In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion In 1929, Ivan Vvedenskii argued that psychiatry was the branch of medicine in which coercion was “the rule rather than the exception.” He explained that the principle of coercion is deployed specifically and systematically in psychiatry . . . . The premise for the deployment of psychiatric coercion is the thought that mental illness distorts the individual’s capacity to understand his situation and his interests, rights, and obligations, disrupts his reciprocal relations with the surrounding environment, and in so doing deprives him of the right autonomously to decide his own actions and to bear the responsibility for them.1 Vvedenskii’s statement offers a distilled expression of the axis of intellectual continuity that runs throughout the revolutionary era in Russia. Confronting a still overwhelmingly peasant society at the turn of the twentieth century, Russian liberal practitioners of the human sciences struggled to articulate the conditions necessary for the modernization of the country, the civic, material and spiritual emancipation of its population, and the creation of a functioning Rechtsstaat. In so doing, they invalidated the claims of contemporaries to individual autonomy and sovereignty and asserted that Russia’s salvation only lay in a scientifically structured understanding of normality that was theirs to define. Propelled by the moderns’ hybrid of boundless optimism and bottomless despair, the human sciences grappled with the forces of vice, disorder, and subversion. Practitioners of the disciplines of psychiatry, criminology, and 1 Ivan N. Vvedenskii, “Prinuditel'noe lechenie dushevno-bol'nykh i psikhopatov,” in Dushevno-bol'nye pravonarushiteli i prinuditel'noe lechenie, ed. P. V. Gannushkin (Moscow: NKVD, 1929), 8. 206 | Renovating Russia psychology throughout the revolutionary period (both liberal “fathers” in the fin-de-siècle and their more radical “sons” working under the Bolsheviks) applied a biopsychological model of deviance to an ever-expanding range of moral, social, and political conduct deemed antithetical to the well-being of society and its future prospects. Soviet totalitarianism distinguished itself from liberal forms of government through the limitless application of Vvedenskii’s principle of coercion to all social and political constituencies understood to have failed in their adaptation to the new order. Yet the Bolsheviks’ own conception of societal renovation (and the nature of the forces impeding it), was heavily indebted to visions of reform and progress articulated by liberal elites in the fin-de-siècle. It was precisely in their enthusiasm for order, improvement, and the creation of a law-bound society (in which Kistiakovskii’s internal restraints would do away with the need for external ones) that Russia’s liberal elites in the scientific, medical, and legal professions could not but endorse, albeit with deep reservations, a tutelary program of coercive modernization. A priori , they claimed a privileged understanding of the needs and interests of the population on whose behalf they sought reform. Alarmed by the backwardness of the Russian people and the violence and disorder they perceived to be expanding throughout the empire in tandem with modernization, liberals within the human sciences came to argue for a series of draconian measures intended temporarily to withhold the democratic rights of the Russian people and to sanction the coercive treatment of the socially dangerous. Yet once reconfigured within the millenarian framework of Soviet Marxism, such arguments came to sanction not the temporary but rather the indefinite subjugation of the population to a disciplinary program of societal and individual transformation. Such a view leads us to a reconceptualization of the fate of liberal modernity in the Russian Revolution.2 Laura Engelstein has articulated what is probably a majority opinion among historians of the period: Whether one believes that Russian liberalism ought to have triumphed, had any reasonable chance of succeeding, or was inevitably doomed, the liberal project has an unavoidable pathos in the social and political environment of late 2 Much has been written in the last decade or so exploring continuities across the 1917 divide. The nature and duration of the continuity depends very much on the thematic focus of the analysis. Oleg Kharkhordin has, for example, claimed to undercover deep continuities in practices of self-formation that stretch back to the sixteenth century in his comparison of the monastery statutes of Saint Joseph Volotskii (1503) and the disciplinary techniques employed in the Soviet educationalist Anton Makarenko’s labor colony of the 1930s. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 54, 117–22. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal has meanwhile argued that Stalinism’s violent transformative agenda was deeply...

Share