The purpose of this chapter is to explore the subjective dimension of Russian women's and men's experience of living with disability in Soviet and post-Soviet times, and to assess the significance of these memories for current constructions of disability and identity. In my earlier writings on issues surrounding disability in Russia, I focused on the experiences of families rearing a disabled child, on the barriers and limits in the social location of such a family and their children (Iarskia-Smirnova 1997). Addressing the contemporary politics of social exclusion and its institutionalisation, through an analysis of interviews with Russian mothers of disabled children, I have looked at how gender stereotypes, insufficient services and discriminatory social attitudes frustrate efforts to develop social tolerance, inclusion, and the participation of disabled children and their families in contemporary Russian society (Iarskia-Smirnova 1999a, 1999b).

Recently, it has become increasingly evident to me that the needs-and-resources analysis of disabled children and their families ‘in terms of living with impairment per se (that is, in terms of a medicalised discourse of the difficult “personal” consequences of being ill or impaired)’ (Thomas 1999: 47), needs to be balanced with the enabling aspects of resistance and success in the lives of disabled adults, in terms of disability as socially constructed phenomena (Oliver 1990).