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Social Movements
Disability and the Soviet Union: Advances and retreats
The second part of “Disability and the Russian Revolution,” which
appeared in ISR 102 (Fall 2016).
By Keith Rosenthal
Issue #103: FeaturesShare
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By the end of October 1917, the Bolshevik Party had won a clear majority
of workers and peasants within the nationwide network of soviets
(revolutionary councils) to their program of the overthrow of the
capitalist, or provisional, government which had replaced the deposed
tsar. Almost immediately after carrying out the revolution, the
Bolsheviks began reshaping all of Russia. To be sure, their ambitions in
these first optimistic years far outstripped the limited means which
Russia’s backward economy put at their disposal. Yet, hopeful as they
were in the spread of the revolution to the advanced capitalist
countries of Europe—bringing with it the promise of direct international
aid and an end to the economic siege organized by said capitalist
countries—the Bolsheviks began reordering society in a truly
revolutionary direction. There were three major areas in which the
revolution effected significant change in the area of disability: law
and policy; labor and the economy; and health and education. Changes in
law and policy were discussed in part one of this article (see ISR
#102). The present article will address the impact of the revolution on
the latter two categories.
Labor and the economy
The dramatic nature of many of the legal decrees notwithstanding, it is
important to note that the Soviet government’s maximum agenda in the
first years after the revolution remained largely aspirational. From its
inception, the revolution had been fettered by the underdeveloped
economic conditions inherited from tsarist feudalism and a disastrous
world war; the inception of a counterrevolutionary civil war backed by
the imperialist Allied countries of Europe and the United States; and a
debilitating economic blockade placed upon Russia by an alliance of
imperialist countries. As a result, it was estimated that by 1919
industrial production had declined to a mere one-fifth of its prewar high.1
At best, the revolutionary government could set for itself the initial
task of dividing up equally amongst the population the existent
accumulated domestic wealth of the landowners and capitalists. Such a
measure could provide immediate relief to the population, but could not
stave off hunger and the generalization of want for more than a brief
period. The Bolsheviks were therefore acutely aware that the eventual
success of socialism in Russia hinged entirely upon the spreading of
revolution to the wealthier capitalist nations of the world, from whom
Russia could obtain substantial economic aid and favorable relations of
trade. Failing that, the Russian people were doomed to either remain
mired in relative poverty or else face a growing compulsion to proceed
down the road championed by the Bolsheviks’ conservative detractors:
namely, to act as a kind of surrogate bourgeoisie committed to wealth
accumulation via the exploitation of labor. As Engels had long before
noted in The Peasant War in Germany,
The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be
compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not
yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the
realization of the measures which that domination would imply. What he
can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of
interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of
development of the material means of existence. . . . Thus he
necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to
all his actions as hitherto practiced, to all his principles and to the
present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved.
In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but
the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination.2
For the time being, however, the working class of Russia was simply
determined to enjoy the immediate fruits of its victory. The experience
of the revolution itself had thoroughly imbued Russian society with
seemingly unbounded feelings of hope, solidarity, and comradeship. The
watchword of the day was that the welfare and well-being of all trumped
all other concerns.
Naturally, the reorganization of the economy proceeded along lines
informed by this prevailing mood. Initially, this was done largely
spontaneously as workers and peasants took matters into their own hands.
They were not waiting for Soviet decrees, but simply proceeding to
reorganize their lives, knowing that the soviets—their soviets—would
invariably codify their actions after the fact. To this end, a massive
wave of factory and workplace takeovers directly succeeded the
revolution. The lowest strata of the peasantry likewise engaged in mass
seizures and occupations of the former estates and mansions of the
landed aristocracy.
Having thus placed the means of production under their own cooperative
control, the workers immediately began to freely adapt and accommodate
the labor process to their abilities, needs, and desires. This took the
following forms: slowing down the pace of work; decreasing the length of
the workday; prioritizing the implementation of safety precautions and
measures; creating substantially more flexible work schedules; exerting
more direct control over the flow and process of the work; and allowing
for greater flexibility in the division of labor within the production
process.
The promise of such a socialist reorganization of the economy was, as
Lenin wrote in December 1917, to draw “the majority of working people
into a field of labor in which they can display their abilities, develop
the capacities, and reveal those talents, so abundant among the people
whom capitalism crushed, suppressed, and strangled in thousands and
millions.”
Every factory from which the capitalist has been ejected, or in which he
has at least been curbed by genuine workers’ control, every village from
which the landowning exploiter has been smoked out and his land
confiscated has only now become a field in which the working man can
reveal his talents, unbend his back a little, rise to his full height,
and feel that he is a human being.3
Reminiscing decades later on the practical changes which the revolution
in the factories had initially wreaked, the Bolshevik leader Nadezhda
Krupskaya wrote, “The revolution had done away with the bullying,
swearing and driving class of foremen and bosses, and the worker was
glad to be rid of them, glad to be able to sit down and have a smoke
when he was tired without anyone driving him. At the beginning the
factory organizations readily released the workers to attend all kinds
of meetings.” She continues by relating a particularly illustrative
anecdote which occurred in early 1918:
I remember a woman worker coming to me once at the Commissariat of
Education to receive some certificate or other. During our conversation
I asked her what shift she was working in. I thought she was working in
the night shift, otherwise she would not have been able to come to the
Commissariat in the daytime. “None of us are working today,” [she said].
“We had a meeting yesterday evening, everyone was behindhand with her
domestic work at home, so we voted to knock off today. We’re the bosses
now, you know.”4
Another aspect of the revolution that immediately expressed itself
throughout the economy was the desire for equality between all sectors
of the working class. For instance, whereas in August 1917 the ratio
between unskilled and skilled workers’ wages was 1:2.32, by 1920 it had
become 1:1.04.5 Historian Marcel Liebman notes that for Lenin and the
Bolshevik party, the impossibility of achieving the complete
equalization of wages was in fact seen as “one of the constraints
imposed by the crisis and by the country’s economic backwardness, and
[Lenin] regarded the necessity of giving specialists specially favored
rates of pay as nothing less than a setback for the revolution. In the
draft program he put before the Eighth Party Congress [March 1919] he
repeated: ‘our ultimate aim is to achieve . . . equal remuneration for
all kinds of work.’”6
The spirit of equality that attended the democratization of the
production process also applied to issues that existed at the
intersection of workplace accommodation and gender. For instance, some
workplaces established free on-site childcare spaces for the benefit of
working mothers, while others implemented regulations allowing working
mothers to take off up to two hours out of their normal workday for the
purposes of feeding their children.7
Perhaps one of the most popular new accommodations that Russian workers
now enjoyed was the ability to take a near-unlimited number of paid sick
days and respites away from work. Because the new revolutionary
healthcare system was controlled by the workers, patients, and local
soviets—and because the health system was free, universal, and removed
from the dictates of market profitability and finance capital—it became
easy for a worker suffering from injury or ill health to obtain
authorization from a nearby medical center excusing them from work for a
given period of time or indicating the necessity of a change in their
workload or workflow.8
In addition to paid sick leave, revolutionary Russia also became the
first country in the world where all workers, without exception, had the
right to an annual paid vacation of two to four weeks. 9 Moreover, the
Soviet government took the added measure of facilitating the widespread
enjoyment of this right by seizing the beautiful seaside palaces and
country estates of the former aristocracy and bourgeoisie and opening
them up to peasants and workers to use for free as therapeutic resorts
and communal vacation homes.10
Outside of the immediate sphere of relations pertaining to the
workplace, there were a number of broader noteworthy social changes that
improved the accessibility of general economic and civic life to all.
For instance, important services such as public transit, electrical
power, and postal and parcel delivery were provided free of charge to
the populace at government expense.11
Another significant development was the national campaign to establish
free communal kitchens, laundries, childcare, and the like; the primary
aim being to lift the many tasks of social reproduction off the
shoulders of the individual family unit in general, and women workers in
particular. Though the scale of these communal experiments was
unfortunately limited by overall economic constraints, it is clear that
those who especially stood to benefit from such measures were mothers
with disabilities and mothers who had children with disabilities.
Additionally, with the complete socialization and universalization of
many tasks associated with individual daily living, all people with
disabilities would be able to more easily obtain all manner of personal
(i.e., communal) assistance necessary for meaningful self-development
and realization.
Ultimately, a fully accurate depiction of the labor and economic
situation in revolutionary Russia cannot be complete without recognition
of the exigencies that stymied all but the most halting progress. By the
end of 1918, sabotage, economic blockade, and open civil war on the part
of the capitalist class and its international imperialist backers was
well underway. From 1918 to 1921, the area under Soviet control was a
society literally under a state of siege. Famine, unemployment, and the
near-total breakdown of railroad transport plagued the cities and
countryside alike. This was the period of so-called War Communism (a
horribly inexact appellation), in which every nerve and fiber of Soviet
society was marshaled toward the fortification and defense of the
revolution. In many regards, it marked a significant retreat (or at the
very least, an austere detour) from the path of democratic, cooperative,
and post-coercive socialist development. As Trotsky put it in
retrospect, “War Communism was the regime of a beleaguered fortress.”12
At the war’s conclusion, the peasant-worker alliance which had made the
tsar’s overthrow possible began to break down under the weight of
generalized scarcity, postwar exhaustion, and industrial collapse. The
breakdown of transportation and the outbreak of the civil war crisis
prompted the new government in August 1918 to begin sending detachments
of workers and poor peasants into the countryside to forcibly
requisition grain in order to sustain the Red Army and to forestall the
depopulation of Russia’s cities. In 1921, with socialist revolution
having failed (at least for the moment) to spread internationally, the
Bolshevik government initiated a New Economic Policy (NEP) premised upon
the limited introduction of capitalist forms of economy. If the policy
of War Communism was one of retreat, then NEP marked a retreat from a
retreat. Nonetheless, it was deemed a necessary concession to the
demands of the peasantry and even elements of the working class, not to
mention the very historical economic conditions obtaining in an
isolated, dilapidated, and underdeveloped society.
As the decade of the 1920s wore on, the NEP saw the gradual
reintroduction of privatized production, the commodities market, wage
determination according to the labor market, social and economic
inequality, and regularized unemployment. The Bolsheviks who ran the
government during this period often felt that they were hostage to
circumstances beyond their control in their implementation of NEP.
Lenin, for example, remarked at the 1922 party congress: “It was like a
car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the
direction someone else desired; as if it were being driven by some
mysterious, lawless hand, God knows whose, perhaps of a profiteer, or of
a private capitalist, or of both.”13
In reflecting upon the limitations and characteristics of Soviet Russia
during these years, it is worth returning to Karl Marx, who in one of
his more expansive descriptions of communism, wrote of a society in which,
After the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of
labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical
labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but
life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with
the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of
co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow
horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society
inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each
according to his needs!14
And yet, how far Russia of the 1920s was from a society in which such
conditions even remotely obtained. If, as Marx wrote, a political
superstructure “can never be higher than the economic structure of
society and its cultural development conditioned thereby,”15 then we are
compelled to return to the original Bolshevik assertion that a workers’
state that remained isolated in an underdeveloped Russia would be simply
unable to conjure into being a genuine communist, classless society.
Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out that in certain key respects, the
genuinely socialist aspirations of the Bolshevik government and the
advanced sections of the working class remained evident even during
these years of retreat and dissolution. For instance, the 1920s
witnessed, inter alia, the emergence of three important labor-oriented
disability advocacy organizations that enjoyed the support of both a
large number of disabled Russians as well as the Bolshevik government.
The All-Russian Cooperative of Disabled People (VIKO), All-Russian Union
of the Blind (VOS), and All-Russian Union of the Deaf (VOG) were
established in 1921, 1923, and 1926, respectively. Insofar as these
three organizations were controlled by their members and yet operated
with the support and under the aegis of the national government, they
were quite without precedent. In fact, it has been argued that VIKO
represents the first national pan-disability advocacy organization in
modern history.16 VIKO was directly established in December 1921 by a
vote of the Council of People’s Commissars.
The structure of VIKO was [that of] a national umbrella disability
organization. All decisions were made democratically (in the early ’20s
it was still allowed), and only people with disabilities had voting
power at VIKO . . . VIKO focused its efforts on providing work
opportunities for people with disabilities by creating special
production lines, kindergartens, resorts, health retreats, vocational
schools and sport centers.17
Along with VOS and VOG (which operated under the purview of the
Commissariat of Social Services), these groups set for themselves the
task of integrating disabled Russians into society by helping them find
“socially useful work; helping them complete secondary and higher
education and find suitable employment; and drawing them into the ranks
of active builders of Communist society.”18 Describing the activities of
VOS in the mid-1920s, historian Bernice Madison writes, “The effort to
do away with illiteracy among the blind began . . . with a cultural
revolution of sorts. Clubs, houses of culture, red corners, and
libraries multiplied. Night schools were developed; records became
available.”19 Of work amongst the deaf, disability studies scholar Sarah
Phillips writes, “Thanks to the VOG, which enjoyed the approval of Party
functionaries, deaf people were able to nurture a deaf culture and
improve the social standing of people with disabilities.”20
Health and education
In addition to (and as a result of) imperialist intervention,
counterrevolutionary violence, and economic dislocation, the abysmal
state of the general population’s health and well-being presented the
new Soviet government with a high-priority crisis demanding immediate
and substantial attention. During the entirety of World War I, cholera,
typhus, and influenza epidemics claimed millions of lives, as disease
raged unabated throughout Russia. With the onset of the post-revolution
civil war, waves of disease once again crashed over the Russian
population. Additionally, the spread of such epidemic diseases was
further inflamed by the 1917–1920 economic blockade imposed on Russia by
the imperialist nations. Not only did this blockade have the
catastrophic effect of barring Russia from importing any of the food
needed to stave off famine sweeping the country (a leading cause of
epidemics), it also meant that Russia was unable to import any of the
desperately needed medicines to aid in the fight against these epidemics.21
Given the daunting scale of the obstacles the revolutionaries faced, it
is actually quite impressive that the Bolshevik government was able,
both in word and deed, to make the health crisis an early priority. As
previously noted, much of the professional class of physicians in
Russia—aside from that of psychiatry—were initially loath to support the
revolution. After the revolution, however, that changed substantially,
in large part owing to a number of bold measures taken by the soviets at
both the national and regional level. The national government
immediately set about centralizing and coordinating the establishment of
a free, universal public health system on a mass scale. In fact,
revolutionary Russia became the first nation in the world to establish a
single, unified federal-level Commissariat (i.e., department or
ministry) of Public Health in July 1918.22
Notably, the Commissariat of Public Health also included a
neuropsychiatric subsection tasked to centralize the delivery of
psychiatric services to the population; official public statements
declared the provision of such services a priority and “urgent task” of
the Soviet government. Specific attention was also given by this
subsection to “the victims of war and revolution,” (the so-called
“shell-shocked” soldiers, or “war neurotics”) whose psychological
condition had been ignored or even punished by the previous government,
but for whom the present government would now assume full responsibility
for treatment and support.23
In terms of epidemiology, one of the early significant acts of the
Commissariat of Health was to aid in the establishment of local Workers’
Committees to Combat Epidemics in all major districts of Russia,
comprised of elected representatives working in conjunction with the
local Soviet bodies. Writing in 1920, after the worst of the epidemic
tides had been successfully stemmed, the Commissar of Health noted:
We may say without exaggeration that the epidemics of typhus and cholera
were stopped chiefly by the assistance of the workers’ and peasants’
committees. But this is not all. Not a single important problem has been
carried out without the assistance of the workers. The question of
systematic measures to combat social diseases, such as phthisis
[tuberculosis] and venereal disease, was discussed with the
representatives of trade unions, Women’s Organizations, Young People’s
Unions, etc. The organization of sanitary protection for workers was
carried out by special inspectors, elected from among the workers
themselves: inspectors of dwellings were organized in the same way.24
A riveting and detailed picture of this process is offered by historian
Alexander Rabinovitch in his authoritative book, The Bolsheviks in Power:
[During] the battle to bring the Petrograd cholera epidemic of 1918
under control . . . local efforts to educate the public about avoiding
infection were headed by medical sections of individual district soviets
or hastily formed district soviet “troikas” to combat cholera, supported
by epidemiologists, staffs of local hospitals, and pharmacists. The
medical sections also established multiple neighborhood cholera
first-aid stations and vaccination centers, which functioned
around-the-clock, and strove mightily to eradicate sources of
contamination. The Commissariat for Public Health . . . formed an
Emergency Commission for the Struggle against Cholera which became a
citywide coordinating center for anti-cholera efforts.
At the peak of the crisis, [the Emergency Commission] took steps to stop
the sale of fruit by street vendors, facilitate the quick adoption of
emergency preventative health measures by workers, and mobilize workers
to bury a huge backlog of coffins at the city’s cemeteries. Labor
conflict associated with the epidemic was minimal and understandable.
Grossly overworked grave diggers at the Uspenskii Cemetery demanded an
increase in their miserly bread ration. The same was true of employees
at the city’s waterworks, especially stokers who themselves became
victims of the disease in inordinately high percentages; they insisted
on a supplemental ration equal to that granted personnel carrying out
high-risk medical duties. These demands were forwarded to the Emergency
Commission and, presumably, were met.25
Beyond the purely medical, one measure in particular proved a
significant boon to the fight against disease: the dramatic improvement
of housing conditions for the Russian working class in the immediate
years following the revolution. This was made possible by a process of
mass requisitioning and property seizures in which every mansion and
large estate of the wealthy class—including the opulent buildings and
monasteries owned by various religious institutions—were requisitioned
to provide adequate lodgings to the homeless, and especially to homeless
and orphaned children and adolescents.26
This latter population in particular drew special, detailed, and
continuous attention from the new Soviet government. Mass fatalities as
a result of world war, civil war, famine, and epidemics had created a
huge population of children without living parents or guardians. It is
estimated that by 1921–1922 roughly seven million children composed a
veritable army of homeless, orphaned, and neglected children.27 Before
the revolution, such children were forced to rely on scant private or
religious charity. After the revolution, however, these children
immediately became official wards of the Soviet government itself. Such
a mass transfer of orphaned children into state guardianship was
near-unprecedented in world history; henceforth, the meeting of their
needs was to be a matter of public obligation rather than private caprice.
A large number of these children had a wide variety of mental and
physical disabilities, whose needs drew the attention of a growing
number of Soviet agencies.28 By the early 1920s, the Soviet government
had established medical and educational facilities specifically for
children with disabilities in every provincial capital of Russia.29 The
study of the phenomenon of disability itself—particularly disability in
children—as it pertained to education, psychology, and sociology, was
also raised to a much higher level within academia and civil society
generally through encouragement and assistance provided by the
government. Historians Jane Knox and Carol Stevens write:
Concern for . . . abandoned children [led] to the inauguration of a
special section of the Commissariat of Education called SPON (Social and
Legal Protection of Minors). Beginning in 1923 (that is, after the
1921-1922 famine had reached its peak), more of the new institutions
sponsored by SPON were directed toward identifying, housing, and
educating children who were physically handicapped or “difficult to
educate.” The net result of the general focus on education and the
particular concern for abandoned children was a marked increase in
facilities for studying and teaching the handicapped and training
teachers for them.30
This marked increase in official attention devoted to disability
pedagogy took on unprecedented proportions within revolutionary Russia.
The Soviet government became one of the very first in the world to make
the universal education of children with disabilities—otherwise known as
“special education”—a matter of public policy administered through the
state.31
Before proceeding to a full discussion of special education within
revolutionary Russia, however, it is necessary to contextually establish
the nature and scope of the transformation that was being wrought in the
field of general education. The goal of placing literacy and education
within the full reach of the entire Russian working class and peasantry
had long been a cornerstone of the Bolsheviks’ approach to the
self-emancipation of the oppressed. After the revolution, this
aspiration truly blossomed. Indeed, perhaps more than any other area of
reform, the education system in revolutionary Russia underwent a
thoroughgoing metamorphosis. These changes had a profound impact on the
entire population, but were of particular importance to anyone with
divergent learning or cognitive abilities.
As the preamble to the Soviet government’s Education Act of 1918 stated:
The personality shall remain as the highest value in the socialist
culture. This personality however can develop its inclinations in all
possible luxury only in a harmonious society of equals. We do not forget
the right of an individual to his own peculiar development. It is not
necessary for us to cut short a personality, to cheat it, to cast it
into iron moulds, because the stability of the socialist community is
based not on the uniformity of barracks, not on artificial drill, not on
religious and aesthetic deceptions, but on an actual solidarity of
interests.32
At the primary level, the Soviet government established free,
mixed-gender, public education for all children, in which homework,
grading systems, and individual high-stakes examinations were abolished.
The elaboration of curriculums and methods was entrusted to elected
school councils consisting of teachers, students, and other school
workers (counselors, etc.). At the level of higher education, entrance
examinations and tuition were abolished and universities were
unconditionally open to all who wished to enter. At all levels students
were encouraged to learn and accomplish tasks in cooperation with each
other, rather than through the kind of competitiveness that is the
hallmark of capitalist education.33
Such was the vibrant context in which a comprehensive system of special
education developed in Russia. The endeavor was organized directly
through the Commissariat of Education, and was led and influenced most
substantially by the Marxist psychologist and educator, Lev Vygotsky. It
is important to note that Vygotsky was uniquely qualified to play a
leading role in the education of Russia’s children with disabilities, as
he himself had a disability. Throughout the entirety of his adult life
he suffered from chronic bouts of tuberculosis—a disease that would
ultimately take his life at the age of thirty-seven. In fact, throughout
the 1920s when he was at his most influential and prolific in shaping
Soviet disability policy, he was repeatedly hospitalized and
intermittently spent stretches of time unable to work and on the state
disability pension rolls.34
Before proceeding further in this section, it is worth saying a word
about terminology. As it developed in Russia, the field of disability
studies went by the official title of “Defectology” (i.e., as in “birth
defect,” etc). This unfortunate appellation was carried over wholesale
from the prerevolutionary lexicon; and the work of disability studies
occurred within this rubric even as its content was undergoing radical
alteration.35 To the modern reader, Vygotsky’s use of the term will seem
as antiquated as early twentieth century English-language texts which
contain then-common terms such as “retarded,” “crippled,” etc.
Nonetheless, what’s most important in Vygotsky’s work is not his
terminology, but the radical ideas he sought to communicate.
The contribution of Lev Vygotsky
At the heart of Vygotsky’s approach to special education were two
general principles, derived from a fusion of the concept of social
education and a Marxist understanding of the historical-materialist
development of conscious human behavior. First, Vygotsky maintained that
“at any given moment, a child is full of unrealized potentials, and
these offer a wealth of creative resources on which a handicapped child,
or any child, may and must build.”36 Second, that only through
collaboration with others can any child, disabled or not, fully develop
their total human personality and unique potential: “That which is
impossible for one, is possible for two. . . [and] that which is
impossible on the level of individual development becomes possible on
the level of social development.”37
In a 1925 speech delivered on behalf of the Commissariat of Education at
an international conference on the education of the deaf and blind,
Vygotsky elaborated, “When we have a blind child before us as the object
of education, then we must deal not so much with the blindness itself as
with the conflicts which arise for a blind child when he enters life. .
. . For a blind or deaf child, blindness or deafness represent
normality, not a condition of illness. He senses the handicap in
question only indirectly or secondarily, as a result of his social
experiences. What then does a hearing loss mean, in and of itself? It
must be accepted that blindness and deafness indicate nothing other than
the mere absence of one means of forming conditional links with the
environment.”38
Relating the situation in Russia, Vygotsky continues:
Perhaps almost for the first time in the world, our schools are
developing an experiment in the self-organization of deaf children. The
children create a student self-government, composed of sanitary,
economic and cultural commissions, etc., which totally envelop the
children’s life. Living skills, social behavior, initiative, leadership
qualities, collective responsibility grow and strengthen in this system.
Lastly this social educational system is crowned by a children’s
communist movement, through which a child learns to see himself as a
participant in life on a world scale. . . . [In this way,] the deaf-mute
child lives and breathes with his whole country. His pulse, his efforts,
his thoughts beat in unison with the masses.39
The significance of Vygotsky’s conceptual reframing of the “problem” of
disability as being primarily a social question is quite profound. If
the supposed “tragedy” of disability finds its source not in any
inherent biological flaw or inferiority on the part of the individual
but rather arises out of social circumstances, then the potential for
transcendence also resides in the latter. For while the phenomenon of
physical and mental impairment is an inalienable, intrinsic feature of
human existence, the specific historical-social conditions the bearers
of such impairments are compelled to navigate are, by definition, not
intrinsic. From such a theoretical vantage point, Vygotsky felt
confident in anticipating a not-too-distant future in which, “pedagogy
will be ashamed of the very notion of a ‘handicapped child,’ which
signifies some unalterable defect in the child’s nature.”
It is our responsibility to see to it that a deaf, blind, or mentally
retarded person is not handicapped. Only then will this notion, which,
in itself, is a true sign of our own inadequacy, disappear. Physically,
blindness and deafness will still exist on earth a long time. A blind
person will remain blind and a deaf person deaf, but they will cease to
be handicapped because a handicapped condition is only a social concept;
a defective condition is an abnormal extension of blindness, deafness,
or muteness. Blindness by itself does not make a child handicapped; it
is not a defective condition, an inadequacy, abnormality, or illness.
Blindness becomes these things only under certain social conditions of a
blind person’s existence.40
Vygotsky approached the education of those with intellectual, cognitive,
or other learning disabilities in precisely the same manner. He
criticized educators who asserted that the “the goal of the [special]
school cannot be the same [as the general school] since the mentally
retarded . . . cannot be builders, or creators of a new life,” and that
the most that could be demanded from such children is that they “not
keep others from building.”41 Vygotsky countered:
Initially, when the bourgeois school confronted the problem and the fact
of mental retardation . . . it set for itself the negative goals of
barring passage into the school for normal children and, with the
assistance of this barrier, sought to weed out those children not
capable of learning there or who were unwilling to. Anyone will
understand the hopelessness of making a selection according to negative
indicators. If we undertake such a weeding out, then we risk isolating
and consolidating into one general group those children whose positive
attributes have little in common. . . . [In fact, it] turned out to be
impossible to explain mental retardation on the basis of a purely
negative definition. It is impossible to be guided only by what a given
child lacks, by what he is not. On the contrary, it is necessary to have
some conception, even if the most vague understanding, of what his
capabilities are and what he represents. In this vein the bourgeois
school accomplished exceedingly little.42
In contrast, Vygotsky pointed to positive outcomes of experimental
education models being attempted in Russia. These were premised upon the
“social nature of education and the role of the collective in the
education of severely retarded children:”
New research has shown that free collectives of severely retarded
children form themselves according to an extremely interesting
principle. Thus . . . these children have a tendency to create and enter
into collectives consisting of individuals of varying intellectual
levels. . . . It is obvious that an enormous educational factor is
represented by the presence of children of various intellectual levels
in collectives, as well as by the cooperation of the children who make
up the given collective. In free collectives . . . where the
participants do not see themselves as the simple sum of the
peculiarities which characterize the individual children, and where each
of the members acquires new peculiarities and qualities, as it were
re-creating themselves into something whole—in such free collectives,
the personality of severely retarded children is represented in an
entirely new light.43
In other words, it is precisely through socialized education—and
ultimately, socialized existence generally—that not only the sum, but
each individual part (person) it comprises, becomes greater than the
particular strengths and weaknesses of that person when taken as an
isolated individual.
The negation of the revolution
Taken together, the subject matter discussed by Vygotsky abundantly
demonstrates the mass optimism and transformation that the revolution
wrought in the conditions and politics of disability in Russia. Yet it
should be noted that the bulk of this material is drawn from a
relatively short period of time, comprising no less than four and no
more than twelve years. In fact, as has been extensively documented
elsewhere, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, the ruling economic and
political system of Russia had in nearly every way become an utter
negation of that which obtained in the early post-revolution years.44
Workers’ power over society had been replaced by a bureaucratic ruling
class exercising power over the workers. This Stalinist version of
“socialism” actually had far more in common with the classical features
of capitalist accumulation and exploitation than with the democratic
collective ownership of the means of production associated with Marx.
Given that the early advances in the liberation of people with
disabilities proceeded in lockstep with the advances of the Russian
Revolution in its overall transcendence of capitalist social relations,
it should come as no surprise that the retreat and ultimate defeat of
the revolution also occasioned regression and mass oppression in the
realm of disability. Glimpses of the negative manifestation of this
dialectic began to appear even in the early 1920s. Aside from the purely
economic obstacles to change discussed above, the austere atmosphere of
NEP led to other restrictions within civil society more generally.
The first immigration controls were introduced during these years, in
which entry was permitted only to those able to secure a job in advance
of their emigration.45 Free health care was phased out and replaced with
tiers of service in which many had to once again pay fees.46 By 1926, a
period in which Stalin (and the burgeoning bureaucratic ruling class he
represented) had begun to exert political hegemony over society through
its now-official state doctrine of building “socialism in one country,”
certain eugenic measures also began to find increasing expression in
government policy. For instance, the updated Civil Code of that year
included such measures as the prohibition of marriage between close
relatives as well as persons who had in legal form been declared
mentally incompetent.47
Ultimately, the experience of the decay of the Russian Revolution
demonstrates that even a democratic workers’ state cannot long engage in
the task of regulating and even encouraging the development of
capitalist social relations (as opposed to abolishing them), before the
roles become reversed; before capitalist relations determine the
character of the state, rather than vice-versa. Indeed, it was precisely
because of this and related factors that a new ruling class was able to
come into being at the end of the 1920s under the leadership of Joseph
Stalin, violently replacing a workers’-state-regulated-capitalism with
simply [state] capitalism.
Thus, by 1928 and afterwards, when the Stalinist government embarked on
the first of several “Five Year Plans” to strengthen the nation, all
semblances of socialist democracy and workers’ power had been completely
liquidated. The explicit goal of the Communist Party-led government had
become to quickly industrialize and develop the Russian economy at all
costs in order to effectively compete with the powerful capitalist
nations of the West. Both the working class and peasantry in general,
and disabled people in particular, bore the full brunt of the resultant
breakneck pace and cutthroat competition which the Five Year Plans
introduced into industrial production and the accumulation of capital.
Whereas the oppression of people with disabilities in capitalist society
is conditioned by the valuation of humans according to the profitability
of their commodity-producing labor, we find a strikingly analogous
imperative imposing itself in Russia during this period.
On the one hand, piece-rate or piecework payment, in which workers were
compensated in direct proportion to the output of their labor, became
ubiquitous throughout Russian industry with underperforming workers
facing summary termination.48 This resulted in the gap in pay between
various tiers of workers reaching unprecedented proportions. In 1928,
the ratio between highest- and lowest-paid workers was approximately
3:1, but by 1940, it had increased to 30:1.49 Moreover, it is only
possible to guess at the toll in life and limb exacted upon the workers
by the rapid increase in the overall rate of exploitation, because the
precise figures do not exist. Whereas before 1928 detailed documentation
was kept on the rate of industrial accidents and injury throughout
Russia (including census figures on the overall disabled population), by
1933 the government simply ceased to report aggregate figures for
industrial accidents or occupational disabilities, let alone make note
of disability in census reports.50
On the other hand, those straddling the edges or outside of the regular
workforce for one reason or another were subjected to equally despotic
measures. Three days absence from work in any month was now punishable
by immediate dismissal without notice; social security benefits were
determined by length and type of employment; the provision of temporary
disability benefits was determined by past employment history (i.e.,
discipline and production history); relief payments to the unemployed
were abolished except in ambiguous cases of “serious” disability; length
of allowable maternity leave was reduced across the board.51
If solidarity and cooperative class-consciousness had been the watchword
of the revolutionary period, the counterrevolutionary period was marked
by selfishness, individualism, and antipathy. For instance, in order to
increase productivity by cracking down on absenteeism and “slackers,”
the Stalinist managers of the economy actively fostered competitive
enmity between workers by installing “red boards” and “black boards” in
most workplaces. The former contained the names of the most productive
workers; the latter, the least. Moreover, individuals were encouraged to
publicly lodge accusations of their own against coworkers through the
medium of the black boards. An American author touring Russian factories
in 1933 noted some of the contents of these black boards. In one shop a
caricature of a woman worker had been drawn next to the indictment: “Why
does comrade Aranova so often go on sick leave and will not work like
the rest of us?” In other shops derisive pictures were displayed over
the workbenches of those who had been disciplined by factory management
for alcoholism. In fact, the author reported that every factory he
visited had some sort of wall display containing the names and
photographs of workers who had been recently treated for alcoholism.52
Ancillary to the sphere of economic production, the health and education
sectors likewise suffered dramatically under the Stalinist
counterrevolution. A 1930 decree shredded the remaining vestiges of
universal health care by repealing the existing law that guaranteed all
Russians equal access to medical resources. Instead, health service
resources were now rationed amongst the population according to
strictly-defined categories, with those working in the most productive
economic sectors enjoying highest prioritization, while the mass of the
rural peasantry, those outside of the workforce, and those in the least
productive sectors were assigned the lowest prioritization.53 The
following year, a decree was issued abolishing special education.54 The
Commissars of Education and Health—both old Bolsheviks and close friends
of Lenin—were summarily ousted as preconditions for the fulfillment of
the foregoing changes.55 Finally, a 1936 decree specifically condemned
and essentially outlawed the philosophy, methods, and works of Lev
Vygotsky and his associates.56
In sum, all the advances that the working class had made in the course
of the revolution to begin to abolish the alienating, oppressive, and
exploitative nature of capitalist economic relations were undone so that
the emergent Stalinist ruling class could achieve its desired rate of
capital accumulation and industrial development. In this respect they
were certainly successful; Russia’s overall industrial output rose from
6.9 percent of the overall US industrial output in 1928 to 45.1 percent
in 1938.57 Yet, as has been well and widely documented, the human cost
of this highly compressed industrial revolution ran into the millions.
Moreover, the economic counterrevolution carried out by the Stalinist
ruling class required an equally brutal political counterrevolution of
terror. By the late 1930s, Stalin had overseen the murder, imprisonment,
or exile of the majority of the original Bolshevik party leaders and
membership.58
Conclusion
The Russian Revolution of 1917—both in spite of and because of later
events that negated it—continues to stand as an invaluable historical
proof of the viability and vitality of socialist revolution. In
particular, it represented a qualitative advance in the emancipation of
disabled people over anything the modern world has seen before or even
since. For insofar as the liberation of people with disabilities is
inextricably bound with the liberation of the entire oppressed,
exploited majority from the fetters of capitalism, the Russian
Revolution remains unrivaled on both counts. Amidst the most
unpropitious of circumstances and leanest of means, the working class
and oppressed of Russia took hold of their collective destinies—if only
briefly—and proved to the world that another mode of human existence is
possible. The possibility was tragically choked off by the failure of
European revolution.
“It [is] possible that the Revolution will fail,” wrote the British
author and journalist Arthur Ransome, upon touring Russia in 1918. “If
so, then its failure will not mean that it loses its importance. . . .
Let the revolution fail. No matter. If only in America, in England, in
France, in Germany people know why it has failed, who betrayed it, who
murdered it. Man does not live by his deeds so much as the purpose of
his deeds. We have seen the flight of the young eagles. Nothing can
destroy that fact, even if, later in the day the eagles fall to earth
one by one, with broken wings.”59
Nearly one hundred years later, modern capitalist society stands more
pregnant than ever with the potential of socialism—and with it, genuine
disability liberation. The sheer scale of wealth, technology, and global
intercourse created by over two centuries of world capitalist
development all but guarantee it. Rather than be used for the further
enrichment of the few and the exploitation of the many, the vast
products of accumulated human labor can be used to ensure the free
development of each and every human. The workday could be transformed,
shortened, more equitably divided, and better accommodated to the needs
and abilities of the actual worker. Technology could be employed both at
the point of production and throughout society for the benefit of all,
rather than merely in order to expedite the mass manufacture of
commodities or for the personal enjoyment of only those who can afford
it. With the chaotic, competitive, and cruel drive for profit removed
from the equation, humans could freely rearrange their social affairs on
the principles of solidarity, cooperation, and mutual well-being. Our
individual strengths and weaknesses could be combined so as to
complement one another, rather than destructively set against one another.
As a result of the pyrrhic advances of capitalist development, humans
have gained the ability to fly, though we have no wings; travel deep
under sea, though we have no gills; move mountains, though our physical
forms remain fragile; compute vast amounts of data at lightning speeds,
though our brains remain sluggish and obtuse by comparison. In a word,
we clearly have the capacity to advance far above the level of our
organic potential. Yet simultaneously, capitalist relations have
determined that those humans amongst the oppressed majority who happen
to lack a given physical or mental faculty are doomed to remain mired at
a level of personal development painfully below that of their social
potential. It is this incongruity, this needless stifling of human
beings, which constitutes the true tragedy of disability. In a word, the
problem with disability is an historical problem of structural origin,
not individual maladaptation or misfortune. Hence, the fate of people
with disabilites in the modern world rests far more on our collective
ability to overcome capitalism than it does on the (in)ability of
disabled individuals to overcome themselves.
1.Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin (London: Merlin Press, 1980),
347. For a brief summary of the devastating impact of the civil war and
blockade on Russia’s economy, the peasantry, and its working class, see
E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, vol. 2, 194–99 and Tony
Cliff, “War communism,” in Lenin: Revolution Besieged (Chicago,
Haymarket Books, 2014), also available at Marxist Internet Archive
https://www.marxists.org, hereafter cited as MIA.
2.Frederick Engels, “The Peasant War in Germany,” in Marx-Engels
Collected Works,
3.vol. 10 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 469–470.
4.V. I. Lenin, “How to Organize Competition,” December 24–27, 1917,
Collected Works, vol. 26 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 404–415;
also available at MIA.
5.Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin (New York: International
Publishers, 1970), 460–461.
6.Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, 352–353.
7.Ibid.
8.Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a
Moscow Metal Factory (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007), 124.
9.Sally Ewing, “The Science and Politics of Soviet Insurance Medicine,”
in Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson, eds., Health and Society
in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1990), 69–96.
10.Arthur Ransome, Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1919), 117.
11.Nikolai Semashko, “The Work of the People’s Commissariat of Health,”
Soviet Russia, vol. 3, no. 2 (September 18, 1920), 278; Arthur Newsholme
and John Adams Kingsbury, Red Medicine: Socialized Health in Soviet
Russia (New York: Doubleday, 1933), 253–259.
12.Liebman, 352.
13.Leon Trotsky, First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 2
(London: New Park Publications, 1953), 266.
14.Lenin, “Speech in the Opening of the Congress, March 27,” Collected
Works, vol. 33 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 238.
15.Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx-Engels Collected
Works, vol. 24 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1989), 87.
16.Ibid.
17.Roddy Slorach, A Very Capitalist Condition: A History and Politics of
Disability (London: Bookmarks, 2015), 127.
18.L. N. Indolev, “A Brief Historical Account of the Disability Movement
in Russia,” Disability World 3 (June–July 2000).
19.Bernice Madison, “Programs for the Disabled in the USSR,” in William
McCagg and Lewis Siegelbaum, eds., The Disabled in the Soviet Union:
Past and Present, Theory and Practice (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 176–177.
20.Ibid., 177–178.
21.Sarah D. Phillips, “‘There Are No Invalids in the USSR!’ A Missing
Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History,” Disability Studies
Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2009).
22.Semashko, “The Work of the People’s Commissariat of Health,” 276-277.
23.Semashko; Neil B. Weissman, “Origins of Soviet Health Administration:
Narkomzdrav 1918–1928” in Solomon and Hutchinson, eds., Health and
Society in Revolutionary Russia.
24.Irina Sirotkina, “The Politics of Etiology: Shell Shock in the
Russian Army, 1914–1918,” in Angela Brintlinger and Ilya Vinitsky, eds.,
Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2007), 128.
25.Semashko, 277.
26.Alexander Rabinovitch, The Bolsheviks in Power (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2007), 257–258.
27.Weissman, “Origins of Soviet Health Administration,” 106–107;
Liebman, 346; Lenin, “To A. V. Lunacharsky,” March 1920, Collected Works
vol. 44, 366a, MIA.
28.Jennie A. Stevens, “Children of the Revolution: Soviet Russia’s
Homeless Children (Besprizorniki) in the 1920s,” Russian
History/Histoire Russe, vol. 9, pts. 2–3 (1982), 246.
29.Jane Knox and Carol B. Stevens, “Vygotsky and Soviet Russian
Defectology: An Introduction,” in Robert W. Rieber and Aaron S. Carton,
eds., The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, vol. 2: The Fundamentals of
Defectology (New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 1993), 3.
30.Semashko, 278; Lenin, “The Prosecution of Minors: Notes and
Amendments to the Draft Decree,” March 4, 1920, MIA; William McCagg,
“The Origins of Defectology,” in The Disabled in the Soviet Union, 28–30.
31.Knox and Stevens, “Vygotsky and Soviet Russian Defectology: An
Introduction,” 3.
32.Knox and Stevens, 2–3; Vygotsky, “Principles of Social Education for
the Deaf-Mute Child,” 1925,Collected Works of Vygotsky (hereafter cited
as CWV), 120–121; McCagg, “The Origins of Defectology,” 28–29; John
Parrington, “All in the Mind,” Socialist Review 176 (June 1994).
33.Cited in Chanie Rosenberg, Education and Revolution: A Great
Experiment in Socialist Education (London, 1972), MIA.
34.Megan Behrent, “Literacy and Revolution,” in Jeff Bale and Sarah
Knopp, eds., Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and
Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 233–241; Liebman, 330–331;
Rosenberg, Education and Revolution.
35.Ibid., 3; Commentary on Vygotsky’s notebook from the Zakharino
Hospital (1926) in E. Zavershneva, “The Key to Human Psychology,”
Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 50, no. 4 (July–August
2012).
36.McCagg, 28–29.
37.This is not a direct quote from Vygotsky, but rather an eloquent
summation of Vygotsky’s thought proffered in Knox and Stevens, 13.
38.Vygotsky, “Introduction to E. K. Gracheva’s book, The Education and
Instruction of Severely Retarded Children,” 1932, in CWV, 219.
39.Vygotsky, “Principles of Social Education for the Deaf-Mute Child,”
in CWV, 111.
40.Ibid., 120.
41.Vygotsky, “The Psychology and Pedagogy of Children’s Handicaps,”
1924, in CWV, 83–84.
42.A.S. Griboedov, “Pedological Work and the Auxiliary School,” The New
School no. 2 (1926), 99, cited in CWV, 49.
43.Vygotsky, “Compensatory Processes in the Development of the Retarded
Child,” 1931, in CWV, 122–123.
44.Emphasis added. Vygotsky, “Introduction to E. K. Gracheva’s book,” 217.
45.Tony Cliff, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Bookmarks, 1988);
Anthony Arnove, ed., Russia: From Workers’ State to State Capitalism
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2003); Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed
(1937), MIA.
46.Yuri Felshtinsky, “The Legal Foundations of the Immigration and
Emigration Policy of the USSR, 1917–27,” Soviet Studies 34, no. 3 (July,
1982): 332.
47.Samuel C. Ramer, “Feldshers and Rural Health Care in the Early Soviet
Period,” in Solomon and Hutchinson, eds., Health and Society in
Revolutionary Russia, 132.
48.Nikolai Krementsov, “Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union,” in
Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the
History of Eugenics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 413–429.
49.N. I. Sinev and I. F. Engel, “Promyshlennyi travmatizm v SSSR,”
Gigiena, bezopasnost i patologiia truda no. 3 (1929), 65, cited in Lewis
H. Siegelbaum, “Okhrana Truda: Industrial Hygiene, Psychotechnics, and
Industrialization in the USSR,” in Health and Society in Revolutionary
Russia (hereafter cited as HSRR), 229–230.
50.Cited in Boris Meissner, “Social Change in Bolshevik Russia,” in
Boris Meissner, ed., Social Change in the Soviet Union (Notre Dame,
Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1972), 44.
51.McCagg and Siegelbaum, eds., The Disabled in the Soviet Union, 89–90,
283.
52.Vicente Navarro, Social Security and Medicine in the USSR: A Marxist
Critique (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1977), 42–43
53.Newsholme and Kingsbury, Red Medicine, 44, 49–50, 104–107, 135.
54.Christopher Davis, “Economics of Soviet Public Health, 1928-1932,”
HSRR, 154–157, 160.
55.Knox and Stevens, 6–7.
56.Susan Gross Solomon, “Social Hygiene and Soviet Public Health,
1921–1930,” HSRR, 189.
57.Knox and Stevens, 7–8.
58.Alexander Gerschenkron, “The Rate of Growth in Russia,” Journal of
Economic History no. 7, supplement (1947), 161, 166, cited in Navarro, 37.
59.Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of
Stalinism (London: Macmillan, 1972), 234–239.
60.Arthur Ransome, “A Letter to America (May 1918),” in Radek and
Ransome on Russia (New York: Socialist Publication Society, 1919), MIA.
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Issue #78
July 2011
Slavery and the origins of the Civil War
Issue contents
Top story
Slavery and the origins of the Civil War
James Illingworth .
.
Features
Marxism, unions, and class struggle
Sharon Smith .
.
Political Islam: A Marxist analysis
Deepa Kumar .
.
The new shape of the struggle in Egypt
Mostafa Omar .
.
Egypt's "orderly transition"?
Adam Hanieh .
.
The state of struggle in Iraq
Michael Schwartz .
.
The evolution of U.S.-Pakistan policy
Adaner Usmani .
.
Rehabilitating U.S. intervention
Ashley Smith .
.
Debates
Spontaneity and revolution: A critique
Paul D'Amato .
.
Spontaneity and Revolution: A reply to Paul D'Amato
Jason Yanowitz .
.
Critical Thinking
Obama, imperialism, and capitalism
Phil Gasper .
.
Reviews
Radical education theory 101
Adam Sanchez reviews Marx and Education by Jean Anyon .
.
Political Marxism and the rise of American capitalism
Ashley Smith reviews The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in
Class-Structure, Economic Development and Political Conflict, 1620-1877
by Charles Post .
.
What do schools produce?
Sarah Knopp reviews Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform
and the Contradictions of Economic Life by Samuel Bowles and Herbert
Gintis .
.
Myth and Malcolm
Brian Jones reviews Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable .
.
The struggle inside the unions
Jenna Woloshyn reviews The Civil Wars in US Labor: Birth of a New Worker
Movement or Death Throes of the Old? by Steve Early .
.
Recession and resistance
John McDonald reviews Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis
and Resistance by David McNally .
.
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The International Socialist Review is published quarterly by the Center
for Economic Research and Social Change
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