The wars of the first quarter of the twentieth century inflicted deep political, economic, social, and cultural wounds upon the Russian empire and the early Bolshevik state. Industrialized warfare caused enormous damage to combatants’ minds and bodies. The lives of millions of men, and their families, were shattered by wartime experiences. Whereas there is burgeoning scholarship of Soviet veterans disabled by the Second World War, and a rich international historiography exploring the fate of disabled veterans of the First World War in other contexts, which this study situates itself within, Russian/Soviet soldiers disabled by the Russo-Japanese War, WWI, and the Civil War, “suffer from a historiography still in its infancy” (8). Alexandre Sumpf makes an important contribution to Russian political, economic, social, and medical history, revealing the importance of this new social constituency to this period.
The Broken Years examines the complicated processes by which wounded combatants, and the wider society, emerged from war and attempted to overcome and compensate for disability. This is not simply a history of bodies and minds injured by shells, bullets, and disease, but also the hopes of experts, politicians, and the disabled themselves for social transformation, medical progress, and political recognition. Treated as symbols of the war's barbarity, they presented a moral, political, social, and economic challenge to both the imperial autocracy and revolutionary administrations. Sumpf draws on an impressive array of published and archival sources, which allows him to explore the challenges posed by disabled veterans “from a successively statistical, medical, legal, governmental, political, and finally symbolic perspective” (13). A recurring thread in this rich tapestry is the visual representation of physical and psychological disability in posters and film. Disabled bodies were instrumentalized, treated as highly visible articles of national concern. As Sumpf notes, “First put on display, then relegated to obscurity, exemplified yet rendered invisible, the disabled veterans were a disturbing sight” (12). The war-disabled were not passive objects of medical expertise or bureaucratic control, they were an organized and active group, which demanded their status and recognition as disabled people. Although state and society failed to reintegrate disabled ex-servicemen, during The Broken Years the war-disabled obtained access to democratized healthcare, the legal recognition of disability as a social status, and welfare payments.
These issues are explored in six thematically structured chapters. Ch. 1 attempts to establish the number of men disabled. While 35,000 soldiers were incapacitated by the Russo-Japanese War (21), 1.14 million, nearly thirty times more, were disabled by WWI (24). Disability became, “a major fact of social life” (25), and a moral shock that raised questions about the fragility of Russian society. Determining who counted as disabled depended on medical assessments. A second chapter explores the militarization of medicine, the developing individual and collective right to healthcare, and transformations in treatment. Medical professionalization, specialization, and experimentation improved treatment and survival rates. “Amputations were no longer performed just to save lives,” (57); in the process surgeons became, “the prime producers of disabled veterans” (64). The huge demand for prosthetics outstripped supply. The right to artificial limbs was widely accepted, despite problems of supply, design, and durability. War-related psychiatric disorders were also studied and recognized as incapacitating by neurologists and psychiatrists. Ch. 3 examines how the war-disabled obtained their new social and legal status. Assistance for disabled veterans was recognized as a universal right, even if there were multiple failures in its application. Ch. 4 demonstrates how ill-prepared the economy was for reintegrating disabled ex-servicemen into the workforce. Navigating the patchwork of private and public assistance initiatives proved difficult. Retraining programs were poorly funded, offered low-paid work, and were concentrated in urban areas. The war-disabled did not accept these obstacles passively. They exploited the freedoms created by the February Revolution to organize, assert their rights, and exert political pressure. Although a revolutionary force, the “Bolshevik coup and Leninist tactics paralysed the disabled activists at the crucial moment of the 1917−1918 demobilisation” (221) and curtailed their influence between 1919 and 1920. The final chapter explores the difficulties of readjusting to civilian and family life, and the challenge to veterans’ masculinity. This transition was complicated by the Soviet devaluation of previous war experience.
As Sumpf concludes, “the disabled veteran represented a medical case, a political cause, and a social challenge characteristic of total warfare” (268) that shaped notions of disability and citizenship, the provision of medical services, and the development of the welfare state. By focusing on the individual and collective stories of disabled veterans, Sumpf counters the marginalization of the victims of “imperialist” wars, revealing the centrality of disability to this period's history.
