All-Russian Union of Maimed Soldiers in the Struggle for the Right to Speak Out: The Order of Discourse of the Central Organization and Regional Branches in 1917–1918

Abstract

The article is devoted to the history of the representative organization of disabled veterans of the First World War that existed in 1917–1918. The political changes caused by the February Revolution of 1917 reshaped previous forms of social assistance. With the fall of the monarchy, the growing social group of disabled war veterans, who were previously the concern of charities during the First World War, gained the opportunity to voice their needs. In June 1917, as a result of the First All-Russian Congress of Maimed Soldiers, the All-Russian Union of Maimed Soldiers, with a central committee in Petrograd and branches throughout the country, was established alongside the state aid institutions. Focusing on the Union’s activities allows us to shift how we view the disabled community, traditionally presented as an object of social policy, and to see it as a political subject that not only sought institutionalization and actively claimed its rights on a metropolitan and regional scale, but also produced its own meanings of who constituted a disabled soldier. Drawing on linguist Norman Fairclough’s understanding of discourse as a semiotic extension of social practice and on the materials preserved in the collection of the Central Committee of the Union of Maimed Soldiers—incoming and outgoing correspondence with local unions, minutes of the Central Committee Board, and documents of all-Russian and local congresses—the article shows how the discourse on military disability was produced in the communications of the central organization, regional branches, and government bodies, how the specificity of regional experiences was manifested in these communications, and what significance regional formations had in the Union’s struggle to maintain an authoritative position in helping disabled war veterans.

Article in Russian