Cultivating the Masses

Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, 1914–1939

David L. Hoffmann

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780801462849
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

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.

1 Social Welfare

The science of policing consists, therefore, in regulating everything that relates to the present condition of society, in strengthening and improving it, in seeing that all things contribute to the welfare of the members that compose it.

—JOHANN VON JUSTI, General Elements of Policing, 1768

Social security for all workers who suffer the loss of labor capacity or unemployment must be a matter of the state.

—ALEKSANDR VINOKUROV, Social Security (from Capitalism to Communism), 1921

Social welfare in its most basic sense refers to provision for the well-being of society’s members, particularly those in need such as the sick, the elderly, and the unemployed. Among the programs commonly associated with welfare are poor relief, disability and unemployment aid, and old age pensions. Welfare, however, can also refer to a broader range of social intervention and regulation designed to improve urban living conditions, order social practices, and inculcate productive behavioral norms—all to ensure the rational conduct of everyday life and the purposeful deployment of human resources. Welfare in this broader sense goes beyond financial assistance to include social work, slum renovation, urban planning, public health, factory inspections, and efforts to school the lower classes in norms of efficiency and hygiene.

Traditional explanations for the rise of the welfare state present it as a by-product of industrialization and urbanization, particularly as the result of labor organizers’ and radicals’ demands that allegedly compelled state leaders to provide for people in need. Research on state welfare programs, however, has undermined these interpretations. Industrialization in the United States sparked no national welfare initiatives; the first extensive welfare program was created much later with the 1935 Social Security Act.1 Moreover, European welfare programs were proposed and implemented not by radicals but by liberal or conservative politicians and bureaucrats. Working-class organizations did not push for, and in some cases even opposed, welfare proposals as they agitated instead for higher wages.2 Although a desire to preempt unrest or to win working-class votes did motivate some politicians in the second half of the nineteenth century, state responsibility for social welfare resulted from a more general reconceptualization whereby officials and nonstate professionals came to see the conservation of the social whole as dependent on the welfare of its members. Also important was a concern of state officials with maintaining the economic and military capacity of their populations. The term welfare state was first used by Sir William Beveridge in the 1940s as an explicit contrast to the Nazi “warfare state.” But already in the late nineteenth century, the state role in welfare had expanded dramatically. And particularly during the interwar period, welfare and warfare were intimately connected, as government leaders implemented welfare programs to ensure the war-readiness of their populations.3

The Russian case provides a striking example of the catalytic impact of the First World War on the development of state welfare programs. Russia had lagged behind most countries of Western Europe in state responsibility for social welfare. But with the First World War the Russian state greatly expanded its role in providing for the population’s well-being, first through parastatal organizations and later via state institutions. Following the October Revolution, Soviet leaders inherited many of the programs of the wartime tsarist and provisional governments. They soon expanded these programs and decreed a comprehensive system of pensions, disability benefits, and unemployment relief. Initially Soviet welfare benefits existed mostly on paper, but with the establishment of the Stalinist planned economy in the 1930s, the Soviet state not only commandeered all available resources but took on responsibility for virtually all workers’ needs, including food supply, housing, and full employment. Soviet social provision, then, emerged not as an attempt to ameliorate the negative effects of capitalism, but rather as part of Party leaders’ attempt to construct a modern, industrial, noncapitalist economy. More than a social safety net, Soviet welfare was to be part of a rational and productive economic order, one directed by the state allegedly in the interests of the laboring classes. The Soviet system, with its requirement that everyone perform “socially useful labor,” is also an example of how welfare in interwar Europe was expanded as a set of reciprocal obligations between the state and its citizens, rather than as a means to protect the dignity of individuals.

Before turning to welfare in Russia and the Soviet Union, I will trace the origins of social welfare concerns and policies more generally, beginning with some features of cameralist thought in early modern Europe and proceeding to developments in social science in the nineteenth century. The social sciences helped to delineate a social realm, distinct from political and economic spheres, and offered a means to study and act on a range of seemingly interconnected problems, such as indigence, degeneracy, crime, and working-class unrest. The delineation of the social realm and the emergence of “the social question” in nineteenth-century Western Europe were essential precursors to social welfare programs, as well as to various forms of social intervention to be discussed throughout this book.

Cameralism, Social Science, and the Origins of Welfare

Political leaders had always ruled over people, but they had not always conceived of themselves as ruling over a population. Only at a particular moment in history did leaders become overwhelmingly concerned with their populations as a resource to be cultivated. The roots of the welfare state lay in the early modern period, when state officials began to scrutinize the population and its productive capacity. In particular, cameralist thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries studied the relationship between the state’s economic and military power and the size and productivity of its population. Unlike earlier thinkers who had focused on territory as the fundamental object of governance, cameralists concentrated on the population and material goods. This reorientation implied aims that went beyond control of territory to include maximizing wealth and ensuring the population’s ability to produce goods and multiply in number. Such ideas also implied a need for knowledge of people and resources, and an administrative apparatus to produce this knowledge and elevate economic production. Throughout the seventeenth century, cameralist thinkers promoted these new goals of government and further analyzed the possibilities for state efforts to raise the productive capacity of the population.4

State concern with infant mortality illustrates rulers’ new understanding of the population as a resource. By the mid-eighteenth century, social thinkers had generated an extensive literature on infant mortality and its costs to the state. One commentator, describing high mortality rates in foundling homes, decried the fact that such a high percentage of human “forces” had died before having been “made useful to the state.”5 Eighteenth-century Russian rulers expressed similar concerns about “human capital” and acted to expand the population through improved infant care. In 1712, Peter the Great issued a decree that deplored infanticide and that ordered construction of foundling homes for illegitimate children in every province. Under Catherine the Great, Russian foundling homes attempted to train abandoned children to be productive subjects.6

Cameralist thought convinced many European rulers that their political and military power depended not only on their ability to collect taxes, but on the overall economic prosperity of the population they ruled. This realization underlay efforts to police societies, enhance their productive capacities, and systematize governmental administration in a way that would encourage economic development.7 The desire to maximize productive capacity also prompted political thinkers to focus on the human body and utilization of its productive and reproductive capacities. What has been termed “an anatomo-politics of the human body” began in the seventeenth century with efforts to discipline and extract labor from workers by integrating them into systems of efficient economic controls.8 Eighteenth-century physiocratic thinkers further elaborated these views and described the state not only as the beneficiary of wealth, but as an instrument to increase wealth by governing social relations in a way to intensify production. An expanded notion of policing was articulated, for example, by the German economic thinker Johann von Justi, who wrote, “The aim of policing is to make everything that composes the state serve to strengthen and increase its power, and to likewise serve the public welfare.”9

Eventually the narrow fiscal interests of cameralist thinkers were superseded by broader objectives of improving society for its own sake. Politically, this emphasis on social amelioration stemmed from new principles of sovereignty introduced by the American and French revolutions. The French Revolution deposed the king and took from him the ancient notion of sovereignty and linked it with popular will. In the name of popular sovereignty, social resources were levied and deployed on an unprecedented scale.10 Not only did this democratization of sovereignty greatly amplify state power, it also meant that the state, no longer an instrument of the monarch, now was to serve the people and provide for their betterment. While monarchical regimes throughout the nineteenth century contested this new political order, the principle of popular sovereignty nonetheless posed a challenge that traditional regimes had to address. As countries moved fitfully toward this new benchmark, no longer was the population seen as merely a resource to state ends. Instead political thinkers increasingly saw the state and its citizens as having mutual obligations to serve one another. The cameralist police state—society at the ...

Table of contents

• Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Social Welfare
• 2. Public Health
• 3. Reproductive Policies
• 4. Surveillance and Propaganda
• 5. State Violence
• Conclusion
• Archives Consulted