society, rather than as an individual experience, disability is experienced as traumatic. The experience of trauma, through the inability participate in the community because of isolation, is, in turn, an experience of disability. Disability, therefore, primarily refers to the way in which Russians understand themselves in relation to the state, to the collective and to the community through meaningful participation. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, however, the state and the Soviet collective disappeared. In the absence of a community to participate in, in the absence of access to meaningful forms of participation, the 1990s were a period of traumatic, individualizing isolation. In this context, where everyone was isolated, the nature of identity changed. Without a general community to be isolated from, the division between abled people and disabled people was more ambiguous. When new concepts of participation and community emerged out of the 1990s, so too emerged new concepts of disability. ! ! ! Acknowledgements Thanks to the Davenport Committee for providing my with the opportunity to conduct research in Russia, without which this thesis would not have been possible To Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock for helping me find my academic place To Peter Rutland for guidance To Laura Ann Twagira for patience, mentorship and encouragement To Sarah, for commiseration To Quinta, for everything And finally to my family for their love and support ! ! ! Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………. .1 Defining Disability in Russia……………………………....……………….. .5 Organization of the Thesis……………………………...…………………………………………………10 Sources and Methods………………………………………………………...16 Other Contexts of Disability……………………………………....................21 Chapter 1: What is Disability……………………………………………...................24 Victims of War and Revolution…………………………………...................27 Shock Workers to Stakhanovites……………………...……………………..32 The War and the War Cult……………………………………...……………39 Parasitism…………………………………………………………………….45 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...52 Chapter 2: Motherhood and the Collapse……………………………………………57 The Happy Soviet Childhood………………………………………………...61 The Unhappy Post-Soviet Child……………………………………………..77 Other Women’s Families…………………………………………………….83 Meaningful motherhood……………………………………………………...86 The Isolated Family….......…………………………………..........................90 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...95 Chapter 3: Lost Children, Grieving Mothers and Unpopular Wars………………….97 Grieving Mothers…………………………………………………………...103 Old Young Men…………………………………………………………….108 Forgotten Wars……………………………………………………………...117 Chechentsi…………………………………………………………………..122 Union of Invalids of the Afghan War………………………………………129 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….132 Chapter 4: Trauma Power and the New Russian…………………………………...134 Soviet Masculinity………………………………………………………….136 Trauma and the Mafia………………………………………………………141 The New Russian…………………………………………………………...147 Addressing the Absurdity of Power………………………………………...153 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….162 Chapter 5: Traumatic Brotherhood and Traumatic Nationalism…………………...164 Brotherhood and Masculine Participation………………………………….168 Mothers of the National Family…………………………………………….179 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….187 ! ! ! Conclusion: Disabled Sports Nationalism………………………………………….189 The Sochi Paralympics……………………………………………………..196 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….202 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..205 Primary Sources…………………………………………………………….205 Secondary Sources………………………………………………………….209! ! ! ! Introduction I spoke to Katya in mid-July at the Early Intervention Institute1 in St. Petersburg. I arrived just at closing time, as a few remaining groups of parents with their children were leaving. Katya was still busy, and told me to wait for a moment while she finished up. She seemed to be the only person still there, and I worried that I was intruding, or that after a full day of working so frantically she might be tired and not interested in talking about a difficult topic after all. Katya, however, was not tired. As soon as the last children had walked out the door, she came over to me and started explaining her work, before I managed to introduce myself. She was a forceful person, and we ended up talking for hours because she never ran out of things to say. Twice, while we were talking, I noticed her skip over the entirety of the 1990s. The first time, when I stopped her to ask for clarification, she simply waved me away and continued talking. The second time, we were talking about how her patients thought about medical care, and how that changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. First, she told me about the Soviet period. Then, “In the last 10 years or so, however…” “What about 20 years ago, in the 1990s? Was this true then as well?” I asked. “No,” she said, “The situation was not the same at all.” “What did people do in the 1990s?” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1!An!institution!which!supports!the!well1being!of!young!children! ! 1! ! We had otherwise been entirely calm and friendly, but this question made her angry or exasperated, as if I had not been listening to her at all. “It was simply entirely different! That time cannot be talked about in the same way.”2 Often, in my interviews, the 1990s did not fit into the timeline. Sometimes, they appeared as only a rupture. 3 There was a before and after, but no during. Other times, they were simply absent. Life progressed from the 1980s directly into the 2000s. Often, the position of the decade in time was off, appearing more recently or more distantly than they actually were. Another woman I interviewed, Alla, said that the point, five to ten years earlier, when she was disabled after a botched surgery on her spine was the worst possible point to be disabled. “20 years ago,” she said, “it would have been much better.”4 “Five to ten years ago was worse than 20 years ago?” I said, “What happened then that made this the worst time?” Our conversation had so far been in Russian, since Alla had studied English when she was a teenager and not since. After this question, she looked at me incredulously, and then answered in English, as if she no longer believed I could understand Russian. “This is because of our Russian history. Ten years ago, or fifteen. Twenty years ago. After the end of… soyuz sovetskikh sotsialisticheskikh respublik!5” “Oh, I understand. In the 1990s?” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2!Katya. Interview by author. (2014, July 18). St. Petersburg, Russia 3!Viktoriya. Interview by author. (2014, July 28) St. Petersburg, Russia, Katya. Interview by author. (2014, July 18). St. Petersburg, Russia 4!Alla. Interview by author. (2014, July 21). St. Petersburg, Russia! 5!USSR! ! 2! ! “Yes! 20 years ago, now.” For the rest of the time we talked about the 1990s, she spoke in Russian. She was not the only one who switched languages to talk about the 1990s. In my interviews that were done in a mix of English and Russian, the 1990s often came up only in Russian.6 Some of the people I interviewed instead remembered their own personal timeline of the 1990s with excessive clarity. Nataliya, who I met in Moscow, said the day that she was first introduced to the idea of working with disabled children was October 3rd, 1993. “I remember this so clearly,” she said, “because it was the day that Yeltsin brought tanks in to shell the White House.”7 When she described other time periods in her life, even more recent time periods, Nataliya was sometimes vague. Yet, this day, and other points in the 1990s, she described in crisp physical detail.8 Disabled people, especially, described the 1990s in language that sounded to me like descriptions of trauma. When a person describes a traumatic experience, it can appear as a rupture in the narrative, with a clear before and after.9 Sometimes people have a flat emotional response to recounting traumatic events, or withdraw into themselves when talking, or have trouble talking.10 The 1990s were a difficult time in Russia. The decade was punctuated by constant economic crises, social !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6!Ekaterina. Interview by author. (2014, July 16) St. Petersburg, Russia 7!The!RussiAn!White!House!is!the!seAt!of!RussiAn!pArliAment,!the!1993! constitutionAl!crisis!wAs!A!source!of!sort!of!trAumatic!memory!of!the!1990s!See:! Lilia!Shevtsova,!Yeltsin's)Russia:)Myths)and)Reality(CArnegie!Endowment!for! International!Peace,!1999).!p!791103! 8!See:!John!Wilson!Boris!Drozdek,!ed.!Voices)of)Trauma:)Treating)Psychological) Trauma)across)Cultures(New!York:!Springer,!2007).!