Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Paradoxically, at the very moment that Soviet authorities were killing thousands of individuals, they were also engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of repressions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people's well-being. Extensive state surveillance of the population went hand in hand with literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture. In Cultivating the Masses, David L. Hoffmann examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming the socioeconomic order and the very nature of its citizens.
To analyze Soviet social policies, Hoffmann places them in an international comparative context. He explains Soviet technologies of social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices. These practices developed in conjunction with the ambitions of nineteenth-century European reformers to refashion society, and they subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive regulations in countries around the world. The mobilizational demands of World War I impelled political leaders to expand even further their efforts at population management, via economic controls, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence. Born at this moment of total war, the Soviet system institutionalized these wartime methods as permanent features of governance. Party leaders, whose dictatorship included no checks on state power, in turn attached interventionist practices to their ideological goal of building socialism.
David L. Hoffmann is Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 and Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941, both from Cornell. He is also the editor of Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices and Stalinism: The Essential Readings.
Table of Contents
Introduction1. Social Welfare Cameralism, Social Science, and the Origins of Welfare The Social Realm in Russia Warfare and Welfare The Soviet Welfare State2. Public Health Social Medicine and the State Social Hygiene Foreign Influences on Soviet Health Care Physical Culture and Its Militarization3. Reproductive Policies Birthrates and National Power Contraception, Abortion, and Reproductive Health Promoting Motherhood and Family Eugenics Infant Care and Childraising4. Surveillance and Propaganda Monitoring Popular Moods Wartime Propaganda Soviet Surveillance Political Enlightenment The New Soviet Person5. State Violence Origins of Modern State Violence Internments, Deportations, and Genocide during the First World War The Russian Civil War and the 1920s Collectivization and Passportization The Mass Operations The National OperationsConclusionArchives Consulted Index
David L. Hoffmann has written a masterful synthesis of much recent literature and added his own archival research to firmly situate late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in the comparative international scholarship of the modern state. By examining state intervention in the realms of social welfare, public health, reproductive policies, and surveillance, he makes a persuasive case for tracing the origins of Soviet socialism in European ideas and practices of cameralism, the Enlightenment, romanticism, and the rise of the social sciences in the nineteenth century. He traces the evolution of the Soviet project from its imperial roots in the professions that deployed social statistics, criminology, demography, and other forms of knowledge and power to the birth of the Bolshevik state in conditions of total war. Socialist ideology as such, he argues, played a less important role against this backdrop of modern state practices.
Geoff Eley
In keeping with other challenging work in Soviet history, David L. Hoffmann asks us to rethink the purposes and meanings of socialist construction during the Stalin years by placing that history comparatively in its time—whether defined by the violence and mass mobilizations of the Imperial and early Bolshevik periods or by the wider European contexts of governmentality, population, and welfare. We may not go all the way, but anyone interested in how the boundaries of the social were attacked and reimagined during those times can do far worse than begin from this book.