"In this work, Igal Halfin exposes the inner struggles of Soviet Communists to identify themselves with the Bolshevik Party during the decisive decades of the 1920s and 1930s. The Bolsheviks preached the moral transformation of Russians into model Communists for their political and personal salvation. To screen the population for moral and political deviance, the new regime enlisted natural scientists, doctors, psychologists, sexologists, writers, and Party visionaries to establish criteria for judging people. Self-inspection became a central Bolshevik practice, epitomized by the autobiography that all Communists were expected to write, in which they reconfigured their life experience in line with official demands." "From a deep investigation of these autobiographies, Halfin traces the intellectual and scientific contortions of this project. Initially, the Party denounced deviant Communists, especially the Trotskyists, as degenerate but innocuous souls, however, in a chilling turn in the mid-1930s, the Party came to demonize the unreformed as virulent, malicious counter-revolutionaries. As Bolshevik power and discipline increased, so did the insistence that the good society could not triumph unless every wicked individual was destroyed. With this ideological logic, Stalin's mass purges and executions of the 1930s became possible."--BOOK JACKET.

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