Whether the result of collateral damage from the great deindustrialization at the turn of the twenty-first century – which devalued everything that sounded like “manufacturing” – or because of changed cultural sensibilities, today the term “social engineering” has negative connotations. In its most common usage, it is synonymous with the idiom “confidence trick”: a way of defrauding a person or an organization by exploiting their trust and sensibilities through various manipulations. This often involves creating altered images of reality that are temporary and visible only to the prospective victims. The original sociopolitical understanding of social engineering – as the molding of society or its individual elements into some desired form with preset qualities – was completely compromised with the publication of James C. Scott’s influential book of 1998.^[1] Treating state-sponsored projects of social reform as malicious conspiracies to take away people’s freedom, Scott practically equated the two main connotations of “social engineering”: one way or another, it is a predatory practice that exploits fellow citizens.
However, there was nothing criminal about the term “social engineering” or its connotations when it was coined by William Howe Tolman (1861–1958) just a century before the publication of Scott’s book. In 1898, as a former professor of history at Sachs Collegiate Institute in New York, Tolman announced the founding of the League for Social Service and Promotion of Good Citizenship, and described its task:

“We are really social engineers, and that is the youngest of the professions. We had a firm faith in the practicability of the work. ... We go from place to place and see what employers are doing for the betterment of their help. ... The members of the league are our clients, and we improve their property on social lines. ... A department storekeeper in Boston wants us to provide a private secretary for him, male or female, whose duty it will be to get in close with the help, learn their individual “hobbies,” and to do all that can be reasonably done to gratify them. ... The position, really, that of a social engineer.”^[2]

Today this is the role of human resources, but back in the day Tolman did not find sufficient demand for this service, so he looked for new ways to draw public attention to it. By 1903, he had reoriented the project from serving private business interests to improving social relations:

“The business of the social engineer is the institution and supervision of all sorts of movements that will improve the condition of the wage earner. ... Large industrial establishments are being forced to acknowledge that [it] is to their mutual advantage to better the condition of their employees. ... In order to carry out such a work, however, they must have “the one who knows.” That “one” appears in the social engineer.”^[3]

Apparently, Tolman tried to resonate with the global mainstream public culture of progressivist reformism to sell his services, and he was very successful in doing so. However, judging by his numerous publications, Tolman had no real interest in politics, so by the 1910s, when the term he had coined acquired truly international popularity and an explicitly political meaning, he hastened to abandon it. In 1909 he published a book titled Social Engineering, which, however, promoted something else: the new profession of “the social secretary” tasked “to improve the conditions of life and labor for the individual.”^[4] This turnaround was inconsequential, as “social engineering” had already acquired full autonomy as a concept envisioning the rational reorganization of society.^[5]
Some thirty years later, Karl Popper famously contrasted “piecemeal social engineering” with “Utopian social engineering” as “the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evil of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.”^[6] This useful distinction could be complemented by other principles of classification. For example, the subject of social engineering could be the government or independent of the government, but in any case, had to be a fully legal public initiative (such as the temperance or civil rights movements), or it could be a subversive revolutionary organization. Alternatively, social engineering can be differentiated by its scale as addressing the entire social order or just specific individual hygiene norms or a select region’s environmental practices. Furthermore, its sphere of application can vary, among which are business practices, private lives, economic models, the political system, culture and religion, animal treatment, and others. And of course, social engineering is differentiated by the degree of coerciveness in its implementation.
Scott attributed social engineering to the wicked mind of “High Modernism,” but any social group of unmediated, anonymous, and thus fairly atomized membership necessitates a rational design to make this group sustainable. Essentially, everything that is not a “tribe” in the sense of nineteenth-century anthropologists – a union bound by blood kinship or at least by stable interclan relations – can be sustained only by a form of social engineering. A mass society is possible only via social engineering as the ultimate answer to the Malthusian predicament of an ever-growing population that dramatically outpaces the supply of “naturally” available resources. Without some sort of coordinated intervention, only a dramatically restricted population can have enough grain, housing, and clean water and air, but merely being aware of this conundrum and approving of its resolution by discarding social engineering already amounts to an act of social engineering.
Throughout his long academic career, Scott exposed his preference for the principles of social cohesion based on what he called a “subsistence ethic,” which can be defined as a moral community.^[7] A moral community is necessarily conditioned by local natural and economic circumstances, as well as by cultural norms and “the art of the locality” in general.^[8] Only solidarity through shared values and local knowledge, including shared memory, could substitute for an alternative principle of social organization via formal institutions and rational schemes for adjusting them.
Modern historians tend to reproduce this binary opposition between the holistic ideal of a moral community and the compartmentalization of reality by social engineering, ascribing certain political and ethical values to both scenarios. They often do this unknowingly, with no concern for specific sociological and anthropological models such as Scott’s, just because the binary “vernacular local knowledge vs. universal rationality” has been interiorized by most popular forms of public discourse. The critique of Enlightenment rationalism as the source of genocidal authoritarianism in the twentieth century has become commonplace since World War II and the powerful intervention of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno.^[9] Since the 1950s, postcolonial theory has celebrated local or indigenous knowledge and life experiences, in a diapason from authentic purity to Scott’s more complicated “metis” type.^[10] Thus, it is difficult to get through college without interiorizing this basic mental map. The analytical merits of identifying the two scenarios of social cohesion – as a moral community and a product of social engineering – are beyond doubt, but are they mutually exclusive? Do moral communities grow naturally? Can social engineering forge an intimate solidarity of common values and memories? The contributors to this issue of Ab Imperio offer highly suggestive perspectives on these questions.
In the “History” section, Olga Linkiewicz tells the story of Polish social scientists during the interwar period who advocated for social engineering policies to be adopted by the government but without much success. In doing so, they pointed to examples of the neighboring Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as allegedly much more efficient in political mobilization of their populations. This well-documented case questions several ingrained assumptions. First, it complicates the understanding of the Sanacja (literally: healing) regime in the Second Republic. Introduced in 1926 after the May Coup by Marshal Józef Piłsudski, Sanacja epitomized the failure of the democratic nation-state as a political project in Poland. Instead of parliamentary politics and modern social engineering aimed at the integration of diverse populations into a single Polish nation by formal policies and legislation, Sanacja focused on restricting access to full citizenship to a homogeneous moral community of shared virtues rather than rights.^[11] Cultural Polishness and Catholicism were entry tickets to this community, and the very term “Sanacja” alluded to Church membership – in Catholicism, “radical sanation” means the retroactive validation of an invalid marriage, so Sanacja was about restoring a failed social contract as the foundation of a political commonwealth. The ardent advocates of social engineering among Polish academics contradicted the holistic Sanacja project, yet they were active participants in it. That their proposals found some response in the government only highlighted the immanence of social engineering to the holistic ideal of a moral community; it is just that Sanacja’s own “schemes to improve the human condition” (Scott) were disguised by conservative and even archaistic rhetoric. The second obvious revisionist contribution of this case concerns the expectation that the state will be the primary driver of social engineering. Linkiewicz reconstructs the opposite dynamic: it was private individuals – social scientists – who developed measures of rational social engineering and demanded their implementation, not the Sanacja government.
The next article in the section, by Arailym Musagalieva and published in Russian, addresses the epitome of brutal social engineering: the rise of forced labor camps in the USSR on the example of mostly agricultural Karlag in Central Kazakhstan and the displacement of the local population it brought about. This story calls into question the numinous appellation “High Modernism” as a seemingly self-evident social diagnosis and explanation for the origins of social engineering. It is not that the opposite clichés of archaic barbarism and the traditional culture of coercion are more meaningful – they are just literary tropes. However, Musagalieva reconstructs a complex picture that reveals a fundamental gap between Soviet dreams of social engineering and the actual inability to implement it productively.
The First Five-Year Plan coincided with the start and culmination of the Great Depression, which reduced the American economy by 50 percent. Yet, somehow, although lacking the industrial potential and the financial might of the United States, during this period the USSR allegedly doubled its economic output. Regardless of the actual numbers, the main economic resource available to the Soviet authorities after 1929 as a means of investment in rapid industrialization was the country’s population. Its transformation into a mobilized “labor force” was a typical social engineering task that became the Soviet regime’s ultimate priority. The fact that it was done through coercion – dekulakization and mass arrests – should not come as a surprise to students of social engineering. What is surprising is that we do not find in Musagalieva’s story the proverbial dictatorship of the OGPU in running the show through coordinated or at least preplanned policies. Instead, she discovers the constant improvisation and competition of semi-isolated government departments, of which the Gulag was just one – a state corporation specializing in transforming the “population” into the “labor force.” Each of those government departments needed to meet the plan without concern for other corporations or administrative hierarchies, which resulted in a most unproductive use of the available resources.
The Five-Year Plan envisioned the building of new iron and steel works, which needed coal. Central Kazakhstan was identified as the country’s second largest coal basin with the center in Karaganda. The prospective mining town required massive amounts of food, so an enormous sovkhoz named Giant was established in the region under the auspices of the Karlag labor camp – a major “island” in the Gulag Archipelago. The only available workforce for the sovkhoz was found in Central Russia among the dekulakized peasants. They were forcibly transferred thousands of miles to the east, yet they signed formal contracts with their prisoner-employer, the Gulag, and were paid small salaries and provided with tools, food, and housing (at least on paper). Moreover, they were supplied with horses transferred from the Central Volga – a faraway region with an endemic deficit of livestock. This seemed paradoxical because in the late 1920s, Central Kazakhstan could boast many millions of cattle. However, even after collectivization, these “Soviet” cattle – or what remained of them after the tragedy of a man-made famine (the Asharshylyk) – were the property of regular collective farms, while the equally “Soviet” corporation of the Gulag could use only its own resources, however distant. Moreover, the establishment of the Karlag camp necessitated the displacement of dozens of villages and auls that were located on its territory. These local farmers and herders were not mobilized in the Karlag sovkhoz because, pace historiographic clichés, this is not how the plan-oriented but uncoordinated Soviet system worked. Instead, Karlag paid substantial compensation for these relocations, in cash and building materials. The district Soviet authorities did not hesitate to demand compensation from the almighty Gulag and, less successfully, to stop its territorial expansion. Both parties were empowered by their obligation to meet the Five-Year Plan and they were restricted in their actions by the understanding that hampering the other party to meet the plan amounted to a capital crime.
Eventually, the forceful Stalinist social engineering completely ruined the region’s pastoral economy and replaced it with less productive collective farms. The largest of these were Karlag’s sovkhozes, which, despite their low-cost labor, incurred enormous overhead expenses in long-distance transportation and especially in compensation payments to the displaced local kolkhozes. In turn, this displacement further compromised the productivity of “regular” collective farms that lost good pastures and arable land. This was the cost of development of the Karaganda coal basin and, most importantly, of turning the uncoordinated “population” and individual “economic producers” into an organized, highly mobile “labor force.” As an act of social engineering in its most dreadful version, disruptive to local cultures and ways of life, it was hardly a paragon of High Modernism, nor did it require or actually involve thoroughly modern social actors and practices.
The third article in the section, coauthored by Andy Bruno and Viktor Pál, can be considered a synthesis of the two preceding case studies on some level of abstraction. Comparing the environmental policies in socialist Hungary and the USSR (on the example of the Kola region), the authors criticize the still dominant “social engineering” explanatory paradigm that registers only “Western-oriented modernization and landscape engineering.” Instead, they argue that one-directional and hence authoritarian rational designs to extract natural resources disregarding the material and human costs – something that the Karlag case vividly demonstrates – did not exhaust the scope of environmental policies. Just as the Sanacja-era program of framing the Polish nation as a moral community implicitly contained the potential of social engineering, the post–World War II socialist treatment of nature betrays the vision of an all-encompassing moral community behind the self-proclaimed ambitious social engineering goals. Bruno and Pál speak of “socialist environmental holism” understood as an entangled and comprehensive treatment of all the natural resources, including human populations. While by no means humanist or necessarily nature friendly, this holistic attitude implied a certain type of moral community as a complex of intimately experienced, shared attitudes and preferences rather than a formalized, rationally articulated policy differentiating society, economy, politics, and nature.
The alleged High Modernism was supplanted and deconstructed long ago by decades of postmodernism, and yet we find the same duality of social engineering and holistic moral community approach today in discussions of a better future. The “Methodology and Theory” section features a transcript of the online conversation of a popular Ukrainian YouTube group of so-called Honey Badgers. Named after the mammal that is recognized by Guiness World Records as the most fearless in the world, the group promotes a sustained debate about the future of Ukraine.^[12] Streamed on a nonacademic platform, the discussion addresses a theme that is hardly original, particularly for such a specialized publication as Ab Imperio: “How Were Nations Formed? Myths, Manipulations, and Stolen Ideals.” And yet their conversation is extremely relevant for modern academia, in remarkable contrast to a general conservative turn in studies of the post-Soviet region. Too many scholars today are hastening to discard the conceptual accomplishments of the past three decades and return to some symbolic “1991” with its fundamental methodological nationalism. This discussion merits publication in the “Methodology and Theory” section because of its genuine interest in developing a new conceptual language to describe and analyze social reality.
It is even more remarkable that a genuine interest in anti-nationalist and methodologically postnational explanatory models is coming from young Ukrainian intellectuals, amid the brutal war of attrition unleashed on their country by the Russian Federation. Under the circumstances, it would be only natural to expect a national mobilization or, rather, a popular mobilization via nationalism to be viewed as a necessary response to foreign aggression. This reaction is prevalent among the older cohort of Ukrainian politicians and social scientists, and it is hard to criticize them for being nationalists under constant missile attacks. And yet, if under these exceptional circumstances Ukrainian intellectuals argue the politically deadly and intellectually futile nature of nationalism, how can American or German historians and political scientists on peaceful and wealthy campuses justify voluntarily succumbing to uncritical essentialism?
The value of this discussion is further enhanced by the participants’ attempts to coordinate the scenarios of social engineering and building a moral community in their formulations of Ukraine’s future – for example, as embodied by the ideals of freedom and creativity as the foundations of the future society. Obviously, political freedom can be formalized institutionally, while creativity as a holistic category cannot be formally diagnosed. As it should be clear by now, social engineering is not an alternative to building a moral community, so the task is not to choose one over the other but to develop a new analytical language and a new political vision that transcend the old binaries and convey a more complex understanding of social reality using these valuable concepts. Addressed to the public, the “Honey Badgers” conversation is an important step in this direction.
College instructors face a very similar task regarding how to find a new, more nuanced yet comprehensible language for students while walking a thin line between uncritically glorifying the socialist moral community or equally uncritically bashing socialist social engineering. The “ABC” section continues the publication of materials in the series “New Curricula for New Histories of Northern Eurasia,” with a special eye on early career faculty as readers and contributors to the series. Zukhra Kasimova reflects on her experience of teaching survey courses in Russian imperial and Soviet history from a multiethnic perspective. She also generously shares with readers the syllabus of her course “HIST 248: The Multiethnic Soviet Union.”
The editors have used the “Archive” section in this issue for a sad task: to commemorate Alla Zeide (1941–2024), a literary scholar and student of Russian culture, who was our close friend and played an important role at the start of the Ab Imperio project. Apparently, it is not only in grand schemes “to improve the human condition” (Scott) that emotional ties become tightly intertwined with rational actions and reinforce each other. We decided to publish a fragment of Alla’s diary from January 1990 as a self-portrait of her but also as a snapshot of a generation and a social type. Alla writes about the trauma of her Soviet Jewishness, which she experienced most acutely during what she called her “personal Jewish pogrom” in school at the peak of the late Stalinist antisemitic campaign. She also contemplates the highly censored family memory of the first generation of Soviets, including her parents born in the 1910s, so that she learned only bits and pieces about her immediate ancestors. It seems that the Soviet version of social engineering eagerly or at least competently accommodated just one form of a moral community – a community of orphans patronized by the regime, whether they were actually familyless or just performing their dissociation from any forms of intimate belonging. This was a strength but also a strategic weakness of the Soviet project. As this issue’s materials suggest, the juxtaposition of a social engineering project to a moral community – or vice versa – is destructive in real life and in scholarly analysis.