Vanishing Veterans: Disability, Medicine, and Soviet Manhood at the End of World War II

FAIN: FB-58316-15

Frances Lee Bernstein
Drew University (Madison, NJ 07940-1434)

This project explores the impact of the mass disabling of Red Army soldiers during and after the Second World War. In the context of a culture long hostile to physical impairment, such substantial numbers of armless and legless men constituted a potent threat to the myth of Soviet invincibility already being manufactured, as the Cold War heated up. Even as returning soldiers were celebrated as the embodiment of masculine courage in the project of mass-commemoration surrounding the war, there were widespread efforts undertaken to make the most severely injured disappear.