The ones who did return exhibited many of the symptoms of untreated post-traumatic stress: explosions of anger and physical violence binge-drinking and panhandling an inability to maintain intimate relationships and hold down a job indigence and homelessness. Others feared going back and becoming a burden and stayed away their families believed them to be missing-in-action. Many veterans had no one to come back to after the war. And, in any case, the usual form of psychiatry practiced by the Soviet state was punitive. The concept of post-traumatic stress disorder did not exist then. Perhaps the most heartbreakingly cynical nickname was given to men who lost their arms and their legs: “samovars.” There were 85,942 such limbless survivors in the post-war USSR. “Flounders” looked out at the world with one eye. The partial limbs of men called “turtles” looked like flippers. “Scooters” were legless veterans, while “kangaroos” hopped on their remaining leg. In the totalitarian society of the late 1940s USSR, there was little kindness toward these newly-helpless warriors. Thousands of veterans, disfigured by war, flooded the streets of Soviet cities in the post-war years. Without both legs: one million 121 thousand… With partially torn off arms and legs: 418,905. Among these: 775,000 with head wounds 155,000 with one eye 54,000 blind… With one arm: 3 million 147 thousand. Of these, 10 million returned from the front with various forms of physical disability. Petersburg, 46 million, 250 thousand Soviet citizens were wounded in the course of the Great Patriotic War. Ulitskaya observes that there were millions of them, adding in an accompanying video that “this is not an exaggeration: it’s an understatement.” She continued:Īccording to the data of the Military-Medical Museum in St. A Postscript,” Lyudmila Ulitskaya, one of contemporary Russia’s most celebrated writers, revisits how thousands of veterans, disfigured by war, flooded the streets of Soviet cities in the post-war years. Others are recalling these veterans now as well. Earlier this year, the Soviet Union marked the 75th anniversary of its victory in the war against Nazi Germany. This image of a severely disabled veteran of the 1941-1945 Soviet-German War, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, has stayed with me. In each hand, he holds a thick, rounded block of wood to propel himself forward. He has no legs, and his trousers are fully turned in. It was a picture of a man in a Soviet standard-issue gray cotton-felt quilted jacket and a cocked ear-flapped hat sitting awkwardly on a low, rough-hewn wooden platform held up, not by wheels, but by four ball-bearings – a primitive skateboard of sorts. Is it from a movie? A picture seen in childhood? Somewhere in the recesses of my memory, there is an image.
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