The history of disabled veterans of World War I in the interwar Soviet Union has long been a blank spot in western historiography, but this copiously detailed study by Alexandre Sumpf goes a long way to filling it. Drawing on his own past work, extensive archival research, and the work of other pioneers in the field like Genish Eiup and Maria Galmarini-Kabala, Alexandre Sumpf here, in six hefty chapters, provides a painstaking social history to the treatment of disabled veterans in the interwar Soviet Union right up until the onset of collectivization in the 1930s.

Russian and Soviet statisticians estimated that about 10 percent of the total of those who fought in Russia’s Great War (1914–17) emerged from it as disabled veterans. This amounted to between 1.14 and 1.9 million men (estimates vary), a very considerable figure, and led to striking levels of social activism during the course of the war itself, most notably via the establishment of the “All Russian Union of Maimed Soldiers” in 1917. This group was associated, as Sumpf has already pointed out in previous published work, with an upsurge in civic activism in 1917, where both maimed soldiers and returning prisoners formed large scale public bodies demanding reintegration into society and asserting their rights to care and support in accordance with the law. The committee leading the All-Russia Union of Maimed Soldiers, the Tsekuva, demanded that the permanently disabled from all past Russian wars now be given agency over the aid rendered to them and the right to full participation in the public sphere. The relative immediate success of the All-Russia Union was all the more remarkable given the distinct absence of high-profile war heroes or prominent public figures in its leading ranks. The union also saw itself as a modernizing, technocratic institution, emphasizing specialized health care, prosthetic devices, and improved retraining programs to reintegrate invalids into society. It was, however, also internally divided, despite being officially apolitical, and was eventually squeezed out of existence by the Bolsheviks in 1919. Contentious from the beginning for both the Provisional and later for the Soviet government were broader questions around the categorization of disability (from those needing permanent physical attention and support, to those whose disabilities or traumas were not necessarily even visible), the variables in local standards of living that rendered standardization of benefits and pensions problematic, and, above all, the disparity in facilities and resources between the cities and countryside.

Having covered the emergence of a new form of “civil society” in the shape of mobilized disabled veterans of the Great War, Sumpf goes on to review the major developments in this sphere until the early 1930s. This begins in a fascinating Ch. 3 that reviews memorialization and commemoration practices that quickly marginalized the Great War experience in favor of civil war veterans. Symbolic in this regard was the official 1924 collection Remember the War, which highlighted the problems of war veterans and the horrors of war in general, but devoted no space to the tsarist experience (86). Utilizing references as wide-ranging as a 1926 short story by Evgenii Zamiatin (80), the appearance of actual disabled war veterans in Soviet films—always typecast as tragic victims—the work of contemporary artists like Marc Chagall, and newsreel footage of commemorative parades, Sumpf here portrays an emerging environment in which disabled veterans were increasingly marginalized and categorized as a social problem. Official Bolshevik policy in particular now emphasized the remobilization of all veterans, even disabled ones, for economic tasks. Accordingly, coverage of disabled veterans increasingly focused on the antisocial behavior of a minority—alcohol abuse, drug use, criminality—which posed many obstacles to these mobilization plans, with veterans themselves increasingly deprived of agency or a voice to tell their own story.

Sumpf’s book builds on his previous work and represents a substantial achievement. It is however hindered by a dense literary style and a tendency to get lost in statistics and parallel cultural phenomena that may render it impenetrable to all but the most dedicated reader. Its great achievement in trying to give voice and agency back to a particular lost group within what was already arguably a lost generation is hampered by a dense and occasionally shapeless format, one that may not itself reach a wide audience. It nonetheless rewards perseverance.