“Microbes of the Mind”: Moral Contagion in Late Imperial Russia

“Microbes of the Mind”: Moral Contagion in Late Imperial RussiaAuthor(s): Daniel BeerSource: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 79, No. 3 (September 2007), pp. 531-571Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/517981 .

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The Journal of Modern History 79 (September 2007): 531–571� 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2007/7903-0002$10.00All rights reserved.

“Microbes of the Mind”: Moral Contagion in LateImperial Russia*

Daniel BeerRoyal Holloway, University of London

Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace, first published in 1869, contains a memorablescene depicting the lynching of a young man. Vereshchagin stands accused ofdisseminating defeatist literature in Moscow as Napoleon’s army sweeps east-ward. On the eve of the city’s fall in September 1812, a crowd of fearful andpanicked Muscovites assembles in front of the residence of the city’s governor,Count Rostopchin. Disconcerted by its unpredictable and riotous potential,Rostopchin pronounces the prisoner responsible for Moscow’s surrender andorders his dragoons to cut Vereshchagin down in front of the crowd. Yet eventsquickly run out of control:

“Sabre him!” the dragoon officer almost whispered.And one soldier, his face all at once distorted with fury, struck Vereshchagin on the

head with the blunt side of his sabre.“Ah!” cried Vereshchagin in meek surprise, looking round with a frightened glance

as if not understanding why this was done to him. A similar moan of surprise andhorror ran through the crowd. “O Lord!” exclaimed a sorrowful voice.

But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from Vereshchagin he uttereda plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was fatal. The barrier of human feeling, strainedto the utmost, that had held the crowd in check, suddenly broke. The crime had begunand must now be completed. The plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by thethreatening and angry roar of the crowd. Like the seventh and last wave that shattersa ship, that last irresistible wave burst from the rear and reached the front ranks, carryingthem off their feet and engulfing them all. The dragoon was about to repeat his blow.Vereshchagin with a cry of horror, covering his head with his hands, rushed towardsthe crowd. The tall youth, against whom he stumbled, seized his thin neck with hishands and, yelling wildly, fell with him under the feet of the pressing struggling crowd.

Some beat and tore at Vereshchagin, others at the tall youth. And the screams ofthose that were being trampled on and of those who tried to rescue the tall lad, onlyincreased the fury of the crowd. It was a long time before the dragoons could extricatethe bleeding youth, beaten almost to death. And for a long time, despite the feverishhaste with which the mob tried to end the work that had been begun, those who werehitting, throttling, and tearing at Vereshchagin were unable to kill him, for the crowd

* Research for this article was generously funded by Downing College, Cambridge.Its arguments were presented to the Department of the History and Philosophy ofScience, University of Cambridge, in 2006. I am very grateful to Susan Morrissey,Alexandra Oberlander, Steve Smith, Catriona Kelly, Nora Milotay, and the anonymousreaders of the JMH for their incisive comments on its various drafts.



532 Beer

pressed from all sides, swaying as one mass with them in the centre and rendering itimpossible for them to either kill him or to let him go.

“Hit him with an axe, eh! . . . Crushed? . . . Traitor, he sold Christ. . . . Still alive . . .tenacious . . . serve him right! Torture serves a thief right. Use the hatchet! . . . Whatstill alive?”

Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed to a long-drawn,measured death-rattle, did the crowd around his prostrate, bleeding corpse begin rapidlyto change places. Each one came up, glanced at what had been done, and with horror,reproach, and astonishment, pushed back again.1

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, extensive citation anddiscussion of this scene became almost de rigueur in examinations by crimi-nologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists of crowd psychology. In 1882, thePopulist philosopher and sociologist Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovskii(1842–1904) cited the scene in full, declaring that he knew of “no other his-torical or artistic description of the moment when a crowd was stimulated byexample that might be compared with these two pages in terms of the expres-siveness and subtlety of the work.”2 A decade later, the criminologist VladimirKonstantinovich Sluchevskii (1844–1926) similarly hailed “one of the mostmagnificent scenes, depicted in graceful prose, of the life of a crowd.” He drewattention to “the powerful rendition of the excitability of the crowd, its cre-dulity and its bloodthirsty instincts, unleashed under the influence of the vic-tim’s cry and the sight of suffering and blood.”3 In 1898, Vladimir Mikhai-lovich Bekhterev (1857–1927) declared that the scene represented a “clearexample of the influence of suggestion on the crowd.”4 Finally, in 1903, theeminent psychiatrist Nikolai Nikolaevich Bazhenov (1856–1923) cited themurder of Vereshchagin as “a depiction, superb in its clarity and power, of amental contagion [psikhicheskaia zaraza], intellectual and emotional, whichinitially appears in one individual and then seizes an entire group . . . in ac-cordance with psychological law.”5 Irina Sirotkina has demonstrated that theinvocation of literary material in psychiatric analyses was a common practicein fin de siecle Russia.6 Yet the insistence with which medical and social sci-

1 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (London, 1993),705.

2 Nikolai K. Mikhailovskii, “Geroi i tolpa” (1882), in his Sochineniia, 6 vols. (St.Petersburg, 1896–97), 2:95–190, 100.

3 Vladimir K. Sluchevskii, “Tolpa i ee psikhologiia,” Knizhki nedeli, no. 4 (April1893), 5–38, 32.

4 Vladimir M. Bekhterev, Vnushenie i ego rol’ v obshchestvennoi zhizni (St. Peters-burg, 1898), 166.

5 Nikolai N. Bazhenov, Psikhiatricheskie besedy na literaturnye i obshchestvennyetemy (Moscow, 1903), 99–100.

6 Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry inRussia, 1880–1930 (Baltimore, 2002).



Moral Contagion in Late Imperial Russia 533

entists returned to this particular scene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace suggeststhat it had struck a nerve. What was it in this depiction of collective irrationalityand destructiveness that contemporaries found so compelling?

The power of the crowd was both real and symbolic. In reality, it was capableof wreaking devastation in the countryside in the form of peasant riots; it couldlay waste to entire sections of cities; it could transform itself into a revolu-tionary mob able to overthrow the existing political and social order of theday. Symbolically, it constituted a distilled expression of mass society, a psy-chological organism in which, briefly and often violently, the subconsciousand irrational sinews unifying societies as a whole were laid bare. For manycontemporaries, then, crowds were central constituent phenomena of the mod-ern age, thrust into the intellectual limelight by the French Revolution andWestern Europe’s often chaotic and violent experience of the rise of masspolitics throughout the nineteenth century.7 Indeed, the French Revolution, the1848 revolutions, and the Paris Commune struck many observers as insepa-rable from the broader evolution of modern societies. They provoked anxietyon the part of educated Europeans but also a desire to understand the mech-anisms by which ideas and feelings spread throughout large agglomerationsof human beings.8 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the disciplinesof psychiatry, criminology, and social psychology gradually extended theirexplanatory models of crowd behavior to the seemingly unpredictable, spon-taneous, and destructive power of riots, strikes, and the forces of revolution inthe age of mass politics.

The study of social psychology enjoyed a particular resonance in late Im-perial Russia, when educated society was discussing both the nature of theEmpire’s modernization and the cultural and political forms that might prove

7 Colin Lucas, “The Crowd and Politics between Ancien Regime and Revolution inFrance,” Journal of Modern History 60, no. 3 (September 1988): 421–57; Philip D.Jones, “The Bristol Bridge Riot and Its Antecedents: Eighteenth-Century Perception ofthe Crowd,” Journal of British Studies 19, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 74–92; Mark Harrison,“‘To Raise and Dare Resentment’: The Bristol Bridge Riot of 1793 Re-examined,”Historical Journal 26, no. 3 (September 1983): 557–85, and “The Ordering of theUrban Environment: Time, Work, and the Occurrence of Crowds, 1790–1835,” Pastand Present, no. 110 (February 1986): 134–68; John Plotz, “Crowd Power: Chartism,Carlyle, and the Victorian Public Sphere,” Representations 70 (Spring 2000): 87–114;Christopher E. Forth, “Intellectuals, Crowds, and the Body Politics of the DreyfusAffair,” Historical Reflections 24, no. 1 (1998): 63–91; Gal Gerson, “Liberalism, Wel-fare, and the Crowd in J. A. Hobson,” History of European Ideas 30 (2004): 197–215;Christine Poggi, “Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd,” Critical Inquiry 28 (Spring2002): 709–48.

8 For this interpretation of the development of mass psychology in France and Italy,see Roger L. Geiger, “Democracy and the Crowd: The Social History of an Idea inFrance and Italy, 1890–1914,” Societas 7, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 47–71.



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adequate to its direction and maintenance. Caught between the apparently en-demic threat of violent social revolution and the obduracy of the tsarist state,the Empire’s liberal, modernizing elites struggled to articulate a vision of aharmonious and stable society, in part by identifying the forces impeding itsemergence.9 It is in this context that theories of social and psychological in-teraction between individuals should be understood, from their very inception,as a protopolitical metaphor—a commentary, increasingly explicit in its de-ployment, on the challenges and perils of social and political change. Theoriesof moral contagion were part and parcel of what has been termed the “biolo-gisation of the social.”10 Contemporaries with opposing interests could all se-lectively appropriate biomedical theories of social decline and individual de-viance to portray society as an organic body that had to be guided by biologicaland psychological laws. These theories gave scientific authority to social fears

9 On the development of the professions in late Imperial Russia, see Nancy Man-delker Frieden, Russian Physicians in an Era of Reform and Revolution, 1856–1905(Princeton, NJ, 1981); Mark B. Adams, “Eugenics as Social Medicine in RevolutionaryRussia: Prophets, Patrons, and the Dialectics of Discipline-Building,” in Health andSociety in Revolutionary Russia, ed. Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson(Bloomington, IN, 1990), 200–23; Harley Balzer, “The Problem of Professions inImperial Russia,” in Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late ImperialRussia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, Samuel Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton, NJ, 1991),183–98; Julie V. Brown, “The Professionalism of Russian Psychiatry, 1857–1911”(PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1981), “Psychiatrists and the State in TsaristRussia,” in Social Control and the State, ed. A. Scull and S. Cohen (Oxford, 1985),267–87, and “Social Influences on Psychiatric Theory and Practice in Late ImperialRussia,” in Solomon and Hutchinson, Health and Society, 27–44; John F. Hutchinson,“‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ An Inquiry into the Death of Zemstvo Medicine,” inSolomon and Hutchinson, Health and Society, 3–26, Politics and Public Health inRevolutionary Russia, 1890–1918 (Baltimore, 1990), “Politics and Medical Profes-sionalization after 1905,” in Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in RussianHistory, ed. Harley D. Balzer (Armonk, NY, 1996), 89–116, and “Tsarist Russia andthe Bacteriological Revolution,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences40 (1985): 420–39; Susan Gross Solomon, “David and Goliath in Soviet Public Health:The Rivalry of Social Hygienists and Psychiatrists for Authority over the Bytovoi Al-coholic,” Soviet Studies 41, no. 2 (April 1989): 254–75, and “The Expert and the Statein Russian Public Health: Continuities and Changes across the Revolutionary Divide,”in The History of Public Health and the Modern State, ed. Dorothy Porter (Amsterdam,1994), 183–223; Elizabeth A. Hachten, “In Service to Science and Society: Scientistsand the Public in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in “Science and Civil Society,” ed.Lynn K. Nyhart and Thomas H. Broman, special issue, Osiris 2nd ser., 17 (2002): 171–209; Joseph Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracyin Tsarist Russia,” American Historical Review 107 (4) : 1094–1123.

10 I borrow the expression from Ulrich Herbert, “Rassismus und rationales Kalkul,”in “Vernichtungspolitik”: Eine Debatte uber den Zusammenhang von Sozialpolitik undGenozid im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang Schneider (Hamburg,1991), 28.




and moral panics and lent respectability to theories of social transformation.Powered by the prestige of science, they allowed modernizing elites to rep-resent their prescriptive claims about social order as objective statements ir-revocably grounded in the laws of nature.

Recognition of the status of moral contagion as a disturbing and prevalentfeature of human interaction accommodated a wide range of opinions bothabout the precise mechanism involved in the transmission of mental statesfrom one individual to another and, crucially, about the etiology of the phe-nomenon. In the early 1880s, discussions of moral contagion focused on thespectacular instances of mass hysteria and violence manifest in religious sec-tarianism and rural unrest. Psychiatrists and psychologists emphasized thebackwardness and superstition of the peasant population in order to advancea campaign of national enlightenment and renewal. The worst manifestationsof the phenomenon were frightening but eradicable. Under the impact ofFrench and Italian studies, however, which directed clinical attention to thetransformative powers wielded by crowds over their constituents, more pes-simistic voices began to caution that susceptibility to moral contagion was aninalienable constituent feature of the human condition, to be limited but in noway eliminated by the power of enlightenment. The status of France in par-ticular as the cradle of the Enlightenment and the engine room of the politicaltransformations that had shaken Europe throughout the nineteenth century in-vested the French experience of urbanization and the rise of mass politics witha special significance for Russian contemporaries. Whereas Russian commen-tators could hopefully posit a future development for their nation in which theforces of progress would dispel what appeared to be a residue of backwardness,the experience of France was very disconcerting. As French commentatorsturned their attention to the power of crowds and mobs in both the FrenchRevolution and the Paris Commune, they seemed to be delineating Russia’sown future in an age of modernization and revolution.11

Indeed, in the 1890s it was partly under the influence of these foreign studiesof mass psychology that a tendency emerged to extrapolate a general theoryof social interaction from the study of crowds and mobs. The fragmentary andlocalized nature of rural and feudal society historically had dissipated the trans-mission of these subconscious and irrational forces, keeping them (by andlarge) confined within certain regions of the countryside.12 Yet the very ex-perience of modernization was generating population concentrations in the

11 From this perspective, the appropriation of French theories and their integrationinto Russian domestic concerns are a fascinating context in which to track the intel-lectual traffic linking late Imperial Russia with its Western neighbors.

12 There were of course spectacular exceptions to this rule such as the Pugachevuprising of the 1770s.



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urban centers, which were bound together by the structures of a mass societyand mass politics that only facilitated the spread of emotions and states ofmind across large expanses of territory, often mediated by the printed word.Seen in these terms, both the creation of a modern unified society itself andthe rise of mass politics were unavoidably beholden to dark and irrationalhuman instincts. Some began to believe that, far from being the conjoinedprize of the progressive intelligentsia, reform and democracy were in fact an-tithetical. The specter of popular revolt, which had long haunted theories ofmoral contagion, would find its most emphatic and revealing application inthe 1905 Revolution.

Theories of moral contagion provide a fascinating lens through which totrace the mounting despair of an influential group of Russian intellectuals notjust with the obstacles to modernity in Russia but also with its very promise.Among the intelligentsia, the established discourse of national enlightenmentin the service of social cohesion began to cede ground to a new discourse thatstressed the necessity of circumscribing and containing human freedom. Intheir intersection with theories of degeneration, clinical discussions of moralcontagion were part of the dark underbelly of the optimistic and secular dis-course of rational enlightenment, reflecting lingering doubts that reason andorder might prove not just elusive but also illusory.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES IN LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

The extraordinary popularity of science in post-Emancipation Russia has beenthe subject of a number of studies.13 Elizabeth Hachten has observed that“virtually the whole of educated society had suddenly been gripped by anunprecedented enthusiasm for science, an intellectual spasm reflected in thebroadened audience for scientific ideas, practices, and potential applications.”14

Evidence of this popularity was very much apparent. Educated Russia flockedto public lectures given by university professors and independent scholars andpublic meetings of scientific societies. The “thick journals” contained a heftyquotient of popular science and discussions of scientific conferences, materialthat constitutes one of the primary sources of the present article. Even specialist

13 James H. Billington, “The Intelligentsia and the Religion of Humanity,” AmericanHistorical Review 65, no. 4 (July 1960): 807–21, 812–13; Alexander Vucinich, Sciencein Russian Culture, 1861–1917 (Stanford, CA, 1970), Social Thought in Tsarist Russia:The Quest for a General Science of Society, 1861–1917 (Chicago, 1976), and Darwinin Russian Thought (Berkeley, 1988); Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: TheStruggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (Oxford, 1989); Torsten Rut-ing, Pavlov und der Neue Mensch: Diskurse uber Disziplinierung in Sowjetrussland(Munich, 2002).

14 Hachten, “In Service to Science and Society,” 182.




journals often enjoyed a broad and interdisciplinary appeal, providing arenasin which academics and clinicians advanced their own theories and debated abroad range of social and moral issues of pressing public concern.

Although frustrated by the obduracy of the tsarist regime and its failure toimplement their proposed criminal codes and reforms of medical and psychi-atric care, on the public stage practitioners of the human sciences were highlyinfluential in articulating the terms in which educated contemporaries came toview the changing world around them.15 Hachten has stressed the centrality ofscientific scholarship and practice in the formation of Russian civil societyin the late Imperial period: “An expanding public culture of science in Russia. . . was part of a broader upsurge of public life that signalled the coalescingof Russia’s civil society. As scientists and educated lay people alike increas-ingly ‘assumed that the successes of science are able to best promote generalprogress,’ scientific enterprises moved to the centre of the project of improve-ment and modernisation that lay at the heart of obshchestvennost’ [civil soci-ety].”16 The influence of the human sciences made itself felt in literature, inthe press, and even in the ecclesiastical output of the Russian OrthodoxChurch.17 Laura Engelstein and Dan Healey have both explored the mountingclinical influence over the public understanding of sexual deviance in the lateImperial period, arguing that clinicians and jurists came to play a central rolein defining the social world and the nature of the human beings acting withinit.18 Irina Sirotkina has discussed how, throughout the revolutionary period,psychiatrists engaged with Russian belles lettres to offer an influential con-tribution to the public discussion of the nature of Russian society and thedisorders afflicting it.19 In the wake of the 1905 Revolution, the human

15 See, e.g., the fate of the rejected 1903 Criminal Code discussed in Laura Engel-stein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia(Ithaca, NY, 1992), 17–55.

16 Hachten, “In Service to Science and Society,” 186–87.17 See the repeated reference to Cesare Lombroso, Gabriel Tarde, and others in Lev

N. Tolstoy, “Vozrozhdenie,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 91 vols. (Moscow,1929–64), 32:72, 313. See also V. P. Zhilekhovskaia, “Vyrozhdenie,” Russkoe obozrenie(1897), no. 43 (January), 41–67, (February), 647–79, no. 44 (March), 171–91, (April),620–44, no. 45 (May), 142–66, (June), 685–719, and no. 46 (July), 93–130; A. P.Vershinin, Vyrozhdenie (Itogi zhizni) (Moscow, 1915); Rosamund Bartlett and LindaEdmundson, “Collapse and Creation: Issues of Identity and the Russian Fin de Siecle,”in Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution, 1880–1940, ed. CatrionaKelly and David Shepherd (Oxford, 1998), 165–224; Daniel Beer, “The Medicalizationof Deviance in the Russian Orthodox Church, 1880–1905,” Kritika 5, no. 3 (Summer2004): 451–83.

18 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness; Dan Healey, Homosexual Desire in Revolu-tionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent (Chicago, 2001).

19 Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius.



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sciences were influential in shaping public response to the unrest.20 Accord-ingly, the articles that constitute the base for this study are, in an importantsense, inseparable from the emergence and self-definition of civil society inlate Imperial Russia.

Science in Russia has traditionally been associated with the secular andprogressive vision of national improvement and renewal. Hachten has stressedthe importance of science in contributing “both ideologically and practicallyto the educated public’s desire for purposive action to achieve the goals ofrenewal and reform of society.” She has argued that “the values and modes ofexpression associated with science fit with the palpable sense of optimism atthis time and the faith in the possibility of improvement, progress, and mod-ernisation.”21 In these terms, it might seem paradoxical that scientifically gen-erated theories of moral contagion came to exert such a fascination over edu-cated contemporary Russians. The post-Emancipation era in Russia certainlydid witness the evolution of a vision of a secularized utopia of individual andsocietal progress that derived its inspiration and persuasive power from thedevelopments of the natural sciences.22 Yet this optimism in scientifically or-dered progress coexisted with dark undercurrents of pessimism. As RobertNye has argued in the French context, “the exponents of a science of societyfound it impossible to discuss the progressive aspects of social evolution with-out considering the negative effects that accompanied it, and that threatenedto stall or even reverse the ‘normal’ condition of advance.”23

For if progress was one of the great obsessions of the nineteenth century,so was normality, and the two were far from synonymous.24 Inherent in thenotion of progress as espoused by the apostles and practitioners of science wasa nagging suspicion that Russia might be forging ahead in the wrong direction,deviating ever further from a loosely defined norm of moral, mental, and physi-cal health. Degeneration theory was perhaps the most striking theoretical ex-pression of the concern that progress was not a panacea. Extant models ofbiological development were reworked into the proposition that modernizationitself might be propelling the population of the Empire into an abyss of moraland physical illness, crime, vice, and sedition.25 If theories of evolution chimed

20 Ibid., 117–44; Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 255–98.21 Hachten, “In Service to Science and Society,” 172, 185.22 Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture; Ruting, Pavlov und der Neue Mensch.23 Robert A. Nye, “Sociology and Degeneration: The Irony of Progress,” in Degen-

eration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman(New York, 1985), 49.

24 On the rise of the binary normal-pathological in the nineteenth century, see GeorgesCanguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1975).

25 On the models of biological development, see Vucinich, Darwin in RussianThought; Todes, Darwin without Malthus. For examples of degeneration theory in the




with the educated public’s breathless admiration of the astonishing technolog-ical advances of the nineteenth century, theories of moral contagion and de-generation offered a persuasive explanation of the mounting human miseryand social disorder they seemed to entail. In his speech to the First Congressof National Psychiatrists in 1887, Ivan Alekseevich Sikorskii (1845–1919), aprofessor of nervous and mental diseases at the University of Kiev, highlightedwhat was a central paradox for contemporaries: it was in “the age of steamand telegraphs” that “the process of physical, mental and moral degenerationhad revealed itself all over Europe, including in our fatherland.”26 Degenera-tion theory accounted for the terrible human cost of modernization, as ex-pressed in the proliferation of “suicide, insanity, and nervous illnesses,” whichwere all “indicators of the nervous-mental health of the population and pointto those localities and periods in which the population begins to manifest atendency toward physical, mental, and moral degeneration.”27 Theories ofmoral contagion intersected with those of degeneration, contending that moraland mentally impaired individuals were more susceptible to the irrational anddestructive impulses that surrounded them.

This pessimistic mood pervaded educated Russian society in the fin de siecleas Rosamund Bartlett and Linda Edmundson have observed:

As early as the 1870s the alarm had been sounded by Tolstoi and Dostoevskii in theirvigorously anti-rationalist and highly nationalistic, but also socially critical late novels,which dissect the moral and social decay of society by depicting (in the case of TheBrothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy, 1880)) a disturbing world of crime, poverty,mental instability, and disintegration, and (in Anna Karenina, 1873–7) marital infidel-ity, the collapse of the family, the corrosive effects of capitalism, and the impotence oflegalistic reform. . . . Key literary texts of the day, such as Chekhov’s “Ward 6” (“Palatano. 6”, 1892) and Garshin’s “The Red Flower” (“Krasnyi tsvetok”, 1883), allegorisedRussian society as an insane asylum, and one, moreover, run by incompetent, enfeebleddoctors, abandoned to its fate by the world outside. . . . The mood among the intelli-gentsia grew increasingly apocalyptic and inward looking.28

In this intellectual climate, the clinical discourse of moral contagion echoedall the more powerfully against a firmly established metaphorical language of

late Imperial period, see, e.g., Pavel Ivanovich Kovalevskii, Vyrozhdenie i vozrozh-denie: Genii i sumashestvie; Sotsial’no-biologicheskie ocherki (St. Petersburg, 1899);Vladimir M. Bekhterev, “Voprosy vyrozhdeniia i bor’ba s nim,” Obozrenie psikhiatrii,nevrologii i eksperimental’noi psikhologii, no. 9 (1908), 518–21.

26 Ivan A. Sikorskii, “Zadachi nervno-psikhicheskoi gigieny i profilaktiki,” in TrudyPervogo S’’ezda Otechestvennykh Psikhiatrov proiskhodivshogo v Moskve s 5 po 11ianvaria 1887 g. (St. Petersburg, 1887), 1055–64, 1055.

27 Ibid., 1056.28 Bartlett and Edmundson, “Collapse and Creation,” 178–79.



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social pathology and infection that featured prominently in the popular pressin the late Imperial period. Articles in the press frequently referred to crimeand sedition as a plague or disease infecting Russian society, never more in-sistently than in the wake of the regicide of March 1, 1881.29 A chronicle ofcontemporary life in the capital by Vladimir Osipovich Mikhnevich (1841–99), Plagues of Petersburg, first serialized in the literary journal Nabliudatel’(The observer) in 1882, was full of allusions to the moral and social diseasesof contemporary Russian society.30 Russian literature also showed clear evi-dence of the theories of psychopathology and moral contagion. In Anton Che-khov’s short story The Duel (1892), for example, the social Darwinist vonKoren refers to the morally degenerate Laevskii as “highly contagious [zara-zitelen]. . . . Judge for yourself the wide field he has for spreading infection[pole zarazy]!”31

THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY IN RUSSIA

Disciplinary boundaries were decidedly fluid within the late Imperial humansciences. The clinicians and theorists who made a significant contribution tothe contemporary understanding of moral contagion were drawn from the in-tersecting fields of psychiatry, criminology, the law, and psychology. For thisreason, tracing the evolution of theories of moral and mental contagion andtheir various clinical applications necessarily overruns any particular institu-tional setting or history of discipline building. For the sake of concision, I haveused the term “social psychology” throughout this article to designate a seriesof overlapping disciplinary contributions.

Russian theories of social psychology developed as clinicians and socialscientists critically assimilated the principles of Western Positivism developed

29 Peterburgskaia gazeta likened the spread of nihilist ideas in Russia’s seminariesto a terrifying epidemic: “Our monasteries have more than once been the wellspringsof murderous miasmas [ubiistvennye miazmy] that have been conceived and spreadwithin their walls. Then, strengthened and shaped in the form of the most infectiousepidemic diseases [zarazitel’neishie poval’nye bolezni], they were borne out by the . . .inhabitants into the sinful world, where a widespread ruin (paguba) then began” (Pe-terburgskaia gazeta, March 4, 1881).

30 Vladimir O. Mikhnevich, Iazvy Peterburga: Opyt istoriko-statisticheskogo issle-dovaniia nravstvennosti stolichnogo nasileniia (St. Petersburg, 2003), 412, 419. Thework was first published in book form in 1886.

31 Anton P. Chekhov, “Duel’,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsatitomakh, 30 vols. (Moscow, 1974–84), 7:353–455, 373. On degeneration in Chekhov’swritings, see Aleksandr Krinitsyn, “Problema ‘Vyrozhdeniia’ u Chekhova i Maksa Nor-dau,” in Chekhov i Germaniia, ed. V. B. Kataeva and R.-D. Kluge (Moscow, 1996),167–86.




by figures such as Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill.32

The belief that psychological reciprocity constituted the essential and irreduc-ible dynamic of social interaction enjoyed great currency among Russian so-ciologists at the end of the nineteenth century. Many Russian clinicians andsocial scientists came to the conclusion that identifying the role of psycholog-ical forces was the key to an understanding of both society and history andaccordingly turned their attention to the means by which ideas, emotions, andactions pass from one individual to another.

An epidemiological construction of mass psychology developed in parallelwith the model of bacteriological epidemiology.33 In the latter, it was commonto separate the process by which an illness is spread from the (hygienic, me-teorological, and so on) conditions that facilitate contagions. Similarly, edu-cational conditions, alcoholism, religious creeds, and similar factors were saidto facilitate the contagion of ideas. Indeed, the sciences of bacteriology andepidemiology served as a model for mass psychology as the former enjoyedgreat influence following their discovery of a coherent and testable descriptionfor the contagion of illnesses. According to the epidemiological approach, thesuggestion of ideas, attitudes, or behavioral patterns, whether normal or patho-logical, is just another instance of contagion. The literature thus mentions notonly a contagium vivum but also a contagium psychicum, analogous to organicagents of contagion such as microbes, that causes a person’s mind to be con-taminated with the ideas, habits, and attitudes of another person.34

Although epidemiology now became the lens through which the phenom-

32 See, e.g., Viktor Kandinskii, Obshcheponiatnye psikhologicheskie etiudi (Moscow,1881), 168. This argument has been made by Vladimir Alekseevich Alekseev andMikhail Aleksandrovich Maslin, Russkaia sotsial’naia filosofiia kontsa XIX—nachalaXX veka: Psikhologicheskaia shkola (Moscow, 1992), 5–7. See also David Joravsky,Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford, 1989). On Western Positivism, seeJ. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–1914 (New Haven, CT,2000); Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Cen-tury Thought (Baltimore, 1971); J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of aSociologist (London, 1971).

33 For this argument, see Alexandre Metraux, “French Crowd Psychology: BetweenTheory and Ideology,” in The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-CenturyThought, ed. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash (New York, 1982), 276–99,285. On the development of bacteriology in Russia see Hutchinson, “Tsarist Russiaand the Bacteriological Revolution,” 420–39.

34 The first reference to mental contagion was a thesis by Prosper Lucas entitled Del’imitation contagieuse ou de la propagation sympathique des nevroses et des mono-manies (Paris, 1833). The theme was again picked up by Prosper Despine, who wrotea pamphlet against the current press reporting of crimes, De la contagion morale: Faitsdemontrants son existence (Marseilles, 1870). Despine used the term as an explanationfor the spread of identical symptoms of mental illness from a diseased individual to ahealthy one.



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enon (mental contagion) was seen, “the putative referent of the expression‘mental contagion’ remained, so to speak, unfulfilled, since the contagiumpsychicum had not been discovered. In other words, the place of the causalagent of mental contagion in the network of laws with which the epidemio-logical approach operated is only formally, but not materially, defined.”35 Fromthe late 1880s until the outbreak of the First World War, paradigms of “mentalcontagion” came to inform theories of mass psychology.

Not only did the mechanism of transmission of psychological states remainelusive; the very terms used to denote it also remained unstable and shifting.36

This conceptual slippage was in part a result of the diverse origins of epide-miological models of crowd behavior. One concept, that of “imitation,” wasdeveloped from Herbert Spencer’s conception of primitive learning and WalterBagehot’s explanation of mental unity within sovereignty. The use of “imita-tion,” conceived of as an “automatic” instinct, to explain the transmission ofsocial facts became widespread in sociology and social psychology.37 The re-lated concepts of “suggestion” and “suggestibility,” which were drawn fromthe scientific lexicon of hypnosis, were used to denote “unconscious imitation.”Initially, then, imitation and suggestion had origins separate from the strictlypathological application of mental contagion. However—and this is essentialto the development of this discourse in Russia—the distinctions between thetwo terms became blurred, largely because of the indiscriminate use made ofthem by collective psychologists to account for the thoughts and actions ofgroups of all sorts: crowds, publics, and political groupings.

Some sociologists, psychologists, and criminologists used the term “con-

35 Alexandre Metraux points here to perhaps the decisive weakness in the epidemi-ological approach and the reason why the interpretative power of this approach ulti-mately ceded ground to the sociological and psychiatric (Metraux, “French CrowdPsychology,” 286).

36 As George Dumas lamented in 1911, there were so many referents of the term“mental contagion” that its usage became vast and undifferentiated: “Psychologists andsociologists, and even some alienists, who are inspired by [the referents], call mentalcontagion [contagion mentale] a mechanism by which nervous, emotional, and repre-sentative states are transmitted [se propagent] from one person to another, and theyonly differ in opinion when it comes to characterizing this mechanism with precision”(Dumas, “Contagion mentale: Epidemies mentales, folies collectives, folies gregaires,”Revue Philosophique 71 [January–June 1911]: 225–44, 225). Indeed, for all his effortsto clarify the distinction between broad and narrow forms of usage, Dumas himselfwent on to exchange “automatic imitation,” “mental epidemics,” “current of opinion,”and “suggestibility” for one another, an indication of the extent to which their meaningsremained unstable.

37 Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850–1880 (Oxford,2000), 203–50; Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in LateNineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT, 1981), 116–17.




tagion” in a narrow sense of “automatic imitation,” the unconscious and re-flexive imitation of the psychological states of others.38 Still others assimilatedthe idea of suggestion and imitation into a broader conception of mental con-tagion.39 The broad application of the term “suggestion” in Russia in the 1890swas manifest in an article written by Pavel Iakovlevich Rozenbakh (1858–1918), which defined its meaning in Brokgauz and Efron’s authoritative Ent-siklopedicheskii slovar’: “Understanding ‘suggestion’ [vnushenie] in its broad-est sense, as a definite influence of external factors on the concrete substanceof an individual’s mental life, ‘suggestion’ must be acknowledged as a pow-erful factor, which constitutes the essence of reciprocal influence [vziamodeist-niie] between society and the individual.”40 Authors did not respect the separateorigins of mental contagion and imitation or suggestion, with the result thatthey came to use these terms almost interchangeably. In 1898, for example,Bekhterev produced precisely this blurring of the categories. Noting that someauthors used the expression “mental contagion” (psikhicheskii kontagii) insteadof suggestion (vnushenie) to denote unconscious imitation (podrazhanie), heobjected that in reality “suggestion and mental contagion were so closelybound up with each other that they could not be easily separated.”41 Since theactual degree of consciousness involved in imitative emotion or action couldnever be determined, the very vagueness of the concepts of “moral contagion,”“suggestion,” and “imitation” facilitated their gradual extension to a wide andessentially disparate range of social phenomena.

38 Vaicheslav A. Manassein, O znachenii psikhicheskikh vlianii (St. Petersburg,1877), 35.

39 Kandinskii, Obshcheponiatnye psikhologicheskie etiudi, 178. Dumas, “Contagionmentale,” 225–27, cites the French edition of Bekhterev’s study of suggestion: Vla-dimir M. Bekhterev, La suggestion et son role dans la vie sociale (Paris, 1910), 24.The concept of “suggestion” originally was intimately associated with hypnos and wasintroduced in the mid-nineteenth century by Alexandre Bertrand in France and JamesBraid in England as an explanation of hypnotic phenomena. It thus replaced the theoryof animal magnetism and other fluidistic theories. Suggestion became a universallyrecognized psychological concept during the famous controversy between the schoolsof Salpetriere and Nancy in the 1880s and 1890s. As long as the term “suggestion”was used exclusively in connection with hypnosis, it related to phenomena that werefunctional rather than homogeneous. Yet, by the 1880s, social scientists found it usefulto incorporate the hitherto predominantly medical concept of suggestion into their the-ories of social interaction. Sociologists such as those named above regarded suggestionas the basic mechanism in the social process.

40 Pavel Rozenbakh, “Vnushenie,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, ed. F. Brokgauzand I. Effron, 43 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1890–1907), 11:689–91, 690.

41 Bekhterev, Vnushenie. The second edition was published in 1903; citations hereare from the expanded third edition (St. Petersburg, 1908), 16 (citing A. Vigoroux andP. Juquelier, La contagion mentale [Paris, 1905]).



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THE RISE OF THE EPIDEMIOLOGICAL MODEL IN RUSSIA

One of the earliest discussions of mental contagion in Russian was an anon-ymous article, “The Contagiousness of Mental Delusions,” which appeared inthe popular scientific journal Znanie (Knowledge) in 1871. Comparing mentalwith physical epidemics, the author argued: “In different countries and at dif-ferent times, we have been able to observe the appearance of epidemics, whichhave utterly changed the moral nature of human beings.”42 He distinguishedbetween the spread of manias such as the desire to emigrate or asceticism andthe spread of a different form of moral epidemic that, while generally affectinga smaller number of people, was capable of wreaking far greater havoc insociety. “We are speaking of that irresistible attraction, which, possessing anindividual like a disease, forces him to commit one or some other crimes.”43

The horrors of the French Revolution were a persuasive example of the epi-demic qualities of certain forms of crime: “All the conditions conducive forthe spread of a mania of murder came together here. Violent political changes,extreme poverty among the people, the gradual loss of respect for human lifein general, self-defence, fear, diseased imitation [boleznennaia podrazha-tel’nost’]—all this inevitably led to those horrific scenes to which Europe borewitness at the end of the last century.”44

In the early accounts of imitation and mental contagion, commentators werecontent to describe the fact of the contagiousness of certain states of mindwithout subjecting the actual mechanism of transmission to any particular scru-tiny. Writing in 1877, the criminologist Leonid Efstav’evich Vladimirov(1845–1917) affirmed that “insanity in a healthy individual is infectious; itcan seize entire masses of the people and become, in a word, epidemic.” Hisexplanation of the dynamic was brief and superficial: as all healthy individuals,unlike unhealthy ones, shared essentially the same “roots of passion,” distur-bance in one individual might elicit disturbances in others.45

The first substantial treatment of the mechanism of transmission was an 1881study by a psychologist, Viktor Khrisanfovich Kandinskii (1849–89), Obshche-poniaznye psikhologicheskie etiudi, the second part of which was entitled,“Nervous-Mental Contagion and Mental Epidemics.” In language reminiscentof the Znanie article, Kandinskii claimed that in addition to physical diseases,“diseases of the mind [bolezni dushi], mental disorders, often also assume anepidemic character.” Indeed, Kandinskii was explicit about the analogy of

42 “Zarazitel’nost’ umstvennykh zabluzhdenii,” Znanie, November 1871, 91–117,93.

43 Ibid., 94.44 Ibid., 109.45 Leonid E. Vladimirov, “Psikhicheskie osobennosti prestupnikov po noveishim iz-

sledovaniiam,” Iuridicheskii vestnik, nos. 9–10 (1877), 31.




physical and mental epidemics: “Like a contagion (kontagiia) of smallpox ortyphus, a mental disease (dushevnaia zaraza) is transmitted from one personto another, to a third . . . spreading with ever more power, afflicting an evergreater mass of people, as long as it finds fertile soil. In the past, smallpox andthe plague have carried off thousands and tens of thousands of victims anddevastated entire countries. Mental epidemics are no less harmful.”46

Kandinskii’s elucidation of the mechanism of transmission was beguilinglysimple, indebted originally to an influential study of collective behavior inanimals by Victor-Alfred Espinas (1844–1922), Des societes animales: Etudede psychologie comparee (1877), which seemed to offer a physiological basisfor mass psychology.47 Kandinskii offered an example favored by social psy-chologists at the time: the act of yawning. “The sight of a person yawningproduces an irresistible desire to yawn. . . . Consciousness and the will areirrelevant here, because the person infected with yawning performs the act notonly bypassing his will, but often in spite of it, or absolutely unconsciously.”48

More complicated emotions or states of mind could be communicated in anessentially identical manner: “In the case of fury, the circulation becomes sig-nificantly impeded, breathing becomes difficult; the face reddens or becomesdeathly pale, the nostrils flare and quiver, the voice breaks, becomes hoarseand shrill or disappears altogether; the teeth grind convulsively; the entirebody, with muscles tensed, straightens or leans forward sometimes trembling;the eyes flash and become bloodshot, the hands tightly clenched into fists areraised, as if to deliver a blow to an opponent.”49 Kandinskii maintained thatless striking emotional states were transmitted from one individual to anotherin exactly the same way, however subtle, and that when it came to the trans-mission of feelings and motives, the notion of “mental contagion” (dushevnaiakontagioznost’) was more accurate than that of imitation (podrazhatel’nost’).50

46 Kandinskii, Obshcheponiatnye psikhologicheskie etiudi, 153–54. Kandinskii, agraduate of Moscow University, worked as a surgeon in the “St. Nikolas the Miracle-Worker” hospital in St. Petersburg. He wrote several works on mental illness in bothRussian and German, including Sovremennyi manizm (Kharkov, 1882), Kritische undklinische Betrachtungen im Gebiete der Sinnestauschung (1885), and K voprosu o ne-vmeniaemosti (Moscow, 1890).

47 Victor-Alfred Espinas, Des societes animales: Etude de psychologie comparee(Paris, 1877). On Espinas’s contribution to crowd psychology, see Barrows, DistortingMirrors, 115–19.

48 Kandinskii, Obshcheponiatnye psikhologicheskie etiudi, 177. Kandinskii’s con-ceptualization of the mechanism of transmission was shared by many other Europeanpsychologists, sociologists, and criminologists in the final decades of the nineteenthcentury.

49 Ibid., 184.50 Ibid., 182. This physiological theory was refined in 1883 by the French psychiatrist

Jean Rambosson in his study Phenomenes nerveux, intellectuels et moraux: Leur trans-



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Discussions over the precise mechanism involved in the transmission ofpsychological states from one individual to another changed little over thesubsequent years. Indeed, the speculative and ill-defined models at the heartof the social psychological paradigm betray almost an indifference to the ques-tion on the part of practitioners of the human sciences. Many studies made nomention whatsoever of the actual process of transfer, content simply to invokeit as a demonstrable fact. Clinicians expended far greater analytical energy onthe question at the heart of criminal anthropology and its related fields ofinquiry: why did certain individuals appear more prone than others to thecontagions of deviance?

EVOLUTIONARY HIERARCHIES

Many believed that the answer lay, at least in part, in the existence of hierar-chies of racial and/or cultural development.51 That such an answer should wieldpersuasive power in late nineteenth-century Russia is not surprising in thecontext of arguably the single most important concern of the contemporaryRussian intelligentsia: the peasant question. The village remained in the lastdecades of the Romanov dynasty an object of anthropological and literaryfascination and moral and political anguish.52 As Christine Worobec has noted,narratives of cultural underdevelopment enabled progressive practitioners ofthe human sciences to articulate a scientifically grounded plea for nationalenlightenment in order to rescue their rural brothers, and, by extension, therest of Russian society, from the depredations of destructive irrationality.53

A few years before Kandinskii’s study, in 1877, Viacheslav Avksent’evichManassein (1841–1901), professor of medicine at the Medical-Surgical Acad-emy in St. Petersburg, published his lectures on mental influence. Manassein

mission par contagion, which was repeatedly cited by Russian commentators through-out the rest of the century. See, e.g., Pavel F. Kapterev, “O podrazhatel’nosti v psi-khologicheskom i pedagogicheskom otnosheniiakh,” Obrazovanie, nos. 7–8 (July–August 1893), 1–41, 26. Kapterev taught psychology and pedagogy in the varioushigher education institutions in St. Petersburg and was the author of several works onboth subjects. See also his Pedagogicheskaia psikhologiia dlia narodnykh uchitelei (St.Petersburg, 1877), Pedagogicheskii protsess (St. Petersburg, 1905), and Istoriia russkoipedagogii (St. Petersburg, 1910).

51 On this phenomenon in general in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seeStephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (1981; New York, 1996), 30–69.

52 Stephen L. Frank, Crime Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley, 1999). Uncompromising literary representations of peasant societyinclude Anton Chekhov’s short story Peasants (1897) and Ivan Bunin’s The Village(1910).

53 Christine Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, Demons in Imperial Russia (DeKalb, IL, 2001), 151.




argued that there was a relationship between evolutionary development andimitation. The unconscious and uncontrolled traffic between individuals wasmore typical of primitive races than of their developed counterparts: “One ofthe characteristics in which lower types of people reveal less deviation fromreflective action than higher types is their tendency to replicate the movementsand noises produced by others; they manifest this tendency in the form of aninvoluntary habit that, according to travellers, they are unable to resist.” ForManassein, such behavior was not “significantly different from automatic ac-tions, and we might expect it to be weakened together with a strengthening ofthe capacity to direct oneself [upravliat’ soboi].”54 In other words, imitationwas a function of an underdeveloped mind and would diminish with evolu-tionary progress.

Kandinskii also inserted discussion of imitation and/or spiritual contagioninto an evolutionary hierarchy in which primitive groups of individuals weremore susceptible than developed ones: “In general we can say that the tendencyto imitate instinctively diminishes with the development of the mind, and thereason for this is clear. . . . Instinctive imitation [podrazhatel’nost’] dependson the nervous-mental organization itself, on the coordinated acts of the au-tomatic mechanisms of the brain. . . . Emotional impressions, perceived by thehigher centers of the brain, elicit the activity of the mind, thoughts. In thisway, the reaction to emotional impressions can be not simply actions butthoughts as well.”55 This mental activity acted as a sort of buffer between theactions or moods of one individual and another witnessing them. More prim-itive societies lacked, however, sufficient development of this cognitive ap-paratus and were unable to mediate their responses to emotions. For Kandin-skii, the intimate relationship between ideas and the emotions they elicitedmeant that the transmission of the latter served as a model for the transmissionof the former: “An intellectually undeveloped, ignorant or half-educated so-ciety willingly embraces a new idea, without any criticism, without any attemptto assimilate it properly or to develop its logical consequences.”56 The equationof primitiveness with group behavior, unmediated by the censorious capacitiesof reason and the will, would become an abiding theme of a later series ofstudies of mass psychology in the 1890s.57

Yet elsewhere Kandinskii was skeptical about the capacities of reason andwillpower rationally to mediate social interaction: “Any impartial observer

54 Manassein, O znachenii psikhicheskikh vlianii, 36–37.55 Kandinskii, Obshcheponiatnye psikhologicheskie etiudi, 179.56 Ibid., 181.57 See Worobec’s examination of psychiatric discussions of shriekers (klikushi) at the

turn of the twentieth century, which revealed a similar nexus of assumptions aboutcultural backwardness, infused with beliefs about women’s sexuality predisposing themto irrational thought and behavior (Worobec, Possessed, 148–87).



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would come to the conclusion that it is not reason and the will that are theimmediate drivers of human behavior but rather desires, feelings, and pas-sions.” Kandinskii cited Comte to the effect that reason does not prompt us toaction but merely controls our impulses and restrains our passions, and heelaborated this mechanism in the following terms: “In general, in relation toactions, if one can so express it, reason plays the role of the police, a role thatcan summarized by the phrase “it is not allowed.” Just as in a well-orderedstate the police should be well organized, so should reason and the will besufficiently developed in a well-ordered mental life; but in the average personthis mental police is not strong and active and therefore a great deal happenswithout its knowledge or in defiance of it.”58 Kandinskii was drawing an anal-ogy between disorder within a state and disorder within a mind. Yet the obviousparallel betrayed a more disturbing relationship between individual and socialinstability: how could individuals with such imperfect control over their ownemotions and states of mind serve as adequate agents of social control in astate? Moreover, Kandinskii’s understanding of the shortcomings of the willsuggested a deeply pessimistic view of the capacity of human rationality toorganize the world and thus to enjoy substantive freedom: “Only a consciouslogical process of thought, the independent assimilation of external impres-sions, which has as its goal the final result of a conscious exercise of the will,makes a person free.” Yet while uneducated and ignorant individuals wereincapable of such an attempt, “even a person with a high level of intellectualand moral development can never entirely avoid the effects of nervous-mentalcontagion [nervno-psikhicheskogo kontagiia]. . . . The facts demonstrate clearlythat the contemporary high level of knowledge in no way safeguards even theeducated [intelligentnyi] layer of society from mental epidemics (it suffices torecall that there are many scholars among the spiritualists).”59

These misgivings notwithstanding, early psychologists concentrated theiranalytical energies on the intimate relationship between underdevelopment andsusceptibility to moral contagion. In 1889, an article appeared that examinedan epidemic of hiccupping among the peasant population of a particular districtin Podolsk Province. The local doctor, Ksenofont Platonovich Sulima (1855–?), insisted that psychological and physical ill health provided an ideal breed-ing ground for mental epidemics: “Our villages abound with a mass of mentallyill individuals and we frequently have to observe the most exquisite forms ofnervous and mental illness.” Therefore, “it is unsurprising that neuroses andpsychoses can assume an epidemic character: unconscious imitation [bezsoz-natel’naia podrazhatel’nost’] or, following Lewes, the capacity of one personunconsciously to enter into unison with another is more present in individuals

58 Kandinskii, Obshcheponiatnye psikhologicheskie etiudi, 169.59 Ibid., 234.




with a primitive mental activity and weakly developed and expressed individ-uality.”60 Sulima cited the German psychiatrist Theodor Meynert (1833–98)to the effect that “the less the mind and individuality depend upon their ownlogical combinations, the stronger the urge to direct thoughts and the actionsassociated with them toward the imitation of the psychological combinationstaken from other people; the lower the mind, the less developed the individ-uality.” Sulima pointed out that “this was the reason for the appearance ofmental epidemics and such a high degree of infectiousness of nervous andmental illness in the Middle Ages.”61 The fundamental equation here of mentalillness and backwardness was to form the nexus of the clinical understandingof mass psychology throughout the late Imperial period. The backwardness ofthe village impeded both the psychological individuation of its members andthe development of a robust, independent, and critical cognitive apparatus ineach of them.62

Sikorskii put forward an alternative reading of the relationship between ruralpoverty, backwardness, and the spread of moral contagion in a study of a masssuicide in Ternovskie Khutora, a village in Kiev Province, in 1892.63 He in-vestigated the case of more than twenty Old Believers who, inspired by theirleader Kondratii Malevanyi, took a shortcut to immortality by burying them-selves alive with small children—an act apparently motivated by fear thatinterference by the authorities into their liturgical practices threatened to com-promise their salvation.64 Sikorskii argued that “the phenomenon rightly

60 Ksenofont P. Sulima, “Epidemiia ikoty (Singultus) v selenii Ketrosy, Iamol’skogouezda, Podol’skoi gubernii,” Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, sudebnoi i prakticheskoimeditsiny, no. 4 (October–December 1889), 36. On George Henry Lewes see Rylance,Victorian Psychology, 251–330.

61 Sulima, “Epidemiia ikoty,” 36.62 A few years later and in more abstract language, Kapterev also argued that “the

most favorable condition for the development of imitation is the instability, the insuf-ficiency, of the imitating organism’s formation. While the organism is not properlyformed and finds itself in a process of education, it is the most predisposed to imitation,as it is unable to resist external influences in any significant way” (Kapterev, “O pod-razhatel’nosti,” 34).

63 Sikorskii was an editor of Voprosy nervno-psikhicheskoi meditsiny, and his ownprofessional activities illuminate the growing public profile of psychiatry during theperiod; he appeared as a prominent expert witness for the prosecution at the notorioustrial of Mendel Beilis in 1913 and published a popular pamphlet justifying his conclu-sions. See his Ekspertiza po delu ob ubiistve Andriushi Iushchinskago (St. Petersburg,1913).

64 Such self-immolation may also be viewed as part of a countervailing discoursewithin Christianity that stressed that stigma, sin, and depravity were indications ofholiness, martyrdom, and asceticism. Indeed, the stigma of depravity was presumed byevery true Christian as part of his or her postlapsarian condition. Some saw the “sal-vation” offered by the Orthodox Church as a satanic interference with a necessary



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deserves to be called a mental epidemic” that had “swiftly overwhelmed thepeasant population in a number of villages.”65 He maintained that the suscep-tibility of the peasantry to religiously inspired mental epidemics was because“the mass of the people wait and thirst for spiritual renewal. They search forthe savior and . . . they find him in the insane Kondratii Malevanyi! It is im-possible to ignore that the epidemic of Malevanyi is a cry of despair from anailing population and a prayer for emancipation . . . , for the improvement ofeducation and sanitary conditions.”66 In other words, responsibility for thepeasants’ self-destruction and their readiness to follow a madman into thegrave lay with the tsarist social order, which had locked them down in suchextremes of degradation and ignorance that they were unable to distinguishsalvation from oblivion. It was the spectacular irrationality of the peasants’behavior that advanced not merely the conflation of backwardness and mad-ness but also their marking out as radically other, removed from anythingapproaching the psychology of educated Russia.

In 1897, Sikorskii published an extended study of mass suicides in KievProvince entitled Epidemic Voluntary Deaths and Murders at Ternovskie Khu-tora, which emphasized the role of insanity in Malevanyi’s followers. Sikorskiiargued that these acts of self-immolation presented society “with a patholog-ical phenomenon [patologicheskoe iavlenie], which was related to a series ofmental epidemics [psikhicheskie epidemii].”67 In the hands of its leader, Vitalii,one Ternovskie Khutora sect became “an instrument of pathological selection[patologicheskii podbor] and the most dangerous source of mental contagion[psikhicheskaia zaraza].” Returning to the 1892 suicides, Sikorskii identifiedsomething new in the understanding of the sources of moral contagion: thepsychopathologies of the leader. “The influence of the insane on healthy in-dividuals, as far as we are aware, has not been the subject of scholarly inves-tigation, yet it undoubtedly exists and becomes particularly noticeable in pe-riods of mental ferment and psychological epidemics.”68 Malevanyi was“suffering from a typical form of insanity,” and “the number of the mentallyill in Malevanyi’s sect was greater than in the rest of the population that didnot take part in the religious ferment.” This constituency provided a critical

stigma or vice that should be accepted as a gift by true martyrs. Self-immolation wasthus an effective measure to sabotage the unholy and secularized sanctions of the state-owned church. On the appropriation of Sikorskii’s work by the Orthodox Church, seeBeer, “The Medicalization of Deviance.”

65 Ivan A. Sikorskii, Psikhopaticheskaia epidemiia 1892 goda v Kievskoi Gubernii(Kiev, 1893), 1.

66 Ibid., 46.67 Ivan A. Sikorskii, Epidemicheskie vol’nye smerti i smertoubiistva v Ternovskie

Khutora (Kiev, 1897), 83.68 Ibid., 92.




mass of psychopathology, which, when triggered by Malevanyi, overwhelmedthe sanity of sections of the remaining population. “The religious ferment wassustained in the population around Kiev uezd while Malevanyi was in a psy-chiatric asylum in Kiev. When he was released into the care of his family andappeared among the ignorant rural population, the ferment intensified signifi-cantly and affected many uezdy in Kiev and contiguous provinces. Pilgrimagesto see Malevanyi began, and first in one place and then in another, epidemicsof hysteria with convulsions, hallucinations, and delirium broke out amongthe hitherto healthy population.”69 Sikorskii’s pamphlet attracted a great dealof attention among fellow psychiatrists and spawned a series of reviews andderivative studies.70 One such example, a 1903 article by Pavel IvanovichIakobii (1842–1913), “Religious-Mental Epidemics,” saw the tragic events atTernovskie Khutora as evidence of a “mental contagion [psikhicheskaia zar-aza] of a significant number of people, who had undoubtedly been infected[zarazhennye] by some or other mentally ill person.”71 Reviewing the masssuicide in a text published in 1905, Hypnotism and Mental Contagion, FedorEgorovich Rybakov (1868–1920), an adjunct lecturer at Moscow University,combined the language of backwardness and a language of psychopathologyin his analysis of events. He identified two types of “carriers of mental infec-tion: (1) a psychopathic type of subject and (2) a type of subject who is in-sufficiently enlightened, insufficiently developed in a spiritual and an intellec-tual sense. Both of these types are well known. The first is found in all strataof society, but the second primarily among the lowest class: it personifies thatelemental force that bears the name of the dark masses.”72 Rybakov’s analysissuggested a fundamental equivalence between backwardness and insanity,thereby uniting the principal explanations of susceptibility to moral contagion:“A psychopathological subject who is also uncultured represents the most suit-able material for induced insanity.”73

69 Ibid., 93.70 Vladimir I. Iakovenko, “Epidemiia istericheskikh sudorog v Podol’skom uezde,

Moskovskoi gub.,” Vestnik obshchestvennoi gigieny, sudebnoi i prakticheskoi meditsiny25, no. 3 (March 1895): 93–109; E. A. Genik, “Vtoraia epidemiia istericheskikh su-dorog v Podol’skom uezde, Moskovskoi gubernii,” Nevrologicheskii vestnik 6, no. 4(1898): 146–59; N. V. Krainskii, Porcha, klikushi i besnovatiia (St. Petersburg, 1900);V. I. Iakovenko, “Psikhicheskaia epidemiia na religioznoi pochve v Anan’evskom iTiraspol’kom uezdakh Khersonskoi gub.,” Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, no. 3 (March1911); 191–98, and no. 4 (April 1911), 229–45; E. A. Genik, “Tret’ia epidemiia isteriiv Moskovskoi gubernii,” Sovremennaia psikhiatriia, no. 8 (August 1912), 588–604.For a discussion of these studies, see Worobec, Possessed, 148–87.

71 Pavel I. Iakobii, “Religiozno-psikhicheskie epidemii,” Vestnik Evropy (1903), no.10 (October), 732–58, no. 11 (November), 117–66, 119–20.

72 Fedor E. Rybakov, Gipnotizm i psikhicheskaia zaraza (Moscow, 1905), 124.73 Ibid.



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Not that backwardness was a prerequisite for mental illness. The relationshipbetween mental illness and susceptibility was one that featured in a large num-ber of psychiatric studies. A textbook on psychiatry published in 1886 by PavelIvanovich Kovalevskii (1849–1923), professor of psychiatry at the Universityof Kharkov, made repeated references to instability (neustoichivost’) to de-scribe susceptibility to abnormal mental states and mental illness. Observinga high incidence of mental illness among students, he remarked, “What are thecauses? Where is the basis for this mental instability [neustoichivost’]?” andsuggested that parents of psychopaths, criminals, and drunkards had passed ona “predisposition to instability [neustoichivost’] and wavering/vacillation [ko-lebaniia] to their offspring.”74 The pedagogue Pavel Fedorovich Kapterev(1849–1921) also identified instability/lack of steadfastness (neustochivost’)as the sine qua non of imitation: “A subject lacking established and carefullythought through concepts and views, with an unstable mood, with ever chang-ing desires and urges, easily falls prey to imitation.”75

These analyses all claimed to locate the source of moral contagion withinthe psychological condition of those caught up in its tide, shaped either bycultural backwardness or by mental illness. An alternative focus of analysis,however, argued that the key to an understanding of collective deviance laynot merely within its individual practitioners but also within the psychologicalstructures of the collective itself—within, that is, the crowd.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CROWD

Visions of unpredictability and irrational interaction between individuals, un-mediated by the censorious capacities of the will and reason, found their mostconcentrated manifestation in discussions of the crowd. The crowd temporar-ily, but often with destructive consequences, replicated the lack of individua-tion found among the peasantry and represented an atavistic return to moreprimitive human instincts. Peasants continued to feature prominently in studiesof the crowd, but, as I will argue, the emergence of crowd psychology as adistinct subdiscipline in the 1890s enjoyed a much more expansive scope ofapplication. It came to be deployed in studies of all human agglomerations andof the functioning of society as a whole in the age of mass politics.

A number of scholars have traced the significance of the crowd in latenineteenth-century European thought.76 Roger L. Geiger has noted that “the

74 Pavel I. Kovalevskii, Obshchaia psikhopatologiia (Kharkov, 1886), 161, 165.75 Kapterev, “O podrazhatel’nosti,” 34.76 Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871–1899 (Cambridge,

1992); Barrows, Distorting Mirrors; H. S. Hughes, Consciousness and Society: TheReorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (London, 1959); Serge Mos-covici, The Age of the Crowd, trans. J. C. Whitehouse (Cambridge, 1985).




spectre of the crowd was a familiar image in the nineteenth century. With itsconnotations of uncontrolled energy, potential violence, even revolution, itsymbolised the temporary abandonment of the constraints that make civilisedsociety possible.”77 Serge Moscovici has argued that psychological theories ofcrowd psychology developed in reaction to the power that France’s lowerclasses acquired after 1850.78 Susanna Barrows has similarly observed thatfear of crowds was indeed a constituent feature of the cultural anxiety thatbeset France in the belle epoque.79

The elaboration of crowd psychology in the Russian fin de siecle, informedby theories of imitation and moral contagion, was similarly representative ofa profound unease at the potentially destructive forces that could be unleashedfrom below. The developments in the theory in Russia were, however, far frombeing simply an appropriation, however creative, of theories first elaboratedin Western Europe. Russian psychologists and sociologists had already ad-dressed the issue of crowd behavior in the 1880s before the publication of themajor French and Italian studies of the topic at the end of that decade. In his1881 study, Kandinskii had commented that the “effects of mental contagionare particularly manifest in a mass of people and all the more manifest thelarger and more compact that mass, and the less the individuals comprising itare accustomed to governing their actions in accordance with the dictates ofreason.” The herdlike mentality with which most crowds were invested con-ferred tremendous power on any leader able to direct them by example: “Who-ever is able to act in the necessary way on a crowd will be able to lead themwherever he likes—into fire, into water, into the murderous combat of a bat-tle.” Indeed, one of the examples of crowd psychology repeatedly invoked todemonstrate the power of example was that of soldiers at war: “The word ofa leader able to inspire soldiers can turn them into heroes and brings victoryin a battle that had already appeared lost. By contrast, the example of one ortwo cowards infects an entire regiment and causes them to flee shamefully.”80

A year after the publication of Kandinskii’s study, the relationship betweenleaders and crowds was the subject of a lengthy article published by Mikhai-lovskii. Mikhailovskii owed his moral and intellectual authority to his prolificwritings as a publicist for the journal Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of thefatherland) and, after 1892, for Russkoe bogatstvo (Russian wealth).81 “The

77 Geiger, “Democracy and the Crowd,” 47.78 Serge Moscovici, “Bewußte und unbewußte Einflusse in der Kommunikation,”

Zeitschrift fur Sozialpsychologie no. 12 (1981), 94.79 Barrows, Distorting Mirrors, 2.80 Kandinskii, Obshcheponiatnye psikhologicheskie etiudi, 185–86.81 Mikhailovskii’s contemporaries intensively discussed his writings on social psy-

chology. See, e.g., A. I. Krasnosel’ skii, Mirovozzrenie gumanista nashego vremeni:Osnovy ucheniia N. K. Mikhailovskogo (St. Petersburg, 1900), 7–14; S. N. Iuzhakov,“Sotsiologicheskaia doktrina N. K. Mikhailovskogo,” in Na slavnom postu, 1860–



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Hero and the Crowd” discussed notions of suggestion and the spread of ideasand emotions in crowds and masses of people in general. Mikhailovskii clar-ified that he did not mean “hero” in the positive sense but rather in terms ofthe individual who was able to prompt the crowd to follow his or her example.In the case of Vereshchagin’s lynching, he identified the dragoon who haddelivered the initial blow with the blunt edge of his sabre: “Vereshchagin waskilled by the unrestrained striving of the crowd, with its disposition to imitatethe hero. In this case, the hero was the dragoon who, out of either bravery orcowardice, delivered the first blow.”82 As early as in this 1882 study, Mikhai-lovskii noted the expansive explanatory potential of theories of imitation: “Thepower of imitation lies in the fact that it manifests itself at virtually every step,in an innumerable quantity of slight instances.”83 A decade later, the general-ization of the explanatory model to the study of societies as a whole wouldbecome a feature of studies of moral contagion.

Throughout the 1880s, however, discussions of crowd psychology remainedconfined to isolated articles. Interest in the subject intensified as Russian psy-chologists discussed the monumental Les origines de la France contemporaineby Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), which was published between 1875 and 1893and which devoted long passages to descriptions of the revolutionary crowdsin 1789. As Daniel Pick has observed, the study was “imbricated with medico-psychiatric and evolutionary naturalist language.”84 In Taine’s account, “thelaws of mental contagion” could, within a crowd, bring about the transfor-mation of an individual into an irrational savage: “Mutual contagion inflamesthe passions; crowds . . . end in a state of drunkenness, from which nothingcan issue but vertigo and blind rage.”85 The work was subsequently translatedinto Russian in a number of editions between 1880, when the early volumesbegan to appear, and the first decade of the twentieth century, and Taine’s workwas widely discussed in Russian literary and scientific journals throughout the1890s.86 Barrows has argued that Taine came to stand as “the hero and model

1900: Literaturnyi sbornik posviashchennyi N. K. Mikhailovskomu, ed. D. Mamin-Sibiriak, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1906), 1:363–65; M. M. Kovalevskii, “N. K. Mik-hailovskii kak sotsiolog,” Vestnik Evropy no. 4 (1913), 192–212.

82 Mikhailovskii, “Geroi i tolpa,” 103.83 Ibid., 113. These early studies of the relationship between crowds and their leaders

(or heroes) anticipated the influential treatise on the same topic by the French sociol-ogist Gustave Le Bon, La psychologie des foules (Paris, 1895).

84 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cam-bridge, 1989), 68.

85 Hippolyte Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, 6 vols. (Paris, 1876–94), vol. 2, La Revolution, 133.

86 See, e.g., Ippolit Ten, Proiskhozhdenie obshchestvennogo stroia sovremennoi Frantsii,trans. A. V. Svyrov, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1907), particularly vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1880).




for crowd psychologists,” yet he “simply stated that passions were contagiouswithout asking why they were.”87 Like Tolstoy’s depiction of the murder ofVereshchagin, Taine’s Les origines provided abundant material for the explo-ration of this question in the language of social psychology.

Domestic events also contributed to the rise of crowd psychology as a dis-cernible subdiscipline within the fields of psychiatry and psychology. In thewake of the rioting that had accompanied the Russian cholera epidemic of1892, psychologists, criminologists, and psychiatrists began to address thesubject in significant numbers.88 As the jurist Leonid Egorovich Obolenskii(1845–1906) observed in 1893, “The cholera riots of last year have elicitedintensified interest in the issues of ‘the criminal crowd’ and the ‘psychologyof the masses.’”89

The speed with which the unrest had spread prompted some to inquire intothe conditions that made it possible. Sluchevskii argued that the cholera riotshad shown that all the crowd required was a mobilizing myth or fable togalvanize it to action: “Without any factual basis, the tales, for example, ofthe poisoning of the people by doctors during the development of the cholerariots occurred not only in our country but also in Paris and Sicily during thecholera epidemic that ruled there during the 1830s.” He was adamant thatcertain common conditions must first obtain, providing a platform for the col-lective sentiment that could then become catalyzed into the unity of a crowd:“Without the presence of this unity in feelings and thoughts there will not existthat bond that fuses people into a single crowd and invests it with a singlesoul.” Sluchevskii’s language revealed the impulse to generalize implicit in hisdiscussion of the crowd that identified in no uncertain terms the location ofthe threat. When he invoked Taine’s Les origines as evidence of the behaviorof crowds, he switched to discussion of “the people” (narod) in general: “Thepeople is unable to distinguish or reason; it thinks par blocs; facts and dreamsappear to it compatible and united.” He invoked the specter of peasant revolt,familiar to educated Russians since the reign of Catherine the Great: “Theharshness of living conditions in the time of Stenka Razin and Pugachev, asthe historical sources of that period testify, created for [these rebels] a crowd

88 On the riots in Tashkent, see Jeff Sahadeo, “Epidemic and Empire: Ethnicity, Class,and ‘Civilization’ in the 1892 Tashkent Cholera Riot,” Slavic Review 64, no. 1 (Spring2005): 117–39.

89 Leonid E. Obolenskii, “Noveishaia psevdo-nauka,” Russkaia mysl’, November1893, 122–42, 122.

For examples of the discussion of Taine’s work, see V. Ger’e, “Ippolit Ten i ego znach-enie v istoricheskoi nauke,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 1 (1890), 5–65, no. 2 (1890), 463–500; K. K. Arsen’ev, “Novyi istorik sovremennoi Frantsii,” Vestnik Evropy, no. 1(1891), 313–42, no. 2 (1891), 784–814, no. 4 (1892), 913–51.

87 Barrows, Distorting Mirrors, 85–86.



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of adherents everywhere they appeared and where the people gathered underthe banner they had raised.”90 He concluded his article with a plea for theimprovement of the condition of the peasantry:

The significant majority of those individuals who enter the crowd belong to the lowerorders of society, which live under harsh conditions of obtaining the basic means tosurvive, whose proud dreams never go beyond the desire expressed in those lines byNekrasov:

“If only someone would call me‘Ivan Moseich’ just once!”

And suddenly this humble man, downtrodden by everyday living conditions, hears thatpeople are hailing Ivan Moseich, he sees that they pay him great attention, and he feelsthat people are only concerned with him, people serve him. . . . Is this not a reason tobecome swept away, to lose any control over oneself!91

Faith in the power of Enlightenment rationality to dispel the ignorance andpoverty that provided the breeding ground for mental epidemics also charac-terized a speech to a gathering of psychiatrists at Moscow University in Oc-tober 1893 by a member of the faculty, Ardalion Ardalionovich Tokarskii(1859–1901). Speaking in the immediate aftermath of the cholera riots, To-karskii could scarcely avoid mentioning them. Referring to the “senseless actsof evil” that had accompanied the disturbances, he suggested that the “basicreason for senselessness and savagery of any kind of mass movement is to befound in the ignorance of the mass; such incidents can only be prevented bythe timely dissemination of the largest possible quantity of knowledge andsound principles among the people.”92

At the beginning of the 1890s, then, many discussions of crowd psychologycontinued to identify the same two principal factors in the spread of collectivedeviance: backwardness and insanity. The view that peasants’ ignorance, su-perstition, and poverty predisposed them to mental epidemics was obviouslya disconcerting one. It suggested that the majority of the Russian populationwas yet to be inoculated with education and civilization against the depreda-tions of irrationality, panic, fear, and the spread of violence. At the same

90 Sluchevskii, “Tolpa i ee psikhologiia,” 11, 13, 26.91 Ibid., 38.92 Ardalion A. Tokarskii, Psikhicheskie epidemii (Moscow, 1893), 23. Tokarskii

graduated from the medical faculty of Moscow University in 1885, after which hebegan to investigate nervous and mental diseases in the university’s clinic for the men-tally ill. In 1887, he published Gipnotizm i vnushenie (St. Petersburg, 1887), and in1891 he became one of the editors of Zhurnal nevropatologii i psikhiatrii. The follow-ing year, Tokarskii became an adjunct lecturer at Moscow University. Throughout the1890s he published a large number of books and articles on suggestion in both Frenchand Russian journals.




time, such a view nevertheless affirmed the ultimate power of reason andprogress to overcome these remnants of a premodern era—features of theMiddle Ages, as Sulima had called them.

THE FRAGILITY OF REASON

Yet West European studies of crowd psychology wielded a destabilizing influ-ence over the contemporary Russian understanding of the robustness of humanreason and the emancipatory power of moral and mental development.Whereas the initial equation of irrationality and backwardness had served ef-fectively to endorse both the necessity and the potential of enlightened ration-ality, far more disturbing was the view, hinted at in some of the earlier discus-sions, that the susceptibility to moral contagion was in fact embedded deep inthe psychological constitution of all human beings and was an inalienable partof their condition. The rise of the second explanation owed a great deal to thewritings of French and Italian criminologists working in the field of collectivepsychology. Their research lent impetus to this reconfiguration of moral con-tagion not simply as the engine of isolated acts of deviance, such as an epi-demic of suicide or murder, but as the mainspring of the social order. Thecrowd was simply an environment that illuminated to a striking degree thesubconscious forces that determined human behavior in a more diffuse mannerin everyday coexistence in communities. The first step in this line of argumentwas to point out the “democratic” appeal of the crowd, in the sense that itcould activate and accentuate impulses in all humans, not just the backwardor pathological.

Almost all people, so the argument ran, would unconsciously surrender theirindividuality and deliver themselves to the collective impulses of the crowd.An influential example of this argument was a work by the French criminol-ogist Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), La philosophie penale (1890), which arguedthat while crowds could easily be dangerous, most of them were not composedof naturally vicious deviants: “The majority of these men had assembled outof pure curiosity, but the fever of some of them soon reached the minds of all,and in all of them there arose a delirium. The very man who had come runningto oppose the murder of an innocent person is one of the first to be seized withthe homicidal contagion, and, moreover, it does not occur to him to be aston-ished at this.”93

93 Gabriel Tarde, La philosophie penale, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1891), 324. Tarde (1843–1904) became known for his writings on criminology and social science while a mag-istrate in provincial France. His prolific output during the 1890s eventually broughthim to the chair of Modern Philosophy at the College de France (1900). In Russia, hisinfluence was extensive; his works were immediately translated into Russian and avidly



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A year later, a publication by a young Italian criminologist, Scipio Sighele(1868–1913), La folla delinquente, which was translated into Russian in 1893,further elaborated the normalization of the members of a deviant crowd.94

Anthropologists and legal authorities, cautioned Sighele, must differentiatebetween two kinds of collective crime: the premeditated offenses of groupslike the Mafia and the spontaneous destruction of the crowd. For born criminalsand for organized sects of bandits, anthropological factors predominated;crowds, like casual offenders, were most conditioned by social factors.95 Allcrowds, even those of decent men and women, were predisposed to evil: “Themicrobes of evil develop very easily, good ones almost never.”96 These studiesof urban crowds tended to militate against the equation of rural superstition

discussed in the pages of Russian journals. See his Zakony podrazhaniia (St. Peters-burg, 1892), Prestupleniia tolpy, trans. I. F. Iordanskii (Kazan, 1893), Publika i tolpa,trans. F. Laterner (St. Petersburg, 1899), Obshchestvennoe mnenie i tol’pa, trans. P. S.Kogan (Moscow, 1902), and Lichnost’ i tolpa: Ocherki po sotsial’noi psikhologii, trans.E. A. Predtechenskii (St. Petersburg, 1903). For Russian discussions of his work, seeAleksei Aleksandrovich Kozlov, Tard i ego teoriia obshchestva (Kiev, 1887); DmitriiA. Dril’, “Chto govorilos’ na mezhdunarodnom ugolovno-antropologicheskom kon-gresse v Bruissele,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 3 (March 1893), 65–70; Leontii Danilovich,Espinas i Tard ob obshchestve (Moscow, 1902). Tarde was also the subject of an ex-tensive entry in the Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’.

94 Scipio Sighele studied jurisprudence at the University of Rome, where he becamea devotee of the work of Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri. His works on collectiveand criminal psychology attempt to hew a middle course between the work of his twoPositivist masters: on the one hand, Ferri’s socialist-inspired criminal sociology, withits naturalistic worldview and conviction that all human actions are determined by avast causal chain; on the other, Lombroso’s criminal anthropology, with its reductionof deviant social behaviors to psychophysiology. In works such as La folla delinquente,Sighele established many of the founding principles that were subsequently codified inGustave Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules (1895): the centrality of heterogeneouscrowds in modern life, the inferior intelligence of collectives vis-a-vis individuals, theprimacy of imitation and suggestion in crowd behavior, the violent and/or criminalpredisposition of human agglomerations.

95 Scipio Sighele, La foule criminelle: Essai de psychologie collective, trans. PaulVigny (Paris, 1892), 28–29. Two Russian translations of the volume appeared in 1893,one of which was Skipio Sigele [Sighele], Prestupnaia tolpa: opyt kollektivnoi psi-khologii, trans. from the French by A. P. Afanas’ev (St. Petersburg, 1893). For a reviewof Sighele’s work, see I. D-ov [Ivan Ivanovich Dobrovol’skii], “Psikhologiia ‘prestup-noi’ tolpy,” Russkaia mysl’, no. 12 (December 1894), 130–58.

96 Not all individuals were equally susceptible to the noxious “microbes” of thecrowd. Those few individuals endowed with exceptionally strong wills could resist theinfection of suggestion. The rest of mankind Sighele divided into two categories: borncriminals, who profited from any occasion to break the law, and the majority of nor-mally lawful citizens, who under certain circumstances might be led into illegal actions.Only the morally weak, degenerate, or “criminaloid” person with an organic predis-position to evil could be hypnotized to commit truly heinous crimes (Sighele, Foulecriminelle, 63, 137–44). To explain the pathological character of most crowds, Sigheleutilized the doctrines of the Salpetriere school of hypnotism.




with a predisposition to moral contagion; they suggested on the contrary thatthe disorder had the power to affect all individuals, not just the unenlightened.

Certain Russian ideological orientations were in any case predisposed tochallenge the attempt to frame discussions of moral contagion within an evo-lutionary or cultural hierarchy of development. With his Populist sympathies,Mikhailovskii resisted indictments of the ignorance and spiritual poverty ofthe peasantry, arguing that the crowd should not be conflated with “the people.”Indeed, for Mikhailovskii, social station was of no consequence in determininghow individuals behaved within a crowd: “If, therefore, people point, for ex-ample, to the recent cholera riots and say: such is the Russian people!—Wecan confidently retort: no, these are not features particular to the Russian peo-ple. They can manifest themselves in any other European or Asiatic people.. . . This psychological process is not the exclusive preserve of the lower ordersof society, usually denoted by the words ‘the people.’ In short, the crowd isnot the people, but an autonomous social-psychological phenomenon, in needof specific study.”97 In effect, Mikhailovskii was arguing that the crowd wasrepresentative of all people, rather than simply “the people” (narod). Such animpulse to generalize crowd behavior led to a number of disturbing conclu-sions about the stability of contemporary society and the status of rationalitywithin it.

Even the writings of those clinicians like Sluchevskii that appeared at timesto argue that educational and material improvement would render the peasantpopulation resistant to the forces of moral contagion were riven by doubts.Referring to the studies of Mikhailovskii, Tarde, and Sighele, Sluchevskiipainted a disturbing picture of irrational forces that remained latent within allhuman beings until they were unleashed within a crowd: “In every person,invisible to him, and all the more so to an external observer, there lies in thesphere of unconscious mental activity the potential of a gradually accumulatedstructure of mental forces. These mental forces manifest themselves in the lifeof a crowd. . . . It is they that give the crowd the character of an organism,living its own mental life, just as they transform for a time the souls of themembers of the crowd.”98 While the emergence of a crowd might be subjectto empirically discernible sociological and psychological factors, once formedit extended a profound and incomprehensible power over its members: “In thesecrets of the human soul, beyond the sphere of consciousness, there are hiddenmental foundations capable, in the presence of the necessary conditions, ofmanifesting themselves in life.”99 Sluchevskii’s article reverberated with anxi-ety at the potentially destructive forces of human irrationality that lurked not

97 Nikolai K. Mikhailovskii, “Eshche o tolpe,” Sochineniia, 2, no. 2 (1893): 415.98 Sluchevskii, “Tolpa i ee psikhologiia,” 10, 16.99 Ibid., 37.



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just beneath the surface of contemporary Russian civilization but within eachindividual.

Early studies of crowd psychology in the 1880s had proposed a correlationbetween the psychological predisposition of a crowd’s members, shaped byinsanity or backwardness, and its collective behavior. Such a view did persistin the following decade, but it gradually began to cede ground to an alternativeexplanation, championed by Tarde and Sighele, that emphasized the transfor-mative capacities of crowds to alter radically the behavior of the men andwomen who comprised them.

CIVILIZATION AND THE EXPANSION OF “THE CROWD”

The crowd was a cauldron of psychological transformation. What, however,did “the crowd” actually signify? Where did the frontiers of its transformativepowers lie? Was the crowd simply the most striking and distilled expressionof a much broader, more subtle psychological dynamic? Having eroded thestability of individual rationality within human associations, studies of thecrowd necessarily harbored an impulse to articulate a disturbing vision ofsociety in general.

The extrapolation from crowd behavior to a general theory of social inter-action began in the 1890s. It was then that Tarde published a study, Les loisde l’imitation, which argued that imitation, or unconscious social influence,was the key to an understanding of societies: “The social, like the hypnoticstate, is only a form of a dream, a dream of command and a dream of action.Both the somnabulist and the social man are possessed by the illusion thattheir ideas, all of which have been suggested to them, are spontaneous.”100 Ina lecture delivered to the annual meeting of the Moscow Psychological Societya year later, Bazhenov endorsed Tarde’s extension of the early studies “of theactivities of individuals and masses” undertaken by Adam Smith, ThomasCarlyle, and Mikhailovskii to the study of societies as a whole: “At the presenttime, one of the greatest thinkers of contemporary France, Tarde, has goneeven further and has placed these ideas at the base of an entire sociologicaltheory. . . . Inasmuch as he is a social being, man is above all an imitator, andimitation is as essential a feature of a social organism as heredity is in indi-viduals and vibration in the inorganic world. He identifies society as a collec-tion of beings imitating each other.”101 A number of commentators noted that

100 Gabriel Tarde, Les lois de l’imitation (Paris, 1890), 87. Tarde had first advancedthe idea in an article published six years earlier: Gabriel Tarde, “Qu’est-ce qu’unesociete?” Revue philosophique 18 (July–December 1884): 489–510.

101 Nikolai N. Bazhenov, Oblast’ i predeli vnusheniia (Moscow, 1891), 16.




social homogeneity facilitated the spread of emotions from one individual orgroup to another. Peasants and soldiers were good examples of such a dy-namic.102 Kapterev’s analysis of imitation expressed a schizophrenic attitudetoward the binary of culturedness and unculturedness by expanding the argu-ment about group homogeneity to embrace the emergence of a modern, unifiedsociety. Having declared that uneducated subjects were more prone to imitationthan their sophisticated counterparts, Kapterev went on radically to subvertthis view by suggesting that civilization itself was a bearer of dynamics thatadvanced the spread of moral contagion: “[The spread of] culture undoubtedlybrings about the physical and mental levelling down of people. Particular re-ligions, specific forms of daily life, original worldviews, and separate lan-guages—all this disappears under the pressure of the dominant unifying ideas,beliefs, customs, languages. . . . An approximation takes place among people,an equalization takes place, and this equalization facilitates the developmentnot of originality, but rather of imitation [podrazhatel’nost’].”103 The reformproject of the liberal and progressive intelligentsia, which strove for the inte-gration of the peasantry into the emerging civil society of educated Russia,therefore threatened to intensify rather than diminish dangerous explosions ofirrationality in society.

In early studies of the phenomenon, contagiousness was understood to residein the deviant acts themselves; what their spread revealed about the nature ofthe social order was far less clear. Under the impact of the studies of crowdpsychology in the 1890s, however, suicide and crime were reconfigured asparticularly horrifying instances of a far more disturbing vision of a society inthe grip of the forces of pathological imitation. As societies developed, theweb of relations between their members became ever denser, subjecting eachindividual to myriad influences and pressures that radically undermined au-tonomy and independent reasoning. Kapterev explained the dynamic as fol-lows: “The individual in society hears conversations, reads discussions of cer-tain topics and of certain incidents in books; people in front of him praisecertain principles and actions and condemn others; he encounters a certainmood, a certain rise or fall in society’s spirits; he reads books with a certainorientation, with a certain tendency. All this unwittingly captivates him, directshis thoughts and mood, and subordinates his mind and his heart to the social

102 I. Kablits [I. Iuzov], Osnovy narodnichestva (St. Petersburg, 1882), 67–68. Themilitary physician N. A. Ukhach-Ugorovich argued that the bonds of discipline withinthe army were something of a double-edged sword: “An organic dependence of thewill of soldiers on the will of the commander is created. This dependence expressesitself first and foremost in the fact that the energy, toughness, and determination of thesubordinates increases or weakens in accordance with the wavering willpower of thesenior commander” (Psikhologiia tolpy i armii [Kiev, 1911], 34).

103 Kapterev, “O podrazhatel’nosti,” 36.



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or literary mental tendency and current of the day.”104 Bekhterev’s Suggestionand Its Role in Social Life (1898) began with an even more alarming descrip-tion of the vulnerability of all individuals to mental contagion: “Although[mental] microbes are invisible under the microscope, like genuine physicalmicrobes they act everywhere and are transmitted by words, gestures, andmovements of the face, through books, newspapers, and so on. In short, wher-ever we are in the society that surrounds us, we are subject to the effect ofmental microbes and are consequently in danger of being mentally infected[psikhicheski zarazhennye].”105 Kapterev and Bekhterev thus extended thescope of contagion to include not merely unmediated forms of imitation, suchas panic, but also a whole range of activities that formed the very fabric of thesocial world. The national press and literature became the carriers of patho-logical imitation and suggestion, capable of extending their influence through-out the whole of society.

In a sense, such an analysis had been implicit within even the earliest ac-counts of moral contagion. These accounts had frequently cited the phenom-enon of the reporting of murders or suicides in the press generating a wave ofcopycat crimes as exemplifying a conceptual blurring between, on the one hand,imitation occurring between two individuals in physical proximity, and, on theother, imitation transmitted over space and time by the medium of word ofmouth or the printed word.106 Both the anonymous author of the 1871 Znaniearticle and Kandinskii had cited the phenomenon of copycat killings followingthe publications of details of murders in the press.107 Yet these analyses merelytook note of the role of the press in the dissemination of certain forms ofdeviance; they did not examine what this revealed about society. By contrast,the studies of the 1890s and 1900s explicitly conceptualized a link betweenpsychopathologies and moral contagion in terms of a latent predisposition tocriminal acts that could be triggered by reporting in the press.

In 1906, the criminologist Dmitrii Arkadeevich Dril’ (1849–1910) drew on

104 Ibid., 16.105 Bekhterev, Vnushenie, 1.106 Indeed, in his study of 1838, Des maladies mentales considerees sous le rapport

medical, hygienique, et medico-legal, the influential French psychiatrist Jean-EtienneEsquirol had noted the role of the press in fostering the spread of deviance. A discipleof Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), Esquirol (1772–1840) was one of the founders ofFrench psychiatry and a strong supporter of the isolation of the mentally ill in psychi-atric institutions. On Esquirol’s career and influence, see Jan Goldstein, Console andClassify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,1987), 128–47. In 1882, Mikhailovskii also cited Esquirol’s remark that “friends ofhumanity should demand that newspapers be prohibited from printing news of themotives and details of all suicides” (Mikhailovskii, “Geroi i tolpa,” 110).

107 “Zarazitel’nost’ umstvennykh zabluzhdenii,” 109; Kandinskii, Obshcheponiatnyepsikhologicheskie etiudi, 190–91.




the precepts of degeneration theory to argue that suicide was frequently a resultof the combined effects of diseased heredity and pathological imitation. Indi-viduals with defective biopsychological constitutions were fatally susceptibleto the influence of their environment. It might be that individuals were bornwith a particular predisposition to suicide, but their choice of means was oftenshaped by the examples to which they were exposed. Suicide was, then, aconjunction of: “(1) moods and a usually acute internal state of health, boththe result of certain deficiencies in the functioning of the organism and (2) thethought of taking one’s life as a means of escaping from these acute internalconditions, a means of bringing them to an end.” Dril’ maintained that while“the first factor might be inherited,” the second could only come about “underthe influence of an overheard conversation, reading the newspapers, books,and so on—in a word, from external influences.”108 Contemporaries celebratedthe growth of the print media in postreform Russia as a feature of society’sprogress in developing literacy and culture.109 Yet in this particular context,the rise of the mass circulation press and the growth of publishing effectivelygenerated conduits for the transmission of pathological imitation from indi-viduals in one time and location to individuals in quite another.

A number of clinicians concluded that society essentially functioned in thesame way as a giant crowd; it was similarly governed by the contagions ofemotions and moods, unstructured by reason. Bekhterev declared that “whatwe find in individually formed crowds, we also find, although to a much lesserextent, in every social milieu and also in large societies, especially in periodsof heightened social passion.” In such an environment, the members of a group“infect each other with their thoughts every minute.”110 On the eve of the FirstWorld War, the psychiatrist Aleksandr Nikanorovich Mumortsev (1879–?) waseven more emphatic in his comparison: “The social organism is an enormouscrowd. The laws of suggestion and suggestibility are the same for it as theyare for the individual and for a typical crowd in the street.”111

The specter of popular revolt haunted these theoretical writings on moralcontagion. Clinical visions of the crowd combined with long-standing convic-tions about the underdevelopment of rural Russia to generate significant res-ervations about the growth of mass society and its prospects for rationality andstability. In the wake of the first Russian Revolution, such fears also retro-spectively acquired a prophetic quality.

108 Dmitrii A. Dril’, “Zadachi vospitanii i rol’ nasledstvennosti,” Vestnik psikhologii,kriminal’noi antropologii i gipnotizma, no. 3 (1906), 1–26, 18.

109 Louise McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development ofa Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 123–44.

110 Bekhterev, Vnushenie, 171.111 Aleksandr N. Mumortsev, “O sovremennom pessimizme i samoubiistvakh,” So-

vremennaia psikhiatriia, no. 11 (November 1914), 861–81, 879.



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THE “TRAUMATIC EPIDEMIC” OF 1905

The violent disorder of the years 1905–7 provided ample evidence of thedestructive power of crowds—what the literary historian Mikhail OsipovichGershenzon (1869–1925) called in 1909 “the fury of the masses.”112 Indeed,1905 suddenly embodied the very social revolution that had long hauntededucated Russian society and had been so vividly described in the pages ofTaine’s Les origines. Even long-standing opponents of the autocracy weredisconcerted by the seemingly random and limitless nature of the violence.113

Writing in 1906, Sergei Osipovich Iaroshevskii (1856–1907) described therevolution as impelled by “everything that had matured over decades and cen-turies in the deepest recesses of the people’s collective soul. Everything thathad moved their hearts and minds, that had seethed and bubbled below thesurface had broken through with unrestrained power.” Yet Iaroshevskii wasdecidedly ambivalent about the nature of this force that had been unleashed:“In this chaos of feelings, thoughts, desires, and urges it is sometimes difficultfor the observer to orient himself, to distinguish the good from the evil, theuseful from the harmful, the realistic from the utopian, the true grain of cultureand progress from those manifestations of atavism that sometimes recall thefeatures of our distant and savage forebears.”114 The very indiscriminate natureof social and political action during the revolution, its estrangement from thestructures of morality and reason, invited the application of moral contagionas an explanatory framework capable of accounting for the spread of the vi-olence. Faced with the explosion of disorder, the arbitrary nature of attacksupon a bewilderingly wide variety of social constituencies, from governmentofficials to impoverished Jewish communities, many clinicians deployed thetheoretical apparatus elaborated over the previous two decades in an attemptto understand events.115

The experience of trauma associated with revolutionary violence was con-sidered by many clinicians to play a significant role in the etiology of degen-eration and mental illness. Traumatic experiences also psychologically desta-bilized individuals, rendering them more susceptible to the spread of moralcontagions. Just as Dril’ had maintained that the press reporting of suicidecould trigger the onset of pathological imitation in those with a predisposition,

112 Michal O. Gershenzon, “Tvorcheskoe Samosoznanie,” in Vekhi: Intelligentsiia vRossii: Sborniki statei, 1909–1910 (1909; Moscow, 1991), 89.

113 Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness, 254–98.114 Sergei O. Iaroshevskii, “Materialy k voprosu o massovykh nervnopsikhicheskikh

zabolevaniakh,” Obozrenie psikhiatrii, nevrologii i eksperimental’noi psikhologii 11,no. 1 (January 1906): 1–9, 1.

115 For a description of the violence and disorder of the revolution see AbrahamAscher, The Revolution of 1905, 2 vols. (Stanford, CA, 1988–92).




Iaroshevskii noted that the experience of the trauma of revolution had a similarcatalyzing effect on those “with an inherited or acquired instability of theirnervous-mental apparatus. . . . In normal times, when social life flows peace-fully without severe shocks, these unstable individuals can also lead their livespeacefully without revolt, as perfectly normal people, provided nothing hap-pens in their individual lives capable of disturbing their mental equilibrium.But the vulnerability of these unstable natures is acutely revealed during po-litical catastrophes. Just as the physically unstable and most receptive individ-uals to a given infection most easily become infected and fall ill during a givenepidemic, so during historical catastrophes unstable minds most easily contractnervous and mental illnesses.”116 In Iaroshevskii’s opinion, while the Empirewas undoubtedly experiencing “a mental epidemic” yet to be properly diag-nosed, its carriers were subjects with impaired or unstable nervous-mentalconstitutions.117 Dril’ suggested in a lecture delivered at the Pedagogical De-partment of St. Petersburg University in 1906 that revolutionaries were indeedrecruited from the ranks of “degenerating generations . . . and frequently play,especially in periods of social unrest, one of the most important roles in thelives of entire peoples.”118 Mumortsev also believed that “if the role of sug-gestion as a social factor is so significant even in normal and healthy conditionsof social life, what can we expect when this life begins to experience certaindeviations, if the mental equilibrium of every individual, comprising that so-ciety or a whole people, is disturbed?”119 In these accounts, revolution was,then, both a prerequisite for and a function of moral contagion. While its spreadwas sustained by the existence in Russian society of pathological subjects,unable to mediate their responses to the social influences that surrounded

116 Iaroshevskii, “Materialy,” 1–2. Discussions of the need for a robust and disci-plined willpower were nowhere more in evidence than in discussions of military psy-chology. Writing in 1905, the military psychiatrist Gerasim Egorovich Shumkov(1873–?) confirmed the “infectiousness of moods” in his observations of Russian sol-diers at the front: “I saw fear on their faces. And the shouts and groans and prayersinfected (zarazitel’no deistvovali na) my mood. . . . One has to be Napoleon or Alex-ander of Macedonia, possessing an iron will, in order not to submit to general influence”(Shumkov, “Razskazy i nabliudeniia iz nastoiashchei russko-iaponskoi voiny (Voenno-psikhologicheskie etiudy),” Voprosy nervno-psikhicheskoi meditsiny, no. 1 (January–March 1905), 1–60, 20. See also N. N. Golovin, Issledovanie boia (St. Petersburg,1907); A. S. Rezanov, Armiia i tolpa: Opyt voennoi psikhologii (Warsaw, 1910); G. E.Shumkov, Psikhika biotsov vo vremia srazheniia, no. 1 (St. Petersburg, n.d. but circa1910).

117 Iaroshevskii, “Materialy,” 1.118 Dmitrii A. Dril’, “Iavleniia vyrozhdeniia i usloviia obshchestvennoi sredi v sviazi

s voprosami vospitaniia,” Vestnik psikhologii, kriminal’noi antropologii i gipnotizma,no. 10 (1906), 265–84, 272.

119 Mumortsev, “O sovremennom pessimizme,” 880.



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them, the vulnerability of these subjects to contagion was only exposed underthe traumatic effects of their revolutionary experiences.

The zemstvo physician Dmitrii Nikolaevich Zhbankov (1853–1932) ex-plored the precise nature of these revolutionary experiences and their relation-ship with moral contagion in an influential series of articles written between1905 and 1907 and widely cited by his colleagues.120 Zhbankov offered acompendium of the violence that was overwhelming the Empire during therevolution, discussing in detail press reports of terrorist killings, pogroms, andthe government’s bloody campaign of internal pacification. He termed therevolutionary violence “the traumatic epidemic in Russia” and argued that ithad generated an atmosphere of “panic and terror that had paralyzed both thereason and the willpower of many people.” Kept in a state of permanent anxietyand fear by the threat of government repression, “the entire people [narod] andunfortunately the mass of educated society find themselves in such a mood ofpathological excitement that the merest pretext is enough to cause them to loseself-control and bring about panic and disturbances.”121 The antisemitic po-grom that took place in the Bessarabian town of Kishinev in April 1903 wasa case in point.122 Zhbankov argued that it was not a “spontaneous hurricane,but rather a systematically prepared massacre of neighbors by neighbors, ofpeaceful people by other peaceful people under the influence of the local ad-ministration,” which had spread “microbes of misanthropy” and “created anatmosphere, full of excitement, of all kinds of gossip and rumors about whatlay in store.” In this atmosphere, “the beast inside man awakened; the air washeavy with a thirst for blood, violence, and vengeance.” The events in the townconstituted the origins of a moral contagion that then swept throughout therest of the Empire: “The contagion of misanthropy, mistrust, and discord fromKishinev began to spread everywhere, intensified continuously by growingadministrative repression that suppressed the population and drove it to a state

120 D. N. Zhbankov, “Travmaticheskaia epidemiia v Rossii (Aprel’-mai 1905 g.),”Prakticheskii vrach 4, nos. 32–35, 1905 (August 13): 633–37 (August 20): 656–61,(August 27): 681–86, (September 3): 703–6; “Travmaticheskaia krovavaia epidemiiav Rossii,” Prakticheskii vrach 5, nos. 32–35 (1906), 533–36, 552–55, 569–71, 584–88; “Travmaticheskaia epidemiia v Rossii (fevral’ 1905g.–iiun’ 1907g.),” Prakticheskiivrach 6, nos. 34–38, 1907 (August 25): 609–15, (September 1): 624–25, (September8): 644–45, (September 15): 661–64, (September 22): 680–83. Bekhterev cited Zhban-kov’s article in the expanded third edition of his Vnushenie i ego rol’ v obshchestvennoizhizni (64).

121 Zhbankov, “Travmaticheskaia epidemiia v Rossii,” August 13, 1905, 633.122 Edward Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York, 1992). On

the pogroms more generally in the period see Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, andPogroms: The Donbass and Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Prince-ton, NJ, 1992).




of panic that increased susceptibility to any kind of mental contagion.” Thereporting of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 further strengthened the moodof violent hysteria, and then the real tipping point in the revolutionary violencecame with the events of Bloody Sunday in January 1905, as a result of which“society and the people became debauched: they ceased to love life and to feardeath.” The national press became vehicles for the transmission of the conta-gion: “The newspapers revelled in the bloodshed and became bulletins aboutthe course of the bloody epidemic: telegrams and reports about thousands ofkilled and wounded in the [Russo-Japanese] war, telegrams and governmentreports about individual murders and the large-scale pogroms inside Russia.”123

The effect was to disseminate the horror of the violence, both military andcivil, across the Empire, exerting its influence over populations that had hith-erto remained unaffected by it directly. Thus, the contagion spread. Zhbankov’sviews were widely shared. Rozenbakh argued in 1909 that the “persistentreports in the press of killings and executions created an abnormal atmosphere”and that “under the influence of general suggestion on the minds and imagi-nation of the population” the number of suicides had increased.124 Bekhterevhimself regarded the outbreak of revolutionary violence as, in large part, aproduct “of the influence of reciprocal suggestion [vziamovnushenie] and so-cial contagion [sotsial’naia zaraza],” and he cited Kuz’min-Karavaev, a deputyto the First Duma: “When policemen are killed, when soldiers are killed attheir posts, when children and schoolboys shoot guns and throw bombs, thenit is obvious that we are confronting an epidemic phenomenon [iavlenie epi-demicheskoe], a particular form of mass psychosis [massovyi psikhoz].”125

Zhbankov was unwilling, however, to stigmatize the entire revolutionarymovement as driven by irrational and destructive forces and pointed to “a risein the self-consciousness of certain groups that clearly understood the realsituation and had proposed effective measures for a restoration of Russia’shealth, [without which] we would be threatened with complete impotence andthe kinds of mass mental epidemics that broke out in the Middle Ages.” Socialelites (of the left-liberal orientation to which Zhbankov himself subscribed)had to exert a restraining influence over the “greater [number of individualsin] our society who are knocked off track, stupefied by both external andinternal events, and are no longer able to resist outrageous impressions, losingtheir self-control and the voice of reason.”126 Yet where Zhbankov saw a pos-

123 Zhbankov, “Travmaticheskaia epidemiia,” August 13, 1905, 635–36.124 Pavel I. Rozenbakh, “O prichinakh sovremennoi nervoznosti i samoubiistv,” No-

voe slovo, no. 11 (1909), 41–47, 46.125 Bekhterev, Vnushenie, 64–65.126 Zhbankov, “Travmaticheskaia epidemiia,” August 13, 1905, 634. Another psy-



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sibility for the reinsertion of reason and morality into the course of the revo-lution, others identified only the indiscriminate subordination of the masses tothose who claimed leadership.

Writing in the midst of 1905, Bazhenov declared that “the most strikingfeature of the masses is their suggestibility, their imitativeness, and this hasperhaps never been more obvious than during the days of the Russian revo-lution.” This fact was the mainspring of the revolutionary movement, not theideas or ethical codes put forward by would-be leaders. Indeed, the particularforms of political organization championed by the various groups contendingfor power during the revolution were in fact of little consequence. The differ-ences between them would effectively be obliterated “by the power of thatpsychological law in accordance with which the whole of humanity is dividedinto two entirely unequal groups—a smaller number of suggesters and thehuge majority who are suggestible.” The operation of this law determined that“any form of social and political structure, whatever name it bore—a despo-tism or a republic, unlimited or constitutional monarchy—in the final analysisboils down to one and the same form, to an oligarchy.”127

In Rybakov’s opinion, the unrestrained dominance of this psychologicaldivision of humanity into suggesters and the suggestible was compounded bythe underdevelopment of political society in Russia. He equated political par-

chiatrist, Vladimir Iakovlevich Iakovenko, expressed a similarly ambivalent attitudetoward revolution. While it was a “healthy societal reaction” to abnormal politicalconditions, revolutionary activity itself was dangerously detached from the constrainingand purposive voice of reason (Iakovenko, “Zdorovye i boleznennye proiavleniia vpsikhike sovremennogo russkogo obshchestva,” Zhurnal obshchestva russkikh vracheiv pamiat’ N. I. Pirogova 13, no. 4 (May 1907): 269–87.

127 Nikolai N. Bazhenov, Psikhologiia i politika (Moscow, 1906), 13. Bazhenov’sargument anticipates in intriguing ways the thesis on oligarchy advanced by the Germansyndicalist, and later fascist, Robert Michels (1876–1936) in his influential Zur So-ziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie (1911). Although Bazhenovmade no mention of his work in this pamphlet, it is inconceivable that he was not wellacquainted with the writings of the influential French sociologist Gustave Le Bon(1841–1931), whose treatise on crowd psychology appeared in several translations inRussia and was widely read in the original. Le Bon argued that crowds were an inal-ienable feature of the modern age and that if they could not be removed, they neededto be tamed: “Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable; it is necessary toarrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselvesto being devoured by them.” Le Bon offered Machiavellian advice to a would-be leaderof the crowd. To seduce the masses, the leader had to enter the irrational minds of itsmembers, pretending to sympathize with their plight, and attain control over them usingemotional and evocative slogans and images. (Le Bon, La psychologie des foules, 90,162–63). See, e.g., Gustave Lebon [Gustave Le Bon], Psikhologiia narodov i mass,trans. A. Fridman and E. Pimenova (St. Petersburg, 1896). On Le Bon, see Barrows,Distorting Mirrors, 173–75; Robert A. Nye, The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gus-tave Le Bon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic (London, 1975).




ties with a “herd instinct” (stadnost’) that serves to channel the undiscrimi-nating and unstable emotions of individuals and crowds toward certain formsof action, certain strategic goals. Parties thus served as a filter of popularemotions, exerting a civilizing influence necessary for the maintenance of so-cial stability. The absence of an established party system in contemporaryRussia left the crowds, and indeed the population as a whole, dangerouslyresponsive to all manner of usurpers and demagogues:

In the West, where social life is more extensively developed than ours, the herd instinctmanifests itself with greater power, but there it finds a more noble form: the form of aparty outlook [partiinost’]; there every party firmly knows the leader whom it follows.. . . [This difference between Russia and the West] does not depend on the fact that theRussian public is in general less developed than that in the West but rather on the factthat in our social life there are no established social organizations. The whole of ourlife is fragmented into individual parts, and when these elements are occasionally fusedtogether it is for the most part by chance; it is a fusion not of thought, not of conviction,but of place and time.128

The revolution represented, therefore, the eruption of mass politics unfetteredby established parties.129 The term “partiinost’” has traditionally been associ-ated with Bolshevik sectarianism. First used by Lenin in 1895, the term becamean important constituent feature of the Bolshevik mind-set, denoting a seriesof political and social views inflected by tribal party loyalty and a Marxist-inspired vision of class conflict and social progress.130 Yet Rybakov’s encour-agement of the development of partiinost’ in contemporary Russian political

128 Rybakov, Gipnotizm, 129.129 This reaction on the part of Russian progressives to the Revolution of 1905 would

be reprised just over a decade later in 1917. In November 1917, for example, theeminent scientist and Constitutional Democrat Vladimir Vernadskii wrote in his diary:“It is a tragic situation. Forces and layers of the people are now playing a role indetermining our structure of life [zhiznennyi stroi], but they are in no condition tounderstand [this structure’s] interests. It is clear that unrestrained democracy, the pursuitof which I set as the goal of my life, requires corrections” (Vernadskii, Dnevniki, 1917–1921, 2 vols. [Kiev, 1994], 1:88 [November 10, 1917; cited in Peter Holquist, MakingWar, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA,2002), 49]).

130 Lenin declared, “Materialism includes, so to speak, partiinost’ (partyness), en-joining one in any judgment of an event to take directly and openly the standpoint ofa definite social group” (V. I. Lenin, “Ekonomicheskoe soderzhanie narodnichestva ikritika ego v knige g. Struve,” in his Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 55 vols. [Moscow,1958–65], 1:418–19). On the subsequent significance of the term, see John Barber,“The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy in the U.S.S.R., 1928–1934,” Past andPresent, no. 83 (May 1979), 141–64, 142; David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and NaturalSciences, 1917–1932 (London, 1961), 25; Leopold Haimson, The Russian Marxistsand the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA, 1955).



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culture suggests that it was not merely a manifestation of antidemocratic sec-tarian instincts. In Rybakov’s opinion, the clinical analysis of the psychologicalforces impelling politics in the age of revolution revealed the need for a set ofpolitical institutions and practices capable of restraining the worst excesses ofmass democracy. In these terms, partiinost’ denoted fealty not to any particularparty but to the party of reason and order.

CONCLUSION: THE DEMOCRATIC SURFEIT

Moral contagion was a rich and flexible tool of sociopolitical analysis in lateImperial Russia. It provides a fascinating lens through which to examine theevaporating faith of the progressive intelligentsia in its own tutelary missionof national enlightenment. Three overlapping stages of disillusionment arediscernible. Initially convinced of the correlation between psychological irra-tionality and cultural and social underdevelopment, practitioners of the humansciences remained committed to the promise of reform and enlightenment toyield a free and autonomous society. Yet under the conjoined influence ofItalian and French studies of the crowd, Russian clinicians began to registerserious concerns that human agglomerations wielded disturbing transformativepowers. They were able to alter the moral and intellectual nature of all theirconstituents, not just the unenlightened, from civilized and sensible individualsto violent and destructive animals. Finally, studies of moral contagion beganto emphasize that essentially irrational forces governed all human beings. Aseries of institutional and political structures capable of filtering out the baserimpulses of human beings was required in order to hold these forces in check.What the cumulative effect of these three related positions amounted to in thesocial and political context of contemporary Russia was a profoundly ambiv-alent response to the rise and promise of mass politics. Clinical observers,whatever their hostility to the autocracy, appeared to regard its advent withdeep unease, as something to be contained and directed rather than unfurledand celebrated. In this view, the involvement of the mass of the Russian peoplein the political community of the nation threatened to offer a colossal hostageto the unpredictable and uncontrollable instincts that lurked beneath the surfaceof the social order.

While it would of course be a gross oversimplification to suggest a straight-forward continuity between liberal ambivalence and Bolshevik dictatorship, itis possible to emphasize that the disillusionment with the promise of masspolitics in Russia in some measure actually preceded the 1905 Revolution.This disillusionment was not reducible to the proposition that educated Eu-ropean Russians feared a tsunami of anarchic peasant violence. ProgressiveRussian clinicians and social scientists were in fact registering serious doubtsabout mass politics tout court, not simply about the risks attendant upon its




introduction in an underdeveloped peasant society. The year 1905 was less awatershed in liberal attitudes toward mass politics than a confirmation of fearslong harbored; it had realized on a grand scale the potential for irrationality,barbarism, and limitless violence that Tolstoy had so deftly captured in Warand Peace.

It was precisely in their Enlightenment concern with reason and order thatthe practitioners of the human sciences found the irrationality, unpredictability,and chaos of mass politics disconcerting. Attempts to devise institutional andideological structures within which the values of the Enlightenment might bedefended from the vagaries of mass society constituted an initial step in thedirection of a circumscription of democracy and the rise of political authori-tarianism that was to find its apotheosis in the Bolshevik regime.131

131 For an elaboration of this argument see Daniel Beer, “Blueprints for Change: TheHuman Sciences and the Coercive Transformation of Deviants in Russia, 1890–1930,”Osiris 22 (2007): 26–47. The disquiet and even alarm with which these psychologistsand criminologists responded to the rise of the crowd was an expression of their de-termination to subject it to critical analysis in the interests of both epistemic and actualcontrol of society. See Robert A. Nye, “Two Paths to a Psychology of Social Action:Gustave LeBon and Georges Sorel,” Journal of Modern History 45, no. 3 (September1973): 411–38, 423.



Documents

“Microbes of the Mind”: Moral Contagion in Late Imperial Russia