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.
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