YouTube User Dankey Kang is a Stalinist who hates the Disabled. Not strange as Stalin locked up more than 250,000 disabled citizens in isolated and freezing gulags guarded by the NKVD. Stalin dubbed the wartime Disabled "Neo-Decemberists" after the demobbed military invalids who overthrew the Russian government upon returning from the front in 1826. The Soviet invention of "sluggish schizophrenia" for political prisoners was legendary for people like Andrei Sakharov. In the expectation of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, a Soviet official told foreign journalists that there would be no Paralympics in Russia as: "There are no invalids in the USSR." The Paralympics had to take place the following year in the Netherlands. Socialists hate the Differently-Abled and we hate Socialists and National Socialists.

"There Are No Invalids in the USSR!": A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History. Sarah D. Phillips. Dept. of Anthropology. Indiana University.

E-mail:  sadphill@indiana.edu

Vol 29, No 3 (2009)

Multinational Review of English Language Disability Studies Degrees and Courses

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v29i3