In this thickly-detailed book, Maria Cristina Galmarini-Kabala outlines the Soviet system's provision of assistance to single mothers, people who were blind or deaf either congenitally or through injury, and delinquent children. The analysis focuses largely on the 1920s and 1930s, with a chapter on the post-war years and an epilogue for the late Soviet period. The study shows particular attention to the institutional actors—commissariats, educators, medical authorities, psychologists, and theorists—of the Soviet system of welfare.

Galmarini-Kabala divides her analysis into two major sections. The first outlines the intellectual and institutional history of the concept of rights under the new state—the “soviet moral order”—and the organizations and governmental institutions committed to protecting and defending those deviants, invalids, and others while singling out for persecution other groups as undeserving of assistance such as the “former people” of the tsarist state. The second section analyzes these larger, thematic concepts through three major periods, with one chapter each: 1918–27, 1928–40, and 1941–50. The source base is impressive and varied and her analysis is supported by work with case studies of the system as employed in Moscow, Perm΄, and Omsk and as recounted in the letters of petitioners throughout the period.

In a state where the relationship to production defined citizenship, the status of the unemployed or those unable to labor was difficult, and Galmarini-Kabala shows the ways in which rights might be established in other areas of production, in past areas of service, or in recognition of previous suffering at the hands of capitalists or in war. Rejecting charity as bourgeois, Vladimir Lenin and his successors instead created a Soviet-style understanding of help, provision, protection, and care, which they held superior to the empty principles of bourgeois societies. As Galmarini-Kabala convincingly shows, this policy was more than simply a means of care and control in some Foucaultian institutional and discursive framework. Instead, this formulation of the Soviet state's obligation to its least able became a means for defining the superiority of the Soviet moral order over those of contemporary capitalist countries.

In the second half of the monograph, the articulation of these ideas against the major economic policy shifts of the 1920s, 1930s, and post-war world display the push and pull between policy, people, and events. Especially in these chapters, the fascinating case histories of different applicants for state intervention, such as pensioners or single mothers, provide a welcome view from the supplicants to balance the rosier image coming from bureaucrats, medical professionals, and social theorists as well as revealing the manipulations of gender, social, and revolutionary language and expectations by petition writers. Interestingly, in this regard, Galmarini-Kabala found no major difference between the implementation of these ideas in the peripheries versus the center.

The categories of disability and deviance were slippery in the periods described and are necessarily loose and responsive to social and historical context in the investigation. The analysis would have benefitted, however, from a more thorough engagement with other recent works that have investigated the place and definition of the deviant within Soviet society. These include Dan Healey's Bolshevik Sexual Forensics and Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent, Sharon A. Kowalsky's Deviant Women: Female Crime and Criminology in Revolutionary Russia, 1880–1930, and Kenneth Pinnow's Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921–1929.

Galmarini-Kabala provides a deeply-researched investigation of the Soviet system of social welfare and places this within a global discourse regarding the responsibility of states to their citizens. For researchers of Soviet health, psychiatry, and social welfare, and for those working on expertise among psychologists, educators, or sociologists, the thorough explanations of the institutional movement of these issues over the course of the Soviet decades covered will prove valuable. This book would be an interesting addition to courses on human rights, Soviet history, or public health, and would work well with undergraduate and graduate classes.