During the first two decades of the twentieth century, millions of male subjects of the Russian Empire returned home from the battlefields of war with their health and bodies impaired. While hardly insignificant in number, disabled veterans have largely been omitted from histories of Russia’s tumultuous encounter with the early twentieth century. In The Broken Years, Alexandre Sumpf excavates disabled veterans from the depths of forgotten history. Drawing upon an impressive array of archival material, cultural artefacts, literature, and autobiographical accounts, this book places a drastically understudied group at the heart of the history of war and revolution.

The Broken Years is comprised of six chapters; four of which are thematic and two of which proceed chronologically. The book opens with a justification of the book’s chronological focus and the delineation of disabled veterans as a specific group in terms of experience at the front and the hospital. Chapter 2 explores interactions between disabled veterans and medical professionals working in the fields of surgery, functional rehabilitation, and neurology, and charts the development of the right to healthcare in the Russian context. The third chapter focuses on the shifting social status of disabled veterans and the fourth looks at how different regimes approached the issue of disabled veterans’ societal reintegration following demobilisation. In chapters 5 and 6, the book switches gears and provides a rich and fascinating history of the collective mobilisation of disabled veterans during the Russian revolutions of 1917 and their battle to maintain influence over their collective fate when faced with an increasingly hostile and dismissive Bolshevik state. While Sumpf has provided panoramic coverage of the experiences of disabled veterans across regimes, those not familiar with Russian history may struggle to navigate the sometimes-abrupt jumps between the tsarist period, the Provisional Government, and the Bolsheviks in the book’s four thematic chapters. The thematic focus also makes it difficult to chart change over time, namely the subtle shifts in public perceptions of war disability and disabled veterans’ ability to advocate for themselves.

There is much to praise about this illuminating study. The Broken Years aptly demonstrates that disabled veterans’ experiences and their engagement with various state actors are fundamental for understanding the history of the Russian revolutions, the development of the welfare state and family rights, and the professionalisation of medicine in the Russian context. While teasing out the distinctiveness of the Russian case, Sumpf places his case study within an international frame and incorporates Russia into broader historiographical conversations about war and disability.1 Sumpf also resists simplistic categorisations of his research subjects and weaves together competing perspectives and representations to provide a nuanced picture of those who became disabled during war. Far from a unified group, disabled veterans were men from all social classes, regions of the Empire, and all shades of the political spectrum. Similarly, their reactions to hospitalisation, demobilisation, and revolution were complicated and multifaceted.

The book’s title is based upon Sumpf’s classification of the period from Russia’s first encounter with industrialised warfare at the beginning of the Russo-Japanese War (1904) until the Bolsheviks had largely emerged victorious from the Civil War (1921). With this broad chronological approach encompassing three wars and three revolutions, The Broken Years is a solid addition to scholarship that explores Russia’s continuum of crisis and which traces continuities across the revolutionary divide of 1917.2 Across the “broken years” of the early twentieth century, disabled veterans of various wars were neglected by successive regimes and objectified in cultural depictions of disability.

Sumpf ought to be commended for expanding the frame beyond 1914—1918, but the chronological coverage is uneven and the book is principally about men who became disabled during the First World War. This is understandable given the sheer scale of destruction and widespread civic mobilisation characteristic of the Great War, which has evidently produced a rich documentary record. However, the heavy focus on the post-1914 period means that important developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are glossed over and framed only as a precursor for what is to come. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, care for retired soldiers with disabilities was gradually transferred from religious institutions to the government and quasi-state organisations were established to provide long-term financial support and care to disabled veterans. The societal reintegration of disabled veterans was also not just an issue confined to the First World War. The Committee for Finding Employment for Military Ranks Who Suffered during the War with Japan was established under the patronage of Empress Aleksandra Feodorovna in late December 1905 with the state goal of providing wounded and disabled veterans with employment within state-owned enterprises and institutions. In 1911, the Military Department granted amputee disabled veterans the right to request a replacement prosthesis three years after they had received the original, signalling that repairing the bodies of men mutilated by war was a long-term responsibility. While these measures were piecemeal and never met the needs of the target population, the growing realm of contact between disabled veterans and the state constructed a reciprocal relationship between the two groups. Before and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War, disabled veterans wrote to state representatives to demand the pensions and prosthetic devices that were owed to them because they had sacrificed their health to protect the Empire. Incorporating more of the pre-First World War history would have better contextualised the collective mobilisation of disabled veterans throughout the revolutionary year of 1917.

These issues aside, The Broken Years is an important book and a fascinating read for scholars of revolutionary Russia. Sumpf convincingly demonstrates that disabled veterans were a distinctive social group whose common struggle for recognition of their sacrifice offers fresh insight into the political and social history of revolutionary Russia. Sumpf’s meticulous efforts to move Russia’s disabled veterans to their rightful place in the broader international history of war and its aftermath will undoubtedly inspire future studies.

Notes:
1 David A. Gerber (Hrsg.), Disabled Veterans in History, Ann Arbor 2012; Beth Linker, War's Waste. Rehabilitation in World War I America, Chicago 2011; Deborah Cohen, War Come Home. Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939, Berkeley 2001; Ana Carden-Coyne, The Politics of Wounds. Military Patients and Medical Power in the First World War, Oxford 2014.
2 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, Cambridge, MA, 2002; Matthias Neumann / Andy Willimott (Hrsg.), Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide, London 2018.