UC Berkeley

My dissertation, Combat Brotherhood: Disabled Soviet-Afghan War Veterans, Traumatic Masculinity and the Mafia State, examines how, in the late 1980s, veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War grappled with their trauma from a war that their government no longer cared to defend. Disabled and traumatized veterans of Afghanistan acclimated early to the disorienting isolation that became the norm after the country’s collapse and were therefore particularly suited to life in the chaotic and violent 1990s. During Russia’s transition to a market economy, a part of the Afghan veterans’ movement became the foundation of criminal and semi-criminal organizations that grew increasingly powerful in the 1990s, first filling the void left by the Soviet Union, and then transforming into the modern Russian state.When the Soviet state vanished, disabled people felt the effects of its absence most harshly. The neoliberal Russian state of the 1990s, focused on creating a hyper-capitalist society, had little interest in providing care to the vulnerable. Disabled people had no choice but to band together if they hoped to survive the transition to capitalism. Disabled veterans of the Soviet War in Afghanistan, however, were unusual among disabled people in their capacity for violence—which, in the 1990s, became suddenly profitable in the absence of a state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. RFIVA and other aid collectives created by and for disabled veterans used profits from racketeering, money laundering, and contract murder to pay pensions, build monuments, and buy wheelchairs. Criminal groups that formed to serve disabled veterans relied on particularly extreme forms of violence, mirroring the extreme danger and deprivation that the transition to capitalism caused for disabled people more broadly.