Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921-1929 (review)

"To commit suicide is to hand over one's self and story to others" (p. 64). In this engaging and lucid analysis of self-killing in the early years of the world's first socialist state, Kenneth Pinnow examines how these stories offer a compelling explanation of the Soviet state's insistent attempts to get inside the heads of its citizens. Arguing that Bolsheviks with the help of liberal experts inherited from the tsarist regime established the "Soviet social science state" (p. 10), this study joins recent investigations of Russia's expert-state relationship in positing major continuities across the 1917 divide.¹ Considerable common ground emerged between the "scientific socialism" of the Bolsheviks (from 1918, the Communist Party) and the liberal social sciences as practiced during the heterodox and anxious 1920s.

While arguing "against Soviet exceptionalism" (p. 11) in matters suicidal, Pinnow also demonstrates that the Soviets distinguished themselves by the degree to which they used European medical and social measures "shaping the subjective affairs of the individual" (p. 12). Suicide science shaped the world, and the individual psyches, of those whom the suicide left behind, constructing new forms of selfhood.

Chapter 1 shows how pre-1917 medicine and criminology struggled with the problem. If the tsarist state rejected the proposition that "society" can be measured as a first step to population management, nonetheless, liberal experts versed in European suicide studies (from Lombrosian degeneration to Durkheimian sociology) were eager to deploy the new disciplinary techniques. The catastrophe of 1914-21 seemed to call for fresh methods of analysis, and the Bolshevik regime that brought the state back from the brink of disintegration offered opportunities for experts who worked with it.

The subsequent chapters examine particular locations where suicide was investigated and the "social science state" articulated. Chapter 2 looks at Communist Party internal discussions about self-destruction. Inside the party moral and medical views competed for primacy; the suicide was a deserter from the socialist movement but also, if a close comrade, a victim of mental illness brought on by political struggle. The tension between the individual's exit and the collective's search for devotion often triggered a party discussion group with "a trained facilitator" (p. 71) leading to posthumous "excommunication" (pp. 71-72) of the comrade- suicide. High-profile suicides agitated supporters of leadership rivals Lev Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, and analyses seesawed between moral condemnation and medical sympathy. A focus on the individual's agency, Pinnow argues, made Soviet views of the suicide distinctive in their deemphasis on deterministic causal factors.

Discipline-building liberals in forensic medicine (chap. 3) and moral statistics (chap. 4) are examined next. Forensic doctors and bureaucrats promoted both population monitoring (by national surveys of suicide) and autopsy as a means of gathering sociomedical knowledge. They prescribed solutions based on their data: eugenics to prevent degeneration, psychiatric dispensaries to relieve distress, and social work to catch potential suicides. Moral statisticians however declined to offer prescriptions from their separate efforts to count suicide. This "passive observational stance" (p. 183) might throw light on dangerous realities such as youth and women's suicide, but such diffidence led to the closing of their bureau in 1931. The social science state demanded knowledge it could apply; and, increasingly under Stalin's leadership, it did not publicize socialism's failings.

Inside the Red Army, political instructors conducted a close investigation of each soldier's suicide, leaving a vivid paper trail (chap. 5). Propagandists, medics, and officers all had to account for the loss to the military collective. Their surveillance of every aspect of the suicide's existence was "a medicopolitics that promoted the comprehensive care of the individual as an integral component of the collective's existence and well-being" (p. 228), yet ominously it "left open the possibility for a radicalization" (p. 229). An epilogue shows the consequences of radicalization in...