Daniel Beer

“Microbes of the Mind”: Moral Contagion in Late Imperial Russia*

Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace, first published in 1869, contains a memorable scene depicting the lynching of a young man. Vereshchagin stands accused of disseminating defeatist literature in Moscow as Napoleon’s army sweeps eastward. On the eve of the city’s fall in September 1812, a crowd of fearful and panicked Muscovites assembles in front of the residence of the city’s governor, Count Rostopchin. Disconcerted by its unpredictable and riotous potential, Rostopchin pronounces the prisoner responsible for Moscow’s surrender and orders his dragoons to cut Vereshchagin down in front of the crowd. Yet events quickly run out of control:

The Medicalization of Religious Deviance in the Russian Orthodox Church (1880-1905)

ions, like ‘the utopian mentality’ or the collective ‘Freudian’ psyche. We might pause, in our disillusionment with tired forms of explanation, before attributing the course of these events to the influence of metaphors invented by intellectuals like ourselves” (Engelstein, “Paradigms, Pathologies,” 877).

Blueprints for Change: The Human Sciences and the Coercive Transformation of Deviants in Russia, 1890–1930

Drawing on the writings of criminologists and psychiatrists in the late imperial and early Soviet periods, the article argues that Soviet biopsychological constructions of the socially deviant have their origins in the efforts of tsarist liberals to identify and contain the crime and social disorder that accompanied Russia’s modernization. While the historiography has traditionally portrayed the Bolshevik Revolution as a tragic overthrow of liberal ideas and values, the article points to important continuities that span the 1917 divide. In the late imperial period, the human sciences began to categorize individuals who posed a biopsychological threat, a “social danger,” to the social order. In the wake of the revolution, these ideas became radicalized under the impact of Soviet Marxism to generate indictments of entire social groups and classes.