“A Conversation Between Deaf-Mutes”: Soviet Sign Language and Deaf Internationalism during the Cold War

This talk explores the issue of miscommunication in Cold War politics by looking at Soviet participation in the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD). While recent scholarship has described communication between the USSR and the West during the Cold War as a ‘conversation between two deaf-mutes’ – citing Khrushchev’s evocative description of his failed attempts to talk to Eisenhower – the reality of deaf communication across the Iron Curtain complicates that picture. On the one hand, the post-war boom in deaf internationalism, and the development of an international sign language, Gestuno, made the world considerably smaller and more interconnected for deaf people. On the other, the ideological conflicts of the Cold War saw the WFD become a crucible of propaganda and conflict, with Soviet deaf representatives attempting to assert the superiority of the socialist deaf experience on the world stage. This tense combination of internationalism and propaganda, this paper will argue, had lasting implications, both for the unfolding of international deaf politics in the twentieth century, and for the way that the history of deaf identity has subsequently been told.

Claire Shaw is Assistant Professor in the History of Modern Russia at the University of Warwick. She is an historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, with a particular interest in the formation of Soviet identity and the history of disabled and marginalised communities. She recently published Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community, and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991 (Cornell University Press, 2017).