The historiography of eastern Europe has traditionally focused on a delimited number of perspectives. There are abundant studies on nationalism, ethnicity, and war, on the political dimensions of communism, or on cultures of memory. Somewhat more recently, social historians have brought gender relations, tourism, or labor to the fore, issues that had been previously neglected by scholars. Against this backdrop, disability history is still on the fringes. Although an expanding field since the 1990s, disability history has predominantly revolved around western experiences, while east European trajectories remain an exception. Admittedly, a number of studies have been undertaken during the past decades, such as Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova's volume, Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: History, Policy, and Everyday Life (2013). But on the whole, and compared to other sub-disciplines, the history of disability in eastern Europe is still in its infancy.

It is against this background that Kateřina Kolárová and Martina Winkler's volume is very much needed. The authors fill a glaring gap by providing case studies on countries such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Bulgaria, which have been studied to a lesser extent through the lens of disability. Across ten separate chapters including an introductory essay, the authors examine the “complex relationship between disability and socialist utopian aspirations” and argue that “disability was a crucial category in formulation and articulation visions of socialism, equality, socialist morality and justice…” (13). At the same time, the book also has the ambition to investigate socialism's “deep trouble with difference and the deep chasm between the (proclaimed) desire for and promises of justice and equality and the rigid notions of normalcy, and ablebodiness or ablemindedness” (21–22). The volume is a result of Disability in Socialist Societies, a conference held 2019 at the University of Kiel in Germany.

Among the positive standouts are those chapters that adopt an explicitly transnational perspective. Claire Shaw, who has previously written a compelling study of the Soviet deaf community, Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 (2017), examines the cross-border connections between the various associations of the deaf in socialist countries. Questioning older narratives of the socialist world as a history of isolation, the author examines the exchanges between the various deaf communities and their role in this transnational socialist space after 1945. This imagined socialist deaf community was both promoted during various personal exchanges between the All-Russian Society of the Deaf and its counterparts in other east European countries, and by the transnational circulation of knowledge, facilitated by the deaf organizations’ own periodicals.

Todor Mladenov's nuanced chapter echoes this stance by showing that socialist welfare states displayed a set of commonalities that transcended national boundaries. In using the example of disability assessment, the author explores the ways in which socialist welfare states assigned disability status to their citizens. The assessment system developed in the early Soviet Union radically remodeled the definition of disability along productivist lines: instead of measuring disability by the degree of impairment, the Soviet model conditioned the recognition of disability on individuals’ work ability. The overall aim of this “medical-productivist” model, which was adopted by other socialist states during the post-war period, was to put disabled bodies back into productive labor. Mladenov convincingly traces how Bulgarian authorities and experts implemented this “bio-social” approach to disability.

The middle chapters look at different aspects of disability in socialist Czechoslovakia, a focal point which reflects the editors’ area of expertise. Taking children's literature and other media as a starting point, Martina Winkler reconstructs how representations of children were framed by notions of normalcy and attitudes towards disability. The author arrives at the salient point that notions of neglect, political manipulation, and oppression under state socialism fall short of explaining the emancipatory and integrative promises of the state towards children and the disabled. Her case study thus exemplifies the ambiguous relationship between emancipatory and oppressive elements that prevailed in many socialist states throughout the post-war period. The other chapters on Czechoslovakia cover various aspects such as the evolution of defectological research (Marek Fapšo and Jan Randák), expert discourses on children's sexuality and “behavioral defectivity” (Frank Henschel), children's health and ability in the women's magazine “Vlasta” (Maria-Lena Faßig), and the intersection between disability and race relating to the Roma community (Kateřina Kolářová and Filip Herza). In addition to these case studies, the volume concludes with two contributions on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Poland: Pia Schmüser examines care facilities for children with “mental disabilities” in the GDR, while Natalia Pamula offers a close-reading of youth literature and discusses representations of intellectual disability in socialist Poland.

The strength of the volume lies in each author's significant contribution to the overarching theme of disability history and the way in which the authors map out similarities between state socialist societies. Sure enough, Re/imaginations of Disability in State Socialism only touches on selected case studies and countries and there is still much unchartered territory in countries such as Romania or Albania. That being said, this is not a shortfall of this volume but rather a call for future research agendas. Kolárová and Winkler have edited an excellent, well-researched volume that deserves to be widely read by students and scholars of eastern Europe and disability history.