What was the Soviet Union like for deaf people? Claire L. Shaw's new volume offers the first comprehensive history of deaf social life and political organizing during the Soviet twentieth century. Shaw combines archival research with analysis of cultural texts to offer an account of shifting discourses about deafness from the rise of the Soviet Union until the early 1990s.

Shaw does not address deafness as a medical condition. Rather, she traces political processes of deaf culture formation in state socialism. This approach builds on the robust literature on global deaf cultures. The notion of deaf culture holds that deaf people around the world communicate via a multitude of signed languages, comprising regionally-distinct linguistic communities, which are often at odds with dominant (spoken) language cultures. Deaf studies scholars have demonstrated that deaf communities frequently mobilize strategies used by ethnic minority cultures to make political claims for deaf solidarity and self-determination (Carol Padden and Tom Humphries 2005; Karen Nakamura 2006; Michele Friedner 2015, cited in Shaw, 15). Shaw builds on this tradition to argue that a deaf culture movement took place in revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union decades before similar movements emerged elsewhere. Shaw proposes that Soviet deaf culture followed principles of Soviet self-making, characterized by a social preference for collectivism, mutual aid, and social usefulness (225), a way of life that was “deaf in form, socialist in content” (10–11).

Deaf in the USSR centers the Moscow proceedings of the central committee of the All-Russian Association of the Deaf, or VOG, exploring how VOG leaders evaluated policies, strategized discursive angles, and implemented action (3). True to her archive, Shaw rarely centers comments from Soviet leaders, nor does the reader learn much about regional members or recipients of VOG services. Rather, the study examines that hinge point between structure and agency that reveals the flexibility of soviet ideological rhetoric in the service of diverse social causes. Like Maria Galmarini-Kabala's recent study of welfare policy (which considers provisions of aid to blind, deaf, single mothers, and deviant children), Shaw's book could be characterized as charting “the middle” of Soviet bureaucracy.Footnote ¹ In this way, Deaf in the USSR is a major contribution to the history of the Soviet welfare state.

The book joins a recent groundswell of research on the region informed by disability studies, and offers the first book-length study of deafness in the Soviet Union. Following the 1989 volume The Disabled in the Soviet Union: Past and Present, Theory and Practice by Willam McCagg and Lewis Siegelbaum (1989), little sustained attention was paid to disability in Anglophone scholarship about the region, save for a few articles deploying the lens of disability in literary analysis. A new wave of scholarship arrived with Sarah Phillips’ ethnography of disabled citizenship in postsocialist Ukraine in 2010 (out this year in Russian for the first time), and a field-defining edited volume from Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova (2013). Meanwhile, since the early 2000s, an active Russophone disability studies emerged, with Iarskaia-Smirnova and her late husband Pavel Romanov at the helm, publishing in both English and Russian. Anna Klepikova's startling new volume, an ethnography of life in an adult institution for people with intellectual and mental disabilities (2018), and Tomas Matza's first book, Shock Therapy (2018), join this wave.

The introduction to the volume situates the text as the story of the VOG. In Chapter 1, Shaw follows an educated class of deaf self-advocates who asserted the need for a deaf political organization in the Soviet Union, deploying revolutionary rhetoric toward their goal of deaf autonomy (in the Tsarist period, deaf people were considered legally unfit, and denied self-determination). The chapter also tracks the development of defektologiia, Lev Vygotskii's science of abnormal development (16; 31–34). Shaw shows that the Marxist ideological influence of the time led Vygotskii to theorize deafness as a complex social condition, in which the barrier to communication, rather than the defect in hearing, created a disability. This is quite different from western medical perspectives of the era on deafness, which viewed deafness as a biological condition linked to Victorian notions of social degeneracy.

In Chapter 2, Shaw attends to how the cultural shift in the 1930s toward Stalinist mass politics reverberated through deaf experience and how Soviet deaf people participated in the making of the new Soviet world. As workers and Stakhanovites, deaf Soviet citizens distinguished themselves, and forged possibilities to be at once deaf and Soviet. Chapter 3 follows deaf Soviets into the Great Patriotic War and reconstruction era. After the war, Shaw demonstrates, the VOG was challenged to extend services to war-deafened veterans, who were hesitant to join the VOG, as disability identity and special services carried a stigma.

In Chapter 4, Shaw dubs the 1950s as the “golden age” of Soviet deaf culture. While the Stalinist era had privileged oral speech and assimilation into hearing culture, in the 1950s, a flourishing sign language culture emerged, including “industrial, educational, and cultural institutions” (19). In this chapter, Shaw focuses on the Moscow sign language theater, Teatr Mimiki i Zhesta, or TMZh. Like the theatrical scene in Mikhail Bogin's film Dvoe (1965), deaf actors performed TMZh's plays in sign language, with oral interpretation read aloud for a hearing audience.Footnote ² Shaw argues that deaf theater was at once an assimilationist exercise, brokering belonging through displays of a high level of kulturnost΄ (culturedness) that was legible to hearing audiences, and a strategy by which deaf people demonstrated their capacity for self-determination (152–56). Shaw's interpretation differs from Anastasia Kayiatos’ treatment of late Soviet deaf theater as a subversive space of alterity, instead showing how the TMZh fit into broader trends in the mainstream deaf politics of the Khrushev era VOG.Footnote ³

In the 1960s, Shaw relates in Chapter 5, concerns about deaf criminality appeared in mainstream newspaper stories. Fears about deaf deviance—begging in train stations, drunkenness, prostitution, and violence between members of the deaf community—troubled the broader public, but especially the VOG. Throughout the Soviet period, prejudice about the deaf in the broader culture was shaped by concerns about muteness, and a suspicion that marginalization from the dominant language might lead to social degeneracy (174). The VOG, Shaw shows, struggled to reclaim the narrative: the publication of such articles in the mainstream press led to heated internal debates about the responsibility of upstanding Soviet deaf citizens to include those who were down on their luck. Shaw shows that these discussions followed dueling tendencies in broader Soviet discourse: whether to excommunicate the deviant, or to remake those whose material circumstances had led them to such “uncultured” behaviors. Partly in response to these debates, Shaw argues, the VOG took on a new role, administering new social welfare provisions for the deaf, and, in doing so, ceded some of its drive for deaf political autonomy as bureaucratic functions took on new importance.

Chapter 6 deals with a new era of Deaf-Soviet Identity in the late 1960s and 70s, when medicalized notions of rehabilitation gained new ground in debates about overcoming deafness. A generation of educators of the deaf, and in turn deaf people themselves, were trained in techniques that privileged spoken language (198–99), curbing the development of sign-language-driven deaf culture.

Finally, in an epilogue, Shaw follows the VOG into the post-Soviet era, describing the shifting capacities and responsibilities of the organization during glasnost and the new legal frameworks for disabled peoples’ organizations in the 1990s (230–31). Shaw concludes that throughout the course of Soviet history, “a historically and culturally distinct deaf community that still endures” (237) was created.

Deaf in the Soviet Union is a welcome contribution to the field. The book insists Slavic and Eurasian studies take seriously the political advocacy strategies of minority communities other than ethnic nationalities. The book will be useful as a teaching volume, to be read in tandem with other monographs charting the scope of Soviet history, other monographs on deaf history and culture, or other studies of medicalization in the region.

The book's few shortcomings arise from the divergent concerns of its many (inter)disciplinary audiences—Slavic and Euarsian studies, disability studies, deaf studies, and welfare studies. Some might be surprised that almost no attention at all is paid to the specificities of Russian Sign Language, or to how its properties—aside from a discussion of visuality which applies to all signed languages—produced a uniquely Soviet Deaf Culture. Others will note that while recent scholarship in global disability studies argues for a departure from the vocabulary of multiculturalism, which assumes a liberal democratic context, Shaw's approach is to use these terms without reservation, a decision that may actually contribute to her argument that disability and deafness are constructed differently in the Soviet Union as compared to western Europe and the United States.

Ultimately, Shaw's approach is, first and foremost, historically rigorous. This begets an adherence to what can be known from the central archive, which leaves readers wondering about deaf experience in the regions, and amongst non-Russian Soviet ethic groups. A sustained discussion of how disability is constructed with and through racialization is curiously absent from the volume. Current disability studies scholarship increasingly focuses on how ableism and racism function as mutually constitutive systems (Jasbir K. Puar, 2017; Kateřina Kolářová, 2015; Kayiatos 2014); perhaps a future project lies in an analysis of how precisely the organizing strategies of the Soviet deaf community and Soviet ethnic minorities are interrelated. With this, the first definitive account of deaf political advocacy throughout the Soviet twentieth century, Shaw has proffered a fertile platform for further scholarship.