In this innovative and revelatory work, Igal Halfin exposes the
inner struggles of Soviet Communists to identify themselves with
the Bolshevik Party during the decisive decades of the 1920s and
1930s. The Bolsheviks preached the moral transformation of Russians
into model Communists for their political and personal salvation.
To screen the population for moral and political deviance, the
Bolsheviks enlisted natural scientists, doctors, psychologists,
sexologists, writers, and Party prophets to establish criteria for
judging people. Self-inspection became a central Bolshevik
practice. Communists were expected to write autobiographies in
which they reconfigured their life experience in line with the
demands of the Party.
Halfin traces the intellectual contortions of this project.
Initially, the Party denounced deviant Communists, especially the
Trotskyists, as degenerate, but innocuous, souls; but in a chilling
turn in the mid-1930s, the Party came to demonize the unreformed as
virulent, malicious counterrevolutionaries. The insistence that the
good society could not triumph unless every wicked individual was
destroyed led to the increasing condemnation of Party members as
helplessly flawed.
Combining the analysis of autobiography with the study of
Communist psychology and sociology and the politics of Bolshevik
self-fashioning, Halfin gives us powerful new insight into the
preconditions of the bloodbath that was the Great Purge.
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