Canadian Slavonic Papers

Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921–1929 by Kenneth M.PinnowReview by: Gregory StroudCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 53, No. 1 (March 2011), p. 162Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25822335 .

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162 Book Reviews

public; he makes extensive use of the 1928 publication of more than 1000 telegrams sent to

and from Astapovo. In addition, the newspaper archive at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow

yielded new evidence. This rich material allowed for a detailed assessment of the media

management around Tolstoy's death.

Ulrich Schmid, Universitdt St. Gallen

Kenneth M. Pinnow. Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921-1929. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. xi, 276 pp. Bibliography. Index. $49.95, cloth.

"Suicide, perhaps more than any other form of human behavior," Kenneth Pinnow argues, "forced the Soviets to confront the individual. It was a form of individuation that raised

thorny questions about autonomy, agency, and responsibility and the right to live and die as

one chose" (p. 15). As a topic of ongoing, widespread government and public concern, suicide proved not only a challenge, but also an opportunity, for what Pinnow describes as

an "emerging social science state" (p. 11). The roots of such a state, Pinnow admits, are

evident both in the broader European context and in pre-revolutionary Russia. This is not

an argument for Soviet exceptionalism. But it is also very much not an argument for

continuity. Rather, Pinnow makes clear that the Revolution dramatically broadened the

"sense of the possible" (p. 10) and only with 1917 and in Russia would "the state fully embrac[e] the statistical conception of the population [...] the potential of modern

governmental practices to achieve a legible and integrated social order" (pp. 13-14). Early

revolutionary methods and aspirations were thoroughly shaped by the social sciences of the

time. Pinnow describes an early revolution which embraced Marx and Durkheim and which

shared "assumptions and aspirations of modernity [...] as much as Bolshevik ideology" (p. 12). The social sciences?and sociology in particular?he argues, "were not only

compatible with Bolshevik dictatorship but also an essential feature of the revolutionary

project" (p. 11). This lean, ambitious work is peppered with provocative ideas. It should find a

welcome audience among graduate students and Soviet specialists. It further confirms a

recent trend toward "normalizing" and Europeanizing historical treatments of the

revolution. It also pairs well with recent late-imperial and early-Soviet studies of lichnost'

(the self) by Oleg Kharkhordin, Mark D. Steinberg, and Igal Halfin, among others. Pinnow also nicely situates his study in a broader European intellectual context, as well as in the

first three decades of twentieth-century Russian history. Readers will find much of interest, in particular, in this wider chronological expanse, as Pinnow ably traces suicide from its

roots as an individual moral problem in an imperial context defined by soslovie (estate),

through the heyday of social science in the 1920s when suicide was understood as a social problem, to the 1930s when responsibility shifted back to the individual for an act "recast as a social anomaly unrepresentative of the newly constructed socialist order" (p. 22).

Such lean breadth and ambition does, however, come at some cost. This is serious,

well-argued work, but often I found myself nevertheless somewhat frustrated with the

focused and filtered treatment of sources; a lack of texture, richness and voice would not

only broaden the potential readership, but also strengthen and nuance Pinnow's arguments. It is perhaps a credit to the scholarship that I found myself wanting an extra fifty pages or so.

Gregory Stroud, Nantucket, MA

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