1. Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy (TsGA Moskvy, formerly TsAGM), fond (f.) 3010 (Moscow City Directorate of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf), opis’ (op.) 1, delo (d.) 192, list (1.) 14. The Soviet deaf community officially made the transition from using the term deaf-mute (glukhonemoi) to deaf(glukhoi) in public discourse in the late 1950s, yet deaf-mute was still routinely used by activists; I therefore use deaf-mute when translating from the original source material. Although it has become the convention in western scholarship to capitalize the adjective Deaf for those who see themselves as belonging to a culturally denned deaf community, this has political connotations specific to the west (and particularly the United States), and as such I do not follow that convention here.

2. Ibid., 1.22.

3. Following Alexei Yurchak, I define the late Soviet era as the years from the mid- 1950s to the mid-1980s; the discussion in this article, however, will confine itself approximately to the years 1954–70. Yurchak, Alexei, “Soviet Hegemony of Form: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 3 (July 2003): 480.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. On the social and cultural history of the deaf community in the late Soviet era, see Palennyi, V. A., Istoriia Vserossiskogo obshchestva glukhikh, 3 vols. (Moscow, 2007–11);Google Scholar Burch, Susan, “Transcending Revolutions: The Tsars, the Soviets and Deaf Culture,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 393–99;CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed Kayiatos, Anastasia, “Sooner Speaking Than Silent, Sooner Silent Than Mute: Soviet Deaf Theatre and Pantomime after Stalin,“ Theatre Survey 51, no. 1 (May 2010): 5–31;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Shaw, Claire, “'Speaking in the Language of Art': Soviet Deaf Theatre and the Politics of Identity during Khrushchev's Thaw,” Slavonic and East European Review 91, no. 4 (October 2013): 759–86.Google Scholar

5. Gulliver, Mike, “Places of Silence,” in Vanclay, Francis M., Higgins, Matthew, and Blackshaw, Adam, eds., Making Sense of Place: Exploring the Concepts and Expressions of Place through Different Senses and Lenses (Canberra, 2008), 91.Google Scholar Emphasis in the original. See also Gulliver, Michael Stuart, “DEAF Space, a History: The Production of DEAF Spaces: Emergent, Autonomous, Located and Disabled in 18th and 19th Century France” (PhD diss., University of Bristol, 2009), 30.Google Scholar

6. See Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Nicholson-Smith, Donald (Oxford, 1991), 195.Google Scholar On the significance of Lefebvre for disability studies, see Gleeson, Brendan, Geographies of Disability (London, 1999), 47–49.Google Scholar

7. For more on the “oral” nature of early Soviet culture, see Gorham, Michael S., Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb, 2003).Google Scholar

8. I define identity as a form of individual or collective self-definition that developed in dialogue with the shifting frameworks of identity promoted by the Soviet state, building on the work of Jochen Hellbeck, who argues that the impact of Soviet revolutionary practice on individuals’ sense of self “was not repressive, but productive.” Hellbeck, Jochen, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” Russian Review 60, no. 3 (July 2001): 341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This research also engages with recent scholarship on deaf identity which examines the ways in which deaf communities shape their own individual and collective selfhoods in dialogue with the norms of hearing society. See, for example, Nakamura, Karen, Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, 2006);Google Scholar and Krentz, Christopher, Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill, 2007).Google Scholar

9. Fürst, Juliane, Jones, Polly, and Morrissey, Susan, “The Relaunch of the Soviet Project, 1945–1964: Introduction,” Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 2 (April 2008): 203.Google Scholar For more on exclusionary practices in the late Soviet era, see Dobson, Miriam, Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, 2009);Google Scholar and Fitzpatrick, Sheila, “Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, nos. 1–2 (January-June 2006): 377–408.Google Scholar On exclusion during the Stalin era, see Hagenloh, Paul, Stalin's Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Washington, D.C., 2009);Google Scholar and Alexopoulos, Golfo, Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca, 2003).Google Scholar

10. See Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 157–97;Google Scholar Healey, Dan, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001), 29–31;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rüthers, Monica, “The Moscow GorkyStreet in Late Stalinism: Space, History and Lebenswelten,” in Fürst, Juliane, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), 247–68;Google Scholar and Fürst, Juliane, Stalin's Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford, 2010), 172–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Crowley, David and Reid, Susan E., eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford, 2002).Google Scholar

11. Dale, Robert, “The Valaam Myth and the Fate of Leningrad's Disabled Veterans,“ Russian Review 72, no. 2 (April 2013): 260–84, 261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On exclusion and disability, see Edele, Mark, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War: A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society (Oxford, 2008), 81–101;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Fieseler, Beate, “The Bitter Legacy of the ‘Great Patriotic War': Red Army Disabled Soldiers under Late Stalinism,” in Fürst, Juliane, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), 46–61;Google Scholar and Phillips, Sarah D., “'There Are No Invalids in the USSR!': A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2009): n.p.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. See, for example, Barnes, Colin, “A Brief History of Discrimination and Disabled People,” in Davis, Lennard J., ed., The Disability Studies Reader (New York, 2010), 27–28.Google Scholar A notable example of the negative coverage of Soviet institutions for the disabled was seen in the response to Ruben Gallego's Booker Prize-winning memoir White on Black, described by the New York Times as “a groundbreaking exposé of the Soviet Union's abuse of the handicapped.” Fishman, Boris, “A Prize Novel Full of Truths That Stretch Believability,“ New York Times, September 4,2004, at www.nytimes.com/2004/09/04/books/04gall. html (last accessed September 15,2014).Google Scholar

13. Foregrounding disabled groups’ agency also challenges the volumes of disability studies that focus on disabled spaces as “cultural locations of disability in which disabled people find themselves deposited, often against their will.” Snyder, Sharon L. and Mitchell, David T., Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago, 2006), 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Emphasis in the original.

14. Paddy Ladd defines the Utopian notion of a deaf golden age as characterized by “literacy and pride in all things deaf,” commonly identified as the period of history before sign language was sidelined in favor of oralist education. While the signposts of deaf history are different in the Russian and Soviet contexts, the term remains apposite. Ladd, Paddy, Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search ofDeafhood (Clevedon, 2003), 394.Google Scholar

15. See Gauger, A. K., ed., Zakony grazhdanskie (Sv. Zak., 1.10, ch. 1, izd. 1914) so vkliucheniem pozdneishikh uzakonenii rasiashenii po resheniiam Obsh. sobr. i Grazhd. kass. depart. Pravit. senata s 1866 po 1914 g (vkliuchitel'no) (Petrograd, 1915), Statute 381,129.Google Scholar

16. Indeed, as Kaganovsky, Lilya has argued, the disabled individual was often cast as a Soviet hero, marked out by his ability to defy his body and prove his rational Soviet “consciousness.” Kaganovsky, Lilya, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Vygotskii, L. S., “K psikhologii i pedagogike detskoi defektivnosti,” in Vygotskii, L. S., ed., Voprosy vospitaniia slepykh, glukhonemykh i umstvenno-otstalykh detei: Sbornik statei i materialov (Moscow, 1924), 21.Google Scholar

18. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. A-511 (Central Directorate of the All-Russian Society of the Deaf), op. 1, d. 45,1.3.

19. For an overview of the development of the Soviet deaf community in the early revolutionary period, see Shaw, Claire, “Deaf in the USSR: ‘Defect’ and the New Soviet Person” (PhD diss., University College London, 2011), 75–119.Google Scholar

20. For more on the foundation of VOG, see Palennyi, , Istoriia Vserossiskogo obshchestva glukhikh, vol. 1; and Ushakov, V. G., Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo glukhikh: Istoriia, razvitie, perspektivy (Leningrad, 1985).Google Scholar

21. Shaw, , “Deaf in the USSR,” 89–92.Google Scholar

22. GARF, f. R-5575, op. 8, d. 2,1.116; GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 21,1.11.

23. Sil'ianova, E. A., “Goroda glukhikh,” in Palennyi, V. A. and Pichugin, la. B., eds., Materialy tret'ego Moskovskogo simpoziuma po istorii glukhikh (Moscow, 2001), 229.Google Scholar

24. Gulliver, , “Places of Silence,” 91.Google Scholar

25. See Moiseev, P., “Kapital'noe stroitel'stvo,” Zhizri glukhikh, 1959, no. 7: 5;Google Scholar GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 398,11. 2–18; GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 446,1. 21; and GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 654,11. 44, 50.

26. Smith, Mark B., Property of Communists: The Urban Housing Program from Stalin to Khrushchev (DeKalb, 2010), 101.Google Scholar

27. Ibid. All deaf building projects needed to be cleared by Gosplan, which had the effect of delaying construction in many cases. See, for example, GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 469,1. 2.

28. Slavina, Alia, “Pripomnim vek minuvshii,” Russkii invalid, no. 11 (2012): 7.Google Scholar

29. Palennyi, , Istoriia Vserossiskogo obshchestva glukhikh, 1:505.Google Scholar

30. GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 469,1. 70.

31. Slavina, , “Pripomnim vek minuvshii,” 7.Google Scholar

32. Ushakov, , Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo glukhikh, 201–4.Google Scholar

33. Palennyi, , Istoriia Vserossiskogo obshchestva glukhikh, 1:553.Google Scholar

34. Reid, Susan E., “The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958–9, and the Contemporary Style of Painting,” in Reid, Susan E. and Crowley, David, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2000), 101.Google Scholar

35. GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 1849,1.10.

36. Slavina, , “Pripomnim vek minuvshii,” 7.Google Scholar

37. GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 353,1. 4.

38. See Palennyi, , Istoriia Vserossiskogo obshchestva glukhikh, 1:564.Google Scholar

39. Similar trends can be seen in the blind community at this time. Like VOG, the All- Russian Society of the Blind (Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo slepykh, VOS) began a building campaign in the late 1950s, following state legislation and fundamental restructuring ofthe organization. It is clear that “blind space” was not conceptualized in the same way as deaf space, however; the particular needs of the blind community meant that blind spaces were inward facing and supportive rather than seeking to advertise blindness to the sighted world, and no evidence has yet been found of social concerns over the behavior of the blind in this period. See Shoev, F. I., Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo slepykh i ego deiatel'nost’ (Moscow, 1965), 88–90.Google Scholar

40. Snetkov, I.I., “Schastlivye sudby,” Vedinom stroiu, 1970, no. 4: 8.Google Scholar

41. See Shaw, , “Speaking in the Language of Art,” 784.Google Scholar

42. For a visual representation of this developing deaf space, see the interactive heat map created by Seth Bernstein for his blog, Abstractualized, at staticsites.abstractualized. com/VogHeatMap.html (last accessed October 27, 2014). This map is based on VOG dataon Moscow social clubs and their members in 1963, located in TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 266.1 am extremely grateful to Seth for his work to give visual form to the notion of deaf space in Moscow.

43. On the visibility of signing deaf groups in the metro, see TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 171,11.3–4.

44. Edele, , Soviet Veterans, 86.Google Scholar

45. Zakon o gosudarstvennykh pensiiakh (Moscow, 1956), 13. For a discussion of the categorization of disabled individuals and their levels of pension rights, see Madison, Bernice, “Programs for the Disabled in the USSR,” in McCagg, William O. and Siegelbaum, Lewis H., eds., The Disabled in the Soviet Union: Past and Present, Theory and Practice (Pittsburgh, 1989), 176–80.Google Scholar

46. GARF, f. R-5446, op. 96, d. 252, 11. 45–46. This decree spawned a series of further decrees by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Social Welfare, the Ministry of Health, and the Secretariat of the VTsSPS as well as local state bodies. GARF, f. A-259 (Soviet of Ministers of the RSFSR), op. 1, d. 1639,11.14–24; GARF, f. R-5446, op. 96, d. 252, 11. 2–34.

47. “Zhizn’ glukhikh,” Izvestiia, June 15,1957, 4.

48. Ibid., 4. This reference to “material support” was in fact untrue: VOG was entirely self-sufficient from 1954 and at certain points gave money to the state to fund activities involving the deaf community. See GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 580,1.35.

49. Edele, , Soviet Veterans, 185–214;Google Scholar Zubkova, Elena Iu., Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans, and ed. Ragsdale, Hugh (Armonk, 1998), 31–39.Google Scholar

50. GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 353,1. 4.

51. On the disabled as objects of pity in popular culture, see Dunham, Vera S., “Images of the Disabled, Especially the War Wounded, in Soviet Literature,” in McCagg, and Siegelbaum, , eds., The Disabled in the Soviet Union, 151–64.Google Scholar

52. The majority of the action was shot on the streets of Riga, but the institutions featured in the film, alongside the scenes shot in the Theater of Sign and Gesture, situate the action firmly in Moscow.

53. Baulin, V. and Razdorskii, I., “Dvoe,” Zhizri glukhikh, 1965, no. 7:13.Google Scholar

54. See D'iachkov, A. I., Sistemy obucheniia glukhikh detei (Moscow, 1961).Google Scholar

55. As Spivak argues, “If, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.“ Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 1988), 287.Google Scholar The issue of muteness in relation to the Soviet deaf community is discussed at length in Kayiatos, “Sooner Speaking than Silent,” 5–8.

56. The subtitle of the article in Zhizri glukhikh about the film sets out the significant points for the deaf community: “The Heroine of the Film is a Deaf Girl. There Are Young Actors in the Main Roles. The Plot Is Taken from Real Life.” Baulin and Razdorskii, “Dvoe,” 13.

57. See, for example, “Novye: Mikhail Bogin,” Iskusstvo kino, 1965, no. 6:29.

58. For examples of 01'ga Garfel'd's life story, see Brudnyi, Dmitrii, “Mimika i zhest,“ Teatr, 1971, no. 11: 39;Google Scholar and Gitlits, Ilya, Leading a Full Life Regardless, trans. Tetskaya, Lyudmila (Moscow, 1984), 32–35.Google Scholar

59. Garina, E., “Pygmalion,” Izvestiia, February 10,1960, 3.Google Scholar While the archival files detailing the editorial discussion of this article are not available, the circumstances of its publication are intriguing: the article appeared shortly into the editorship of Aleksei Adzhubei, who is notorious in the deaf community for having prevented the deaf from using a holiday home (dom otdykha) next door to the Izvestiia holiday home outside Moscow because “he didn't like having ‘deaf-mute’ neighbors.” Palennyi, Istoriia Vserossiskogo obshchestva glukhikh, 1:543.

60. Garina, , “Pygmalion,” 3.Google Scholar

61. See, for example, Fitzpatrick, “Social Parasites.“

62. A key example of Marxist thought as applied to deaf child development in the Soviet Union can be found in Vygotsky, L. S., “The Collective as a Factor in the Development of the Abnormal Child,” in The Collected Works ofL. S. Vygotsky, vol. 2, The Fundamentals ofDefectology (Abnormal Psychology and Learning Disabilities), ed. Rieber, Robert W. and Carton, Aaron S., trans. Knox, Jane E. and Stevens, Carol B. (New York, 1993), 199.Google Scholar

63. GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 13,1. 41. Emphasis added. The term living person ﹛zhivoi chelovek) appears to have originated in the literary debates of the 1920s, used to refer to characters who possessed well-rounded, complex personalities and appeared to live beyond the page (as opposed to the paper person, who did not). See, for example, Tret'iakov, Sergei, “Zhivoe i bumazhnoe,” in Chudak, N. F., ed., Literatura fakta: Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa (Moscow, 2000), 149.Google Scholar

64. For details of the “deaf-mute affair,” see Ginzburgskii, D. L., “Pomniu tragicheskii 1937-i,” and Razumov, A. la. and Gruzdev, Iu. P., “Delo leningradskogo obshchestva glukhonemykh,” in Bogomolov, D. I. and Razumov, A. la., eds., Leningradskii martirolog 1937–1938, vol. 4 (St. Petersburg, 1999).Google Scholar

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66. Brown, Kate, “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place,” American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (February 2001): 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

67. See Fitzpatrick, , “Social Parasites,” 389–94;Google Scholar and Dobson, , Khrushchev's Cold Summer, 156–85.Google Scholar

68. TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 212,1. 61; GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 887,1. 4.

69. GARF, f. A-511, op. 1, d. 670,1.49.

70. Ibid., 1.50.

71. TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 212,1. 52.

72. Ibid., 1.10.

73. Ibid., 1.4.

74. Postcard selling was a perennial concern for VOG. A popular way to earn money in the prerevolutionary deaf community, in the Soviet era it was seen as evidence of the persistence of old habits in the face of the enlightening power of Soviet re-education. See Sakharov, G., “Khuliganstvu—boil,” Zhizri glukhikh, 1966, no. 10:1.Google Scholar

75. TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 212,11.25–26.

76. See, for example, Tsipursky, Gleb, “Citizenship, Deviance, and Identity: Soviet Youth Newspapers as Agents of Social Control in the Thaw-Era Leisure Campaign,” Cahiers du monde russe 49, no. 4 (October-December 2008): 629–49;Google Scholar and Dobson, , Khrushchev's Cold Summer, 139.Google Scholar

77. Tsipursky, , “Citizenship, Deviance, and Identity,” 632.Google Scholar

78. Savelev, P., “Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo glukhonemykh za 30 let,” in Sutiagin, P., ed., 30 let VOG: Sbornik statei (Moscow, 1957), 3–24.Google Scholar The compiling of deaf history developed over the late Soviet period; alongside the Museum of the History of VOG, housed inside the Republican Palace of Culture and formally opened in 1976, the organization produced several commemorative volumes, including Korotkov, A. S., 50 let Vserossiiskomuobshchestvu glukhikh (Leningrad, 1976);Google Scholar Ushakov, , Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo glukhikh; and Krainin, V. and Krainina, Z., Chelovek ne slyshit (Moscow, 1984).Google Scholar

79. TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 212,1.4.

80. This notion of the hearing gaze draws on Foucault's description of power relations in medical and penal institutions, in which the gaze of outside observers leads to a change in individual behavior: “An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorization to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.” Foucault, Michel, “The Eye of Power,” in Foucault, Michel, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin (New York, 1980), 155.Google Scholar For an example of the application of Foucault's theory to the Soviet Union, see Kotkin, Stephen, “Living Space and the Stranger's Gaze,” in Magnetic Mountain, 157–97.Google Scholar

81. TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 192,1.14.

82. Ibid., 1. 22.

83. Ibid., 1.14.

84. See, for example, “Sornuiu travu—s polia von!,” Zhizri glukhikh 11, no. 7 (1958): 18; and Shuvalov, V., “Sovet kluba na strazhe poriadka: Khuligany poluchaiut otpor,” Zhizri glukhikh 11, no. 9 (1958): 13.Google Scholar There is evidence that a deaf druzhina operated within the Moscow Palace of Culture well into the 1970s. See TsGA Moskvy, f. 3089 (House of Culture of the Moscow Directorate of VOG), op. 1, d. 38.

85. TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 192,1. 23.

86. Indeed, the “Pygmalion” debates referred consistently to deaf criminals and hooligans as “deaf-mutes” rather than as “deaf.” See TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 212,1.46.

87. Kabo, L., “Chto takoe ‘Kul'turnyi chelovek'?,” Zhizri glukhikh, 1966, no. 4:18.Google Scholar On the use of deaf space to rehabilitate deaf criminal elements, see TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 212,11.52–53.

88. TsGA Moskvy, f. 3010, op. 1, d. 192,1.13.

89. Ushakov, , Vserossiiskoe obshchestvo glukhikh, 204,206.Google Scholar

90. Korotkov, , 50 let Vserossiiskomu obshchestvu glukhikh, 43.Google Scholar

91. Krainin, V. and Krainina, Z., “Vy dali vsem nam schast'e,” in Krainin, and Krainina, , eds., Chelovek ne slyshit, 137,138.Google Scholar

92. Nakamura, , Deaf in Japan, 11.Google Scholar