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Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939

Online ISBN:
9780801462832
Print ISBN:
9780801446290
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939

David L. Hoffmann
David L. Hoffmann
The Ohio State University.
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Published online:
18 August 2016
Published in print:
6 October 2011
Online ISBN:
9780801462832
Print ISBN:
9780801446290
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

Under Joseph 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. This book examines the Party leadership's pursuit of these seemingly contradictory policies in order to grasp fully the character of the Stalinist regime. To analyze Soviet social policies, the book places them in an international comparative context. It 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.

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