David L. Hoffmann
Cultivating the Masses
The Stalinist regime was among the most repressive and violent in all human history. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet government carried out a massive number of deportations, incarcerations, and executions. Yet, paradoxically, at the very moment that the Soviet government was killing hundreds of thousands of people, it was engaged in an enormous pronatalist campaign to boost the population. Even as the number of incarcerations and executions grew exponentially, Communist Party leaders enacted sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people’s wellbeing. 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.
Cultivating the Masses examines the Party leadership’s pursuit of both “positive” and “negative” population policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime, a regime intent on transforming both the socio-economic order and the very nature of its citizens, and ready to employ unprecedented levels of social intervention to do so.
In this book, I analyze a range of social policies and present Soviet social intervention as one particular constellation of modern state practices—practices that arose in conjunction with ambitions to refashion society.
Soviet social policies reflected a new ethos by which state officials and nongovernment professionals sought to reshape their societies in accordance with scientific and aesthetic norms. This rationalist ethos of social intervention first arose in nineteenth-century Europe, and it subsequently prompted welfare programs, public health initiatives, and reproductive policies in countries around the world.
Social intervention intensified with the rise of mass warfare. The tremendous mobilizational demands of the First World War in particular impelled the leaders of all combatant countries to expand their use of economic controls, health measures, surveillance, propaganda, and state violence—all of which became prominent features of the Soviet system.
Editor: Erind Pajo
Cultivating the Masses
David L. Hoffmann Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939 Cornell University Press 328 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978 0801446290
Available here →January 13, 2012
20120113-hoffmann-david-on-cultivating-the-masses-1-1-1
In a nutshell
The rest of this thread
David L. Hoffmann
David L. Hoffmann is Professor of History at Ohio State University. He received his B.A. at Lawrence University and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University. Besides Cultivating the Masses, featured on Rorotoko, Hoffmann is the author of Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (1994) and Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (2003), all by Cornell University Press, and the editor of Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Macmillan, 2000) andStalinism: The Essential Readings (Blackwell, 2002).
Pull this thread
pulls againstpulls alongside
Socialist ideology did not cause Stalinist violence, whose techniques came from a European repertoire of modern state practice.
Against DS · Dehumanization works because its victims are seen as human vermin, uncanny fusions of fellow human and subhuman creature. On: Ideology explains state and collective violence
Against AS · Russian revolutionary terrorism grew from deep Christian soil, and Zasulich's dream of martyrdom came from reading the Bible. On: Ideology explains state and collective violence
Against FF · Fascism was a transatlantic ideology, and Argentina's sacred Catholic version runs directly into Peronism and the 1976 dictatorship. On: Ideology explains state and collective violence
Alongside HR · Wounded Knee happened because control of the U.S. Senate hung on one contested South Dakota seat. On: Ideology explains state and collective violence
Alongside TH · Ordinary crime control, not ideology, was one of the decisive steps to the Bolshevik totalitarian state. On: Ideology explains state and collective violence
Alongside AW · Beijing's red guard factions came from the same politically reliable families and fought because China's leaders were divided. On: Ideology explains state and collective violence
Know something the rest of us don't?
Most threads on Rorotoko begin with our invitation. Any thread can begin with a proposal: you write it with the same prompts every thread answers, and we review it.
Propose a thread →