In Deaf in the USSR, Claire L. Shaw asks what it meant to be deaf in a culture that was founded on a radically utopian, socialist view of human perfectibility. Shaw reveals how fundamental contradictions inherent in the Soviet revolutionary project were negotiated—both individually and collectively— by a vibrant and independent community of deaf people who engaged in complex ways with Soviet ideology. Deaf in the USSR engages with a wide range of sources from both deaf and hearing perspectives—archival sources, films and literature, personal memoirs, and journalism—to build a multilayered history of deafness. This book will appeal to scholars of Soviet history and disability studies as well as those in the international deaf community who are interested in their collective heritage. Deaf in the USSR will also enjoy a broad readership among those who are interested in deafness and disability as a key to more inclusive understandings of being human and of language, society, politics, and power.

Finalist for the National Book Award • Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award • Winner of the National Jewish Book Award • Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award • Finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize • Finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection Ilya Kaminsky’s astonishing parable in poems asks us, What is silence? Deaf Republic opens in an occupied country in a time of political unrest. When soldiers breaking up a protest kill a deaf boy, Petya, the gunshot becomes the last thing the citizens hear—they all have gone deaf, and their dissent becomes coordinated by sign language. The story follows the private lives of townspeople encircled by public violence: a newly married couple, Alfonso and Sonya, expecting a child; the brash Momma Galya, instigating the insurgency from her puppet theater; and Galya’s girls, heroically teaching signing by day and by night luring soldiers one by one to their deaths behind the curtain. At once a love story, an elegy, and an urgent plea, Ilya Kaminsky’s long-awaited Deaf Republic confronts our time’s vicious atrocities and our collective silence in the face of them.

Comedy and tragedy collide in stories of family life in Soviet Russia and the complexities of the immigrant experience “We can’t stop turning the pages of this book.” —Ilya Kaminsky, New York Times Book Review From the moment of its founding, the USSR was reviled and admired, demonized and idealized. Many Jews saw the new society ushered in by the Russian Revolution as their salvation from shtetl life with its deprivations and deadly pogroms. But Soviet Russia was rife with antisemitism, and a Jewish boy growing up in Leningrad learned early, harsh, and enduring lessons. Unsparing and poignant, Mikhail Iossel’s twenty stories of Soviet childhood and adulthood, dissidence and subsequent immigration, are filled with wit and humor even as they describe the daily absurdities of a fickle and often perilous reality.

Countless studies have assessed the dramatic reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, but their analysis of the impact on European communism has focused overwhelmingly on the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc nations. This ambitious collection takes a much broader view, reconstructing and evaluating the historical trajectories of glasnost and perestroika on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Moving beyond domestic politics and foreign relations narrowly defined, the research gathered here constitutes a transnational survey of these reforms’ collective impact, showing how they were variably received and implemented, and how they shaped the prospects for “proletarian internationalism” in diverse political contexts.

When Lenin asked, "Who will beat whom?" (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest "cultural hegemony" from the intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in the 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between "proletarian" Communists and the "bourgeois" intelligentsia? Or was it, as the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by the ruling Communist Party on the eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom? In this volume, one of the foremost historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce battle on "the cultural front" from the October Revolution through the Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays—two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here—which illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional control. Individual essays deal with such major issues as the Cultural Revolution, the formation of the new Stalinist elite, and socialist realism, as well as recounting colorful episodes including the uproar over Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, arguments over sexual mores, and the new consumerism of the 1930s. Closely examining the cultural elites and orthodoxies that developed under Stalin, Fitzpatrick offers a provocative reinterpretation of the struggle's final outcome in which the intelligentsia, despite its loss of autonomy and the debasement of its culture, emerged as a partial victor. The Cultural Front is essential reading for anyone interested in the formative history of the Soviet Union and the dynamic relationship between culture and politics.

A glimpse into the struggle of the disabled for identity and society's perception of the disabled traces the disabled's fight for rights from the antebellum era to present controversies over access.

Winner of the prestigious Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, selected by poet and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Eleanor Wilner who says, "I'm so happy to have a manuscript that I believe in so powerfully, poetry with such a deep music. I love it." One might spend a lifetime reading books by emerging poets without finding the real thing, the writer who (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) can take the top of your head off. Kaminsky is the real thing. Impossibly young, this Russian immigrant makes the English language sing with the sheer force of his music, a wondrous irony, as Ilya Kaminsky has been deaf since the age of four. In Odessa itself, "A city famous for its drunk tailors, huge gravestones of rabbis, horse owners and horse thieves, and most of all, for its stuffed and baked fish," Kaminksy dances with the strangest — and the most recognizable — of our bedfellows in a distinctive and utterly brilliant language, a language so particular and deft that it transcends all of our expectations, and is by turns luminous and universal.

It was September, 1932. Gerasimovka, Western Siberia. Two children are found dead in the forest outside a remote village. Both have been repeatedly stabbed and their bloody bodies are covered in sticky, crimson cranberry juice. Who committed these horrific murders has never been proved, but the elder boy, thirteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov, was quickly to become the most famous boy in Soviet history - statues of him were erected, biographies published, and children across the country were exhorted to emulate him. Catriona Kelly's aim is not to find out who really killed the boys, but rather to explore how Stalin's regime turned Pavlik into a hero designed to produce good Soviet citizens. Pavlik's story is intriguing and multi-layered: did he denounce his own father to the authorities? Was he murdered by members of his own family? Did he ever belong to the Pioneers, the Communist youth organization who claimed him as member No. 001? This is the first book in English on Pavlik's legend, using previously inaccessible local archives.

Written by the prominent Russian expert in the field of deafblind education, Tatiana Basilova, this book overviews the history of teaching deafblind students in Russia in one of the country's most dramatic eras, the 20th century. The material presents the biographies of three famous Russian scholars and investigates their experience of working with deafblind people since the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to this, the current state of deafblind education and the history of changes in deafblind organizations are examined. Further, Basilova discusses teaching methods that may be useful for specialists in the future. In her work, she uses unique data from personal archives of Russian specialists which are published in English for the first time.