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  • Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930
  • Nathaniel Knight
Daniel Beer . Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1930. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. ix + 229 pp. $45.00, £22.95 (978-0-8014-4627-6).

Fin-de-siècle Europeans lived in a world of progress and anxiety. Glorifying in their technological achievements and global dominance, Europeans were nonetheless [End Page 800] haunted by the specter of moral and physical degeneration. Scholars of the human sciences have explored western European theories of degeneration at length. Daniel Beer now aims a spotlight at the comparable discourse in Russia and the early Soviet Union. Beer extends his analysis well beyond the realm of science. Theories of degeneration and deviance, rooted in the prerevolutionary tradition and infused with Marxism in the 1920s, came to serve, he argues, as a "condition of possibility" (p. 204), an enabling factor facilitating Stalinist repression. Beer's argument falls within a growing body of scholarship that spans the boundary of 1917 and treats late imperial society as a laboratory of ideas and practices that would ultimately grow into the totalitarian repertoire of the Soviet state. Late imperial liberalism, in particular, with its abiding faith in the power of science, its visions of social transformation, and its mistrust of the masses, appears not as a victim of Bolshevism but rather as an elder sibling preparing the way for the Communist utopia.

Beer's story is one of ideas. Institutions, social settings, and even individuals are excluded from his narrative. In their place, Beer unfurls a discourse, a cluster of mutually reinforcing ideas laid out in a set of texts produced by a relatively small group of scholars at the intersection of the medical and social sciences—psychiatrists, physiologists, physicians, sociologists, criminologists, and a few anthropologists. Unifying the discourse is a curious blend of optimism and pessimism—on one hand, a pervasive belief in the degenerative impact of modern life and on the other, faith in the transformative power of science. Modernity was both cause and cure of society's ills.

Beer's early chapters lay out in detail the mechanisms of degeneration and their supposed effects. Eschewing or misconstruing Darwinian natural selection, Russian theorists from the 1880s onward embraced a neo-Lamarckian model of biological transformation. Damage inflicted by an unhealthy environment, it was assumed, could be passed on and amplified in subsequent generations. Thus Russia faced a double burden: the impact of urbanization and industrialization superimposed upon the enduring legacy of serfdom. The result was a wave of pathologies—malformed bodies, depraved morals, and stunted intellects—an alarming social epidemic obvious to clinicians but irreducible to external causes.

Politically, degeneration theory placed its practitioners in an ambivalent position. Overwhelmingly liberal in their political sentiments, Beer's scientists held the Tsarist regime responsible for the environment that fostered degeneration. But revolution to them was more a manifestation of deviance than a corrective. The turmoil of 1905, in fact, demonstrated the dangerous tendencies prevalent among the lower classes. European science confirmed these fears. Theories of crowd behavior underlined the fragility of individual reason and the violent impulses lurking just below the surface of social order. Deviance, moreover, had the potential to act as a social contagion contaminating all of society, especially the poor and uneducated. Degenerate individuals therefore posed a threat not only to themselves and their victims but to society as whole. Incarceration, isolation, and forced therapy were justified not simply as a means of rehabilitation, but also as a "social defense" protecting the healthy elements of society against infection. [End Page 801]

Passing over the turbulent years of war and revolution, Beer finds in the 1920s a younger generation of specialists who had made peace with the Bolshevik regime and redefined deviance as a failure to adapt to the new conditions. Individuals who could not conform constituted a "social danger" and were prescribed the same coercive treatment that had been recommended for deviants under the old regime. Thus the liberal discourse of social degeneration took a decidedly illiberal turn, merging seamlessly with totalitarian impulses of the Soviet state.

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