Dr Rob Dale (Newcastle University)

Testing the Silence:  Trauma in the Archive of the Ukrainian Republican Neurosurgical and Neuropsychiatric Hospital for Invalids of the Great Patriotic War.

This paper re-examines evidence concerning the extent and treatment of war-related trauma in the Soviet Union in the wake of Great Patriotic War (1941-1945).  In so doing it challenges the deeply embedded narrative that Soviet Combatants escaped the Second World War without falling victim to the neuroses that affected the bourgeois West.  The paper tests the boundaries of the social, cultural and scientific silences around war-related trauma in late Soviet society.  First, it briefly outlines the historiographical context, before arguing that there was a much wider articulation of war-trauma than commonly than often suggested.  In their letters, diaries and memoirs, frontline soldiers regularly listed instances of concussion (kontuziia), described their psychological and emotional pain, and identified themselves as traumatized more openly and frequently than commonly appreciated.  Second, the paper attempts to illustrate these issues through a case study of how war-trauma was represented and treated in the archives of the Ukrainian Republican Neurosurgical and Neuropsychiatric Hospital for Invalids of the Great Patriotic War in Kharkhiv between 1945 and 1958.  These files offer the opportunity to reconstruct the kinds of traumatic reactions veterans experienced, how they were understood and treated by medics, as well as the disorderly and disruptive behaviour traumatised veterans displayed in this setting.  Taken together these files challenge the notion of a deadening silence around trauma in the Soviet Union.