This chapter explores the discussions surrounding “Pygmalion”, a Soviet newspaper article from 1959 about the criminal behavior of a young deaf woman, in the context of widespread concerns over the perception of deaf people by hearing Soviet society. It argues that deaf people in the late Soviet period were objects of a hearing ‘gaze’ which framed them as exotic and other; a gaze which VOG activists internalized and used to police deaf behavior in public. This chapter focuses particularly on the figure of the deaf woman, whose framing in popular culture as doubly “other” shaped hearing responses to deafness. The view of the deaf community as a potential crucible of anti-sovietness, and of VOG as a source of discipline and control, radically recast the nature of Soviet deaf identity and the place of deaf people within the Soviet body politic.

ABSTRACT:This article analyses one of the first extensive ‘acculturation’ projects undertaken by the Soviet leadership, the construction of Gorky Park, Moscow, between its inception in 1921 and the 1930s. It undertakes a close reading of the developing conceptualization of Gorky Park as, to borrow Timothy Colton's phrase, a ‘fairground for “building the new man”’ and the practical limits of this ambition.

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Deaf in the USSR explores the history of the deaf community in the Soviet Union from the February Revolution of 1917 until the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991, situating the experience of deaf people within the broader framework of Soviet programs of identity. Using sources from the All-Russian Society of the Deaf (VOG), a deaf-run state body that can trace its history back to the revolutions of 1917, alongside institutional archives, deaf journalism, literature, theatre, art, cinema and personal memoirs, it considers deaf engagement with the Soviet project to remake society in its various incarnations throughout the Soviet era, and reveals the shifting ways in which the hearing world perceived Soviet deaf lives. By asking what it meant to be deaf in a culture that was founded on a radically utopian, socialist view of humanity, and how Soviet ideologues sought to reconcile the fallibility of the body with the dream of a perfect future society, it interrogates the fundamental contradictions inherent in the Soviet revolutionary project, and reveals how these contradictions were negotiated – both individually and collectively – by Soviet deaf people.