Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-18T18:30:46.479Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Population Politics, Power and the Problem of Modernity in Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2014

CLIFFORD ROSENBERG
CLIFFORD ROSENBERG*
Affiliation:
The City University of New York: History Department, The City College of New York, 160 Convent Avenue, New York, NY 10031, USA; CRosenberg@ccny.cuny.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Did population policy under Stalin differ, in any fundamental respect, from those of inter-war France or other Western countries? In a radical rethinking of the Soviet experience, Stephen Kotkin said no. Magnetic Mountain moved the field of Soviet history past an increasingly sterile cold war standoff between the so-called new social history and the totalitarian school. With the social history generation, Kotkin insisted on seeing the Soviet project from the perspective of ordinary people, subject to the same kind of forces that applied throughout Europe. He had no truck with ideas like oriental despotism or Russian exceptionalism, but, with the totalitarian school, he took ideology seriously, presenting everyday life and high politics within a single analytical frame. To do so, he drew eclectically on a range of theoretical perspectives, above all on the work of the late Michel Foucault. Foucault often implied that Auschwitz and the Gulag were the logical outcome of the Enlightenment project, but his primary goal was to illuminate the corrosive, coercive nature of liberal reform efforts in Western Europe, to puncture their claims to universality. The vast bulk of his corpus avoided the twentieth century. Kotkin, by contrast, used Foucault's perspective directly on the Soviet system itself.

Type
Forum: Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain (1995)
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , May 2014 , pp. 193 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar. Future references will be cited in parenthesis in the text.

2 Rosenberg, Clifford, Policing Paris: The Origins of Modern Immigration Controls Between the Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

3 Foucault, Michel, ‘La “gouvernementalité”’ (lecture at the Collège de France, 1 Feb. 1978), Dits et écrits (hereafter DE), Vol. 2: 1976–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001)Google Scholar, document (hereafter doc.) 239, 2:635–57.

4 For critiques of abstract, teleological concepts of modernity, Cooper, Frederick, ‘Modernity’, in his Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar, ch. 5; and Mazower, Mark, ‘Foucault, Agamben: Theory and the Nazis’, boundary 2, 35, 1 (2008): 23–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Noiriel, Gérard, ‘Les Pratiques policières d’identification des migrants et leurs enjeux pour l’histoire des relations de pouvoir: Contribution à une réflexion en “longue durée”’, in Blanc-Chaléard, Marie-Claude, Douki, Caroline, Dyonet, Nicole and Milliot, Vincent, eds, Police et migrants, France 1667–1939 (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2001), 115–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See the exchange between Gary Gerstle and the migration scholar Donna Gabaccia in The Journal of American History, 84, 2 (1997), esp. 574–5, and 580. For the landmark overview of work on the US, Bodnar, John, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; for Europe, see Hoerder, Dirk and Moch, Leslie Page, eds, European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

7 Piore, Michael, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also McKeown, Adam, ‘Global Migration, 1846–1970’, Journal of World History, 15, 2 (June 2004): 155–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, more broadly, Hoerder, Dirk, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, parts 3–4.

8 Halfin, Igal and Hellbeck, Jochen, ‘Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain and the State of Soviet Historical Studies’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 44, 3 (1996): 456–63Google Scholar.

9 On this point, Moine, Natalie, ‘Le Système des passeports à l’époque stalinienne: De la purge des grandes villes au morcellement du territoire, 1932–1953’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 50, 1 (Jan.–Mar. 2003): 152Google Scholar.

10 Buckley, Cynthia, ‘The Myth of Managed Migration: Migration Control and Market in the Soviet Period’, Slavic Review, 54, 1 (1995): 896–916CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Moine gives some indication in ‘Le Système des passeports’, 152–4. For police efforts elsewhere, Becker, Peter, Verderbnis und Entartung: Eine Geschichte der Kriminologie des 19. Jahrhunderts als Diskurs und Praxis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2002)Google Scholar; Becker, , ‘Vom “Haltlosen” zur “Bestie”: Das polizeiliche Bild des “Verbrechers” im 19. Jahrhundert’, in ‘Sicherheit’ und ‘Wohlfahrt’: Polizei, Gesellschaft und Herrschaft im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Lüdke, Alf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 97–131Google Scholar, esp. 126–31; and Ilsen About, ‘Naissance d’une science policière de l’identification en Italie (1902–1922)’, in the special issue, ‘Police et identification: Enjeux, pratiques, techniques’, ed. Pierre Piazza, Les cahiers de la sécurité, no. 56 (2005), 167–200.

12 Gutmann, Myron P. and van de Walle, Étienne, ‘New Sources For Social and Demographic History: The Belgian Population Registers’, Social Science History, 2, 2 (1978): 121–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kalvenmark, Ann-Sophie, ‘The Country That Kept Track of Its Population’, in Time, Space, and Man: Essays in Microdemography, ed. Sundin, Jan and Söderlund, E. (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1979), 221–38Google Scholar; Torpey, John, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and the work of Fahrmeir, Andreas, especially his ‘Paßwesen und Staatsbildung im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Historische Zeitschrift, 271 (2000): 68–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Fosdick, Raymond, European Police Systems (New York: Century, 1915), 353Google Scholar.

14 Rosenberg, Policing Paris, chs 6–7.

15 Mazower, Mark, ed., The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1997)Google Scholar.

16 Cf. Moine, Natalie, ‘Comment peut-on être pauvre sans être prolétaire? La privation de droits civiques à Moscou au tournant des années 1920–1930’, Mouvement social,196 (2001): 89–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Denis, Vincent, Une histoire de l’identité: France, 1715–1815 (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008)Google Scholar, ch. 12. For an earlier period, Groebner, Valentin, Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe, tr. Kyburz, Mark and Peck, John (New York: Zone Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

18 Calavita, Kitty, ‘The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and “Passing”: Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882–1910’, Law and Social Inquiry, 25, 1 (2000): 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McKeown, Adam, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Jean-Pierre Masse, ‘L’Exception indochinoise: Le Dispositif d’accueil des réfugiés politiques en France, 1973–1991’, PhD thesis, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, 1996.

19 Ticktin, Miriam, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Holquist, Peter, ‘State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism’, in Weiner, Amir, ed., Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in Comparative Perspective (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 34Google Scholar.

21 Werth, Nicolas, ‘Un état contre son peuple: Violences, répressions, terreurs en Union soviétique’, in Le Livre noire du communisme: Crimes, terreur et répression, ed. Courtois, Stéphane (Paris: R. Laffond, 1997), 41–295Google Scholar.

22 Gellately, Robert, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Johnson, Eric, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999)Google Scholar.

23 Halfin, Igal, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fulbrook, Mary, The People's State: East German Society From Hitler to Honecker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. See also Stargardt, Nicholas, ‘Beyond “Consent” or “Terror”: Wartime Crises in Nazi Germany’, History Workshop Journal, 72, 1 (2011): 190–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Föllmer, Moritz, ‘Was Nazism Collectivistic? Redefining the Individual in Berlin, 1930–1945’, Journal of Modern History, 82, 1 (2010): 61–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Föllmer, , Individuality and Modernity in Berlin: Self and Society From Weimar to the Wall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; which explore the complex interplay of individuality, terror and consent.

24 Shearer, David R., Policing Stalin's Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009)Google Scholar, chs 6–8.

25 Figures from Shearer, Policing Stalin's Socialism, 14–15. See also Hagenloh, Paul M., Stalin's Police: Public Order and Mass Repression in the USSR, 1926–1941 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

26 Scott, James C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

27 See, e.g. Kotsonis, Yanni and Hoffmann, David L., eds, Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000)Google Scholar; Holquist, Peter, ‘“Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work”: Bolshevik Surveillance in its Pan-European Perspective’, Journal of Modern History, 69, 3 (1997): 415–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hirsch, Francine, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Weiner, Amir, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Martin, Terry, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, Journal of Modern History, 70, 4 (1998): 813–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Cooper, ‘Modernity’; and Mazower, Mark, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, American Historical Review, 107, 4 (2002): 1158–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here at 1159–60.

29 On the exceptional nature of political violence in the USSR, ibid. 1167–70.

30 Mazower, , ‘Foucault, Agamben’, 25 n. 4, quotes Michel Foucault, Power, ed. Faubion, James D., tr. Hurley, Robert (New York: New Press, 2000)Google Scholar, 293. I have provided a fuller version of Foucault's quote and altered the Hurley translation. The original, from a 1978 interview (published in 1980), appears in Michel Foucault, DE, doc. 281, 2:910.

31 Foucault, ‘Pouvoirs et stratégies’, a 1977 interview with Jacques Rancière, in DE, doc. 218, 2:418, 420.

32 Mazower, ‘Foucault, Agamben’, 24; Miller, James, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 38–40Google Scholar; and the interviews quoted above, Foucault, DE, esp. 2:422 and 2:867–70.

33 See, e.g. Foucault, ‘Le Sujet et le pouvoir’ (1982), in DE, doc. 306, 2:1043: ‘One of the many reasons they are so troubling is that despite their historical singularity, they are not altogether original. Fascism and Stalinism used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies. Not only that, but, despite their internal madness, they relied to a considerable degree on the ideas and procedures of our political rationality.’ See also Foucault, ‘La Philosophie analytique de la politique’, lecture delivered in Tokyo, 27 April 1978, in DE, doc. 232, 2:534–51, esp. at 2:535–36.