Manufacture of Deviance the Case of the Soviet Purge 1936-1938

Soviet Purge

"The Manufacture of Deviance: The Case of the Soviet Purge, 1936-1938." American Sociological Review, 1972.

It's us vs. them! This familiar theme runs through a substantial amount of political rhetoric in the current electoral media discourse. However, writing during one of the most polarized periods of American politics, Walter D. Connor from the University of Michigan was able to show that such a construction of deviancy in a group deemed sociologically 'other' has been largely true of both the left and the right, throughout history and in many nations and political environments. Much as hippies and other social undesirables were tarred and feathered as deviant during the late 1960's and 1970's, in America, the American Sociological Review of 1972 article entitled "The Manufacture of Deviance: The Case of the Soviet Purge, 1936-1938" suggests that the repressive Soviet regime of Stalin similarly derived its sense of popular legitimacy from manufacturing or creating not only a communist sense of class or dialectical warfare, but of medical and racial and social deviance of good citizens of the republic vs. The bad citizens.

As the class warfare, according to official Soviet rhetoric had ended, between the bourgeois and proletarian, Stalin was in something of an ideological quandary as to how to define what was wrong with Soviet society, even after communist 'reforms' had been instated. Personal deviance from what was considered the norm in a sociological fashion was one way this was created. By perpetually creating or manufacturing distractions, and then purging such deviant groups, Stalin kept his hold on power through paranoia.