Socialist Realism and the Study of Rural Life, 1945–1958

Abstract

The campaign against cosmopolitanism (1946–1953) forced social scientists to develop a methodology that captured socialist transformation in a socialist realist vernacular. The article examines the way socialist realism served as a prism through which to identify, categorize, and order research objects. Focusing primarily a 1951 ethnographic expedition to Voronezh province and its search for a “typical” village, the article argues that ethnographers, like other social scientists, perceived themselves as social engineers and their mission as molding soviet society into a socialist realist form. In this sense, scientists used socialist realism as a mechanism to distill reality into socialism. The article suggests that rather than discuss the truth value of soviet social scientific knowledge, historians should conceptualize these scholars’ work as manifestations of a unique soviet impulse to transform society.