Cultivating the Masses

by Hoffmann, David L.

• ISBN13: 9780801446290
• ISBN10: 0801446295
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Abbreviations	p. xv
Introduction	p. 1
Social Welfare	p. 17
Cameralism, Social Science, and the Origins of Welfare	p. 19
The Social Realm in Russia	p. 29
Warfare and Welfare	p. 34
The Soviet Welfare State	p. 48
Public Health	p. 70
Social Medicine and the State	p. 72
Social Hygiene	p. 86
Foreign Influences on Soviet Health Care	p. 101
Physical Culture and Its Militarization	p. 110
Reproductive Policies	p. 125
Birthrates and National Power	p. 126
Contraception, Abortion, and Reproductive Health	p. 135
Promoting Motherhood and Family	p. 143
Eugenics	p. 156
Infant Care and Childraising	p. 168
Surveillance and Propaganda	p. 181
Monitoring Popular Moods	p. 182
Wartime Propaganda	p. 187
Soviet Surveillance	p. 195
Political Enlightenment	p. 211
The New Soviet Person	p. 224
State Violence	p. 238
Origins of Modern State Violence	p. 242
Internments, Deportations, and Genocide during the First World War	p. 253
The Russian Civil War and the 1920s	p. 258
Collectivization and Passportization	p. 269
The Mass Operations	p. 278
The National Operations	p. 295
Conclusion	p. 306
Archives Consulted	p. 315
Index	p. 319
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