• (in literature) a traditional or recurrent narrative theme or plot structure. • a set of beliefs or assumptions about something.
(Google Dictionary, accessed December 14, 2014)
It would be entirely possible to tell the story of disability in Karelia without ever mentioning Valaam. After all, what happened there remains a mystery. Each assertion of fact or revelation of historical detail is covered by another. But, the truth is beside the point: it pales in comparison to the mythos of the invalidi of Valaam.
Petrozavodsk sits on the Western shore of Lake Onego, one of two large lakes in Karelia. To the south, bordering the Saint Petersburg administrative district is Lake Ladoga. Ladoga is famous for its strategic history as a supply route into and out of Saint Petersburg, including during the Seige of Leningrad. In a northern corner of the lake, set a clear distance through mists beyond the pine and birch lined banks, is the island of Valaam. Valaam is the largest of a small archepelago of islands, forested, edged with grey granite boulders and circling gulls.
The story goes like this.
After the Great Patriotic War (World War II to the West), there were many soldiers left unwhole. They had one arm, one leg, they were missing hands or feet. They were broken
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veterani-invalidi. Now they could not work as they had worked before; they could not contribute. Yet they had already sacrificed everything.
The next part is told differently by different writers.
Some say they were rounded up in the night. Others say it happened some other less violent or secretive way. But most agree that disabled veterans from around the Karelian republic were brought to the island of Valaam, where the men (were there any women? are there ever any women in the tellings?) were set up to live in the crumbling monastery on the island.
In the 1960s, a tourism initiative began offering boating excursions on Lake Ladoga, and tourists were brought to the island. Whatever it was that tourists glimpsed of the
residents of internat in the monastery left an impression; their stories of the "hell on
Valaam,"29 where abandoned veterans wandered limbless, hungry and alone were passed as whispers or ghost stories. A strange publication appeared, "The Valaam Notebook," which told the tale.
These stories took on varied meanings. One telling is a fable of cruelty and injustice at the hands of the Soviet government, that imprisoned its bravest soldiers if their bodies did not fit into the imagined nation.
The myth of the prison-like institution for veteranov-invalidov did not appear suddenly. It seems to have begun with secrecy that surrounded the home for invalidi on Valaam. The author of the famous [book] The Valaam Notebooks, the tourguide Evgenii Kuznetsov, put it this way:
"In 1950 according to an order from the High Committee of the Karelo-Finnish SSR established on Valaam a Home for Invalidov of war and labor in the buildings of the monastery. And what an institution! It's not an idle question to ask: why there, on an island, and not somewhere on the mainland? Certainly it would have been easier to set up and cheaper to maintain. The formal explanation - there were many residences, that could be set up on the grounds, the land was tended !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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29 The Russian Wikipedia entry for "Valaam Home for Invalidov" recently included the sentence: "The story of the Valaam 'hell' took many forms and continued to spread."
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(there was just one farm there), there were beds fro a vegetable garden, and fruit trees, and berry patches. But the informal, actual reason was that the Soviet people had already had an eyeful of tens of thousands of invalids: without hands, without legs, wandering, barely alive and begging in the train stations, on the trains, on the streets, and well, everywhere else. So, see for yourself: they have medals on their chests, but he has to beg for bread. He's of use to no one! To get rid of them, there would have to be some way to get rid of them. But where to put them? Well, in a former monastery, on an island! Out of site, from the heard of the war. In just a few months the victorious nation had purged its streets of this "mark of shame"! So that's how the asylums ended up at Kirillo-Belozerskii monastery, Goritskii monastery, Aleksandro-Sbirskii monastery, Valaamski monastery, and so on..."
That is, the remoteness of the island of Valaam is explained by Kuznetsov in the sense that people wanted to get rid of the veterans... although there were plenty of institutions in plain site.30
Another telling offers the tale as an iteration of meaningless suffering: Imagine, those men survived the front, only to be gathered up and kept like criminals.
In yet another, the tale becomes a ghost story, something teenagers tell one another for shock value, a chill up the spine, so that the bodies of veterans are turned into monstrous warnings, half-human: on Valaam, there is a man with no arms and legs, just a head and a torso. He lost them all in the war. The other invalids carry him around in a basket. He can do nothing for himself... they live in a decaying monastery, with no heat or work, and they are not allowed off the island.
Recent retellings online have led to a new proliferation of accounts. Trolls and
conspiracy theorists publish unsubstantiated blog accounts; journalists seek out archives; the state-funded center for social and political research attempts to set the record straight: the men were allowed off the island, they came shopping occasionally in Petrozavodsk.The air of scandal, secrecy, wronged souls, a society without justice follows the story.
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30 This excerpt is taken from one of the many websites contributing a perspective to the controversy about what "really" happened on Valaam. The author quotes extensively from Kuznetsov's Valaam Notebooks, both in this excerpt and throughout, but disputes Kuznetsov's interpretation, asserting that what's at stake in the retelling is the honor and moral character of the Soviet or Russian people.
Truth or Falsehood: What Happened to the Veterans of WWII on Valaam (Pravda Ili Vymysel: Chto Bylo S Veteranami VOV Na Valaame) 2012. Newsland. http://newsland.com/news/detail/id/1097458/, accessed December 15, 2014.
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The monastery-institution was closed, or moved, in the 1980s. Some accounts say that its survivors now live in another internat, no longer on an island, but in a rural town not far from the lake.
But the tellings haven't stopped. Just as someone suggests a summer excursion to the now renovated monastery, once again a religious destination, the onion domes repaired and painted a bright blue, so the story of the veterani-invalidi comes up. Do their ghosts haunt the island? What was their fate when it was decided that the monastery would be renovated? The real people who lived there are supplanted with ghostly symbols of the shadowland of Soviet morality, when there was no religion, only suffering.
Yet none of these tellings are ever presented in the voices of the survivors themselves. The fate of these now fabled residents of the monastery haunts Karelia. The
mythology that continues to swirl around them reflects a discursive pattern that stretches beyond the island, beyond their individual bodies. Valaam offers a location and form for a mythos of disability that resonates throughout Karelia, and the mythos that grounds this ethnography.
I sat at dinner one night in 2014 with my friend and colleague, historian John Little. We were eating Thai food in Washington DC, but our conversation was on disability in the Soviet era. I recalled an article by Robert Dale about the mythology surrounding the
veterans on Valaam (2013). I asked if John had ever had a chance to visit the monastery, or heard the stories of Valaam. He hadn't. I asked if he had encountered anything in the archives in Saint Petersburg or Moscow. He hadn't, he said. I told him what I knew of the site, and that I didn't know where it fit into my ethnography. Perhaps it wasn't anything.
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It fits, John said. Because it's part of the stories that we tell ourselves and that we hear about disability in Russia.
If we want to know about people with disabilities in Russia, they are always tucked away on a special island. They are always inside of some system of care - a church, a state, a family. They don't exist to speak for themselves or clear the record, rather they are tragic voices of the wronged, they are mythological, they are symbols.
Disability theorists David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder coined a now famous phrase, narrative prosthesis, by which the mean, the practice of inserting characters with disability into fiction as a way to symbolize greater themes. Or perhaps of bestowing fictional
characters with particular disabilities as a manner of patterned lyrical suggestion: the blind man who can see the truth, the child with a sickly body but deep moral compass, the villan with a misshapen face. In these fictive iterations, non-normative embodiments are never simply themselves, they are symbolic vessels by which author or teller communicates with the reader or listener, a prosthetic aide to the course of the narrative. In this way, actual people with disabilities are doubly silenced - they are excluded as narrators from a dominant discourse, and, simultaneously, their physical characteristics are taken to speak more about their individual characters than their own ignored accounts.
The Valaam mythos offers a glimpse of a sort of Soviet and postsoviet incarnation of narrative prosthesis, yet in this instance, it is not a particular bodily attribute, but rather disabled bodies themselves, that come to stand for something else. Who were the heroes of the Soviet era, and who were the villains? Was the church a victim? Was the state to blame? How did so many people suffer, and what does that suffering mean? These debates get played out in the online tellings and retellings of the Valaam mythos. The stories are about disabled
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bodies, but they are bodies that are always apart from the rest, separated, secluded; bodies that do not speak for themselves, that are victimized, or protected; bodies that were cursed, or blessed; bodies that occupy some other space of story, mythology, and history.
In this way, any story that I tell about disabled bodies in Karelia is a story that must wind its way past the mist of Valaam, twist through the eddies of Lake Ladoga's inlets,
through the snail-like cochleae of everyone who has heard this tale. To come out on the other side, each disabled body must negotiate these narrative sinkholes, paddle past the mythos, burn off the mists of metaphor. The narratives that I share here are burning for this chance. To be seen as people first, people whose bodies might simply be, bodies beyond the mythos.
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CHAPTER IV