Recent Historiographical Trends in Scholarship on Disability and Socialism in Eastern Europe

Radu Harald Dinu

doi:10.16993/sjdr.829

Abstract

This paper seeks to outline recent trends in historical research on disability during state socialism in Eastern Europe. In doing so, it explores how an emerging generation of historians have investigated various aspects of disability in Eastern Europe before 1989 and raises the question of whether there was a distinct experience of disability under state socialism. Drawing on studies published in English and German, the paper traces both Soviet discourses and practices after 1917 and Central and Eastern European trajectories after 1945. It argues that disability policies and expert discourses were informed by a productivist logic as a governing strategy to increase work capacity and to integrate the disabled into socialist society. The paper concludes by discussing the need for a transnational, comparative approach for conceptualising how disability was construed during communism in Eastern Europe.

Highlights

Until recently, the topic of disability has been largely neglected by scholars working on Eastern European history
During the Cold War, there was limited access as well as a lack of interest both within and outside of Eastern European countries to carry out research on marginalised groups of society
As Carol Poore (2007) wrote with regard to disability in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), historians faced major methodological hindrances when writing about disability in state socialism, where disabled people could not express their views publicly without being subjected to censorship

Summary

Introduction

The topic of disability has been largely neglected by scholars working on Eastern European history. Scholars have criticised the fact that disability studies and disability history have almost exclusively focussed on Western societies while neglecting the challenges disabled people outside liberal-democratic settings have faced (Grech 2015; Grech and Soldatic 2016). While seminal works such as Henri-Jacques Stiker’s A History of Disability (Corps infirmes et sociétés) from 1982 or Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies (1997) have unquestionably inspired historians in this field, they exclusively explore Western European and North American trajectories. An integration of Eastern European experiences promises to enlarge our understanding and to yield new insights into the variety of disability experiences in modern history

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion