The Vanishing Veteran: Doling out Disability in the USSR

The hundreds of thousands of soldiers who received disabling injuries during the war had every expectation of being taken care of by a socialist state in whose name they had sacrificed so much. Despite the truly heroic efforts and sacrifices made by countless doctors, there was grave dissatisfaction with the state of the medical care provided to the disabled both during and after the end of hostilities. Initially the medical service at the front was poorly organized and inadequately provisioned and too often staffed by undertrained doctors who had been hurried through medical school to meet the growing demand. Added to the vast number of soldiers disabled in battle were many more who became so as a result of inadequate treatment of their injuries.

But the major source of ongoing discontent was the medical bureaucracy, most notably in the form of the Medical-labor Expert Commission (VTEK). The function of this organization, comprised of physicians and social workers, was to determine the extent of the veterans' disabilities and hence the size of their pensions. This paper charts the long, bureaucratically encumbered, and often humiliating process undergone by soldiers who received disabling injuries as a result of the war and who applied for state support. It looks at how veterans received their disability status, a series of categories that would determine all benefits thereafter, and shows that in an effort to reduce its substantial support obligations, VTEK continually redefined disability classifications at the expense of the veterans. Many of those who had initially been designated to the most severe group of impairments were reassigned, a reduction which then allowed the state to make triumphant claims about its success and devotion in treating the war disabled.