CULTIVATING THE MASSES

David L. Hoffmann

ISBN 10: 0801446295 / ISBN 13: 9780801446290

Published by CORNELL UNIV PR, 2011

About this Item

Hoffmann examines the Soviet government s implementation of sweeping social welfare and public health measures to safeguard people s well-being and literacy campaigns, political education, and efforts to instill in people an appreciation of high culture.

Seller Inventory # 595002844

Bibliographic Details

• Title: CULTIVATING THE MASSES
• Publisher: CORNELL UNIV PR
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801446295
• ISBN 13: 9780801446290
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

David L. Hoffmann is Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He is the author of Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917–1941 and Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941, both from Cornell. He is also the editor of Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices and Stalinism: The Essential Readings.