Renovating Russia is a richly comparative investigation of late Imperial and early Soviet medico-scientific theories of moral and social disorder. Daniel Beer argues that in the late Imperial years liberal psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists grappled with an intractable dilemma. They sought to renovate Russia, to forge a modern enlightened society governed by the rule of law, but they feared the backwardness, irrationality, and violent potential of the Russian masses. Situating their studies of degeneration, crime, mental illness, and crowd psychology in a pan-European context, Beer shows how liberals' fears of societal catastrophe were only heightened by the effects of industrial modernization and the rise of mass politics. In the wake of the orgy of violence that swept the Empire in the 1905 Revolution, these intellectual elites increasingly put their faith in coercive programs of scientific social engineering.

Their theories survived liberalism's political defeat in 1917 and meshed with the Bolsheviks' radical project for social transformation. They came to sanction the application of violent transformative measures against entire classes, culminating in the waves of state repression that accompanied forced industrialization and collectivization. Renovating Russia thus offers a powerful revisionist challenge to established views of the fate of liberalism in the Russian Revolution.

About the Author

Daniel Beer is Lecturer in Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Reviews

Beer offers a wealth of new material on the pre-revolutionary roots of the intellectual apparatus used by the Bolsheviks to make sense of their society. The book offers a convincing case in favor of seeing the Soviet modernization project, not as a deviation from European modernity, but as 'a legitimate offspring of the modern spirit,' as Zygmunt Bauman has put it. The book also effectively challenges a common perception that the biological paradigm for understanding social issues was completely marginal to the Russian intellectual tradition.... Daniel Beer succeeds in offering an unexpected perspective on Russian and pan-European influences on Soviet socialism.

* Times Literary Supplement *



Book Information
ISBN 9780801446276
Author Daniel Beer
Format Hardback
Page Count 248
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 155mm * 21mm