Kenneth M. Pinnow, Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. xi + 276, $49.95, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-8014-4766-2.

Abstract

With Lost to the Collective, Kenneth M. Pinnow details the rise of the ‘social science state’ in the Soviet Union. In the investigations of suicides by state, party, and military organs, Pinnow underscores the desire of authorities to see citizens through forms, statistics, and forensic examinations, but highlights a uniquely Bolshevik goal of diagnosing and preventing ideological deviance alongside a distinctive conception of the role of the state in the lives of Soviet individuals. Pinnow argues that because the Bolsheviks believed the survival of their collective was closely tied to individual behaviour, ‘the making of suicide into public property achieved its ultimate expression in the hands of the Soviets’ (p. 65). The number of suicides pales in comparison to the vast losses from war, disease, and famine in the aftermath of revolution, yet suicide emerged as a focal point for broad investigation in 1920, under the purview of the Soviet Commissariat of Health, even in the face of limited resources and personnel. Pinnow argues that Soviet doctors, psychiatrists, and forensic specialists elevated the importance of suicide as a way to assess both the individual’s progress and that of society as a whole. The evaluation of suicide fluctuated depending upon viewer and victim. Many authorities considered it a mark of degeneracy in males, it was especially disquieting when found among the advanced cadres of Komsomol youth, the Red Army, or party workers, yet they considered suicide a sign of progress in women who, as a consequence of the opportunities of revolution, were more engaged in economic and social affairs. Numbers, especially those collected by the Department of Moral Statistics of the Central Statistical Administration, became a major part of expert analysis, but even so, Pinnow deftly shows how not all were won over to the side of data, as debate raged over the value of aggregates over the investigation of the particular. As they examined holdovers of the past, moral statisticians measured their profession’s progress against the dearth of statistical studies from Tsarist authorities. In the creation of this statistical structure, Pinnow argues that the Soviet state presided over ‘the formation and radical expansion of the social as a site of governmental action during the 1920s’ (p. 13). Firmly embedded in works on the history of medicine, psychology, and sociology in Russia and Europe, Pinnow’s study is less tied to cultural works – particularly those on gender. Although Pinnow brings excellent insights to the perceived wave of female suicides, anxiety over masculine potency and feminine danger resonate through the expert commentaries on male suicides as well, and could have been more fully explored. Including Elizabeth Wood’s work on the interconnection of gender and political standing, as well as further incorporating the ruminations of Fran Bernstein, Dan Healey, Sharon Kowalsky and Eric Naiman on the angst-filled, gender-troubled NEP era, would have expanded on the underlying disquiet regarding nervousness and problems of the will among male suicides, as well as giving further depth to the analysis of suicides among women. Clearly written and provocatively argued, the work is extremely, and impressively, well situated within the Russian language materials – both contemporary and modern – and contributes to a growing literature on the ways in which Soviet policies compare to those of Europe and to pre-revolutionary Russia (many of these works also authored by graduates of Columbia’s prolific and influential programme). Specialists in the history of suicide, psychology, sociology, or forensic medicine will find much of comparative interest in the history of these fields in the exotic, contested, and politically charged terrain of revolutionary and Stalinist Russia.