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Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939
344![Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914-1939
344Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801479748 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 10/02/2014 |
Edition description: | Reprint |
Pages: | 344 |
Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Social WelfareCameralism, Social Science, and the Origins of WelfareThe Social Realm in RussiaWarfare and WelfareThe Soviet Welfare State
2. Public HealthSocial Medicine and the StateSocial HygieneForeign Influences on Soviet Health CarePhysical Culture and Its Militarization
3. Reproductive PoliciesBirthrates and National PowerContraception, Abortion, and Reproductive HealthPromoting Motherhood and FamilyEugenicsInfant Care and Childraising
4. Surveillance and PropagandaMonitoring Popular MoodsWartime PropagandaSoviet SurveillancePolitical EnlightenmentThe New Soviet Person
5. State ViolenceOrigins of Modern State ViolenceInternments, Deportations, and Genocide during the First World WarThe Russian Civil War and the 1920sCollectivization and PassportizationThe Mass OperationsThe National Operations
Conclusion
Archives ConsultedIndex
What People are Saying About This
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.
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.