The Right to Be Helped: Deviance, Entitlement, and the Soviet Moral Order

By Maria Cristina Galmarini

"Doesn't an educated person—simple and working, sick and with a sick child—doesn't she have the right to enjoy at least the crumbs at the table of the revolutionary feast?" Disabled single mother Maria Zolotova-Sologub raised this question in a petition dated July 1929 demanding medical assistance and a monthly subsidy for herself and her daughter. While the welfare of able-bodied and industrially productive people in the first socialist country in the world was protected by a state-funded insurance system, the social rights of labor-incapacitated and unemployed individuals such as Zolotova-Sologub were difficult to define and legitimize. The Right to Be Helped illuminates the ways in which marginalized members of Soviet society understood their social rights and articulated their moral expectations regarding the socialist state between 1917 and 1950.

Maria Galmarini-Kabala shows how definitions of state assistance and who was entitled to it provided a platform for policymakers and professionals to engage in heated debates about disability, gender, suffering, and productive and reproductive labor. She explores how authorities and experts reacted to requests for support, arguing that responses were sometimes characterized by an enlightened nature and other times by coercive discipline, but most frequently by a combination of the two. By focusing on the experiences of behaviorally problematic children, unemployed single mothers, and blind and deaf adults in several major urban centers, this important study shows that the dialogue over the right to be helped was central to defining the moral order of Soviet socialism. It will appeal to scholars and students of Russian history, as well as those interested in comparative disabilities and welfare studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781609091965

Book preview

THE RIGHT TO BE HELPED

DEVIANCE, ENTITLEMENT, AND THE SOVIET MORAL ORDER

Maria Cristina Galmarini-Kabala

NIU PRESS

DEKALB

NIU Press / DeKalb, IL

Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

© 2016 by Northern Illinois University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16        1 2 3 4 5

978-0-87580-497-2 (cloth)

978-1-60909-196-5 (e-book)

Design by Shaun Allshouse

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction -

Prologue - Deviant Citizens in Fin-de-Siècle and Interwar Europe

SECTION I - Ideas of Rights and Agents of Help

Chapter 1 - Social Rights in Russia Before and After the Revolution

Chapter 2 - From Invalids to Pensioners

Chapter 3 - The Activists and Their Charges

SECTION II - The Practice of Help

Chapter 4 - Homes of Work and Love (1918–1927)

Chapter 5 - Worthless Workers—They Don’t Fulfill the Norms (1928–1940)

Chapter 6 - A Massively Traumatized Population (1941–1950)

Epilogue - The Rivalry with the West and the Soviet Moral Order

Timeline of Welfare in Russia and the Soviet Union

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Considering themselves as a model product of nature, the normals . . . believe it natural to apply . . . their concepts about what is proper and what is improper, without worrying too much whether their concepts—of the normals—correspond to the demands of justice.

—Deaf activist Aleksandr Udal’, 1917

To my son Matteo, in gratitude for the adventure we shared

Acknowledgments

This Rubicon will be passed, I told myself every time I was ready to give up. That’s what the blinded veteran Aleksandr Malyshev repeated to himself when he was writing his doctoral dissertation in the early 1950s. This simple statement gave me the energy and the strength to pursue my project as much as it sustained Malyshev in his academic endeavors. However, for me as for Malyshev, it would have not mattered without the comradely support of colleagues, friends, and family. It is my great pleasure to thank at least some of them here.

I am deeply thankful to my academic advisors at the University of Illinois for their constant support and guidance. First and foremost, I thank Diane Koenker, who has indefatigably read all the versions of this book since its very inception, has guided me with her intelligence and sincere care, and has taught me to trust myself as a historian. Many other mentors have also greatly contributed to shaping my thinking: Mark Steinberg, Antoinette Burton, John Randolph, and Maria Todorova gave me precious advice and encouragement. Both inside and outside the halls of Gregory Hall, they have been a source of inspiration for me throughout the years. Among my many Russian mentors, I am particularly grateful to Galina Yankovskaya, who shared with me her deep knowledge of Stalinism and made my visits to Russia possible despite all bureaucratic hindrances. I largely wrote this book at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies in Cambridge, where I enjoyed the warm support of colleagues from a variety of disciplines. In particular, I thank Terry Martin, Stephanie Sandler, Juliane Fürst, Mikhail Dolbilov, all the Fellows in the Subjectivities and Identities in Eurasia Seminar as well as my colleagues in the Historians’ Seminar and the Gender, Socialism, and Postsocialism Working Group. I am thankful to Christine Worobec for her feedback on the book’s introduction and her support of the entire project; to Thomas Ewing and the other anonymous reviewer of my draft manuscript for their careful reading and constructive criticism; to my editor Amy Farranto for believing in my ideas; to Timur Mukhamatulin for his work as research assistant; and to Anna Ivanova for looking up a last-minute reference in the libraries of Moscow. I owe much gratitude also to Mary Louise Loe, Christine Varga-Harris, Liene Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, Alisa Klots, and Vladimir Ryzhkovskii for the feedback they offered on various drafts of my chapters.

This book would have not been possible without the generous financial support of the International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and the Office of Dean David Jeffrey at James Madison University. I also thank Helen Sullivan, Jan Adamczyk, and Joe Lenkart of the Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois as well as the archivists and librarians of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Moscow), the Archive of the Russian Academy of Education (Gorki Leninskie, Moscow province), the State Scientific-Pedagogical Library K. D. Ushinskii on Pogodinskaia St. (Moscow), the State Archive of Perm’ Region (Perm’), the Library and Museum of the All-Russian Society of the Blind (Perm’), Perm’ University, and the Historical Archive of Omsk Province (Omsk). I would have not been able to pursue my research without the intellectual generosity and assistance of many colleagues at these institutions. I am deeply indebted to all of them for the time and energy they devoted to me, day after day and year after year. Their expertise, mentorship, and hospitality are the pillars on which this book stands.

Many friends have helped me through this book and supported me with their love, intelligence, honesty, and patience. Any list of names would be incomplete, but I do wish to express special gratitude to a group of loyal tovarishchi who have shared with me not only their wisdom of things Russian, but also true friendship: Olga Svinarskii, Nazanine Agassi, Yulia Dolinnaia, Veneta Ivanova, and Hana Jochcova in Urbana-Champaign; Iaroslav Leont’ev, Marina Bubnova, Galina Deeva, and Andrei Biurkland in Moscow; Mariia Romashova and her amazing family, Olga Kislukhina, Ekaterina Petkova, Veronika Zaleshchuk, and Mariia Khrustaleva in Perm’; and Umut Abeldinova in Omsk.

Last but not least, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my family: my mother, Teresa Benedetti, and my father, Gaetano Galmarini (now deceased). There are no words to say how grateful I am to my beloved, Jakub Kabala, whose name truly deserves to be on the cover of this book. I thank him for the interest that he has always shown in my ideas, for the time we spent talking about this book, for his insights, his fresh perspective, his sharp comments, his sense of humor, and his intellectual openness to a world that was new to him and that we now share. I thank him also for our child, Andrea Aleksander, and the promise of more books and ideas to discuss together.

My son Matteo, as usual, is the real engine behind it all. I thank him for making me laugh, forcing me to stop thinking (as he says), and constantly reminding me of why I wanted to write this book. To him I devote it, because he does not see any difference between normal and abnormal, and I hope he never will.

INTRODUCTION

FOR TWENTY LONG years, since 1909, the village teacher Mariia Petrovna Zolotova-Sologub had worked in nightmarish conditions. During the day, she received her pupils in a cold and damp peasant hut. In the evenings, she walked behind the broken oven that separated the classroom from her bedroom, consumed a modest dinner, and went to sleep. Living in unheated quarters and subsisting on a starvation diet had disastrous consequences on her health. Zolotova-Sologub had a complicated pregnancy and a premature delivery, as a result of which her daughter Margarita grew up as a weak, sick, and nervous child. The mother herself began to suffer from various ailments such as hysteria and neurasthenia, heart disease, and anemia. Finally, Zolotova-Sologub developed rheumatoid arthritis and underwent the amputation of a leg. Now I am a cripple . . . a complete invalid, she wrote in June 1929 in a letter to the Women Workers’ and Peasants’ Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Unable to walk and to care for her sick child, Zolotova-Sologub argued that she needed help—medical assistance for herself and a monthly subsidy to buy food for her daughter. More importantly, she felt entitled to the state’s help. Indeed, Zolotova-Sologub did not come from the wealthy and privileged whom the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 had cast out as class enemies and alien elements. Not only had she worked to bring literacy to the Russian countryside, she had also been part of a Bolshevik organization and—as she claimed in her letter—suffered mistreatment at the hands of the White armies during the Civil War of 1918–1921. Yet, Zolotova-Sologub did not have the required working seniority to qualify for a decent disability pension. The sixteen rubles and sixty-six copecks that the state insurance agency had assigned her were certainly not enough to live on. Describing her predicament to the state authorities, this disabled single mother insisted that the Soviet socialist state had the duty to provide free medical therapy, food, and education to her daughter and herself. Soviet power, she asserted, could not possibly forget her and refuse her help simply because she was now useless and no longer able to perform productive labor. In the end, as Zolotova-Sologub intimated in her letter, the very moral legitimacy of Soviet socialism depended on the realization of her right to be helped. As she wrote, Is this [rejection of help] in line with the program of the Party and of socialism turning into communism? . . . Doesn’t an educated person—simple and working, sick and with a sick child—doesn’t she have the right to enjoy at least the crumbs at the table of the revolutionary feast?¹

This book embodies my aim to answer Zolotova-Sologub’s questions. My intention is to illuminate the ways in which marginalized members of Soviet society understood their social rights and articulated their moral expectations vis-à-vis the socialist state between 1917 and 1950, and to analyze how various state authorities, mid-level bureaucrats, and educated professionals responded to vulnerable individuals’ requests for help. Their interactions on the issue of social justice could be characterized by an enlightened nature, but also by coercive discipline, and most frequently by a combination of both. To disentangle these contradictory forces, in this book I focus on four specific social groups—behaviorally problematic children, unemployed single mothers, and blind and deaf adults—and offer case studies from three major urban centers in the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic—Moscow, Perm’, and Omsk. Through this material, I argue that the dialogue over marginalized individuals’ right to be helped was pivotal to defining the moral order of Soviet socialism.

The Unspoken Variables of Lenin’s Formula and the Rights of the Deviants

Vladimir Lenin described the social contract under socialism in terms of needs and contributions, famously saying he who does not work shall not eat. Scholars have generally read this motto as indicative of the revolutionary injunction to distinguish between the friends and the enemies of the new Dictatorship of the Proletariat. The workers—i.e., the able-bodied and industrially productive citizens of the first socialist country in the world—made up the first group, while the rich, the bourgeoisie, and the parasitical exploiters of the workers’ labor constituted the second. The welfare of those who lived off their own work was protected by a state-funded insurance system, which—although far from truly effective—provided industrial workers with a strong sense of entitlement and identity as the core of the Soviet project.² In turn, for those who evaded the central duty of Soviet citizenship to engage in useful work, nothing less than revolutionary justice demanded the deprivation of political as well as social rights. This logic, as Golfo Alexopoulos has shown, did not preclude the politically disenfranchised from adopting specific petitioning practices of their own. However, they constituted the least entitled group within Soviet society, who could at best make a claim for reinclusion into the community.³

A reading of Lenin’s provision through such an inclusionary-exclusionary framework does not, however, account for the large and nebulous group of citizens who fell in between the friends–foes divide and lived on the margins of the nascent Soviet collectivity. These were people like Zolotova-Sologub: men and women impaired in their mobility, sight, or hearing. They could be unemployed and unmarried mothers, or children with behavioral problems, mental disorders, and physical disabilities. The field of Soviet history does include important works on each of these social groups. For instance, my work joins the studies of childhood and wayward youth written by Anne Gorsuch, Dorena Caroli, Juliane Fürst, Alan Ball, and Catriona Kelly.⁴ It draws on the research conducted by Wendy Goldman, Frances Bernstein, and Mie Nakachi on unmarried mothers and pro-natalism.⁵ It also builds on a number of recent works by Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova, Sarah Phillips, Mark Edele, Lilya Kaganovsky, Claire Shaw, and Beate Fieseler, which illuminate both the everyday hardships of people with disabilities in the Soviet Union and the discriminatory force of the construct of disability in that cultural context.⁶ Yet, while these historians have provided crucial interpretative starting points in relation to these marginalized populations, they have not raised the question of how Lenin’s formula applied to them. As nonworking elements, labor-incapacitated and unemployed people appeared as deviations from the sociopolitical norm of contributive labor and remained largely uncovered by the workers’ insurance system. Were other social services available to them? How did they lay claim to their social rights, their membership in the Soviet social body, and their human worth? In the end, if the Revolution had set the goal of emancipatory justice for all the oppressed and downtrodden, why did the rights of economically inactive and socially stigmatized people seem so problematic to define and legitimize? Finding answers to these questions was of vital significance to the unproductive and supposedly deviant elements of Soviet society. However, as we will see throughout this book, the dilemmas that such deviants posed to the socialist order deeply worried also the political authorities of the Soviet Union and many educated contemporaries.

In this book, I look at unemployed single mothers, blind and deaf people, and behaviorally problematic children together as deviants. The word deviant can indicate illegal behavior or delinquency, but here I have in mind its designation of bodies, sexualities, and socioeconomic behaviors that differ from a set norm. Although it might seem counterintuitive to apply this term to the claimants (and sometimes bearers) of social assistance rights, I believe that this terminological choice has two advantages. First, it is a powerful reminder that these populations were always perceived as abnormal. Second, deviant strongly conveys the assumption—which informed both the representation of these social groups by the normals and their own self-fashioning—that they would engage in aberrant behaviors unless restrained or provided with proper assistance. While not technically delinquents, adults with physical disabilities, jobless unmarried mothers, and difficult youth threatened to slip into nonconformist and illegal activities that in the Soviet Union were considered counterrevolutionary—such as begging, private trading, fortune-telling, public singing for alms, homelessness and vagrancy, alcoholism and drug addiction, if not thieving and prostitution. In the eyes of power, they were always deviating (otkloniaiushchiesia)—that is, departing from the imagined norm of able-bodied-ness, working capacity, disciplined behavior, and gender uprightness. At times, they were seen as maliciously refraining (ukloniaiushchiesia) from contributing to the collective.⁷ They were the undesired and suffering others—in anthropologist Didier Fassin’s words—who oscillat[ed] between [inspiring] sentiments of sympathy on the one hand and concern for order on the other hand.⁸ In comparison with the exemplary Soviet subject, who was imagined as a skilled, wage-earning, industrially productive, healthy and young, rational, and implicitly male citizen, all economically inactive individuals were by default unproductive others—invalidated, infantilized, and feminized.⁹ Of course, they did not constitute neat communities, internally homogeneous and externally bounded. Their deviance depended on contingent circumstances and on the specific time and place in which they lived. Nonetheless, it always derived from their inability to contribute to the goals of the socialist state and from their alleged lack of any aspiration to overcome this inability. If we look at deviance from this perspective, then we see that the questions left open by Lenin’s slogan necessarily found competing answers among those perceived as deviant, the political leaders writing policies about them, and the professional experts responsible for assisting them.

When unemployed and labor-incapacitated people wrote petitions to the Soviet state in order to demand social assistance, they articulated a clear sense of entitlement.¹⁰ They felt that they had a right not only to economic security, education, and health care, but also to social integration and personal happiness. Men and women with physical disabilities reflected upon the misery that was caused by their impairments and contended that the Soviet regime should guarantee them help in attaining justice and equality. The parents of children with various mental and physical handicaps wrote on behalf of their defective (defektivnye) children: they wanted education for their offspring and expected the socialist state to ensure liberation from the social pain of disability. Jobless and husbandless pregnant women argued that they would no longer be compelled to seek abortions, abandon their children, and practice prostitution, if only the state would give them financial subsidies and medical care. In short, people who deviated from the Soviet norms of economic and gender behavior often believed that they had the right to enjoy the material well-being and social justice that had been promised to the able-bodied and economically productive citizens. They grounded their claims in the contention that they too strove to contribute to the collective, despite their social suffering and physical ailments. In addition, they emphasized that they would overcome their defects and transform themselves into valuable members of the social body—provided that the state put them in the proper conditions to do so and upheld its terms of the social contract.

While social historians have long argued that ordinary Soviet people viewed socialism as a sociopolitical order in which the border between attaining one’s rights by law (po pravu) or through networks of patronage (po blatu) was very elastic, and in which people could simultaneously refer to traditional expectations of justice and to new ethical values,¹¹ in this book I show that for those who deviated from the norm rights were even more flexible. People like Zolotova-Sologub were rarely able to claim and acquire rights autonomously, either as inborn and inalienable entitlements or as codified and juridically enforceable laws. Neither could they simply appeal to a moral economy grounded in the Leninist saying he who does not work shall not eat.¹² Nevertheless, as the unproductive members of Soviet society struggled to establish a relationship between their contributions and their needs, they asserted that Lenin’s formula entailed unspoken variables such as gender and reproductive labor, physical ailments and mental disorders, material suffering and emotional pain. They further argued that the state’s representatives needed to factor these variables in if they wanted Soviet socialism to be a legitimate moral order. This sense of entitlement to help was based not only on laws, but also and above all on a particular understanding of socialist morality that derived from the experience of being different. It was informed both by policies and discourses imposed from above and by embodied experiences of poverty, disability, and marginalization.¹³

The final outcome of Zolotova-Sologub’s story clearly illustrates this point. In response to her letter, the Women Workers’ and Peasants’ Department proceeded to inspect her family, material, and economic situation, and then assigned her a onetime monetary subsidy of fifty rubles. It also arranged for her and her child’s recovery in a local hospital and for the provision of free medical therapy to both of them. Interceding on Zolotova-Sologub’s behalf with other state agencies for over one year, the Women’s Department was in the end able to obtain a permanent increase in her disability pension (doubling it from sixteen to thirty rubles per month) and the placement of her sick daughter in a children’s sanatorium. In the eyes of the social worker Popova, who had handled the case, the labor Zolotova-Sologub had performed in the past and her current state of suffering qualified this disabled single mother as an entitled citizen.¹⁴ To express gratitude, in her last letter to Popova, Zolotova-Sologub reached out again to the value of revolutionary work: But now, oh now, my spirit is lifted; I suddenly grew strong wings, hope, and confidence that the Soviet state does not leave without attention and reward those who have worked for the Revolution.¹⁵ This positive outcome, and in fact the entire correspondence between Zolotova-Sologub and Popova, reveal that both petitioners and mid-level bureaucrats internalized the official values of labor and need, but also contextualized them and made sense of them through the petitioners’ life stories. In the Soviet Union, it was the state that initially set the terms of entitlement, and individual citizens could write petitions only within the framework the authorities provided them. However, although party ideologues and policymakers defined the very categories of gender, disability, and suffering from above, the incorporation of personal experiences of impairment, difference, poor health, poverty, and precariousness offered both petitioners and bureaucrats a powerful tool with which to broaden official discourses. As we will see through many more examples in the following chapters, categories that were quite unstable since their very definition at the hands of the political authorities became even more controversial when deviant citizens mobilized them in their requests for help.

Thus, the politics of entitlement explored in this book constitute an integral part of a dual process that has been well described in Soviet historiography with regard to other issues. Namely, the state attempted to mold people’s subjectivity by promoting certain values and imposing structural and institutional forms, and individuals responded by fashioning themselves in ways that fit configurations of power and even internalized the goal of becoming the New Soviet Man.¹⁶ At the same time, this particular type of grassroots politics of entitlement also demonstrates that when people deemed to be deviant voiced their claims to the officials in power, they were both fitting acceptable forms of presentation and expressing desires, anxieties, obligations, and intentions of their own. While Soviet social policies produced and maintained the ways marginalized people thought about themselves in relation to power, petitioners not only reproduced the meaning of normality and deviance, but also tested the limits of these concepts. In doing so, they disturbed from within the very mechanisms by which the Soviet state’s institutions of care and cultural forms mediated their subjectivity.

The questions left unanswered in Lenin’s formula greatly preoccupied the Soviet political authorities, because invalids (invalidy), unemployed single mothers, and mentally disturbed children constituted not only deviations from the exemplary Soviet subject, but also suffering citizens whom the socialist state had to protect. Certainly, the leaders of the Soviet Union never regarded decisions about the well-being of these populations as equally important as choices relevant to the welfare of workers. Yet, party and government officials recognized that social policy toward vulnerable groups had the potential to define their state’s identity. The Soviet Union’s unique care for its poor, sick, and insane citizens cast the October Revolution as an emancipatory event, a complete and absolutely positive break with the tsarist past and any other state formation in the world. Indeed, because of its legitimizing force, social protection remained a major component of Soviet self-representation even during the harsh years of Stalin’s rule. The Constitution of 1936 reiterated Lenin’s dictum he who does not work shall not eat and complemented it with the axiom from each according to his ability, to each according to his work, thus indicating that the Soviet government had rejected religious and private philanthropy in favor of reciprocal obligations and state-funded welfare. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia also made this point clear when it explained that charity (blagotvoritel’nost’) was no longer one of the manifestations of Christian love—as in the prerevolutionary Orthodox Theological Encyclopedic Dictionary—but rather the expression of bourgeois hypocrisy and a religious glossing over the rule of the exploiting classes. In contrast to charity, the Soviet key informational resource positively identified help (pomoshch’), provision (obespechenie), protection (zashchita), and care (zabota) as the bundle of state measures aimed at guaranteeing justice to the needy, and it unfailingly accompanied these words by the attribute social (sotsial’nyi).¹⁷ This shift in semantics reflected the emancipatory and humanitarian dimensions of socialist welfare but also indicated the state’s complete monopolization of the social sphere and its ability to decide who was entitled to help and who was excluded from it. Besides being a paradigm of socialist morality, social assistance to vulnerable populations was also supposed to be a modern-state project rigidly directed from above and fulfilling the state’s productivist agendas.

Finally, along with marginalized petitioners, mid-level bureaucrats, and high state authorities, many educated contemporaries also reflected upon the variables of Lenin’s formula. They too used the concept of help to the deviants as one of the key categories through which they viewed the Soviet sociopolitical order and as an idiom by which they discussed its morality. As we will see in the following chapters, physical ailments and mental disorders, gender and reproductive labor, material suffering and emotional pain were themes discussed almost everywhere in the years between 1917 and 1950—in periodicals and daily newspapers, collections of laws, handbooks, medical surveys, police reports, poems, fictional literature, and movies. For sympathetic experts, in particular, help constituted a right that each impaired, helpless, and backward Soviet citizen should enjoy. At the same time, help was also the fundamental component of a transformative project conceived and managed from above and directed at those below through the adept interventions of experts.

That modern educated publics have historically conceived help as a blend of care and control is an argument well known to historians and social theorists. As Samuel Moyn has pointed out in his critique of Lynn Hunt’s book Inventing Human Rights: A History, the ability to feel empathy stems from an enlightenment cultural practice that requires educated people to embrace rights, but also leads them to embark upon civilizing missions.¹⁸ According to Michel Foucault and the numerous scholars who draw on his theory of governmentality, professional authorities have often constructed help as a combination of integrating and disciplining impulses, discourses that empowered them as the experts, and practices that simultaneously entitled and marginalized the abnormals of modernizing societies.¹⁹ In fact, as Didier Fassin has observed, the dialectic between compassion and repression and the confusion between the humanitarian and the political are still very much alive in contemporary European biopolitics.²⁰

One of the central contentions of this book is that this double sociopolitical and moral logic of help was part and parcel of Soviet professionals’ and social workers’ approaches to the deviants of the socialist polity. As we will see, Soviet activists’ discourses and practices of social protection were not simply nefarious elite plots aimed at controlling the masses and removing those who did not fit.²¹ They were also marked by positive transformational components, by the aspiration to give rights and integrate, and by the paradoxical tension between progressive reform and repressive social discipline.²² Motives involving some degree of coercive rehabilitation, normalization, and punishment of nonworking deviants coexisted with emancipatory intentions and genuine humanitarian concerns. On one hand, Soviet activists championed help as a tool of order, knowledge, and control—all values that could lead to coercion and at times outright physical violence. On the other hand, in the eyes of many activists, help entailed equally powerful discourses concerning ethical notions of human dignity and, above all, moral rights in a socialist regime.

In short, since neither Lenin’s formula he who does not work shall not eat nor his more extensive speculations on the subject of welfare offered a clear blueprint for defining the social rights of the deviants of Soviet society, contemporaries engaged in heated debates about the place of disability, gender, suffering, as well as productive and reproductive labor in legitimizing a citizen’s entitlement to help. Individuals at the margins of the norm entered these debates, too, as through their letters and actions they pushed forward their own ideas about the nature of socialist help and the meanings of their alleged deviance. They sometimes looked at the experts as potential allies and advocates on behalf of their rights, but often they viewed them as standing outside the parameters of justice and representing a state from which they felt alienated. For all of them, as much as for policymakers and high political authorities, help was an occasion to bring into focus the idea of a different but still entitled Soviet subject.

How This Book is Structured: Historical Actors and Historical Contexts

The Right to Be Helped consists of two parts bookended by a prologue and an epilogue. While the book’s core chapters address the specificity of the Soviet case in the postrevolutionary and Stalinist periods, the prologue offers a thumbnail historical sketch of the treatment of deviant populations in fin-de-siècle and interwar Europe, and the epilogue casts a glance at the post–World War II pan-European debates on social welfare and human rights.

In section I (Ideas of Rights and Agents of Help), I introduce the entire cast of characters and human conditions as well as the institutional apparatuses, laws, and conceptual underpinnings that defined the right to be helped in Soviet socialism. Soviet notions of social rights, as I discuss in chapter 1, had their formative sources in ideas and social movements that had appeared already in the last years of the tsarist regime but could find a venue for concrete implementation only after 1917, with the establishment of the Commissariat of Social Assistance (Narodnyi Komissariat Sotsial’nogo Obespecheniia) and the Department of Social Insurance of the Commissariat of Labor (Otdel Sotsial’nogo Strakhovaniia Narodnogo Komissariata Truda). These two institutions emerged and developed in competition with one another—the former was in charge of protecting unemployed and labor-incapacitated citizens, while the latter represented the privileged scheme of contributory insurance for industrial workers. As we will see, the logics behind the two systems were never reconciled and, depending on political necessity, the Soviet government alternated between contributory and universalist arguments to justify its politics of entitlement and marginalization. This inherent contradiction at the very inception of the right to be helped set the context for many of the difficulties that the Soviet state would later encounter in crafting and implementing its policies of social assistance.

Alongside ideology and institutions, the human predicaments of self-defined invalids also powerfully influenced the Soviet state’s dilemmas in defining social rights. I advance this argument in chapter 2 through an analysis of the exchanges between individual help-claimants and the bureaucrats working in the Commissariat of Social Assistance. Here, I condense incommensurable destinies by bringing together the intimate stories of disabled men and women and the state’s laws and programs of social protection. It is precisely in the frictions between state discourses and personal biographies that, I would suggest, we can best see the breadth and the limits of the Soviet right to be helped. In addition, the interactions between petition-writers and social assistance workers demonstrate that the deviants of Soviet society—whether they achieved specific rights or failed to secure them—actively participated in defining the particulars of a shared culture and thereby imparted new meaning to the notion and the lived experience of socialist morality.

While the Commissariat of Social Assistance was broadly responsible for the welfare of all uninsured, unemployed, and labor-incapacitated individuals, four distinct organizations emerged already in the immediate postrevolutionary years as specifically committed to defending the rights of behaviorally problematic minors, blind and deaf people, and unemployed unmarried mothers. I introduce these organizations in chapter 3 and then trace their developments in the book’s second section. They included a defectological center called the Medico-Pedagogical Station (Mediko-Pedagogicheskaia Stantsiia), the All-Russian Society of the Blind (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Slepykh), the All-Russian Society of the Deaf-Mute (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Glukhonemykh), and the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy (Otdel Okhrany Materinstva i Mladenchestva). These agencies employed child psychiatrists, teachers, directors of welfare facilities, social workers, legal consultants, gynecologists, midwives, and blind and deaf advocates for disability rights, whom I collectively call activists. They translated the state’s policies into practice and operated as liaisons between higher political officials and ordinary people. Some of them had to deal with petitions for state help as part of their routine and everyday work. Others were experts with strong professional reasons for desiring to help the marginalized groups of Soviet society, while still others became spokespersons for their communities due to the fact that they themselves suffered from physical impairments. Despite their differences in identity and motivation, they all held positions within the state’s administrative apparatus and were responsible for disseminating and enacting legislation and policy at the local level. Legitimized either by their competence or by an explicit political mandate (and most of the times by both), these activists controlled the mechanisms of social welfare and were able to muster enough political support to propose new programs or make significant changes in the implementation of old policies.

As in other European countries of the time, Russian welfare and medical experts had access to political, administrative, and personal resources that allowed them to qualify state policies and decide the limits of their applicability. Under socialism, however, the state had a greater ability to bring activists’ knowledge in line with the political imperatives of the moment. Soviet professionals, mid-level bureaucrats, and social workers had been mobilized by a revolution that had created many possibilities for them, but that could also take their authority away when state politics shifted.²³ As we will see, the activists of the Medico-Pedagogical Station, the All-Russian Societies of the Blind and the Deaf-Mute, and the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy were committed to the emancipation of deviant individuals from social injustice, but they were also entangled with the state’s agendas of regimentation of childhood, sexuality and motherhood, as well as disability and labor capacity. These activists joined hands with the state to follow the socialist dream of justice and modernity as well as to acquire stronger professional authority. While they could strongly empathize with their constituencies, they also largely accepted the disciplinary tasks that they were expected to perform in relation to them. The Societies of the Blind and the Deaf are a prime example of the contradictions at play for men and women who simultaneously worked within the state apparatus and championed disability rights. Their activities were sometimes in line with the state’s policies of coercive normalization of the blind and the deaf, while at other times they strove to nurture attitudes of acceptance toward human difference. Strong tensions even animated the doctors and midwives of the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy as well as the defectologists in charge of correcting morally defective children in the Medico-Pedagogical Station. All of them had to juggle their own personal ethics and sense of professional responsibilities with the demands of state power and the claims of their assisted. As I argue in chapter 3, they found an outlet in devising constructions that legitimized assistance to deviant subjects but also empowered themselves as the agents of Soviet help.²⁴

In section II (The Practice of Help), the story of the right to be helped unfolds chronologically under the impact of major events in Soviet history between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the attempted welfare reforms of 1949–1950.²⁵ Here, I analyze how state authorities, social activists, and marginalized citizens themselves fine-tuned their constructions of social rights to respond to the turbulent and ever-shifting conditions of the Soviet reality in those years. At the beginning of the Soviet regime, as I discuss in chapter 4, state authorities and experts largely saw themselves undertaking a thoroughly rational and modern but also humane and emancipatory project, one that was explicitly framed as the opposite of bourgeois charity, a corrective to the stigma and condescension with which needy populations were treated in the tsarist order. As we will see, the years between 1918 and 1927 constituted an overall positive phase in which the Soviet Union was intent on catching up and surpassing the rest of the world in the articulation of a progressive welfare system and in the application of modern scientific ideas to the field of public care. In those years, Christian and capitalist moralities were discredited, but their Soviet counterparts—secular and egalitarian moralities—were not yet firmly established. Prominent activists and experts rushed to fill that moral vacuum by suggesting standards of entitlement grounded in need as much as in contribution, and by introducing conceptions of subjectivity that valued deviant citizens’ capacity for self-transformation.

The onset of Stalinism in 1928 and then the drafting of the Stalin Constitution in 1936 changed the relationship among rights, paternalistic benevolence, and oppressive control (chapter 5). Indeed, by the late 1920s it had become clear to political leaders that neither the theory of Marxism nor the rhetoric of the Revolution offered a solution to the practical and financial problem of providing support to the mass of unemployed people not covered by state insurance. As the ideal goal of equal distribution was dangled before the eyes of the population, the reality of social protection was increasingly constrained by economic and political exigencies. With the great leap forward into the industrialization project, the Soviet state changed its discourse of help and insisted that all costly programs involving help to needy citizens be subordinated to the cause of socialist construction. As a result, in the years between 1928 and 1940, the early Soviet open-ended and multivocal environment of help became streamlined. For instance, the defectologists advocating on behalf of the rights of so-called difficult children were beleaguered and deprived of their budgets. In the case of disabled men and women, the desires of enterprise managers to maximize production greatly limited welfare services for this group. Although a few activists still struggled to preserve the rights of blind and deaf people, for most of them the expediency of the Five-Year Plans replaced the revolutionary ideals with the goal of labor productivity. Similarly, the advocates of single mothers’ rights encouraged all women to mobilize for production and reproduction, often compelling them to accept jobs and pregnancies they did not want.

Only after 1941 did the picture of state help to marginalized individuals change again, as the suffering and chaos of wartime ushered in new ways to address the dilemmas of social assistance (chapter 6). Military service in the Second World War, for instance, introduced new relations of obligation and debt, which further modified the dynamics of labor and need. Activists involved with the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy, a group of committed child psychiatrists, and a new cohort of blinded veterans attempted to reinject the field of social assistance with humanitarian beliefs alongside political and economic exigencies. Their efforts aimed at relaunching the less coercive side of help to the deviants that had characterized the first postrevolutionary decade and had almost disappeared during the 1930s. In many respects, these efforts heralded Nikita Khrushchev’s reforms of the Soviet welfare system and his emphasis on the humaneness of socialism. The book’s final chapter, however, also attends to the ways in which deviant subjects could contest the activists’ understanding of Soviet morality.

Throughout the book we will see that, despite the important changes just outlined, a few crucial aspects of the right to be helped stably defined the Soviet moral order. First, the tension between progressive policy and repressive discipline constantly informed it (although this tension had different outcomes in connection with shifts in ideology, economy, and politics). Second, a moral order in principle founded on the Leninist social contract always problematically coexisted with an order grounded on gifting, whereby citizens’ welfare depended on Stalin’s personal care. Both benevolent paternalism and the idea of a social contract undergirded official ideology, and both were incorporated in people’s understandings of their rights.²⁶ Lastly and perhaps most importantly, negotiating the strains inherent in the right to be helped remained pivotal throughout this