Making suicide Soviet: Medicine, moral statistics, and the politics of social science in Bolshevik Russia, 1920-1930

The dissertation uses Soviet suicide as a window into the Russian political landscape during the first decade of Bolshevik rule. Amid concerns over an "epidemic" of suicide during the 1920s, forensic-medical doctors, moral statisticians, and Red Army political workers investigated this phenomenon, which they understood as a "social" problem requiring a set of governmental and scientific solutions. In the dissertation I analyze the results of their efforts--primarily statistics, autopsy reports, questionnaires, and political surveys--to argue that the Bolshevik Revolution was defined as much by such explorations into "everyday life" as it was by formal party politics and legislation.;At stake within debates about the levels and meanings of suicide was the formation of a Soviet "society," which I pose as an object of historical inquiry. My study suggests that during the 1920s the very idea of "society" as a unified whole was not taken for granted, but rather was seen as something to be created through organized study and management. Doctors, statisticians, and others envisaged it to be a specific realm where they could apply scientific knowledge to transform individuals and fundamentally reorder the character of "everyday life.";Five central theses are explored in the dissertation: First, I argue that studies of Soviet suicide are only comprehensible when examined as part of the wider effort to build a "healthy" form of social relations known as socialism or communism. Second, my work suggests that the opportunities for thinking and acting as social scientists or "experts" greatly expanded during the 1920s. Third, the dissertation asserts that the mutually constitutive ideas of "health" and "disease" were fundamental to understandings of society, and therefore to the practice of Soviet politics. Fourth, it proposes that a common ethos of modernity, rather than simply explicit political ideology or affiliation, served to unify different social investigators within the new regime. Lastly, this study contends that statistics were a vital form of communication and politics under Soviet power. Numbers were essential for imagining, speaking about, and realizing the "Soviet" social order.