Description
Book SynopsisDoesn''t an educated personsimple and working, sick and with a sick childdoesn''t she have the right to enjoy at least the crumbs at the table of the revolutionary feast? Disabled single mother Maria Zolotova-Sologub raised this question in a petition dated July 1929 demanding medical assistance and a monthly subsidy for herself and her daughter. While the welfare of able-bodied and industrially productive people in the first socialist country in the world was protected by a state-funded insurance system, the social rights of labor-incapacitated and unemployed individuals such as Zolotova-Sologub were difficult to define and legitimize. The Right to Be Helped illuminates the ways in which marginalized members of Soviet society understood their social rights and articulated their moral expectations regarding the socialist state between 1917 and 1950.
Maria Galmarini-Kabala shows how definitions of state assistance and who was entitled to it provided a platform for policy
Trade Review
The Right to Be Helped is an excellent account of the complex nature of help and its construction in the context of historical events and individual stories.
* Europe-Asia Studies *
The Right to Be Helped brings together significant new archival information on the Soviet state's practice of social assistance, and provides a valuable addition to the scholarship on marginality, disability, and welfare in the USSR.
* The Russian Review *
This book is a very valuable addition to our understanding of Soviet history, precisely because it gives a voice to those who were excluded and overlooked.
* Canadian Slavonic Papers *
