The Broken Years: Russia’s Disabled War Veterans, 1904–1921 by AlexandreSumpf. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 322 pp. $99.99. ISBN 978‐1‐0090‐4729‐6

Alexandre Sumpf's outstanding study of disabled veterans in the Russian Empire across three early twentieth century wars offers a fresh look at the soldier in Russian and Soviet history.While the topic in broad strokes has been done before, including draconian Tsarist conscription laws in the nineteenth century and the social, cultural, military, and everyday life histories of the Red Army in the Soviet era, veterans of the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, and the Russian Civil War have not drawn nearly as much attention from historians.Sumpf's decision to recover these particular veterans' stories is significant, but his achievement goes much further.Drawing on an astonishing depth of sources in three languages, Sumpf's straightforward but powerful argument seems obvious only in hindsight and thanks to his meticulous research: that the plight of Russia's disabled veterans is only fully knowable within this longue durée of "interlocking wars" (p.12).He shows, for example, how the 1904-5 war provided the Russian medical and legal systems early experience with the effects of mechanized warfare that European governments did not share in 1914, and how the Bolshevik elevation of the Red Army soldier closed services for veterans of earlier wars.The book above all is a major contribution to disability history for Russia and the USSR, a still-understudied field (with notable exceptions by Maria Cristina Galmarini-Kabala, Beate Fieseler, and Claire Shaw, all of whom Sumpf references).Sumpf develops his argument over six chapters that proceed mostly chronologically, although he wisely gives each a thematic focus as well.In chapter 1 he navigates unreliable data on casualties and shifting definitions of incapacitation to define "disabled war veterans as a social group" (p.18).This chapter also includes a fascinating section on soldiers suspected by medical professionals of wounding themselves.Although not a sizeable group, these veterans aided popular suspicion of all disabled servicemen.In chapter 2, Sumpf focuses on the increasing medicalization of veterans' care, especially during the First World War.Making "soldiers into patients" was also about demonstrating the reach of public health care and the government's ability to care for the "national body" as an extension of the soldier's body (p.56).Like in Europe, Russia's public health discourse emerged during, and because of, the huge numbers of wounded returning from the Great War.But as Sumpf points out, the Russians drew on their experience in the war with Japan in developing treatments.He also shows that the Tsarist medical establishment prioritized restoring disabled veterans' labor functionality, from managing pain to fitting men with prosthetic limbs.The Great War set Russian health care on a democratic path, with veterans pioneering better access to care for all.Chapter 3 discusses laws governing disability status and pensions.Sumpf focuses on a 1912 law on pension rights, one of the remarkable social service achievements of the Russo-Japanese War, not the Great War as we might assume.These legal frameworks helped change how all disabled people 544

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