The spatial politics of disability in late Soviet Estonia
A healthy and capable body was one of the pillars of Soviet ideology, glorified in the images of victorious military heroes, muscular factory workers and outstanding sportsmen. However, generating a new Soviet body as one of the aims of the Socialist utopia necessarily involved segregating and displacing the deviant bodies that did not comply to this heroic image. In the public discourse, people with disabilities were invisible. According to an oft-cited anecdotal situation, when Western journalists were asking at the 1980s Moscow Olympics if disabled Soviet sportsmen, or ‘invalid sportsmen’ as they were called at the time, also planned to attend the first Paralympics to be held later that year, they received a shockingly blunt answer: “There are no invalids in the Soviet Union!” [1] Indeed, the daily issues of disabled people, their living conditions or specific spatial needs were addressed neither in the professional magazines of architecture and construction industry nor in the mainstream media. Yet those people did exist, were housed and taken care of somewhere. The following article will try to offer a look into the spaces designated for the disabled bodies in late Soviet Estonia, asking how the spaces planned, designed and built for them contributed to their marginalisation in the society, what role did these spatial strategies have in the construction of their identity, and how did the specificities of those buildings affect their everyday experience.
There are different models of defining disability – the Soviet understanding of the concept was unambiguously medical. A disabled person was someone who had been diagnosed as such, and hence was subject to medical examination and experimentation. Although due to the shortage of facilities, many disabled people also certainly remained in family care, the Soviet system was primarily focused on institutionalisation – mothers giving birth to disabled children were intensely persuaded to give up their child, and the overall attitude, aimed at the most rational organisation and treatment, saw professional care as the primary solution for dealing with the disabled. The bodies of disabled people were therefore not sovereign, but rather objects for correction and manipulation by managers and doctors.[2] The decisions concerning their location, living environment and medical treatment lay within the expert realm.[3] Furthermore, the central determinant in the Soviet discourse was work, with the ability to work forming the basis of an individual’s identity as well as their social value. Accordingly, disabilities were categorised based on an individual’s ability to work. Everyone not able to work were regarded as ‘workforce in reserve’ or ‘tomorrow’s labour’, expected to contribute once the disability had been treated or compensated.[4] Certain semi-official hierarchies were also in place: veterans of war and labour received more state attention that people with congenital disabilities[5]; and people with hearing and sight impairment were regarded as ‘more valuable’ than those with mobility impairments, and the mentally disabled even less so.[6]
The primary level of spatial segregation of disabled people was achieved by their displacement from larger cities. Across the Soviet Union, the laws against social parasitism enabled, among else, relocating disabled veterans of the II World War from the cities to remote kolkhozes and even labour camps.[7] Similarly, specially designated institutions, the so-called boarding homes for the invalid, were established in remote rural settlements. This was a standard practice in the whole Eastern bloc[8], but in Estonia the institutional network also made use of the legacy of the small pre-war nursing homes that had often found lodging in the historical manor houses that were left unused with the emigration of the former upper class, the Baltic Germans in 1919 and after. With the rise of institutionalisation in the 1960s-1970s, those manor houses were expanded with new modernist wings that were more often than not unproportional and insensitive towards the historical buildings as well as unimaginative in their architecture and barely minimal in their spatial options. Some of the most vivid examples include Võisiku (architect Paul Kangur, 1958; 1970s annex architect unknown) and Aa (architect Ülar Saar, 1975) nursing homes for the mentally disabled and Imastu boarding home (architect Burchuladze, 1965) for the disabled children. Their low status in the hierarchy of building typologies in late Soviet Estonia and constant lack of funds resulted in architecture that mostly employed the most rational floor plans with a long corridor in the middle and wards to both sides, administrative, medical and personnel spaces grouped together, and one multipurpose hall as the only accent (unless the latter function was fulfilled within the historical wing).
Architecture and spatial layout of the boarding homes also contributed to disciplining the disabled bodies and marginalising their subjectivities. In the Soviet medical system, assignment to a boarding home was usually a finite decision, rendering the spatial environment of the particular setting a tremendous influence over its inhabitants’ life experience.[9] To a large extent, the architecture, spatial conditions and social practices combined to produce settings that may be identified as total institutions[10], characterised by compressing all aspects of life into a single spatial setting, restricted contact with outside world, collectively organised activities with little personal agency, bureaucratic top-down organisation of daily life, unbalanced power hierarchies of the inhabitants and the caregivers, and as a result, development of a certain ‘inmate identity’. The rural boarding homes combined living, studying (in the case of disabled children) and working in single spatial premises. For the sake of self-sustainability, the institutions often included agricultural facilities and sewing and shoemaking workshops – especially in the context of mental problems, work therapy was seen as the main cure in Soviet medicine. The caregiving personnel also mostly lived on site or nearby. This combination made the boarding home an isolated complex, effectively restricting contacts with surrounding community.
Collectively organised life meant that wards were densely inhabited – in the historical buildings, Baroque enfilade halls were simply filled with up to 20 beds per room. For the modernist annexes the norms approved up to six inhabitants per room but in reality the number was often higher.[11] In addition, a complex of spatio-temporal regulations micromanaged all activities throughout the day. Daily schedules were meticulously followed, and everything from the morning cleansing routines to eating, studying, gardening, outdoor walks and newspaper reading was taking place together, at a designated time. The schedules allowed minimum amount of unregulated time, just as the space practically did not enable an option of non-collective habitation.
In the 1980s, first signs of disability activism emerged, with sports events like rallies for hand-operated cars and wheelchair races having a major effect on reducing the social stigma and helping to form a community.[12] A documentary Wheelchair Dance made by Hagi Šein in 1986 was the first time in the Soviet Union that the problems faced by people with mobility impairment, including their special spatial needs, were discussed in the public sphere. At the same time, a project for the nursing home for the blind and the deaf by Saima Truupõld and Tõnu Hilep (1986) was the first attempt at an institution that would take care not only of its inhabitants’ medical needs but also, to an extent, their emotional and intellectual needs, with double and even single rooms, a hall for movies and theatre, a library, hairdresser, occupational therapy and visitor areas. Also, designing involved consultations with the Estonian Association of the Blind – the first instance of letting the users have a say in the process and design solutions.[13] Regrettably, due to the slowness of the Soviet construction industry and the constant lack of funds, the facility remained unbuilt.
The segregation, displacement and neglect of disabled bodies has of course not been an exclusively Soviet phenomenon but rather something that has characterised modernity at large. In the USA, from the 19th century to the 1970s the ‘ugly laws’ curbed public appearance of people with ‘diseased, deformed, mutilated or otherwise unsightly’ bodies[14], and similar practices of segregation have been followed in European countries. However, the Soviet combination of undisputed authority and bureaucracy in the medical system, the drive towards maximum rationalisation, and deficit of means enabled those tendencies to work out in a more extreme manner. In spite of the rhetoric of commitment to care of all members of society, and the architects’ attempts at designing better facilities, the schism between idealist rhetoric and practical reality remained large. The disabled population was heavily marginalised, and deliberate as well as underacknowledged spatial strategies played a major role in it.
Published in A Shade Colder, July 2023
[1] Fefelov, V. V SSSR invalidov net! (There are no invalids in the USSR!). London: Overseas Publications Interchange Ltd, 1986, cited in Sarah D. Phillips. “There Are No Invalids in the USSR!”: A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History. – Disability Studies Quarterly, Vol 29, No 3, 2009. Available at: https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/936/1111.
[2] Iarskaia-Smirnova, E., Romanov, P. 2014. Heroes and spongers. The iconography of disability in Soviet posters and film. Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova (eds). Disability in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, 81.
[3] Galley, M. 2019. Builders of Communism, ‘Defective’ Children, and Social Orphans: Soviet Children in Care after 1953. PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield, 20.
[4] Iarskaia-Smirnova, E., Romanov, P. Heroes and spongers, 70.
[5] Although there was a law already from 1918 promising state support for those unable to work, disability benefits did not apply to the ones born with congenital disabilities until 1967, see Sarah D. Phillips, There Are No Invalids in the USSR!.
[6] Aitsam, M. 2012. Eesti invaspordi ajalugu [History of Estonian Parasports]. Sinuga, 2012 winter issue, 36.
[7] Fitzpatrick, S. 2006. Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism. Cahiers du Monde russe , Jan. - Jun., 2006, Vol. 47, No. 1/2, Repenser le Dégel: Versions du socialisme, influences internationales et société soviétique, pp. 377–408, and Sarah D. Phillips, "There Are No Invalids in the USSR!"
[8] Vann, B. H., Šiška, J. 2006. From ‘ cage beds’ to inclusion: the long road for individuals with intellectual disability in the Czech Republic. Disability & Society 2006/21:5, 425–439.
[9] Research has shown that the spatial setting has a more definitive influence upon inhabitants’ everyday experience than fellow inhabitants or caregivers, see: Davies, K. 2017. A small corner that’s for myself. Space, place, and patients' experiences of mental health care, 1948-98. – James Moran, Leslie Topp, Jonathan Andrews (eds.) Madness, architecture and the built environment. Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context. London: Routledge, 307.
[10] See: Goffman, E. 1961. Asylums. New York: Doubleday.
[11] Lall, L. 2020. Sovetiseerimise mõju Eesti erihoolekande arengule [The Effects of Sovetisation Upon the Developments of Special Care in Estonia]. Master’s thesis, University of Tartu, 39-40.
[12] Aitsam, M. Eesti Invaspordi ajalugu.
[14] Schweik, S.M. 2009. The Ugly Laws. Disability in Public. New York and London: New York University Press, 1.
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