http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09687599.2015.1014666#abstract Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union is indeed a timely book. It arrives at the 25-year anniversary of the collapse of most of the socialist governments in Eastern and Central Europe; an anniversary that is still largely seen as a celebration of the arrival of democracy and freedom to the ‘Eastern bloc’. This simplifying appraisal of the complex and difficult social transformations of the post-socialist societies following 1989 or 1991 respectively illustrates how needed the intervention this volume offers really is. Resounding with the current critiques of austerity measures and politics of exceptionalising (and undoing) disabled lives, editors Michael Rassell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova sum up the ambivalent effects of the post-socialist transformations as follows: ‘In a cruel irony of fate, disabled people in Eastern Europe gained greater recognition and freedom over their lives at a time when political and economic instability undermined the potential of state welfare systems to reduce disabling barriers’ (6). Hence, one of the important contributions of the book lies in providing us with concrete examples of the contradictory nature of the impacts the post-socialist developments (and the role of international organisations and transnational institutional bodies) had on the lives of people with disabilities. This book offers 12 individual essays whose thematic build-up and interdisciplinary breadth will speak to a varied audience, and in particular to historians, anthropologists, policy-oriented researchers and sociologists. The book covers a historical period spanning from the welfare aftermath of World War II to the current post-socialist and post-Soviet developments. The first part of the book follows a chronological time-line, opening with a study by Beate Fieseler on the Soviet welfare (mis)treatment of the disabled World War II veterans. Frances Bernstein lays out the symbolical importance of the imagery of powerful (abled) hands and arms for the official state ideology of Russia under Stalin, to then contrast it with the failing supply of prosthetic limbs that were largely unavailable, failing or lost in on the way to their disabled recipients. Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov symbolically conclude this introductory section of the book with a discussion of Soviet film and visual representations of disability. Their text provides an overview of the development in ‘iconography’ of disability from the 1920 all through to the perestroika of the late 1980s. Touching upon the differences and similarities in the West medicalising paradigms of disability and the tradition of Soviet ‘defectology’, Agita Lūse and Daiga Kamerāde discuss psychiatric discourses in the context of soviet Latvia and their transformation under the influence of western diagnostic models. Essays by Eszter Gábor, Teodor Mladenov and Sarah Phillips constitute the middle section of the book, primarily drawing from lived experiences and narratives of people with disabilities. Gábor presents experiences of the Hungarian disabled people who against all odds of structural and systemic disadvantagement accessed university education. Teodor Mladenov’s discussion of disablism and its historically changing forms draws on an autobiographical essay ‘I, My Impairment and Sex’ written by a Bulgarian disabled activist, Nina Zhisheva, to discuss sexual silence and taboo as a central axis of disability oppression. Sarah Phillips’s exploration of the ways disabled Ukrainians articulate their citizenship and relationship with the state through economic entitlement and claims to employment highlights the central conflict in this disabled citizens–state relationship in the notion of dobytysia. As she concludes ‘[the disabled activists] are critical of a state that denies them full citizenship rights yet persist in appealing to institutions of a state as a guarantor of such rights’ (179), while, as she also elucidates, there are presently no alternatives. The last section of the book examines policies and institutional framework of disability politics. Darja Zaviršek focuses on the ideology of work, a theme that runs through many of the essays in the book, and explores it across the larger Eastern European region. She demasks the myth of the easy welfare reliance by claiming that the ‘majority of disabled people has always worked’ (186) and it is through medicalisation and segregation and other effects of disablism that ‘their economic activity lost some of the fundamental characteristics […] associated with work’ (186), such as salary, recognition and self-determination. Hisayo Katsui lays out the paradoxical promises of the ‘human rights approach’ to disability in the context of Central Asia. She weights the ways it allows to push against the persisting medicalised and charity-based discourses against the ways in which these promises of emancipation become hollow and unfulfilled and serve the interest of the transnational bodies and capital rather than the disabled people. Majda Beċireviċ and Monica Dowling examine the policies of inclusion of children with disabilities in Bulgaria and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Their essay further highlights the above raised issues as it brings concrete examples of how the international campaigns carried out in the name of inclusion and deinstitutionalisation of disabled children may lead, if simultaneously accompanied by the pressure to improve national economy by reducing social protections, to severe precarity. The closing essay by Victoria Schmidt traces the USSR legacy of the monopolistic system of special education in the failures of the states in the Caucasus region to provide inclusive education to children with disabilities. Presenting a discussion of disability history in the specific geo-political location of Eastern Europe, Disability in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union has the ambition to do more than add up new empirical material and stir. Covering extensive geographical and geo-political span from the Central Asian republics to Latvia to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the book does not provide in-depth analysis as a monograph would. The editors name the book’s ambition as to put forth disability as one of the key analytical lenses to histories of ‘Eastern Europe’. As they argue, ‘engagement with post-socialist specifics can enrich disability studies [and Eastern European studies] in empirical and theoretical terms’ (1). The collection aims to offer context-sensitive theorisations of disability and of systemic and structural ableism. This offers a looked-for contribution to the growing body of work engaged in deconstructing the dominance of western/northern disability theory. That said, most of the analytical bringing together and theoretical heavy lifting is done by the introduction itself. Even though in most cases the essays build off valuable and rich material and inspiring questions, much of the analytical conclusions and larger implications are left to the reader. Also, even as the editors call for decolonisation of scholarship, they retain the moniker ‘former Soviet Union’ that carriers with it legacies of Soviet imperialism as well as Cold War dualities. The introduction calls for the use of disability as an analytical tool, although the essays do not always convincingly deliver on the ambition to go beyond viewing disability as an object of study. This ‘about-disability’ perspective occasionally comes out in descriptiveness of the texts or unreflected use of disability metaphors such as ‘debilitating injuries’ (42), or even outright ableist turns of phrases such as ‘[disability was] tremendous cost to the state’ (43) and ‘they [the disabled veterans] had nothing to offer society in return’ (25). Additionally, this disconnect between the analytical ambition of the book and its delivery also shows in the ways in which most of the essays omit to think disability together with and in relation to other categories of difference and social hierarchisations. Despite intersectionality being posited in the book’s introduction as one of its guiding principles (and some of the authors are known for their intersectional analyses – Phillips, Zaviršek and Iarskaia-Smirnova, to name just a few), the essays are not working from an intersectional framework and understanding of disability. Mladenov’s essay discussing disability in relation to sexuality offers a notable exception here. These omissions are most profoundly felt in relation to race and ethnicity – in particular, when racialisation was an important mechanism of hierarchisation within the Soviet Union and across the socialist states. Just as importantly, race and ethnicity are key to understanding the social changes initiated by the post-1989 and post-1991 ‘transformations’ that lead to massive displacement of racialised communities. Ultimately, this omission helps to reinforce the ideology of European racelessness (El-Tayeb). This book aspires to accomplish an intervention that no single volume can do. And this ambition is in fact another of its considerable achievements as it opens up avenues of thought and questions with which scholars will undoubtedly engage with in future work. As such, despite its limits, Disability in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union makes very clear how productive and generative the critical dialogues between disability studies and Eastern European studies can be and why we need more of them. The book genuinely enhances ways of thinking and theorising disability by extending our knowledge of how contexts, economic structures, political frameworks, ideological structures and social formations shape disability and its intersections. Kateřina Kolářová Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU
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