Maria Cristina Galmarini's Ambassadors of Social Progress is one of the few recently published studies on disability history in the former Soviet Union. It analyses how blind activists from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe engaged with the worldwide post-war disability movement and influenced its development and direction. The book's first part analyses the history of the international blind movement, which the author reconstructs from the period between the two world wars until the beginning of the 1970s, which marked the heyday of socialist leadership. The second part focuses on the work conducted by the two most influential groups of blind activists of the Soviet bloc, the VOS (All-Russian Society of the Blind) in the Soviet Union and the BSV (Union of the Blind and Low-Sighted) in East Germany, and by their leaders, during the central decades of the Cold War.
Beginning in the 1920s, blind activists in the Soviet Union advanced an understanding of blindness as a product of capitalism and the material poverty generated by it. Limited but with great potential for social integration, the blind, they argued, should be guaranteed equal participation in social and political life as sighted citizens through access to education and employment by state interventions and the right to self-advocacy. This understanding of blindness differed from understandings prevalent in the United States and the United Kingdom, based on private-sector charity and assistance granted by sighted medical experts. If, especially after the Second World War, these ideas did not find their place on the stage of international blind activism in the West for ideological reasons, they spread within the Soviet Union and, under its influence, in the Eastern European countries. Put forward by associations of blind activists and endorsed by socialist governments, these principles were translated into a set of functioning policies that granted opportunities for a substantial part of the blind population of these countries and radiated within and beyond the Soviet bloc via events such as sportive gatherings meant to display the progressiveness of the socialist policies and their superiority to those in the West. Closely intertwined with the political dynamics of the Cold War, Soviet blind advocacy did not survive the fall of communism, after which the Western neoliberal model for disability politics established itself as triumphant on the international stage.
The author's reconstruction of the functioning of VOS and BVS and the work these associations conducted during the central decades of the twentieth century shows their leaders as ambassadors both of disability advocacy and of socialism, the latter encompassing the values of mutual support, equality, social harmony and fraternity beyond the borders that lay at the centre of their fight to ensure dignity and self-determination for blind citizens in the world. It also shows the mandate for these organizations to act in accordance with the dictates and lines established by the government and the Party, which saw their actions as instrumental to the triumph of socialism against the West.
Galmarini's work is a powerful critique of existing historical narratives of international blind activism history. It challenges the biased accounts that have often overlooked the role of socialist associations in global disability history. The author demonstrates that, despite their limitations, such as their allegiance to the Party line and the failure of their endorsed policies to help a significant portion of blind citizens, these associations have sustained and promoted a paradigm for blind advocacy that has resonated with many people across the world. This paradigm offered a viable alternative to the neoliberal, charity-based approach championed in the United States and the United Kingdom. Galmarini's book does remarkable work reconstructing the functioning of VOS and BSV throughout the turbulent decades of the Cold War, detailing their evolution from the Stalinist years to the opening that followed Khrushchev's reforms and the challenges they had to face after 1989. By showing the deep intertwining between activist organizations and politics, her work demonstrates the far from marginal role these associations played in the eyes of their respective governments and the fact that, on the contrary, they were considered valuable assets and strategic players in the Cold War.
Galmarini's work has some limitations, however. Although the story of socialist blind activists is told with great accuracy, the relevance of what she describes as the socialist paradigm of disability – an expression indicating the specificities of the Soviet approach to disability as different from the medical model and the social model of disability – is not entirely clear, as a theoretical discussion in this regard is missing. Moreover, while identifying a Marxist understanding disability (that disability results from capitalist exploitation of the people) as widespread in the Eastern bloc as an original and unique contribution to disability theory, she seems to forget that within disability studies several prominent Western authors (Mike Oliver, Vic Finkelstein, Brendan Gleeson, Paul Abberly) endorsed a similar understanding of disability. Finally, in telling the story of the socialist way of disability advocacy versus the Western way, she appears to disregard the fact that, although this approach was undoubtedly prominent in the United States and the United Kingdom, other Western countries – from France to Italy, from the Netherlands to the Scandinavian countries – supported different views on disability policies, melding state-driven assistance and the promotion of autonomy for their disabled citizens, and sustained self-representation for people with disabilities.
Despite these limitations, Galmarini's work is an essential contribution to global disability studies and a most welcome addition to scholarship on the still poorly known history of people with disabilities in the Soviet Union.
