David L. Hoffmann

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

Cover Interview of January 12, 2012

In a nutshell

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.

europe / violence / government / 20th century / modernity / soviet union / socialism / warfare / stalin joseph / family /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009