Authors

Robert Dale¹;  ¹ Newcastle University, UK

Discussion

This paper seeks to explore the boundaries of the social, cultural, medical and scientific silences that supposedly enveloped Soviet society after 1945. It argues that understandings and interest in psychological trauma varied across Soviet space, and although they changed over time never entirely disappeared. It attempts this through a local case study of a single medical institution, namely the Ukrainian Republican Neurosurgical and Neuropsychiatric Hospital for Invalids of the Great Patriotic War, which operated in Kharkiv between 1945 and 1958. The relatively long span of the institution’s archive, and associated files in the Ukrainian Ministry of Health allows for a detailed examination of how trauma manifested itself within and beyond the walls of this facilitate. The paper places the institution within the local medical and psychiatric landscape and briefly outlines its institutional history. It then focuses on examining the medical and scientific understandings of trauma reflected in the hospital’s annual reports, the treatments offered, and patient case histories. Yet the archive also reveals an even more troubling side to trauma. By exploring the disorderly and disruptive behaviour of patients, and its impact on staff, we can see how traumatised men behaved in medical settings and beyond. If psychological trauma and war’s mental pain remained taboo within post-war Soviet public culture, trauma nevertheless manifested itself in tangible ways, especially in Kharkiv. On the basis of this case study, the paper also argues that place matters in understanding trauma. Not only were wartime experiences different in different places, but that republican and local responses to war trauma differed.