Freedland/Phillips

Under Stalin, the Soviet state's approach to dealing with citizens disabled during the war was guided by two main ideas. First, it was thought imperative to provide adequate support to "war invalids," in part to placate them and prevent them from rebelling against the government, as had disabled veterans of the war of 1812. Indeed, the Second World War-wounded returning from the front sometimes were called "neo-Decembrists," in reference to the Decembrist uprising of 1826 (Tchueva 2008:96). At the same time, however, in Stalin's trend of silencing or denying any negative aspects of the Second World War, images of "war invalids" were excluded from the official interpretations of the war experience and representations of post-war life. The war wounded — many of them amputees in wheelchairs, who colloquially were called "samovars" (Gudkov 2005:4) explains that they seemed like "human stumps on little wheels") — were a grim and "superfluous" reminder to the populace of the inhumane traumas of war:

The invalids in the post-war period...were left to the mercy of fate, people were ashamed of them, turned away from them, hid them with an unpleasant feeling of guilt and a sense of the ugliness of life — everything was done to keep them out of the official gala picture of peace-time life. (Gudkov 2005:4)

This dual approach to addressing disability — the provision of state support for the material needs of people with disabilities, but within a culture of stigma and social isolation — was to characterize Soviet disability policy throughout most of the 20th century. Because the problems of "war invalids" was a taboo subject, official statistics were scant, and existing Soviet-era statistics are highly questionable.

Sarah D. Phillips




Harold Laski, stellar LSE professor, co-founder of the Left Book Club and one-time chairman of the Labour party, cautioned that: "The time is surely coming … when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself." Meanwhile, JBS Haldane, admired scientist and socialist, warned that: "Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of 'undermen'." That's Untermenschen in German.

I'm afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign "the eugenists soundly urge". If it's any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp.

According to Dennis Sewell, whose book The Political Gene charts the impact of Darwinian ideas on politics, the eugenics movement's definition of "unfit" was not limited to the physically or mentally impaired. It held, he writes, "that most of the behavioural traits that led to poverty were inherited. In short, that the poor were genetically inferior to the educated middle class." It was not poverty that had to be reduced or even eliminated: it was the poor.

Hence the enthusiasm of John Maynard Keynes, director of the Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, for contraception, essential because the working class was too "drunken and ignorant" to keep its numbers down.

Jonathan Freedland