This article presents an overview of disability rights issues in the context of state socialism in the former Soviet Union, especially the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics. The Soviet state’s governmentality of disability, and the little-known history of Soviet-era disability rights movements, produced important legacies that shape disability policy and discourses, rights movements, and experiences of disability in the region today. By focusing on Soviet approaches to housing, education, rehabilitation, and work vis-à-vis people with disabilities, and documenting the varied responses of disability communities, this article contributes a missing Soviet chapter to the new disability history. This approach encourages readers to reconsider some assumptions about the evolution of disability rights outside the West. Especially, I interweave discussions of Soviet-era state policy with descriptions of people’s personal experiences to emphasize the ways that people with disabilities in the former Soviet Union have been active agents--if not organized advocates--across the 20th century.
Although women and men participated in nearly equal numbers in Ukraine's 2013–14 Maidan protests, women were excluded from some of the more dangerous activities and their contributions went largely unrecognized. I examine women's modes of participation in and their exclusion from the Maidan and the creative responses of feminists to this exclusion, including creation of so‐called Women's Squads. The protests generated important feminist initiatives and discussions about women's roles in Ukraine's past and future, which were partially couched in discourses of nationalism and militarism. Examining debates about women's roles during and after the protests suggests that the Maidan provided Ukraine's feminists with opportunities to articulate divergent yet reconcilable perspectives on women's activism, social change, and national sovereignty. Their creative responses to the challenges of the protests have potentially paved the way for broadening the base of Ukrainian feminism, introducing women's rights principles to segments of the population previously reluctant to embrace feminism.
This article examines the narrative discourses that shape representations of disability in newspapers in postsocialist Ukraine, arguing that narratives about disability are linked to a meta-discourse of 'transition' that emphasizes disorder. Further, newspaper coverage prescribes competing and contradictory models of citizenship and personhood for postsocialist subjects living with disabilities. The article offers recommendations for improving press coverage of disability issues.
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