Transcending Revolutions: The Tsars, The Soviets And Deaf Culture

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2000 by Susan Burch

Revisionist scholarship has redirected our interpretations of race, class, and gender but has yet to fully address a fundamental component in our historical identity: physical ability and its underlying concept of normality. Scholars in Deaf history offer one approach to this issue by examining the community through a cultural lens rather than a medical or pathological interpretation. In contrast to the medical perspective of deafness, which reduces the experience of deafness to a physical condition and a pedagogical problem, the works of Deaf historians have revealed a vibrant culture with its own folklore, visual humor, publications and associations, as well as its own primary, signed language. However, most of these researchers have focused primarily on Western Europe and the United States in an attempt to demonstrate the validity of a cultural model of Deafness. Moreover, the corpus of these current social studies remains limited by an ambiguous definition of culture. The relative abundance of American an d Western European studies has inadvertently created an image of a monolithic Deaf culture. The focus on sign language and education as cultural informants of Deafness also neglects other crucial determining conditions. An excellent counter-example to the western cultural model of Deafness is Russia. The history of Deaf people there offers substantive corroborating evidence to the cultural model. More importantly, close examination of Russian and Soviet Deaf history redefines and clarifies the meaning of social identity, ultimately expanding the notion of community in general and the cultural model of Deafness in particular.

Two scholars in Russian Deaf history offered important critiques of this community. The late Howard Williams of Great Britain focused extensively on the attempts to establish schools for the deaf during the Imperial age and early Soviet period. [1] An educator of the deaf himself, Williams was astutely aware of the political and pedagogical issues involved in educating this minority community. Igor Abramov, the late head of the Moscow Federation of the Deaf, also examined deaf education, but included closer study of his community's reactions, as well as more overt criticism of the regimes. [2] Both researchers produced cogent works in the field, but were not able to expand the scope of their studies to include other cultural issues in Deaf history before their untimely deaths. This work depends heavily on Williams' and Abramov's research, and seeks to address some of these more complex issues.

A distinctive Deaf culture began in Russia, as in other nations, with the establishment of deaf residential schools. This minority group demonstrated attributes prevalent in other Deaf communities: they shared a common sign language, established clubs and periodicals for and by the Deaf, passed down their own folklore, and primarily socialized with and married other Deaf people. However, the unique social-political-economic environment in Russia fostered a cultural minority that differed in important ways from European and American Deaf communities. Four areas in particular: education, economic and employment status, social characteristics, and the relationship between the community and the state informed a decidedly Russian Deaf cultural identity.

In most Western nations, deaf education began as a Christian endeavor, with ministers and priests attempting to "save" those who could not hear the word of God by giving them written and signed communication. In Russia, Imperial and secular philanthropy defined Deaf education. Inspired by a meeting with a deaf boy in 1807, Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna sought advice on Deaf education from progressive France, and she implemented their sign language-based form of teaching at the Murzinka School in Pavolvsk, the first Russian Deaf school. [3] In 1809 this institute moved to St. Petersburg and became the largest deaf school in Russia. With the blessing and official approval of the Tsars, other schools for the deaf soon appeared in Warsaw (1817), Odessa (1843), Moscow (1860), and Kazan (1886). Deaf Russians benefited both from the sanctioned use of sign language, the primary feature of their cultural identity, and Imperial recognition. Funding for schools, however, remained precarious. Without consistent financ ial support from the state or the Church, Russian deaf schools often closed, or catered only to the well-to-do. As a gesture to assuage growing concerns over the limitations of deaf education, the Imperial family helped establish a supervisory organization in 1898 known as the Guardianship, or the Marinskii Foundation for the Deaf. This all-Russian charitable organization established a network of schools for the deaf and hard of hearing, sought improvements in vocational training, and publicly campaigned against the neglect and suffering of the deaf and hard of hearing. Plagued by corruption and inefficiency, however, the Guardianship ultimately offered limited aid to deaf people, and dissolved shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution. [4] During its existence, the Guardianship focused primarily on major urban sites, and consequently deaf education remained highly varied according to geography and class. [5]