Renovating Russia: The Human Sciences and the Fate of Liberal Modernity, 1880–1980 (review)

This book is informative and thought-provoking in two respects. But it is also incomplete and misleading. First the positives. Four of the book’s five chapters explore a fairly neglected cohort in late Imperial Russia: psychiatrists, psychologists, and criminologists, particularly in their attempt to unravel whether deviant and criminal behaviors are genetic or the result of environmental factors. The examination gives added dimension to our knowledge about medical specialists and the intelligentsia in late Imperial Russia, especially how au courant they were with Western European and American theories about criminality, deviance, and crowd behavior. The theories of both the foreigners and the Russians are presented in a concise and palatable manner, nicely depicting both Beer’s and the late Imperial Russian human scientists’ wide ranging familiarity with the new sciences of sociology and anthropology. The Russians accepted some foreign interpretations, rejected others, and engaged in vigorous debates and empirical studies in order to understand criminal and mass psychology.

Beer’s thesis for these chapters also is convincing. It is that “liberal” psychiatrists and psychologists initially supported greater democracy in Russia but, upon close encounters with the masses, particularly with peasants (who constituted some 80% of the population), and having witnessed street violence during the upheavals of 1904 and 1905, became distrustful of the masses’ ability to manage their own affairs. Thus, instead of advocating greater participation by the populace in policy making, the liberal human scientists sanctioned the subordination of the great unwashed to intellectual élites.

The major problems regarding this section of Beer’s work are a failure to site the “liberal” Russian psychiatrists and psychologists in the context of actual political, economic, and social developments in late Imperial Russia and the uncertain linkage between the liberal human scientists, and identified liberals.

In viewing late Imperial Russia totally through the prism of the “liberal” human scientists Beer gives readers a distorted picture of the actual environment in this seminal and dynamic period. The “liberal” scientists are out of touch with reality. We are told that they wanted to modernize Russia, particularly in the political sector. But political, economic, and educational progress was already visible in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and certified liberal groups and individuals, as well as enlightened bureaucrats, had played a major role in the process.

Zemstvos or local councils, established in 1864 in thirty-four of the empire’s fifty European provinces (and subsequently in others) were comprised of representatives of those who owned land in freehold—including peasants who owned land outside their communes, owners of businesses and communal peasants, some ex-serfs. These bodies, uniting disparate groups, expanded medical care and education and, to a lesser extent, improved the infrastructure on the district level and on the provincial level until the Bolsheviks shut them down in 1918. City government was very democratic between 1870 and 1892, enabling all who paid even a small local tax to participate in urban councils or dumas. Women who fulfilled the requisites participated in zemstvos and city dumas through male relatives. Although Russia had no parliament until 1906, the zemstvos and city dumas served as training grounds in self-government, as Charles Timberlake has documented in the case of the Tver zemstvo and V. A. Nardova has demonstrated in her Russian-language study of city governments.

Zemstvo and city activists, in conjunction with professionals, created national liberal parties, principally the Constitutional Democrats or Kadets and the Party of 17 October or Octobrists, in the first years of the twentieth century. The elections to the first two State Dumas, or lower houses of the national parliament, had wide suffrage as Rolf Torstendahl and Natalia Selunskaia have demonstrated in their Russian-language study of the elections in six provinces. And far from being ignorant and passive, peasants hired teachers, as Ben Ekloff has documented, who were engines of Russia’s economy and were savvy electors...